Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row

ecstatic, but right then there were other things on my mind. I’d given Deanna my word that I would find her, but time was slipping through my hands. I was beginning to feel that I would never again know what life was like beyond those walls. After being locked in a cage for weeks, the thought of ever getting out became one of those things that are too good to be true.
    My mother and father came to see me the next day. There was no way to touch, and we had to talk to each other through two-inch-thick bulletproof glass. My father hardly recognized me. When he and my mother walked through the door I heard him ask her, “Is that him?” We were allowed to talk for fifteen minutes, they on one side of the glass and me on the other. That’s not much time to get reacquainted, but my father promised that he would be part of my life from then on. The guard then came and told them it was time to leave.
    I look back now and find myself filled with a tremendous amount of anger at how unjust it all was. The punishment for a first-time breaking and entering charge and an accusation of sexual misconduct didn’t fit the crime by any stretch of the imagination. All I did was walk into an abandoned trailer. This made no sense.
    At my court date a couple of days later Jerry Driver recommended to the court that I be put in a mental institution, which he told my parents and me was the alternative to holding me in jail for nine months until going to trial. At the time, it didn’t seem logical but it did seem like the lesser of two evils. I was given my clothes and told to get dressed. If you’ve never had to wear jail clothes, then you can’t comprehend what it’s like to finally be able to put your own clothes back on. It takes a while to get used to. The jail clothes are designed to strip you of any identity and reduce you to a number. You don’t even feel like a human being when you’re wearing them. You have no dignity.
    The four of us traveled in Driver’s car, and it was a long ride. It took several hours to get from Jonesboro to Little Rock, where Charter Hospital of Maumelle was located. He restrained himself from asking more insane Satanist-related questions in front of my parents, but I could tell it almost caused him physical pain to do so. Every time I looked up I saw his beady rat’s eyes staring intently at me in the rearview mirror. For some unknown reason he had visited my mother while I waited in jail, and asked her if he could see my room. She let him in and left him back there alone. He told her that he was “confiscating” a few things, even though that was blatantly illegal. He took the Goya-like sketches from the walls and a new journal I had started. (It was in a funeral registry book, morbidly enough.) He also took my skull collection.
    It sounds kind of odd to have a skull collection, but I’ll explain. There’s a hard-packed dirt path behind Lakeshore that the local youth would wander on. It doesn’t go anywhere specific, just sort of meanders around a small lake and a few fields. I often found odd pieces of the skeletons of possums, raccoons, squirrels, birds, and even the occasional dog or cat that had died out there. I began collecting them because my teenage mind thought they looked cool. I’m not the only one, and I’ve never denied having questionable taste when it comes to interior decorating. The oddest thing Jason and I ever found was a beer bottle with two tiny skulls inside. The problem was that they were slightly too large to get out of the bottle. We spent hours trying to figure out how they got in the bottle in the first place.
    At any rate, Jerry Driver took my personal possessions as “evidence.” Evidence of what, he didn’t say. I wouldn’t know this for quite a while, as it would be some time before I ever saw Lakeshore again. For now, I was on my way to the funny farm.
    By the time we arrived, all the other patients had been put to bed. It was about ten o’clock at night and the place was silent. My mother and father had been completely convinced by Driver’s authoritative tone, that this was Driver’s right and they had no choice in the matter. They sat in a small office giving my personal information to the woman in charge of filing paperwork on new patients. The process took about thirty minutes, and Jerry Driver sat silently listening to everything. I was exceedingly nervous, never having been in such an environment before. The only thing I had to base my