Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three (42 page)

41. Christopher’s life had been hard from the start. He’d weighed less than four pounds at his birth, which was premature, and had had to undergo immediate abdominal surgery.

42. The neurologist, Dr. Donald J. Eastmead, reported that Christopher had “a great many problems…. He overreacts and has temper tantrums at home. He is aggressive on occasion with little remorse. Bedtime, morning, mealtime, riding in the car and various other social situations are a problem. He frequently interrupts.” The doctor prescribed Tofranil for Christopher’s hyperactivity. But on a visit three months later, he was dismayed to see that Christopher seemed to have regressed. Eastmead noted that the child seemed to be suffering from paranoia, complaining about “something being in his hair.” The doctor kept him on the Tofranil and prescribed, in addition, five milligrams of Ritalin twice a day. By the time Christopher was seven, the Tofranil had been stopped and the dosage of Ritalin quadrupled. But the boy’s problems did not abate.

43. During the visit shortly before Christopher’s death, Eastmead noted that he showed signs of “extreme impulsivity, destructiveness, opposition, defiance, hyperactivity, extremely low frustration tolerance and refusal to follow commands.” Eastmead reported: “I am in a quandary as to the reason. He has been on Ritalin 20.mg twice a day, which has improved his hyperactivity and inattention but has made no appreciable change in his poor social skills, including such things as playing with his feces and poor judgment in terms of self-care and self-help…. This is certainly a difficult child who may require in-hospital treatment to gain control of his behavior. I am increasing the medication and changing it to Dexedrine 5 to 10 mg morning and noon, 5 in the afternoon, as well as adding Tegretol.”

44. The case was handled by state police Investigator Steve Dozier. The ring that had been part of the shipment was apparently never recovered.

45. Gitchell to Kermit Channel, Arkansas crime lab, May 26, 1993.

46. Gitchell to deputy prosecuting attorney John Fogleman, May 28, 1993.

47. The deputy prosecutor who accompanied Fogleman to the crime lab was James “Jimbo” Hale.

48. When interviewed in April 2001, Fogleman said that he did not often take such measures but that he and Hale visited the crime lab in this instance “because it was a very difficult case.”

49. First two verses of an untitled poem by Damien Echols, date unknown.

50. General offense report, Marion Police Department, March 6, 1992.

51. Personal information about Jerry Driver in this chapter was drawn from an author interview with him conducted by phone on November 1, 2000.

52. General offense report, Marion Police Department, May 13, 1992.

53. Record of arrest, Crittenden County Sheriff’s Office, May 19, 1992.

54. Petition and detention order in the Juvenile Division of Chancery Court, Crittenden County, May 19, 1992.

55. “I found several instances of animal sacrifices,” Driver later explained. “They were mostly small animals. The largest was a dog. We could tell they had been mutilated. The dogs would be skinned, with the entrails out of them. We found some in an old school building in West Memphis that had a pentagram on the wall and 666. I found, like, a little altar made with sticks and stones. And there was a lot of bird bones there, and a cat that had been skinned.”

56. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, alarm was spreading throughout the United States about crimes that had reportedly been committed as part of cult-related rituals. Concern first arose in the mid-1980s, when a few psychotherapists began to report that a startling number of their clients had described, while under hypnosis, vivid “recovered memories” of ritual abuse they claimed to have suffered in childhood. Many “survivors” of ritual abuse, as they came to be called, reported having been raped; some reported witnessing murders. Interest in the reports spread from the mental health profession to other fields, including religion and law enforcement. Groups were formed to help victims of ritual abuse and to identify likely offenders. A task force formed to address the problem in Los Angeles noted that “ritual abuse does not necessarily mean Satanic. However, most survivors state that they were ritually abused as part of Satanic worship.”

57. “A Law-Enforcement Perspective on Allegations of Ritual Abuse,” Kenneth V. Lanning, supervisory special agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation.

58. The consultant was Steve Nawojczyk, a former coroner in Little Rock. According to his press releases, Nawojczyk consulted with law enforcement officials nationally on gang activity, as well as on “cults and occultic groups.”

59. Driver also kept in touch with other cult watchers scattered around the country. He and a police officer in New York exchanged faxes in order to compare graffiti. They concluded that some of the graffiti Driver was seeing in Crittenden County resembled graffiti that police in New York had discovered as part of the infamous Son of Sam murder case. As Driver later explained, “There was an abandoned school, and when you went down a long hall and into this room, it looked sort of cavelike. The whole scene looked very similar—eerily similar, I’d say—to a picture that was published in a book about Son of Sam.”

60. Records supplied to Jerry Driver by Charter Hospital of Little Rock.

61. According to family members, Damien had suffered from intense motion sickness since childhood. Even when he turned sixteen, he showed no interest in learning to drive. He’d seemed content to walk, and drivers in Marion and West Memphis had grown accustomed to seeing Damien, often wearing a long black trench coat, walking along the roads.

62. Report of Calvin L. Downey, juvenile department counselor, Washington County, Oregon; August 14, 1992.

63. Damien was taken to St. Vincent Hospital and Medical Center.

64. Affidavit to the Juvenile Division of Chancery Court of Crittenden County, Arkansas, sworn and filed on September 9, 1992.

65. Petition filed in the Juvenile Division of Chancery Court, September 9, 1992.

66. Notarized document authorizing change of guardianship signed by Pamela Joyce Echols in Oregon on September 11, 1992. The Arkansas court order changing custody and the order adjudicating Echols a delinquent were entered three days later, on September 14.

67. Undated report of Joyce Cureton, director of the Craighead County Juvenile Detention Center.

68. Charter Hospital physician’s discharge summary, September 28, 1992.

69. Damien was seen by Sherry Dockins, LMSW, a clinical social worker at the East Arkansas Regional Mental Health Center. He told Dockins that he often slept during the day, that he usually visited Domini at night, and that he liked to “trance out” when he was alone, because it took him away from “what’s going on.” He acknowledged having used alcohol, cocaine, acid, and marijuana in the past, but said he had never been a major drug user and had used no drugs for several months. Dockins also noted that Damien told her that he had a history of self-mutilation; that he usually felt “neutral or nothing”; that “he feels people are in two classes—sheep and wolves. (Wolves eat the sheep.)”; that he revealed “a history of abuse as he talked of how he was treated as a child [but] denies that this has influenced him, stating, ‘I just put it all inside’”; that he “describes this as more than just anger—like rage. Sometimes he does ‘blow-up.’ Relates that when this happens the only solution is to ‘hurt someone’”; and that “when questioned on his feelings, he states, ‘I know I’m going to influence the world. People will remember me.’”

70. According to a 1998 Southern Focus poll conducted by the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
and the University of North Carolina, more than 60 percent of Southerners polled—and almost three-quarters of all churchgoers—said they believed that humans are sometimes possessed by the devil.

71. Martin B. Bradley et al.,
Churches and Church Membership in the United States
(Atlanta: Glenmary Research Center, 1990). Nationally, Southern Baptists accounted for about 8 percent of the population.

72. In November 2001, the Arkansas Baptist State Convention passed a resolution to “firmly denounce” J. K. Rowling’s best-selling series of books about the boy wizard Harry Potter. The resolution was intended to alert merchants—particularly booksellers—to the Baptists’ concern that the series was “inconsistent with biblical morality,” sounded an “anti-Christian theme,” and “promoted pagan beliefs and practices.”

73. Driver was an Episcopalian. His wife, a Roman Catholic, attended St. Michael’s Church in West Memphis—the same church that Damien Echols had attended for a time. Driver knew that before his hospitalizations, Damien had taken an interest in Catholicism. He knew that the teenager had completed a course for converts and that he had been baptized into the Catholic faith. Damien had told Driver the same thing that he had told officials in Oregon, that he had changed his first name from Michael to Damien when he was adopted by Jack Echols, and that he had chosen Damien in honor of a famous Catholic priest by that name who’d cared for the lepers of Hawaii. But Driver doubted the story. He knew that a century ago, there was a Father Damien who’d cared for Hawaii’s outcasts. But Driver also knew that Damien was the name of the demon child in the 1976 movie
The Omen,
and he suspected that, if any identification was being made, it was with that character.

74. Author interview with Driver, November 2000.

75. Baldwin’s account of his early life, as presented in this chapter, is drawn from interviews by and correspondence with the author while he was at the Grimes Unit of the Arkansas Department of Correction, during 2000 and 2001.

76. Jason’s favorite band since first grade was Metallica. He liked the way the group could “build with music, the way they build all these different harmonies and melodies with their single instruments, and yet the music that they build independently becomes an instrument in itself, to make the overall song.” By the time Driver had focused his attention on Damien—and secondarily on Jason—Jason’s favorite song was Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters.” He loved the music as well as the lyrics. Music played a big role in the boys’ lives, partly because there was so little else. Jason would recall, “Damien listened to different music for the same reasons.”

77. The friends had much in common—and many differences. “People thought we did drugs because we looked wild,” Jason would recall, “but we didn’t. We didn’t need them. Damien smoked cigarettes. I never have. He was smoking cigarettes before we ever met. If he wasn’t smoking when we met, he would never have started that bad habit. Most of the people we knew smoked, and a lot of people did drugs, like smoking marijuana. We couldn’t have afforded to buy drugs, anyway. We just never had any money to do anything wild or adventurous. We lived on a lake, so that was cool. I liked to fish, but Damien didn’t. But that was okay. He could sit on the dock, feed the ducks, and watch me fish. We also had a Super Nintendo, with the coolest game at the time, which was Street Fighter II. I know it’s a violent game, but it was fun! We would spend time at my house playing Super Nintendo and listening to the stereo.”

78. Jason said he’d often been told that he was going to hell because he liked a type of music that some local ministers denounced. By sticking together, he and Damien were able to absorb the barbs. “After a while,” Jason said, “it was water off a duck’s back.” He dismissed their critics. “You know how kids are,” he’d say. “They probably got it from their families and their church.”

79. After that incident, Jason said, “Steve Jones would hound me for wearing rock and roll T-shirts and the like. He was always around messing with me. But I didn’t care. It wasn’t until he started hounding Damien that I began to care. He absolutely hated Damien. He told all the kids in the neighborhood that Damien was a Satan-worshiping faggot. That caused all types of trouble for Damien. Someone always wanted to kick him down, but he was smarter than that. He thought it was humorous, all the rumors about him. He didn’t realize how a lot of people took what was said, along with his name and how he looked, serious.”

80. Jason did not like Deanna. He said, “When her parents forbade her to see Damien, it was her idea for them to run away to California. As I look back on it now, I should have been a better friend and talked him out of it. I tried, but not as hard as I could have. He wanted me to go with him, but I couldn’t. I had responsibilities to my family. I told him that I did not want him to go, but she put herself on him and got her way. I wished him the best and we collected money up for his trip. I don’t remember how much he ended up with, but it wasn’t much. That was a sad dark day. Especially when the police picked him up. After that, the police had a ‘legitimate’ reason to keep Damien out of Marion. Because of his love for Deanna, Damien went to juvenile hall and afterward lived in Portland for a while. He tried coming back to Marion a couple of times and even tried to return to Marion High School. The police escorted him out. All because of a girl who really did not care for him, who was just rebelling from her parents and looking for the first person she could manipulate into taking her away.”

81. Interview notes of Don Bray taken by investigator Ron Lax, October 7, 1993.

82. The pastor was Dennis Ingall, of Lakeshore Baptist Church.

83. When Lax interviewed Bray in October 1993, the police officer still carried the piece of paper in his shirt pocket. Lax wrote in his notes of that interview, “I asked if he knew Damien Echols personally and he admitted he had never met him, nor had he ever had any connection with him. He stated there was a case in Marion in which a teenage girl was raped and he felt Damien Echols was involved; however, under further questioning, he stated a young man had been arrested for the rape and Echols had never been charged or questioned.”

84. Pam Echols later recalled the interview as having taken place on May 6. Damien said he remembered a helicopter circling the city while he was being questioned.

85. Handwritten notes of Detective Bill Durham.

86. This appears to be a reference to the interview on Friday, May 7, when Sudbury and Jones questioned Echols.