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The author of "The Case Against the West Memphis 3 Killers" follows new developments in the case, as well as other cases covered in various podcasts, televisions shows and documentaries, such as "Making a Murderer," "Truth and Justice," "The Staircase," and related news coverage, with a heavy emphasis on detailing misinformation and propaganda designed to subvert the judicial process.
Episodes
Friday Nov 09, 2018
Friday Nov 09, 2018
The author of "The Case Against the West Memphis 3 Killers" examines the misconceptions surrounding the cases in light of recent developments, with a particular emphasis on media portrayals and news coverage. While many future episodes will continue to explore the WM3 killings of Christopher Byers, Michael Moore and Stevie Branch, Meece will also be looking at how other crimes are being falsely portrayed on film, TV, print and broadcast.
Tuesday Nov 13, 2018
Tuesday Nov 13, 2018
Episode two examines recent media coverage of Damien Echols and the West Memphis 3, particularly a Sept. 26 New York Times piece that demonstrated a poor grasp of the facts of the case.
Tuesday Jan 01, 2019
Tuesday Jan 01, 2019
We begin a series of podcasts surveying the texts in "Blood on Black" and "Where the Monsters Go," starting with the prologue for the first book about the West Memphis 3. We also talk about the upcoming book from Terry Hobbs and talk a bit about "Making A Murderer" and other true crime documentaries and podcasts.
https://www.facebook.com/WestMemphis3Killers/
Sunday Jan 06, 2019
Sunday Jan 06, 2019
In this week's episode in this ongoing podcast exploring the case against the West Memphis 3 killers, Gary Meece reviews press coverage of the case and determines that the so-called Satanic Panic involved in the case stemmed from the confession of Jessie Misskelley and Damien Echols proudly proclaiming his occult beliefs. Prior to the arrests, while there were rumors and local talk of occultism tied to the killings, there was no such media presence. Some press coverage during the trial revealed that jurors and spectators thought the occult angle was unconvincing. An excerpt from "Blood on Black" explains the events that made Damien Echols a prime suspect, and they had nothing to do with black T-shirts, listening to Metallica or having a funny haircut.
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Sunday Jan 13, 2019
Sunday Jan 13, 2019
Gary Meece, author of "Blood on Black," "Where the Monsters Go" and "The Case Against the West Memphis 3 Killers," delves into the perhaps the most controversial aspect of the West Memphis 3 case, the occult angle, taking a look in this episode at what the overkill deaths of Michael Moore, Stevie Branch and Christopher Byers might mean in terms of occult ritual. Was Damien Echols influenced by pagan practices in his plans for murdering these children?
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Saturday Jan 19, 2019
Saturday Jan 19, 2019
Episode 6 of The Case Against goes over the statements surrounding John Mark Byers and Terry Hobbs on the West Memphis 3 case. Gary Meece, author of "Blood on Black" and "Where the Monsters Go," also talks about the upcoming book about Hobbs and season 3 of "True Detective," which obviously drew some inspiration from the West Memphis case.
https://www.facebook.com/WestMemphis3Killers/
Sunday Jan 27, 2019
Sunday Jan 27, 2019
In Episode 7 of The Case Against, Gary Meece draws upon the "Swirling Cauldron of Suspicion" in "Blood on Black" to present the evidence that the West Memphis police did not focus almost exclusively on Damien Echols as a suspect, and specifically citing some of the more memorable leads the police followed, including "Mr. Bojangles," "the tattooed man" and James K. Martin.
https://www.facebook.com/WestMemphis3Killers/?ref=br_tf&epa=SEARCH_BOX
Sunday Feb 03, 2019
Sunday Feb 03, 2019
Episode 8 of "The Case Against" tackles another persistent falsity about the West Memphis 3 case: Belying the claim that Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin were barely acquainted with Jessie Misskelley are their own words and the words of their friends and acquaintances. They knew each other and frequented the same teenage hangouts.
https://www.facebook.com/WestMemphis3Killers/
"I THOUGHT WE WERE SORT OF FRIENDS"
Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin were best friends, blood brothers, two boys from the trailer parks who had formed an inseparable bond. In May of 1993, Echols was a high school dropout who received Social Security Disability checks due to various mental illnesses. He stayed some of the time at his parents’ home at Broadway Trailer Park in West Memphis and some of the time at his 16-year-old pregnant girlfriend’s home in Lakeshore Estates, a trailer park between West Memphis and Marion, Ark. Jason’s trailer was just down the street from where Domini Teer and her mother lived. Echols’ parents had recently remarried after years of separation. His mother, who had lifelong troubles with mental illness, had divorced his stepfather the previous year over allegations of sexual abuse of Echols’ younger sister, Michelle. The sprawling, trash-strewn trailer parks were near where Interstate 55 came from the north to join east-west Interstate 40 for a brief stretch through West Memphis. While Baldwin, a skinny 16-year-old, lived in Lakeshore and attended Marion High School, much of his social life revolved around the video galleries, bowling alley and skating rink across the interstate in West Memphis. Baldwin lived with two younger brothers and a mentally ill mother who had recently separated from his habitually drunken stepfather. His mother’s new boyfriend, a chronic felon, had moved in a few weeks ago. Echols told of ficers handling a juvenile offense in May 1992 that he and Baldwin were heavily involved in “gray magic.” One of their mutual friends, Jessie Misskelley Jr., 17, a school dropout and another trailer park teenager, was regarded as a bully and a troublemaker. Misskelley had been in repeated trouble for attacking younger children. He eventually would admit that he had been involved in satanic rituals with Echols and Baldwin. One of the WM3 myths is that Misskelley was a distant acquaintance of the other two. Misskelley and Baldwin had been off and on as close friends for years, and Misskelley and Echols often spent time together. In a letter to girlfriend Heather Cliett written from the detention center, Baldwin, showing a sense of betrayal, wrote: “What gets me is why Jessie would make up such a lie as that, because I thought we were sort of friends except for the night at the skating rink when he tried to steal my necklace, and that made me pretty mad, but not as mad as all of this is making me.” Mara Leveritt’s book “Dark Spell: Surviving the Sentence” tells of Baldwin’s first encounter with Misskelley on his first day in sixth grade at Marion Elementary School. According to the book, Misskelley attacked Baldwin without provocation during recess, “hollering like he meant to kill him.” In eighth and ninth grades, the two boys lived on the same street in Lakeshore. They “got to be pretty good friends.” Around that time, Echols’ grandmother moved to Lakeshore and Echols began hanging out, mowing lawns and using the money to fund his interest in skateboards. In “Life After Death,” Echols described first noticing Baldwin, “a skinny kid with a black eye and a long, blond mullet.” Echols was struck by the number of music cassettes Baldwin carried in his backpack — “Metallica, Anthrax, Iron Maiden, Slayer, and every other hair band a young hoodlum could desire.” After his Nanny suffered her second heart attack and had her leg amputated, the Echols family moved to Lakeshore. In “Life After Death,” Echols described Lakeshore as full of “run-down and beat-up” mobile homes, filled with jobless drunks and addicts who earned their money through petty crime or scrounging up recyclables. Echols more recently imagined that the dilapidated trailers somehow have improved with age along with the neighborhood: “I suppose it would now be considered lower middle class.” Not so. While some of the homes are kept up nicely, many of the yards are littered, youths roam the streets aimlessly and trailers often catch fire, sometimes from meth labs. Lakeshore residents routinely show up in Municipal Court hearings, often for petty crimes and drug offenses, for failing to appear at hearings, for not paying fines, for the sort of offenses committed by chronic small-timers everywhere. The “lake” at Lakeshore is the same scummy, trashy stinkhole that Echols remembered.
Lakeshore is still populated by many carnies and other itinerant workers. It remains a hotbed of occultism, witchcraft and Satanism, with the West Memphis 3 having achieved the status of folk heroes.
Similarly, Echols in “Life After Death” described Marion High School as a sort of “rural” “Beverly Hills 90210,” “a place where kids drove brand-new cars to school, wore Gucci clothing, and had enough jewelry to spark the envy of rap stars.” Actually, the students of Marion High were and are the typical mix of modestly attired kids from a modestly middle-class community.
Marion is a small Arkansas town with a traditionally agriculture-based economy, with a number of residents who commute to jobs across the river in Memphis. As in many similar towns, a deeply entrenched elite holds sway over most municipal affairs. Their style is far from ostentatious. Marion is not an elite suburban community, though Marion residents do hold themselves aloof from the larger,
predominately black and considerably rougher town of West Memphis to the immediate south.
Median income in Marion today is roughly twice that of West Memphis. By comparison, median income in the elite Memphis suburb of Germantown is roughly twice that of Marion.
Nonetheless, there was a class divide between the trailer park kids and the more affluent students. Local teen Jason Crosby described “high society people which would be the people who come to school in shirt and tie, don’t want to get messed up, want to stay on the sidewalk all the time.”
Among students with parents with steady jobs, a strong work ethic, no arrest record and solid social standing, kids from the trailer parks often didn’t fit in.
As outsiders together at Marion Junior High, Damien and Jason became fast friends, sharing interests in music, skateboarding and video games.
In “Life After Death,” Damien described how he met Misskelley through Jason. Knocking on the door of the Baldwin trailer, Damien was told that Jason was over at Misskelley’s trailer, four or five trailers away. Damien described Misskelley was a short, greasy, manic figure prone to funny and slightly odd antics. The Misskelleys were pumping up the tires on the old trailer and moving it to Highland Trailer Park, just across the way, that very day.
Still, said Echols, “I never did see Jessie a great deal, but we became familiar enough to talk when we met. Jason and I would run into him at the bowling alley and spend an hour or two playing pool, or hang out for a little while at the Lakeshore store.”
Echols former girlfriend Deanna Holcomb described a tighter relationship between Echols and Misskelley, naming Jason, Jessie and Joey Lancaster as particular friends of Echols.
When Damien moved up to high school, he left Jason a grade behind. Damien made no attempt to fit in and soon adopted his trademark all-black wardrobe, complete with black trench coat, partially inspired by the Johnny Depp character in “Edward Scissorhands.”
All three hung around typical hangouts in West Memphis such as the bowling alley, the skating rink and video game booths. A surveillance video from the skating rink posted on William Ramsey’s Occult Investigations YouTube account recently showed Echols and Misskelley as two of the older boys hanging out at the skating rink soon after the killings.
Jennifer Bearden was a 12-year-old Bartlett girl when she first encountered the three killers at the rink around February 1993. She struck up a romantic relationship with the 18-year-old Echols. Concerning Misskelley, “I knew him a little bit. … I saw him at the skating rink several times.”
Asked about the relationship of Misskelley to the other two, she testified in an August 2009 hearing: “.… Whenever we were at the skating rink, uh, Jessie was, he, he was a little bit louder, he was a little bit more —- I don’t know — he liked to cause a little bit more trouble. … We kind of like stayed to ourselves and there was an incident that he stole the 8-ball from the pool table at the skating rink. … And uh, he showed (it) to us and actually, Damien and Jason got blamed for it. And they got kicked out of the skating rink for it. … They were pretty upset with him.”
Joseph Samuel Dwyer, a younger playmate of Baldwin living two doors down at Lakeshore in 1993, described in a hearing on Aug. 14, 2009, what he knew of the relationships among Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley.
Dwyer said that he knew Misskelley quite well from the neighborhood, particularly since Misskelley’s stepmother, Shelbia Misskelley, separated from “Big Jessie,” lived on the same street as Dwyer and Baldwin.
Though Dwyer was in frequent contact with the Baldwin boys, he merely knew Echols but did not associate with him. Echols shared few interests with most boys and usually dressed in black. “I just never really hung out with him or even tried to get to know him,” testified Dwyer.
He explained: “I really didn’t have anything to do with him just because, uh, just the way he acted. … We’d get off the school bus and he’d be standing there, it’s almost like craving attention in an all-black outfit so all of the kids on the bus would see him.”
Dwyer pegged Echols as a poser who reveled in drawing negative attention to himself. “… He liked horror movies. He would talk about watching horror movies and stuff like that.”
In an affidavit in 2006, Dwyer said of Echols: “I didn’t like what I saw of him. He liked to call attention to himself. One day he painted a star over one of his eyes. Damien was a talker. He liked to say things to get peoples’ attention.”
Dwyer characterized Misskelley as a “trailer park redneck.”
Dwyer recalled the relationship of Baldwin and Echols: “I did see Damien and Jason together after Jason started getting friendly with Damien, I was around him less than before because I didn’t like Damien. I know that after Jason started hanging out with Damien, he got a trench coat just like Damien’s. It was a long black trench coat. Damien had a certain way of talking and Jason picked up some of Damien’s way of talking.”
Another myth in the standard WM3 storyline is that the police pegged Damien as the killer partially because he wore a black trench coat .
In 2009, Dwyer explained “the trench coat thing, at the time that was sort of a fashion fad. I have one, uh, everybody, if they didn’t have one they wanted one. That was kind of a fashion thing. … It was the rock shirt, rock T-shirts and the trench coat.” So
“everybody” had or wanted to have a black trench coat as part of a “fashion thing,” along with rock T-shirts. Baldwin and Echols tiresomely claim they were singled out, persecuted, arrested and convicted because they “didn’t dress like everyone else.” But “everybody” wanted to dress the way they dressed.
Dwyer added: “Everybody out there in the trailer park was terrified; everybody was profiled because of our rock T-shirts, the trench coat , the long hair. Everybody look at us like we were just part of this cult thing, and it was totally made up, if you ask me. Totally made up. And we all felt like we could just as easily have been, uh, picked as a suspect because we were in the the same trailer park, dressed the same. We were all scared about that. Channel 3 news, all the news station were riding through there every day trying to film us as we were walking down the street, you know.”
Echols testified that after he began dressing in allblack, other students followed his example.
Consider, too, the myth that the boys were singled out for their interest in heavy metal.
In 2006, Dwyer said, “A lot of people in our age groups at the time were interested in rock and roll music, and in heavy metal music … I remember that after the three boys were found dead, and the news cameras came out to Lakeshore from time to time, anyone wearing a Metallica t-shirt, or some other heavy metal band t-shirt, was viewed as a devil worshipper, especially if the person had long hair.”
Longhaired kids who were heavy metal fans were common, as were black T-shirts.
At trial, defense attorneys elicited police testimony that Echols was wearing a Portland Trail Blazers black T-shirt on the night of his arrest, establishing to no clear end that black T-shirts were mainstream enough to be worn by NBA fans. Or by Reba McEntire fans, as demonstrated by a T-shirt from the Misskelley home.
Juvenile Officer Jerry Driver testified about Misskelley’s links to Baldwin and Echols in Misskelley’s trial.
Driver, who died in August 2016, had seen the three together for the first time around Nov. 15, 1992, at Lakeshore. Damien, Jason and Jessie walked by while he and a sheriff’s deputy were dealing with a suspected drunken driver. “It was nighttime … They all had on long black coats, and Damien had a slouch hat and they all had staffs. … Long sticks that they were walking with.”
Misskelley dismissed the story as ridiculous during one of his many confessions, saying he did not have a black coat. Driver’s account has been widely ridiculed, though never refuted.
Driver repeated the story at the Echols/Baldwin trial. “We saw three gentlemen walking by … Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley, and Jason Baldwin … with long coats” and “long sticks or staffs.”
Driver had seen them together on a few other occasions, “maybe two or three times,” … “Twice, I think, at uh — at Walmart and once out in the trailer park.”
Otherwise, he had seen Echols and Baldwin together dressed in black.
Echols girlfriend Domini Teer, in a Sept. 10, 1993, statement, surprised Deputy Prosecuting Attorney John Fogleman by volunteering that “Jessie came around after them kids was killed.”
Fogleman: “OK, what do you mean by that? That he came around after the kids were murdered? What do you mean?”
Domini: “I mean, the boy shows up a week after them kids were killed …. Out of nowhere. I mean we hadn’t seen Jessie for months. I mean he did that when Damien and me got back together, and Damien was living with his stepdad, Jack. All of a sudden, Jessie comes showing up, and the first time we’ve seen Jessie since the year before that. …”
Fogleman: “And … then Jessie was around quite a bit then?”
Domini: “Every once in a while, like once or twice, yeah, I saw him. … I mean, when all the cops were bringing everybody in and all and talking to everybody … It was like two days after the cops were coming around, um … Jessie came over to Jason’s house one day while I was sitting there, and wanting Damien to take Blockbuster movies to Blockbuster … And they went, and I guess, took Blockbuster movies back and they wound up over at Jessie’s house … because his mom had come over to get Damien … Damien’s mom … cause he was supposed to be at Jason’s house….
“And it made me mad, and I called over to Jessie’s and said where’s Damien. And he goes, Damien’s on his way back. Matthew just come get him. I said I know, I sent Matthew over there to come get him, cause his parents are here. And then I hung up the phone.”
Fogleman: “And about when did that happen after this Wednesday?”
Domini: “Um … it was about like that next week.” That would have been when Damien’s parents supposedly were temporarily separated, according to some contradictory accounts of Echols’ mother, Pam, and after Damien had been interviewed by police several times and failed the polygraph.
Jessie was trying to get Damien and selfappointed detective Vicki Hutcheson together about that time. “Dark Spell” described Baldwin’s version of the visit.
According to Baldwin, Misskelley showed up unexpectedly at the Baldwin trailer because a friend from Highland Trailer Park wanted to meet Echols.
from Highland Trailer Park wanted to meet Echols.
year-old Hutcheson.
Domini told Fogleman she had seen Misskelley a total of three times. “The first time, we had come up the street, and he was messing around with Matt, and we thought somebody was getting beat up, because they were all screaming and hollering out there, and when we walked out there was Jessie.” “Messing around” with younger kids was routine for Jessie.
“And the second time I seen him, they had come over there and me and Damien was together, and they had just come knocking on the door with him and B.J. … And that was the last time I’d ever seen him until that time that he …. came over to Jason’s to go get Damien.”
Charlotte Bly Bolois, who lived at Lakeshore the summer of 1992 and visited there often, told police that Echols and Misskelley were close friends at that time, constantly seen together along with her cousin, Buddy Lucas.
She also described how Misskelley got into a fight in June 1992 with her husband, Dan Bolois: “My husband has two younger brothers, one is fixing to be 16 and other one is fixing to be 18, and he started a fight with my husband younger brothers and um, my husband went up there and ask him what was the deal and little Jessie Misskelley was going to pull a knife, but I got behind Jessie and took the knife from him.”
The younger brothers were Johnny and Shane Perschke, and there have been various accounts of fights involving John Perschke.
Bolois recalled a fight “right there at my trailer” with Misskelley. “Him and my husband got into a fight later on down Fool Lake.” That was the fight involving the knife. She requested that Misskelley give her the knife. “And he turned around and handed me the knife, I said if you’re going to fight, fight fair. … He busted a hole in my husband’s lip.”
A recent account from a West Memphis resident who asked that her name be withheld painted a disturbing portrait of Damien, Jason and Jessie interacting with children from the neighborhood where their victims lived:
“In 1993 I used to live in Mayfair Apartments. I lived in the townhouses that are located in the back of the complex. I lived there for around a year and a half.
“One day I was coming home and parked in front of a park on the property close to my apartment. As I parked I noticed 3 teenage boys and 3 young boys. It caught me as strange cause one of the teenagers was dressed all in black with a long black coat the other 2 were standing a few steps back from the one in black. So I sat there in my car watching for a few minutes. The teen in black was coaching those 3 little boys (I guessed at the time were 8 or 9 years old) how to hold their bikes on their shoulders and climb a ladder of a slide and how to ride down. The other teen boys were just standing a little behind the one in black not doing much except watching and laughing from time to time. One was kinda stocky the other one skinny. It didn't seem to bother them that I was watching. They saw me.
“Any way one of the little boys was about to start up the ladder so I got out of my car and told him to get down. That's when the teen in black made a couple steps toward me and said I needed to shut the f--k up and take my ass into my apartment. This was none of my business. At that point I said if it didn't stop I was going to call the police. Then I was called a f--king bitch. So I got my kids out of my car as he stood there and watched. He watched me all the way to my apartment. It was kinda frightening. I go to call the police but looked back out to see if he or they were headed toward my apartment but instead they just left. So I decided to not call the police and never thought anything else of it. …
“About 3 weeks to a month later three 8 year old boys were murdered in the woods right out the back door of the apartment I used to live in. I remember thinking I was so glad we had moved. Well then I was watching the news showing that 3 teenagers had been arrested. When I saw the pictures of the boys I told my husband that the one called Damien Echols was the one that cussed me out and was the one trying to make the kids carry their bikes up the slide. I also recognized the other 2 boys. They are Jessie Misskelley and Jason Baldwin.
“The three little boys I saw Echols, Misskelley and Baldwin with that day I can't swear was Michael, Stevie or Chris. I do remember 1 of the boys was blonde and 1 had a red bike. If I'm remembering correctly it was the blonde that had the red bike on his shoulder. I really wasn't watching the little boys. I was paying more attention to the 3 teen boys and what they were doing.
“I never told anyone what I saw but family and friends. I never thought it was very important at the time since they had caught them. I was in my early 20's, working, taking care of 2 young kids and my grandparents. My husband was working and going to school at night. I had my hands full. Looking back I wish I had told what I saw.” "DAMIEN ADMITS TO A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE." The central figure in the investigation,
prosecution, incarceration and release of the West Memphis 3 was the flamboyant and problematic Damien Echols, whose boyhood ambition to become a world-class occultist put him out of step with his peers in the Arkansas Delta.
Meece, Gary. Blood on Black: The Case Against the West Memphis 3, Volume I (The Case Against the West Memphis 3 Killers Book 1) . UNKNOWN. Kindle Edition.
Sunday Feb 10, 2019
Sunday Feb 10, 2019
While Damien Echols has consistently downplayed his violent history in softball media interviews, the records, as usual, tell a very different tale than heard from Echols and his supporters.
"DAMIEN ADMITS TO A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE."
The central figure in the investigation, prosecution, incarceration and release of the West Memphis 3 was the flamboyant and problematic Damien Echols, whose boyhood ambition to become a world-class occultist put him out of step with his peers in the Arkansas Delta.
Quickly pegged as a likely suspect in the murders from multiple sources, including his own all-too-knowing initial interviews with police, Echols seemed to have adopted his black-clad “figure of the night” persona as a defense against often-rough circumstances.
Becoming a self-proclaimed witch and part-time vampire made sense to a mentally ill misfit who could turn his outsider status into a means of drawing attention to himself.
Intrinsic to this dark image was the creation of the impression that he was capable of great and weird violence. For those who knew him, it was not surprising that he fulfilled his self-created legend as a dreaded monster.
He worked hard at becoming the terror of the town. On the road to infamy, he built up a history of violence that gave credence to an ability to torture and kill.
'According to his discharge summary from Charter Hospital of Little Rock in June 1992: “Supposedly, Damien chased a younger child with an ax and attempted to set a house on fire. He denied this behavior. He reported that his girlfriend’s family reported this so that they could get him in trouble. He was also accused of beating a peer up at school. Damien admits to a history of violence. He said prior to admission he did attempt to enucleate a peer’s eye at school. He was suspended subsequently from school. He was suspended on seven different occasions during the school year. He related he was suspended on one occasion because he set a fire in his science classroom and also would walk off on campus on several occasions. He was disruptive to the school environment. He was also disrespectful to teachers. He has been accused of terroristic threatening.” Echols had gotten into trouble in one in- stance for spitting on a teacher.
Much of this history of violence came from Echols himself.
His teenage acquaintances told grisly stories about Echols’ casual cruelty.
Joe Houston Bartoush, Jason Baldwin’s cousin, offered another insight into Echols’ violent character; a portion of Baldwin’s “alibi” centered on the fact that he had cut the lawn of his great-uncle Hubert Bartoush, Joe’s father, on May 5.
On June 14, 1993, Detective Bryn Ridge was interviewing Hubert when Joe Bartoush volunteered a statement. Joe, in his early teens, said he and Echols had been walking down the road west out of Lakeshore into a field when they came upon a sick dog. Echols grabbed a brick and began attacking the dog.
Joe told Ridge: “On 10-27-92 I was at Lakeshore Trailer Park with Damien Echols when he killed a black Great Dane. The dog was already sick and he hit the dog in the back of the head. He pulled the intestines out of the dog and started stomping the dog until blood came out of his mouth. He was going to come back later with battery acid so that he could burn the hair and skin off of the dog’s head. He had two cat skulls, a dog skull and a rat skull that I already knew about. He kept these skulls in his bedroom at Jack Echols house in Lakeshore. He was trying to make the eyeballs of the dog he killed pop out when he was stomping. Damien had a camouflage survival knife to cut the gut out of the dog with.”
Joe was sure of the date of the dog killing because he had skipped school that day and had been caught.
Joe said Echols had used the survival knife to carve his name into his arm on another occasion. A similar survival knife recovered behind the Baldwin home, known as the “lake knife,” was a highly publicized piece of prosecutorial evidence. His former girlfriend also described Echols having a similar knife, and Echols testified that he had owned “a bunch” of Rambo-style camouflage survival knives.
Heather Cliett, Baldwin’s girlfriend, told investigators of similar animal cruelty: “States that one time at
'The Case Against the West Memphis 3 Killers, Vol. I'
the skating rink Damien told her that he stuck a stick in a dog’s eye and jumped on it and then burned it.”
Timothy Blaine Hodge, a 14-year-old ninth-grader at Marion who lived in Lakeshore, had known Baldwin for some time but only knew Echols since his return from Oregon. “I’ve heard Jason say that Damien was in the crazy house in Oregon. Damien and Jason were always together. They spent a lot of time in West Memphis at Wal-Mart. They stole a lot of stuff. I always seen just Jason and Damien and Domini together walking around Lakeshore. There was a big black Great Dane dog at Lakeshore that I was on the trail over the bridge to the right as you go over the bridge. It was dead. Its intestines was strung out of his butt. A boy named Adam told me he heard Damien did it.”
Chris Littrell, a neighbor of the Echols family and a Wiccan, told the police that Echols liked to stick sharpened sticks through frogs to see how long it took them to die.
He said Echols claimed that he had burned down his father’s garage and then stood in the flames chanting.
Echols told Murray Farris, another teen who was a Wiccan, that he once poured gasoline over his own foot and set it aflame.
Reports of Echols planning to sacrifice his own child in a ritual were persistent. Littrell told police that Echols did not intend to kill the baby that Domini was expecting, as the child would entitle him to a larger government check.
The story surfaced after Echols was arrested with Deanna Holcomb as they attempted to run away.
Jerry Driver, the juvenile officer in charge of the Echols case, mentioned the baby sacrifice rumor on June 1, 1992, in a phone message to Charter Hospital, where Echols was taken for his first hospitalization for mental illness. The message read “Court-ordered to Mid South Hospital. Suicidal, self-mutilating -- made pact ... girlfriend & Devil to sacrifice 1st born.”
A psychiatric evaluation at Charter dated June 2, 1992, stated: “There was a conversation that concerned staff at the detention center. Reportedly Damien and his girlfriend were going to have a baby and then sacrifice the child. Damien denies this type of behavior.”
The discharge summary on June 25 repeated that information, as did the discharge summary on Sept. 28 after his second trip to Charter. The Sept. 28 discharge summary also noted that Echols had been on probation for threatening his girlfriend’s parents and for a charge of second-degree sexual misconduct stemming from having sex with his underage girlfriend.
Driver’s dealings with Echols dated from that ar- rest on May 19, 1992, when Damien and Deanna were found partially clothed in an abandoned trailer at Lakeshore.
In a series of contacts with law enforcement over the next year, Echols described a network of occultists active in Crittenden County. In turn, Echols consented to have his home searched and officials confiscated Echols’ notebook, full of somber and morbid poetry, and artwork from his bedroom, full of demonic and occult images. Driver believed a drawing of four tombstones, with a baby’s foot and a rattle, under a full moon, indicated Echols’ plan to sacrifice his own child.
Deanna told West Memphis police on May 11, 1993, well before the arrests: “I found out that he planned to kill our first born if it was a girl. Damien would not do it. He is a coward and would have tried to get me to do it. That’s when I knew he was nuts and I had nothing else to do with him.”
Stories about Echols drinking blood were similarly persistent and pervasive.
The West Memphis Evening Times ran a story quoting an anonymous girl who said she had seen Echols drink the blood of Baldwin and Domini. The same story quoted a Lakeshore resident who said that dogs had come up missing in the trailer park. Schoolmates often asked Echols if he drank blood, and he didn’t deny the practice.
The Sept. 28 discharge summary from Charter noted that, “While at the Detention Center, he reportedly grabbed a peer and began ‘sucking blood from the peer’s neck’. According to Damien, he relates that the peer was aware that he was going to do this. Staff reports that Damien was not remorseful for his behavior.
Damien indicated that he sucked blood in order to get into a gang. He denies it was any type of ritual. …
“Damien laughed when he was called a ‘blood sucking vampire’. He relates that he does not know why people think this.”
After an office visit on Jan. 25, 1993, his therapist noted that Echols believed he obtained power by drink- ing the blood of others, that the practice made him feel godlike.
At trial, John Fogleman asked Dr. James Moneypenny, a psychologist from Little Rock testifying for the defense, “In your business, is it not unusual to find people telling you about drinking blood, and that they do it to make them feel like a god?”
“It’s highly unusual,” said Dr. Moneypenny. “It’s what?”
“It’s not usual at all,” said the psychologist. “It is very atypical. I think that represents some of the extremes of his thinking and beliefs and what it has come to for him.”
Driver found that Echols was not the only blood- drinker in his circle of friends. Driver had transported Domini to Charter Hospital after she broke probation on a shoplifting charge. “She discussed with me the blood- drinking and said ‘Why should I not drink blood, because my mother drinks blood?’ and I thought, now that’s a strange thing to say.” Domini, consistently dismissive of the most damaging evidence, denied making this statement.
While there is little else to suggest that Baldwin was an avid blood-drinker, testimony from a fellow detainee at Craighead County Juvenile Detention Facility centered on a gory confession made to Michael Carson.
Carson, a 16-year-old admitted drug user, testified, “I said, just between me and you, did you do it. I won’t say a word. He said yes and he went into detail about it. .... He told me how he dismembered the kids, or I don’t know exactly how many kids. He just said he dismembered them. He sucked the blood from the penis and scrotum and put the balls in his mouth.”
Carson stood by his testimony when reports sur- faced in 2000 that he had committed perjury. Carson said he didn’t cut a deal in exchange for the testimony. He had passed the polygraph before testifying.
Christy Jones, a friend of Misskelley’s who had attended school with Damien, told police on Oct. 1, 1993, about Damien “I saw him cut his arm with something and he then sucked the blood out of the wound. I had heard that Damien was weird and part of a satanic cult.”
The evidence of his cruelty to animals continues to dog Echols. When such talk surfaced on Twitter in 2013, Echols referred to the many stories as “animal lies” and suggested that, if the stories were true, they would have showed up in the court record.
After all, Damien’s dad, Joe Hutchison, had told the “Paradise Lost” documentary filmmakers: “This boy is not capable of the crime that he’s been arrested for. I’ve seen him take a little kitten and love it just like you love a little baby.” Considering that Echols intended to sacrifice his own little baby, Hutchison’s statement held a certain ironic truth.
Documentary filmmakers have made no mention of Damien’s history of torturing animals, drinking blood and planning human and animal sacrifices.
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Sunday Feb 17, 2019
Sunday Feb 17, 2019
Episode 10 of The Case Against examines the documented mental ills of young Damien Echols. #WM3 #DamienEchols #TrueCrime
From "Blood on Black" by Gary Meece
'AN ALIEN, FROM ANOTHER WORLD, NOT LIKE ANY HUMAN ON EARTH"
“I think at the time I probably suffered from what most teenagers suffer from, you know, just teenage angst, maybe depression, maybe sometimes even severe depression,” Damien Echols explained to CNN’s Larry King in 2007 about his adolescence, making it sound as if he was a typical moody teenager.
Echols painted a self-portrait of a fairly ordinary kid just a little out of the norm: “Things weren't exactly the same — especially in the South — as they are now. I believe that I probably stood out in the small town where we were living just because of the music I listened to, the clothes that I wore, things of that nature.
They considered me an oddity. So I drew attention. For example, one of the things they used against us at trial was the fact that I listened to Metallica. You know, back then, 15 years ago, that was something that was considered strange. Now you hear it played on classic rock stations. It's no big deal at all.”
The West Memphis police had more promising leads than who was listening to Metallica, which would have been a rich field for suspects. By 1993, Metallica was one of the top rock acts internationally, playing 77 shows worldwide on its “Nowhere Else to Roam” tour, including dates in such Southern towns as Johnson City, Tenn., Lexington, Ky., and Greenville, S.C. Five years earlier, Metallica had been one of the headliners for the Monsters of Rock Tour at Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium, just across the river from West Memphis. Two years before that, Metallica had opened for Ozzy Osbourne at the Mid-South Coliseum at the Memphis Fairgrounds.
Then as now, being a Metallica fan was no big deal and not something that would single anyone out as a murder suspect.
Echols was known around Marion and West Memphis for his carefully cultivated persona as a sneering specter in black stalking along the side of the road, reveling in his bad reputation as a practitioner of the dark arts.
What troubled authorities was not an immature poseur with Gothic pretensions but the deeply troubled youth behind the cliched facade.
In 2001, Dr. George W. Woods, a Berkeley, Calif., psychiatrist, attempted to clarify what was wrong with Damien Echols in a lengthy statement with an encompassing survey of Echols’ mental troubles and background, based greatly on suspect self-reporting.
Dr. Woods’ evaluation was requested by the Echols defense to determine if his mental illness affected his competency to stand trial. The defense, attempting to appeal the conviction, contended that antidepressants Echols was taking in 1992-1993 heightened his manic episodes, creating a “psychotic euphoria” that included hallucinations and the delusion that “deities” were transforming him into a “superior entity.”
The problems and limitations were longstanding, Dr. Woods explained. “Mr. Echols’ mother, Pamela, was adopted under mysterious circumstances and reared as the only child of her adoptive mother, who was trained as a practical nurse, and her adoptive father, who was an illiterate blue collar worker. When Mr. Echols’ mother began junior high school, she developed bizarre behavior that intensified as she grew older. She stopped attending high school because, in her words, it made her ‘crazy.’ She was unable to cope with the stress of school, stopped leaving her home entirely, and received psychiatric treatment. Her adoptive mother was forced to quit work in order to stay home and care for her. Mr. Echols’ mother, Pamela, married Mr. Echols’ father, Joe Hutchison, when she was only 15.
“Mr. Echols’ mother became pregnant with Mr. Echols during the first year of her marriage. Due to her age and mental condition the pregnancy was high risk and marked by numerous complications. According to her, the pregnancy ‘almost killed me.’ She remained so nauseated and ill that she lost 50 pounds over the course of nine months. Her diet was very poor; she was not well nourished. Her long, high risk labor necessitated a caesarean section from which she recuperated slowly.
“Not surprisingly, Mr. Echols had many problems as an infant and young child. He was ‘fretful and nervous and cried all of the time.’ His mother could not soothe him, and he slept fitfully for only three or four hours a night. At a very young age he began to demonstrate troubling behaviors. He repetitively banged his head against the wall and floor until he was three. ...
“Following Mr. Echols’ birth his mother suffered a miscarriage and soon after became pregnant with his younger sister. ... Mr. Echols’ mother was not able to care for her two small children, so she sent Mr. Echols to live with his maternal grandmother. Although Mr. Echols returned to live with his mother and father, his mother was very dependent on her mother for assistance in caring for Mr. Echols and, later, his sister.
Pamela Echols was never able to live on her own or care for her children without a great deal of support. She remained dependent on others for guidance and assistance with child rearing.
“Like Mr. Echols’ mother, his father, Joe Hutchi- son, also appears to have suffered from mental instabili- ty. Joe Hutchison is uniformly described as immature, self absorbed, cruel and capricious. He chronically neglected and abused his family. He berated his wife and son, set unrealistic expectations, called them degrading names, destroyed their most cherished possessions, terrorized them by threatening to break their bones and hurt them in other ways, and isolated them from community and family support by moving frequently -- sometimes impulsively leaving a residence only days or weeks after moving in. On one occasion, he forced his wife to leave her hospital bed to move with him to an- other city. He found sadistic pleasure in donning horrifying rubber masks of hideous monsters and appearing at his son’s bedroom window where he terrified Mr. Echols by making gruesome noises. In addition, Mr. Hutchison kept his family anxious with his fixation on the notion that others were trying to hurt him. For ex- ample, he was convinced ‘people were trying to run him down’ and constantly harangued his wife and son about the individuals who were trying to kill him. ...
“Neither mother nor child was equipped to deal with Joe Hutchison’s increasingly disturbed behavior. Fearing for her life and those of her children Pamela Echols finally found the courage to divorce Joe Hutchison in 1986.”
Damien was the product of two extremely unstable parents. Damien’s troubling and often bizarre behavior from an early age worried family members.
None of this suggested that the result would be a teenager whose only complaint would be your average case of ‘“the summertime blues.”
Dr. Woods continued: “Mr. Echols first recalls being overwhelmed by distressing and terrifying emotions in the second grade when he was positive there was going to be a nuclear war. He believed he ‘had to get back to where something told him he came from before the war started.’ As he grew older this obsession evolved into a driving force that consumed him and ‘took up every bit of brain space and brain power.’ He became convinced that he was ‘an alien, from another world, not like any human on earth.’”
Problems at home continued, Dr. Woods noted. “Mr. Echols’ mental deterioration spiraled against the backdrop of his unpredictable and troubled home life. His mother’s confusion and dependence continued.
Within days of divorcing Joe Hutchison she married Andy Jack Echols, an illiterate laborer who worked intermittently as a roofer. The family was extremely poor. They found a shack set in the middle of crop fields that were doused with pesticides at regular intervals. Despite the extremely unhealthy conditions, the Echols remained in the shack for five years. …"
Damien’s adoptive father, the since-deceased Jack Echols, gave his impressions of the young Damien on Sept. 4, 2000: “I married Pam Hutchison in 1986, shortly after she split up from her husband Joe. I had known her from the city through friends that we both had. I adopted both of her children, Michelle and Damien.
When I adopted Damien, his name was Michael and he had to change his last name to Echols and while he was doing that he changed his first name to Damien.
Damien was reading about a preacher named Damien who he liked and that is how he got his name.
“When we first got married, I lived in some apartments in Marion. Pamela and her children moved in with me and we stayed there for a few months. We finally moved into a house that needed a lot of work that was in the middle of a wheat field. Some folks might call it a shack, but it gave us a roof over our heads and a place to go home to. It was only 35 dollars a month and we needed someplace that did not cost very much. I fixed the house up as best I could. We had a toi- let in the bathroom and a sink in the kitchen, but they weren't hooked up right so we could not use them at first. I fixed up a pump that was supposed to pump in water, but it could only handle a little bit of water at a time. We learned to use as little water as possible. Since water was a problem we ate off paper plates so we did not have to do dishes. During part of the year, the water would quit running and we had to bring it in from outside. Most of the time we went to Pamela's mama's house and my children's houses and filled up gallon jugs. We tried to fill up enough at one time so that we only had to go every other day or so. We had to haul in wood to heat the place, and it got plenty cold in that part of Arkansas. I got paid okay when I was roofing but if there was ever a storm or other bad weather then I did not work and we did not get a paycheck for that week. I was the only one working in the family so it was real hard when I missed out on work.”
In his writings, Damien has described this portion of his childhood with great bitterness.
Jack Echols continued: “Damien was not in very good health while we lived at the old farm house. He was not able to go outside of the house because he got really sick. He had a real hard time with his breathing because of all the crops outside the house. Sometimes his eyes and throat swelled up and he could not swallow or see very good. The place right below his eyes turned to a darkish color kind of like he had been hit in the eye. I think the worst thing for Damien, though, were his headaches. From the time that we moved into that house, he would get terrible headaches. He asked me to squeeze his head so that his pain would go away. I would put my arms around his head, like in a head lock and I squeezed it. I did not want to hurt him but he always asked to squeeze harder, so I did. I think that the pain of the headache hurt more than the squeezing of his head. He got relief for a few moments while I did this but the headache always came back. He took some medicine to help with his breathing and to try and keep his swelling down and it did help a little bit but not near as much as we wanted it to work.
“Damien went through these spells where he could not sleep no matter how hard he tried to. He stayed up for three or four nights in a row without sleeping at all. These periods were very hard for him and by the end of the second day of no sleep, he was exhausted, fussy, and miserable. He cried a lot during these times and no one seemed to be able to help him with what he was upset about. We never could figure out what he was so upset about, but there was no doubt in my mind that he was as miserable as a little boy could be. His sister Michelle went in his room to talk to him and he sometimes fell asleep for a couple of hours or so and then he stayed up for another few days before getting anymore sleep. I was worried about Damien but I did not know what to do. I had to work during the day and every evening when I came home, I hoped that he would be asleep but he was normally still up. After many days of this, Damien finally slept for an entire night. Once he got a full night's rest, he went for a few weeks without having trouble sleeping. I always hoped that these times would not come back but they always did. It just about broke my heart to see how hard Damien tried to handle his problems, but he never was able to figure out what made him so sad.
“Damien never was a really happy boy. He got really sad sometimes and no one, including Damien, had any idea what was wrong. He cried really hard and I asked him what was making him so sad and he told me that he did not know. I never could figure out how someone could cry so hard and not know why they were sad and it was real hard to watch Damien go through this. Damien used to spend a few days in a row where he cried really hard. Sometimes it seemed like he was having trouble with his breathing because he cried so much. During these periods, Damien sometimes started laughing uncontrollably, just like one of those laughs that comes from the belly. It was very strange to me that he went from crying to laughing and I was confused about why he did this. Michelle and his mama tried to get him to stop being so sad but the only thing that ever seemed to help him was time. After a while, he would finally get to where he could stop crying and being so sad. Damien went through this on a regular basis.
“There were other times when Damien had so much energy he did not know what to do. He got really excited and kind of hyper and he always walked at these times. Damien walked to some of the parks in the area, to some of his friends houses, and across town. He told me that he sometimes got confused because he was sure where he needed to go but when he got there he felt like he was in the wrong place. I thought that he meant that he changed his mind about where he wanted to go but he told me that it was not like that. Damien did not decide where he was supposed to walk to but got a feeling about where he should be but, when he got where he was going, his feeling changed and he had to go somewhere else. He was real frustrated at these times and I did not know how to help him. I did not really understand what he meant about not knowing where he wanted to be. I sometimes felt that I should have done a better job trying to figure out what he was talking about and maybe then I could have made things a little better for him.
“I remember that Damien had some strange needs. Some things could never be out of place and had to be put in a place just so. He had the same pillow all his life and if it ever got misplaced, he howled his head off. Damien could not sleep with any other pillow for as long as I have known him. He had a lot of fear about the closet in his room and did not want any of his toys ever put in the closet. If his toys were in the closet, he panicked and thought they would die. Damien had these two fire hats; one was black and one was red. We had to keep the hats under the bathroom sink just so and right beside each other. If they were not in their place, it made him panic and afraid. …
“Sometimes Damien did not have any appetite and he did not eat for several days. It did not seem to matter what Pamela put on the table, he did not want to eat it. After a few days of not eating, Damien looked weaker and I could tell it was wearing on him. I wished that he would eat for his health but when he did not have an appetite there was nothing any one could do.”
Dr. Woods wrote: “Going from Joe Hutchison to Andy Echols was like going from the frying pan into the fire. In addition to increased isolation and poverty and being exposed to toxic pesticides, the Department of Human Services (DHS) records show that Andy Echols sexually abused Mr. Echols’ younger sister repeatedly until she mustered the courage to report him to her school counselor. DHS intervened and Pamela moved her children out of the shack. Yet, that was as much as Pamela Hutchison Echols was able to do to protect her children from the ravages of poverty, domestic violence, mental illness and sexual abuse. For, no sooner had she separated from Andy Echols than she, Damien and his sister moved in with Joe Hutchison, along with Joe Hutchison’s own mentally impaired son. The return of Joe Hutchison, whom Mr. Echols had not seen for years, coincided with Mr. Echols’ first psychiatric hospitalization.”
Echols’ mental troubles did not get better with age, wrote Dr. Woods. “In adolescence Mr. Echols became frankly suicidal. Unable to find a way out of his depression and hopelessness, he thought the only escape from his constant mental, physical and emotional pain was to kill himself. ... At about the age of 16, his mental illness took a sudden turn for the worst. Mr.
Echols describes feeling disorganized and out of control of his racing thoughts and emotions. He began to ‘laugh hysterically and make other people think I was crazy.’ For Mr. Echols ‘manic-ness’ meant ‘everything sped up and became frantic. Others called it hysterical,’ but Mr. Echols described it as ‘... being driven.’ When he ‘... went crazy, everything sped up.’ He ‘... had no thought process.’ He could not remember ‘... all of the weird things I did,’ but people would tell him about them lat- er and he was surprised by his actions. For example, he recalled a time when ‘some kids threw a hamburger up on the ceiling’ and he reached up, grabbed it, and ate it.
“His mania was interspersed with periods of ‘waiting’ interminably for ‘an abstract thing that might come in the blink of an eye.’ He was mentally confused and ‘did not know what he was waiting for.’ Mr. Echols ‘tried cutting’ himself to ‘feel different somehow’ and ‘to see if it would let some of the pain out.’ He felt ‘worn-out.’ During the one year of high school he attended in the ninth grade, he kept a journal at the instruction of his English teacher. It became more and more abstract -- ‘when I wrote about one thing it came out as something else. If I wrote about the moon, I was actually describing the grocery store.’
“Mr. Echols reported that the intense shift between depression and mania ‘literally drove me crazy.’ He remembered that ‘everything hurt, from the smell of water to green grass, brown grass.’ He was exquisitely sensitive to ‘the way people smelled’ and ‘the smell of water.’ He described manic episodes when his ‘brain rolled, like a TV that is not adjusted.’ He believed his brain rolled when it rained or when he was near a large body of water. The change of seasons had a strong effect on him also, especially fall and winter, and made ‘his brain roll constantly.’
“Mr. Echols’ overwhelming depression and other problems with mood during childhood and adolescence caused disabling disturbances in his emotions, thoughts, behavior and physical health. His sleep was irregular; he often had no energy to perform the simplest tasks; his thoughts were paralyzingly sluggish or racing at speeds he could not control. He felt caught in time, and thought it was hopeless even to think about feeling better or gaining control over his life. He ruminated about painful memories and insignificant events. He could not concentrate and became easily confused; it was impossible to make even simple decisions. He cried and ‘sobbed all the time without any understanding of what made ...’ him so sad. He had no ability to feel joy or pleasure. He became completely inconsolable and isolated, unable to relate to others in any meaningful way. He was inexplicably sensitive to physical sensations and reacted to the slightest changes in his environment. His body ‘hurt when the sun went up or when the sun went down, when it rained or when it did not rain.’ He could not stop or escape from the pain; it became ‘a throb that never went away.’ He despised himself and felt worthless; he was consumed with shame and despair.”
Dr. Woods added:
“Mr. Echols has been evaluated on three separate occasions by three different psychologists, each of whom administered a battery of tests. A prominent feature of each evaluation was the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), which was administered on June 8, 1992; September 2, 1992; and February 20, 1994. The independent test results were quite consistent; all revealed valid profiles and strong indications of depression, mania, severe anxiety, delusions and psychosis.
“Test results for the June 8, 1992, MMPI reflected elevations on scores of psychotic thinking, including hallucinations, paranoid ideation, and delusions, as well as severe anxiety and other related emotional disturbances. The suggested diagnoses were schizophrenia, disorganized type; and bipolar disorder, manic. Individual responses on this test revealed that Mr. Echols was afraid of losing his mind, had bizarre thoughts, and had very peculiar experiences. Three months later, on September 2, 1992, a second MMPI was administered.
The test results very closely paralleled the findings of the earlier MMPI. Shortly before Mr. Echols’ trial began in 1994, he was administered the MMPI a third time for the purpose of identifying mitigating evidence. Like the other two, this MMPI revealed psychotic thought processes consistent with schizophrenia. Specific indicators of a thought disorder included mental confusion, persecutory ideas, acute anxiety, and depressed suicidal ideation. ...
“Prior to and during his murder trial, Damien Echols suffered from a severe psychiatric disorder characterized by enduring delusions, auditory and visual hallucinations and severe mood swings ranging from suicidal depression to extreme mania.”
Dr. Woods wrote: “Mr. Echols’ accounts of his symptoms since childhood are consistent with severe traumatic stress disorders and mood disorders. He reported periods of dissociation in which he ‘lost’ long spans of time. He also endorsed numerous physical problems, including frequent severe headaches (for which he was treated with prescription medications as a child), heart palpitations, difficulty breathing (he was diagnosed with and treated for asthma), and chronic sleeping problems. He reported having nightmares from which he awakened in a terrified state as often as twice a night. These symptoms persisted throughout his childhood and adolescence and grew to include periods of psychosis. …
“ Although he has received no psychiatric treatment on death row Mr. Echols stated his mental illness has improved significantly since his incarceration. ...
“Prior to and during his trial, Mr. Echols heard ‘voices that were not really voices’ and he ‘was not sure if it was a voice inside’ his head or ‘somebody else’s voice.’ He thought it ‘was nearly impossible’ to tell if it was his voice or somebody/something else. He experi- enced visual hallucinations that ‘were personifications of others. They were like smoke, changing shape but present and constant.’ The personifications had specific names and activities. One was ‘Morpheus Sandman’ who was a hybrid of a human being and a god. Another example was ‘Washington crossing the Delaware.’ Mr.
Echols saw Washington cross the Delaware with ‘Her- mes on the boat.’ Hermes was able to cross with Wash- ington because ‘Hermes was moving backwards through time.’ Mr. Echols came to believe that he was the same as these personifications, ‘made of the same material and from the same place.’
“Mr. Echols stated that at some point in his adolescence he came to believe he was ‘something that was almost a supreme being that came from a place other people didn’t come from.’ This transformation caused him to change physically, the pertinent changes appearing in his ‘appendages, hands, feet, hair.’ He acquired ‘an entirely different bone structure that was not human.’ He developed ‘stronger senses.’ His eyesight was better and his ‘ability to smell and taste changed.’ He had a different stance, moved his eyes and held his head differently. He grew his nails so that they would be a ‘perfect 1 ½ inches long.’ When he looked at his hands, he could see his bones. His weight dropped to 116 pounds, consistent with neurovegetative signs seen in mood disorders. This period of physical change be- gan the year before his arrest and lasted for about two years after he was on death row. …”
Echols’ lifelong struggle with mental illness took several violent turns in the year leading up to his arrest.
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