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

high and the cops were taking no chances. We would ride to court every day in a convoy of police cars—six of them, to be exact. When we pulled up out front we had to walk a gauntlet. There would be a huge crowd of reporters, and people who wanted us dead, and we had to walk right through the middle of them like Moses parting the Red Sea. The screams of hatred were so loud you couldn’t discern individual voices. Reporters shoved cameras and microphones into your face at every step, all shouting questions at once.
    An interesting thing began to happen as the days passed. People who supported us and believed in us began to appear in the crowd, one or two at a time. They would smile or give me a slight nod as I made my way in or out. They were mostly young boys or girls standing apart from the rest, many dressed in black. I started to receive little bits of poetry scratched on scraps of paper. Someone sent me a single red rose. The supporters never matched the haters in number or volume, but they mattered a great deal to me.
    There were a few odd cases, too. Ron started a ritual of pointing out the girls he said were “eye-fucking” me. As I got out of the car one morning a girl screamed, “Oh my God, he looked at me!” like she had just seen John, Paul, George, and Ringo rolled into one.
    The reporters were the worst. If people knew how much of what they read in the papers or see on the news is distorted or outright lies, media corporations would soon go out of business. I’ve seen more fiction on local news broadcasts than I’ve read in novels. Quite often, the newspaper accounts didn’t match anything I saw go down in the courtroom. Valuable information went unreported and preposterous new developments were invented. One day, sitting in my cell watching coverage, the broadcast was interrupted with breaking news: a stick covered in a red substance and hair had been found in my mother’s now abandoned trailer. The announcement was made and regular programming resumed—but in everyone’s mind here was a possible murder weapon. In fact, it was a paint stick, the kind you use to stir a freshly opened gallon of paint. My mother had been disciplining her two Pomeranians with the end of a used stick—and before anyone did the logical thing, the media had their hands on it somehow. In a later example of the hysteria, during a post-trial hearing, new evidence was presented—they had found teeth marks on one of the bodies, and they did not match my teeth. There was no mention of it in the next day’s paper.
    Burnett and Fogleman welcomed the media’s presence, and they (in addition to my attorneys and Jason’s) agreed to allow Joe and Bruce to film the trial for their HBO production—one would suppose because they assumed that they were going to be the centerpieces of a major legal victory when the trial concluded. Since both Joe and Bruce had visited me often in jail, pretrial, at this point, I had gotten to know them fairly well and I was used to the cameras by then. They didn’t discuss the specifics of the case with me, but asked me about my background and childhood, and often asked why the police might have focused on me as a suspect. They interviewed Jason and Jessie extensively, too. Their presence was comforting in the courtroom—amid the sea of outraged and angry people, their conversations and attention to me was the only familiar part of my life at that point.
    It’s maddening to sit there hour after hour, day after day, on trial for something both you and the cops know you didn’t do. You feel hundreds of eyes drilling into you, taking in your every shift and move. Many seemed to think this was the greatest form of entertainment they’d ever witnessed. Vultures were stripping the flesh from my bones while I was still alive.
    I never stood a chance. During breaks, the judge and prosecutors told jokes about me and smiled like they were awaiting a pat on the back. Burnett would comment on what a nice ass one of the female potential jury members had, and Fogleman’s teeth would stick out while he yuk-yuk-yukked it up. Convincing twelve people they should vote to have me murdered was just another day at the office for them.
    Whenever evidence was introduced that could have helped me, the jury was escorted out of the room so they wouldn’t hear it. It was discovered that John Mark Byers, the stepfather of one of the children, had a knife with blood on it that matched the blood of at least one of