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

satanic kingpin and had no idea what Driver was raving about. The officer reported that I was breaking no law, didn’t seem to be abnormal, and that the apartment was not the hotbed of satanic activity that Driver seemed to want them to believe. I can only imagine the tantrum Jerry Driver threw when they refused to arrest me.
    Meanwhile I became more lethargic and lackluster by the day. I no longer cared about anything. My mother expressed concern that I would harm myself, though I never seriously considered it. Everything exploded one night over a simple misunderstanding.
    I had some Kahlúa and planned to drink it in milk. I’ve never been a regular drinker of alcohol of any sort, but this stuff had a nice chocolaty taste and helped me sleep. I poured it into the milk and stirred it briskly. My sister went and told my mother that I was in the kitchen “doing something sneaky.” Of course I was being sneaky—I was trying to spend what little money we had on the pint without being caught!
    My mother didn’t bother to come and ask me anything; she went behind my back and as I was walking back to my room I heard her talking very quietly on the phone, so I stopped to listen. She was telling whoever was on the other end that I had been depressed and quiet lately, and she feared that I might commit suicide. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This was the lowest thing anyone had ever done to me in my life. This was a betrayal of epic proportions.
    You must understand my mother to be able to really understand why she did this. If you don’t know her you could easily mistake her action for the concern of a caring parent. In reality it was the action of a drama queen. My mother loves to create drama, as I’ve already said. She still does. These days, anytime a reporter comes around she can’t keep her mouth shut and goes into her “poor mother” routine, complete with copious tears. I’ve seen it too many times.
    I continued on to my room and listened to the radio for a few minutes, knowing she had set an unalterable chain of events in motion. I don’t know if she called Driver for advice, but within a very short time, someone knocked on the door and I opened it to discover a police officer. He asked if I would talk to him, so we took a seat in the living room. I couldn’t believe the difference between the police in Oregon and the police in Arkansas. The guy was well groomed and fit, very polite, and spoke proper English. He treated me like a human being, and I may have even liked the guy under other circumstances. The upshot of communications between my mother and the police—and possibly others—was that it was decided I should be taken to the psychiatric unit of St. Anthony’s Hospital in Portland, nearby. The cop left, and I got in the car with my parents.
    I sat at the hospital, waiting to see a doctor and wondering why the hell this was happening to me. My parents had been utterly convinced by strangers that their son was suicidal and mentally unstable, and their solution was to lock me up. My mother has made more than her fair share of stupid mistakes, but I believe this one was the most ridiculous. My relationship with my father also changed that night.
    It’s been so many years that I can now no longer even remember exactly what he said, but it was something along the lines of “You need to straighten up and fly right. I’m tired of you moping around all the time, blah, blah, blah.” He followed it up with some kind of threat. He was trying to be a hard-ass because I refused to speak to either him or my mother. I had nothing to say to them, not after doing this to me. I listened to his whole angry spiel without saying anything, but every word he spoke changed the way I saw him.
    In that moment, I saw my father not as a man but as a boy. He was a child who had never lived up to a single responsibility in his life, and he had failed me in every way conceivable. He had abandoned me, left me to live in poverty and squalor with a hateful, religious zealot of a stepfather and a mother who wouldn’t raise a hand to protect us from his tyranny. I saw him as weak, knowing he wouldn’t have survived the despair of a life like the one he had left me to. I didn’t want to hear anything else from him. With absolute contempt I spat the words, “I’d eat you alive.” During my trial the prosecutor tried to say that I meant those words literally—that I was a cannibal, lacking nothing but a bone to