Echols was 18 years old when he and two other teenagers – his friend Jason Baldwin and another local lad Jessie Miskelley Jr – were charged and convicted of killing three kids in West Memphis, Arkansas.
The case was marred by an inept police investigation, dubious evidence, unreliable witnesses and mass hysteria around that time regarding teenagers engaging in Satanism and witchcraft.
Echols and his mates were dirt-poor white trash: iIll-educated and antisocial. But were they killers? It seems the big problem in this Bible Belt town was that they were different. Ultimately, they were convicted of this horrendous crime because law officials looked at their dark clothing, long hair and love of heavy metal and decided they MUST have done it.
In 1993, that was enough to get you tried and convicted. Baldwin and Miskelley were handed life terms, but Echols – the so-called ringleader – was sentenced to death.
Luckily for Echols, the notorious case was highlighted soon after his conviction in a HBO documentary titled Paradise Lost, which caught the eyes of some pretty influential celebrities like Henry Rollins, Johnny Depp, Eddie Vedder, Marilyn Manson and director Peter Jackson, who took up the fight – along with many ordinary people – to get the case re-examined by the authorities.
I’d been aware of the West Memphis Three case for many years – possibly due to zine coverage and the growing celebrity buzz about the case. So it caught my eye late last year when I read that all three men had been released from jail. Their defence lawyers had built up a pretty good case to get them acquitted, but the case never went back to trial.
Instead, a deal was cut. The WM3 weren’t exactly exonerated – in fact, many local cops and investigators still believe the trio are guilty – but they could claim their innocence. It’s a wacky bit of Arkansas legislation known as the Alford plea.
Echols now lives in New York with his wife and is making a go of his new life as a writer – starting with this new autobiography, Life After Death (out next month).
And it’s a damn good (if harrowing) read. The author’s early life was one of unrelenting misery with fucked-up parents and a community steeped in fundamentalist religion and good ol’ ignorance. His life only went downhill from there. Really, the book is nearly 400 pages of unrelenting horror and degradation, but at least it has a happy ending.
Echols comes across as intelligent and quite spiritual – he had a lot of time to study and practise a ton of religions on Death Row, particularly Buddhism – and his writing style’s achingly beautiful at times.
However, I question the way he glosses over the period leading up to his arrest, the murders and trial itself. He basically says, “It’s all out there – go find the info yourself.” Which I think is lazy.
Also, by not documenting a lot of what went on at that time – except what he was personally experiencing, which is hampered by the fact (and he admits this) that he really had no fucking idea what was going on while the system railroaded the three of them – it feels like Echols is whitewashing the more horrific details of the case. Was he guilty? Where was he on the night of the murders? Why doesn’t he want to talk about it? It left a nagging doubt in my mind.
There are times when repetition kicks in and you’re treated to Echols’ endless complaints about the evil warders, the corrupt legal system, the grinding numbness of day-to-day life in jail and how much the man misses seeing the sky and feeling grass beneath his feet.
This sounds awful considering the guy was horribly mistreated, but there are times when you wanna say, “Stop your fucking whining and man up, bitch!” But I guess you can’t blame Echols for feeling sorry for himself 24/7. He really was dealt a shit hand.
So is this book a “stunning piece of work” and “a classic” as some of Echols’ famous fans claim? Not really. But it’s a must-read for those who want to understand the mindset of a man trapped in a living hell that he had no control over. It’s at times a very frightening insight.
