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

capital murder charge. He’d killed someone with a sawed-off shotgun while burglarizing their house. His back had already started to curve into a hump, like an old man, even though he was only sixteen.
    Chad seemed a bit slow in the thinking department, if you catch my drift. He claimed he had been there for years and was quite excited that he now had company. He couldn’t answer a single one of my questions: he didn’t know where we were, or how far we were from West Memphis, or how to make a phone call, or anything else I could think to ask him. He’d just smile really big, throw his hands up in the air as if to say, “Who knows? Only the gods can say,” then rock back and forth for a while. Not so encouraging.
    I didn’t find out where I was for a week. My thinking was that perhaps my whereabouts were being kept secret from everyone, including Domini and my family. I was worried about how Domini was taking it. My family and I weren’t on the greatest of terms, but when you’re drowning like I was, you’ll reach for anything. I was lost and alone and empty. Floating deep in outer space would have been no more frightening. I had done nothing to deserve this, and I was goddamned if these assholes were going to make me the sacrificial lamb.
    I was still taking antidepressants, which the guards gave me every night. That very first week, I had the ingenious idea of saving them up and taking them all at once. That was the only way out I could see at that point. The situation was getting worse. There was no Sherlock Holmes coming to solve the case and let me out. Besides, what did I really have to live for, anyway? I would regret not being there for the baby. It would have been nice to stick around for that.
    When I was in one of the hospitals, I had heard that 800 milligrams of the particular antidepressant I was on was enough to put you into a coma you’d never come out of. I wanted to be certain I did it right, so I took 1,200 milligrams. I swallowed the pills and sat down to write a quick note to Domini and my family. It was only a few lines scratched out quickly with a pencil. I don’t recall what they were and I don’t want to. That being taken care of, I stretched out on my concrete slab and flipped through one of Chad’s magazines. He wasn’t much of a reader, but he loved those pictures. He wasn’t too fond of losing the only company he had, either. I hadn’t bothered to hide what I was doing from him, thinking there was no need.
    The main sensation I had was of being so tired it was physically painful. I wanted to sleep more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life. I closed my eyes and just let go. That’s when all hell broke loose. About ten guards came for me. Chad had told them what I’d done, because he didn’t want to be left all alone again, especially with a dead body. I could hear them talking but couldn’t make my eyes open. Someone opened them for me and shone a flashlight in them. Someone else poured a vile-tasting liquid in my mouth and told me to swallow it. It was some sort of vomit-inducing syrup. They put me in the backseat of a car and drove about 150 miles an hour to get me to a hospital. By that point I was so confused I kept asking myself if the drugs were taking effect yet, or if I was already dead. I tried to tell the cop behind the wheel that we would have been there by now if we’d all ridden on the back of a giant spider. Unfortunately, my mouth wouldn’t work the way I wanted it to.
    I don’t remember much about the hospital that night. I know it was somewhere in Monroe County. I woke up for a moment when someone put a tube up my nose and down my throat. Two cops were sitting before me, watching, while all the doctors and nurses were moving double-time. Can’t let the star of the show die, can we?
    Strangely enough, all the doctors and nurses looked like therapists from the mental institution. I was so discombobulated that I hardly knew what was happening to me, much less could think about where I was at that point. I was awakened a couple of times during the night by someone shining a light in my eyes and asking if I remembered my name, but I slept through the entire stomach pumping procedure. When I finally woke up sometime the next day, I found myself in the intensive care unit.
    My court-appointed lawyer, Scott Davidson, first came to see me while I was in the hospital. He stayed for maybe ten minutes, just long enough to introduce himself and tell me my