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

she said indeed there was. My heart sang just at hearing her voice, being in contact again. It was more than just her—I was talking to home, to my familiar world. I was on the phone with someone who didn’t sound like they had a Yankee accent. I felt alive again. I felt like myself, and that was a rare thing of late.
    It’s hard to describe what had changed. Ever since I walked through the doors of that mental institution I’d felt like an old man shuffling his feet along the halls of a nursing home. Talking to her sent a wave of energy through me that shook the rust off and I felt ready to get moving again. That all ended in less than sixty seconds. “Do you still want me to come for you?” If she said yes, I would leave right then, even if I had to walk.
    She didn’t say yes, though. What she said was, “I don’t know.” She was hesitant, uncertain. The magick was broken. The last thing she ever said to me was “I have to go now.” She hung up the phone and we have not spoken again to this day.
    Up until that point my life had at least had a purpose, a direction; some part of me still had faith that it would all work out. That was now gone and I was infinitely tired. I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the wall for a very long time, not knowing what else to do.
    My parents were going to visit relatives in California and would be gone for a few days. Nanny was flying out to meet them there because she didn’t think she was strong enough to make the road trip when the rest of us came, and would return to Oregon with them. I chose to stay at home. Once they were gone, I walked to the corner store and bought two of the cheapest bottles of wine they had—Wild Irish Rose. I spent the entire night sitting out on the balcony looking down at the street and drowning my sorrows with the foulest-tasting alcohol ever dreamed of by man. I guess I was at the point most people call “rock bottom.” I was so lonely that I no longer felt like expending the energy necessary to keep living. When the sun began to rise I went to bed and didn’t get up for several days.
    Little did I know, Jerry Driver had been a busy bee in my absence. Deanna’s reluctance came from the fact that Driver had told her parents that I was a satanic monster and the head of a very large cult that was up to all sorts of skulduggery in the area. Driver had no doubt Deanna’s life was in danger as there was no telling what foul plot I had devised to trap her in. He told them he was positive I had been committing sacrifices all over town, that I’d burned down churches (even though no church in the area had burned), and that I had a hand in infinite other untold crimes. He wove a tale in which I was the very incarnation of evil, come to create hell in Arkansas.
    Why did he do this? I don’t know. I didn’t learn all these facts until later, when local teenagers told me he questioned them about me every time they went out into the streets of Lakeshore, burning gas and taxpayers’ dollars as he terrorized teenage boys. He was beyond doubt a very sick individual, and I never have understood why it was me who became his obsession. He once went so far as to make Jason take off his shirt so he could “inspect him for satanic markings.” I was also later told that during the investigation after my arrest in the summer of 1993, he persuaded Deanna’s parents to send her to a “deprogramming center” to be certain she was no longer under the influence of my nefarious spell, and that they should contact him at once if they ever saw or heard from me again. That’s precisely what happened.
    After I got off the phone with Deanna, her parents questioned her about the call and she eventually told them it was me. They called Driver and sent up a red alert. Driver’s reaction was to call the police in Oregon and tell them that I was on probation in Arkansas for all sorts of satanic crimes and that I should be arrested at once. The police seemed to think it some sort of joke, but when he kept demanding that I be arrested for calling Deanna, they sent someone out to talk to me. I found out about this from Driver himself, who told me in an effort to prove that at any given moment he always knew what I was doing.
    An officer in plain clothes came to our apartment to find out what was going on. He sat at the kitchen table drinking, a cup of coffee as he asked me and my family questions. I told him that I had indeed called Deanna, but that I was no