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

Everyone called him either Ju San or Si-Fu. He was a Zen Buddhist, and was ordained as a Rinzai priest before his execution. That’s where the name Ju San came from. Si-Fu is a generic term that means
teacher
in Chinese. He was a huge white guy with a shaved head and tattoos of Asian-style dragons on his back. The package he sent was something he gave to every new person who came in, to help them get on their feet.
    His constant companion was a guy who greatly resembled a caveman. His name was Gene, and he had dark hair that reached the small of his back and a full beard that reached his chest. Gene was a Theosophist, a follower of H. P. Blavatsky. They both loaned me books on Buddhism and Theosophy, and answered countless questions. Listening to them debate each other on the yard was like watching a tennis match. Both of them lit a fire in me that grew into a decade-long educational process. I made my way through texts such as
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
and
Isis Unveiled
.
    These two guys were no dry scholars. They loved to laugh, and nothing was more hilarious to them than the perverse. They were completely irreverent. It was not unusual to hear one or the other make comments such as “I like the way your butt sticks up in the air when you bow to that little Buddha statue.” Gene was a remarkable artist, and I once saw a canvas he had painted to look like a giant dollar bill. If you looked closely, you’d notice it wasn’t George Washington in the middle, it was Jesus. Look even closer and you’d realize Jesus had a penis for an ear. Gene lectured for an hour on what such symbolism meant. Believe it or not, I actually learned quite a bit from him.
    I also learned quite a bit from the guy in the cell next to me, though I’ve never put the knowledge to use. He was an old biker from a gang called the Outlaws—rivals of the Hell’s Angels. He was a horrendous sight—three hundred pounds, blind in one eye, and barely able to walk. He was the epitome of hateful, old-age cunning. He was too old to fight, so he devised other ways to get revenge on those who did him wrong. He was known to befriend his enemies and then feed them rat poison and battery acid. A guy once stole five dollars from him, then found himself on the floor puking up blood after drinking a cup of coffee. He told me everything I needed to know in order to move and operate within the system. He also sold me my first radio. After not hearing music for a year, Lynyrd Skynyrd sounded like a choir of angels.
    My first two weeks on Death Row were spent vomiting and sleeping. I suffered a pretty fierce withdrawal from the antidepressants I had been on for three years. The prison system spends a bare minimum on medical care for inmates, so there was no way in hell they were going to pay for a luxury item like antidepressants. Instead of gradually weaning me off the medication the way they should have, I was forced to go cold turkey. My sleep was troubled and I could keep nothing in my stomach. Even though it was agony, in hindsight it was for the best. After the drugs had made their way out of my system, I felt better physically and clearer mentally. I also lost all the weight I had gained while sitting in the county jail. You don’t get much exercise when locked up in a cage, so I had gained over sixty pounds by the time I went to trial. I lost that and more. At one point I was down to 116 pounds. My attorneys visited me maybe once, telling me they would file an appeal—none of it made sense to me, and nothing they said offered me any idea as to how I might take the next steps legally to appeal my conviction. Their primary goal was to keep me from participating in my own defense, and so nothing was explained to me clearly, and nothing was asked of me.
    Almost immediately, though, I started to get requests from media sources asking me to do interviews. I thought this could be my chance to tell my story to the rest of the world, since no one else had articulated my side of the story. It was obvious that no one else was going to do it for me. So I granted a couple interviews, with disastrous results. A local news station got ahold of the footage of one of my interviews and claimed I had talked “exclusively” to them. In truth, I never talked to anyone from their station; they cut and spliced the footage to make it appear that I had done so. A newscaster would say something like “Here’s Damien Echols, talking about his leadership of a satanic