‘Felt this kinship’Monday, July 5, 2010
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the third of a 4-part series stemming from a recent prison interview with convicted killer Damien Echols. Some of the information is more graphic than previously published.
By George Jared
James Byard | The Sun
Damien Echols shares a humorous story from a holding cell
at the Arkansas Department of Correction’s Varner Unit on June 16.LITTLE ROCK — Lorri Davis first saw her future husband in a film chronicling his murder trial.
Davis attended a screening for “Paradise Lost” at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art in February 1996. The documentary depicted the arrest and trials of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr., charged with the sadistic murders of three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis.
The film opens with detectives combing over a wooded area in West Memphis known as Robin Hood Hills. The pale, nude bodies of Michael Moore, Stevie Branch and Christopher Byers lay on a ditch bank, bound from wrist to ankle with their own shoelaces.
Davis was haunted by the film that night. It wasn’t just the boys’ gruesome murders that kept her awake.
“I’d never been affected by something like that,” Davis said. “I felt this kinship with Damien. There was something about him that wasn’t sinister to me.”
The film by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky started a sensation when it was released by HBO later that year. Support groups formed for the so-called “West Memphis Three.”
Berlinger and Sinofsky initially thought the men, who were teens at the time, sodomized, tortured and drowned Michael, Stevie and Christopher near a rain-filled ditch on May 5, 1993.
But as the court hearings unfolded, the directors began to believe the men might be innocent. Many who watched “Paradise Lost,” including Davis, also believed Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley were innocent.
The film might have started an international movement, but Echols said from a death row holding cell last month that he didn’t see “Paradise Lost” until years later.
“It literally felt like I was going through it again,” Echols said. “It was so real. I only watched half of it. I couldn’t do it.”
Echols said the documentary was the beginning of his potential salvation.
“I’d be dead right now if it weren’t for them [Berlinger and Sinofsky],” Echols said. “They would have murdered me and swept it under the rug.”
Davis, now 47, began writing Echols and exchanging books with him immediately after her harrowing night. Months later she flew to Arkansas from New York to meet him. Every two or three months she returned to death row to visit the man she describes as her soulmate.
“I have never shared with any other person what me and him share,” she said.
Early in 1999 Davis left her job as a landscape architect in New York City and moved to Little Rock. She didn’t have a job, and her family had no idea why she moved.
“I did it for Damien,” she said.
Later that year Echols asked Davis to marry him.
“She is my entire world — she fulfills me,” Echols said. “She makes me feel whole.”
Up to that point Davis’ parents, Harry and Lynn Davis, didn’t know their daughter was involved with a notorious convicted murderer.
Family lifeDavis was born July 16, 1963, in Charleston, W.Va., the middle child of a self-described conservative family. She said she wanted to be a sculptor at an early age — she studied art and design in England.
“My family didn’t understand anything I was doing,” Davis said. “They were shocked. They were afraid of what to say. I was asking them for a lot.”
Echols and Davis wed Dec. 3, 1999.
It took her parents a year to meet Damien. She said the connection was immediate. “My dad loves Damien,” Davis said. “He knows he didn’t do it.”
When Davis married Echols, she expected him to be released within five years. As appeals slogged through the courts, the movement to free the West Memphis Three grew.
Musicians such as Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder and Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks, along with actors such as Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder, began to publicly support the men. Millions of dollars have been raised to hire new attorneys and expert witnesses to prove the men’s innocence.
Davis worked for the City of Little Rock for a brief time and helped with the Riverfront Park river trail, she said. Working on the case consumes her time now.
On weekdays she calls Echols at 8 a.m. and talks to him for 15 minutes. On weekends she calls at 8:30 a.m. and talks for up to a half hour.
Davis said she has spent more than $100,000 on phone calls over the years.
Davis and Echols often try to do an activity at the same time of day, such as meditating. Echols said he meditates up to seven hours a day.
More than 10 years into their marriage, the two have barely touched, she said. Prison guards monitor their visits, and almost all contact is prohibited.
Davis scoffs at those who think she’s married for the publicity. Early in their marriage, Davis said, she shied away from the spotlight.
“It’s one of the hardest lives a person could live,” Davis said. “Anyone who’d believe [she sought publicity] is pretty ignorant.”
Echols’ intelligence is his most attractive feature, Davis said. His least attractive is his anger.
“He gets upset by the way he’s treated in prison,” she said. “This whole thing has taken so long.”
The sequelBerlinger and Sinofsky created a second documentary in 1999, “Paradise Lost II — Revelations,” outlining Echols’ ongoing court battles and casting doubt on Byers’ stepfather, John Mark Byers.
Described by Sinofsky as “one of the most interesting figures in film history,” John Byers was considered the true killer by many West Memphis Three supporters.
John Byers’ antics on film, such as removing his teeth when experts testified that wounds on the bodies might be human bite marks, and his run-ins with Echols leading into the courthouse continued to cast suspicion on him.
The focus shifted from John Byers to Stevie’s stepfather, Terry Hobbs, in 2007 when detailed, modern DNA analysis revealed a hair collected from Michael’s ligature came from Hobbs, according to court records. No DNA evidence linked John Byers to the crime scene.
None of the evidence tested had DNA from Echols, Baldwin or Misskelley.
John Byers, who publicly admonished the West Memphis Three for years and scorned supporters, now believes the men are innocent.
“They didn’t kill my little boy,” a tearful Byers said outside a courtroom in August 2009. Christopher’s mother, Melissa Byers, died in 1996.
During a 2009 Rule 37 hearing for Baldwin and Misskelley, Byers became visibly upset when Victoria Hutchinson, a key witness in the Misskelley trial, prepared to testify. “That’s the bitch who started all of this,” Byers said as she made her way to the stand.
He later said the “witchcraft stuff was caused by her.”
Hutcheson originally testified that she attended an Esbat, or witches’ gathering, with Echols and Misskelley. Her testimony was meant to prove the two were involved in the occult.
She now denies attending an Esbat with Echols and Misskelley, according to a sworn affadavit obtained by The Sun. That was further affirmed in comments she has made to reporters. She now says police coerced her testimony.
Prosecutors would not grant her immunity at the August hearing, and she refused to recant on the stand for fear of being charged with perjury, she said. Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel would not comment as to why Hutcheson wasn’t given immunity in exchange for her testimony.
John Byers gives talks about the case to college students on various campuses and plans to release a book sometime this year.
Berlinger and Sinofsky are slated to release a third film about the case at the end of the year. Another filmmaker, Amy Berg, is also shooting a documentary.
Davis thinks her husband will be out of jail soon — “hopefully in the next year,” she said.
