Damien Echols of the West Memphis Three on surviving death row and proving his innocence
In 1993, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr. were charged with killing three 8-year-olds in West Memphis, Arkansas. Despite its slapdash case, the prosecution convinced a jury in 1994 to send Echols to death row, and Baldwin and Misskelley to life in prison.
Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s 1996 documentary, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, revealed the flaws in those convictions and drew national attention to the botched prosecution. There was no physical evidence against the teenage suspects (who had become known as the West Memphis Three), the police had missed a crucial series of leads, and witnesses later recanted their most damning testimony. A 2007 DNA analysis eventually ruled out Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley as the killers, but it took another three years for the Arkansas Supreme Court to clear the way for the Alford pleas that would set the men free. They walked out of prison in 2011.
Echols has written a memoir, Life After Death, which details his imprisonment. He speaks and signs copies of the book at 7 p.m. Friday at Unity Temple on the Plaza (707 West 47th Street). See rainydaybooks.com for tickets ($26) and information on the Midwest Innocence Project fundraiser that precedes the talk. Echols now lives with his wife, Lorri Davis (they met exchanging letters about the case), in Salem, Massachusetts. The Pitch spoke with him by phone.
The Pitch: Was it tough to recall your time on death row in the book because most people wouldn’t want to go back there mentally?
Echols: I’d say 85 percent of it was written while I was still in prison. I started working on it—I want to say—seven years ago. I only wrote probably 15 percent when I was out, and most of that was just editorial type stuff where you write a piece here and a piece there to sort of bridge two pieces together. It was like I was out here and having to go back and relive it all again. I was sort of writing it as I was living through it, which made it not as difficult.
