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

had recently seen the documentary about my case at a film festival in New York. Her name was Lorri Davis, and she did something no one else had ever done—she apologized for invading my privacy by seeking me out. That really struck me, because I felt like I no longer had any privacy. My entire life had been exposed for anyone and everyone to examine and poke at with a stick. I was a fly that had its wings ripped off by a malicious kid. I was the proverbial ant under the magnifying glass. Every day I received letters from people who did nothing but ask questions about the most intimate aspects of my life, almost as if everyone in the world felt entitled to demand anything of me they wanted to know. Imagine being hounded by the paparazzi, but instead of taking your picture they throw rocks and try to dissect you.
    Here was a lady who understood the value of common courtesy. She said she felt horrible about what I’d been through and was compelled to contact me, but she didn’t want to intrude. I immediately wrote back to her, and ever since we have tried to write to each other every single day. Our letters to each other now fill up an entire closet.
    She’s the most magickal thing on earth, but it took me at least a year to be able to understand her, because she was so foreign to anything I’d ever known. She was from New York, college-educated, a world traveler who’d been to South America and as far away as the Middle East, and an architect who had worked on projects for people I’d heard of only from Hollywood movies. I was introduced to a whole new way of life through her.
    We wrote to each other obsessively, and we spoke on the phone for the first time a month or so after that first letter. I just decided to call her one day—I was terribly nervous, knowing I’d need to improvise the conversation rather than script it ahead of time. She always laughs now when she tells anyone about the first time I called her. She picked up the phone to hear a deep, Delta accent ask, “Are you okay?” It was such a shock to her system that it took a second for her to reply. She said it nearly killed her. She still sometimes teases me about my accent, but her friends in New York often tell her that she’s started to sound like me.
    Lorri came to visit me about six months later. I remember it was summer because she wasn’t wearing a coat. We had no idea what to expect, and both of us were on autopilot, for lack of a better way to describe it. We both knew we needed to talk to each other, and then to see each other. Lorri flew in the night before to be at the prison at eight a.m., when the three-hour visitation period began. She flew back to New York the same day.
    It was a slow and gradual process, forging ahead together. In the beginning, I couldn’t have even articulated what we were doing because I had no concept of subtlety. Now it’s a personal obsession of mine, to know more of subtlety. I believe this obsession started with literature. The Latin American writer Julio Cortázar had had a huge impact on her life, and his books were among her most valued possessions. When she sent them to me, I was dumbfounded. I truly couldn’t understand why anyone thought these stories important enough to commit to paper. They made no sense to me. I had been raised to believe a real story had a beginning, a middle, and a conclusion in which the loose ends were tied up. These stories seemed to defy logic.
    I knew I was in love with Lorri when I started to wake up in the middle of the night furious and cursing her for making me feel the way she did. It was pain beyond belief. Nothing has ever hurt me that way. I tried to sleep as much as possible just to escape. I was grinding my teeth down to nubs. Now, years later, it’s exactly the opposite. Now there is no pain, yet she still makes my heart explode. Now there is only fun and love and silliness. She drives me to frenzy, because I can never get enough.
    For the first two years we knew each other, Lorri flew from New York to Arkansas about every other month, so in addition to the phone bill, this was an extremely expensive relationship for her.
    When she came to see me, there was a sheet of glass separating us. It was maddening, and we would often blow through the screen at the bottom of the glass just to feel each other’s breath. I loved to sit and look at Lorri, as she has an absolutely perfect body. It’s every man’s fantasy, like a 1950s pinup model. To have such