Johnny Depp: Free The West Memphis Three
Damien Echols, 35, has spent his entire adult life on Arkansas' death row. Every day, he faces the possibility of execution. But there is a bright spot in his life.
"She's like a living, breathing miracle in human form," Damien says of Lorri Davis, his wife of 10 years.
Lorri met Damien after she became aware of his controversial case. She wrote to him, traveled from New York to see him and offered her help. "It was the right thing to do," she says, "because he is innocent."
"I can understand you believing that he's innocent and wanting to work on his case. But what made you actually decide to marry him?" asks "48 Hours Mystery "correspondent Erin Moriarty.
"Well, I mean, the simple answer is I loved him. He's an amazing person. And he's going to be worth this."
Lorri is now familiar with every facet of Damien's case and works day and night with the legal team, fighting not only for Damien on death row, but for Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, the other convicted men who are serving life sentences.
"We have gone through every aspect of this case and there was never been anything that pointed to their guilt," she explains.
They are known as the West Memphis Three, and they are now actively supported by people who could really make a difference, like Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam and actor Johnny Depp.
"I'm here because I firmly, truly, 1000 percent believe that Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley are totally innocent," Depp tells Moriarty.
Photos: Star Support for the West Memphis Three
Watch More of Depp's "48 Hours" Interview
Despite all that, the Arkansas courts have upheld all three convictions for more than 16 years. Prosecutors maintain that Damien, Jason and Jessie are responsible for the cold-blooded murder of three 8-year-old boys.
On May 5, 1993, Chris Byers, Michael Moore and Stevie Branch were out playing together.
"Stevie was very outgoing, a brilliant child. Anyone who knew him loved him," says his mom, Pam.
A waitress back then, Pam didn't worry very much when her son wasn't home before her 5 p.m. shift began. "I just figured that he might of lost track of time and was on his way home."
It was when her husband, Stevie's stepfather, picked her up at 9 p.m. that she heard for the first time that the boys had still not returned. "I just started cryin' and sayin', 'God, no, no. Why isn't he home?'"
Pam searched straight through the night along with other panicked parents, including Chris Byers' father, Mark.
Then, at 1 p.m. the next day, police made a grim discovery in a wooded strip by the interstate known to the kids as Robin Hood Hills. Stevie, Michael and Chris were found bludgeoned and drowned in a drainage ditch. Their bodies were naked and hogtied with their own shoelaces.
"I hit the ground screaming, 'God, no, no!" says Pam.
"Just a gut wrenching moment to put into words… the disaster, the devastation," Byers recalls.
Six days later, he buried his son, Chris.
"When these murders happened, it was something that was almost like an atomic bomb going off," Damien explains. "You have three children that are murdered. I mean, that in itself is a pretty horrific thing…And then slowly, details start comin' out about how they were found. Now, a lot of these details weren't true."
Byers says there were a lot of rumors. "I heard that one of 'em was skinned. I heard that one of 'em's face was cut off."
"Then you start hearin' all these, you know, people whispering about, maybe it was Satanists that did this," says Damien.
That theory did not seem so farfetched at the time. A media-fueled hysteria about satanic cults was sweeping the country.
An FBI investigation found no such satanic murders, but in 1993, West Memphis juvenile officer Jerry Driver was concerned about cult activity, saying, "It seems to be a trend right now."
Retired Agent Ken Lanning on the FBI Investigation
Damien Echols Speaks Out
Driver had Damien, an 18-year-old dropout, in his sights.
"I think I was the closest thing he could come to conceiving of what he thought a Satanist would look like… all black was the only thing I ever wore. Ridiculous hairstyles. I was a stupid teenager. I really was a smart ass," he says, admitting he didn't help his case at all.
Driver was convinced that the murders were the work of Damien Echols, and he told that to the police.
Damien was now a prime suspect and he says word of that leaked out. "I walked into a softball game. I went around the concession stand and I hear people sayin', 'There he is. That's him.'"
Still, police had no physical evidence or anything else to connect him to the crime; not until someone Damien knew spoke out.On June 6, 1993, just one month after the three 8-year-old boys were found dead in the woods, there were arrests.
In custody were 17-year-old Jessie Misskelley, 16-year-old Jason Baldwin, and the alleged ringleader, 18-year-old Damien Echols.
Damien says he was angry and scared. "Everything in the world just went wrong and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it."
The police were confident they had the killers. The key evidence: a statement that Jessie Misskelley gave them. In it, he said he saw Damien and Damien's best friend, Jason, abuse the three boys in a devil worshipping ritual.
"Did you consider Jesse Misskelley a friend?" Moriarty asks Damien.
"To be honest, I didn't really think of him at all," he replies. "He was just someone that was sort of on the fringes of mine and Jason's life."
Dan Stidham, now a state judge, was Jessie Misskelley's lawyer.
"The best way to describe Mr. Misskelley's capabilities is he is operating at about the level of a 5-year-old child," says Stidham.
He says it was clear his client knew very little about occult rituals.
"[Jessie] walked in one day and he hands me this book. On the cover, it had a picture of the devil and [he] said, 'Dan, who is Satin.' Satin," Stidham recalls. "Here's a kid who's supposed to have committed the very first ever satanic ritualistic homicide, yet he didn't know who Satan was."
At first, Jessie told the police he knew nothing. But after hours of pressure, Jessie finally implicated Damien and Jason, saying, "I saw Damien hit this one boy real bad. Then Jason hit Steve Branch."
Then, Jessie implicated himself by saying he chased down a boy who ran away.
"He thought he was helping by adding to the story," says Stidham, "but he turned himself from a witness to an accomplice."
A lot of what Jessie said was just wrong. For example, he first said the crime took place early in the morning, but the victims were at school all day. Nevertheless, all three teens were charged with murder.
In January 1994, eight months after the crime, Jessie Misskelley was the first to go on trial.
Defense attorney Stidham attacked the police - not only for the tactics they used on Jessie, but for the major mistake they made.
"On the night that the homicides occurred, someone had stumbled into a fast food restaurant covered in mud and blood," he tells Moriarty.
That night, the Bojangles' restaurant manager reported the bloody man to police. But detectives waited until the next day to collect evidence. And then, they lost it.
"They had actually taken a blood sample. Never got to the crime lab," says Stidham.
Police never identified or found that potential suspect. At trial, their blunder was overshadowed by Jessie's own words.
Jurors heard the recorded parts of his statement:
Officer: Did you see any of the boys being killed?
Jessie: Yes, that one right there.
It was enough. Jessie was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
Less than three weeks later, Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin went on trial together.
"I had people standing out there screaming, telling me every morning when I went into court how I was going to die, how the state was going to fry me," Damien recalls.
Jessie Misskelley refused to testify against Damien and Jason. Prosecutors could not use his confession, because it would have violated the defendants' right to face their accuser.
But the two girls who were at that softball game that Damien attended testified that they overheard him admit to the murders.
"I don't remember saying that at the time because to me, it - I didn't actually do it. It would have been like a joke," he says.
"Help me understand why you would think that's a joke back then," says Moriarty.
"It's the person I was and it's the way I thought at that time in my life, and I - I can't make excuses for it."
The state also introduced a knife found in the lake behind Jason Baldwin's home. Nothing connected that knife to the crime or the defendants.
But the state pathologist testified that some of the wounds could have been made with a knife like it.
More disturbing, the pathologist said one boy was sexually mutilated. That fit with the state's belief that the crime was occult related.
Witness Dale Griffis claimed to be an expert on the occult.
"This guy had a mail order mail order Ph.D," says Stidham.
During the trial, Griffis was asked, "Are you saying that this murder was held at an occult service?" His reply: "Yes."
There were no signs of any service - occult or otherwise - at the scene. Still, Griffis noted that the moon was full and he offered an opinion about why the police didn't find much blood: "They will take it and store it. They will use it to bathe in. They will use it to drink."
But police didn't find any blood in Jason and Damien's homes.
"You can't believe that anybody's gonna take that kind of stuff seriously when you're going through it, but evidently they did," Damien says. "Dale Griffis was the gasoline that they threw on the fire."
Damien took the stand at his trial and was asked, "Have you ever participated in any human sacrifice?" His reply: "No, I have not. I'm not a Satanist. I don't believe in human sacrifices or anything like that."
Chris' father, Mark Byers, watched as Damien explained himself. Byers described Damien's demeanor at trial as "arrogant… like a big game to him, kind of."
"I behaved in ways that were very, very stupid," Damien admits. "There were times when I was really inappropriate."
Jason Baldwin didn't take the stand, but everyone knew he was Damien's best friend. Although no physical evidence linked them to the crime, Damien and Jason were convicted.
Jason got life. Damien, believed to be the mastermind, got death.
"That was the absolute worst, absolute crushing despair," Damien tells Moriarty. "And knowing that you didn't do what they sent you here for."Condemned to death row in 1994, Damien Echols had little hope. "I had come to feel absolutely hated and loathed by the world."
Then, two years later, "Paradise Lost," an HBO documentary about his case was released.
"That is probably what has saved my life," Damien tells Moriarty. "I really do believe without that footage of the trials, the state would've probably already killed me by now."
The floodgates opened, he says, as outrage spread. People moved by the case organized Web sites, reporter Mara Leveritt detailed its flaws in a book, and Damien heard from people around the world, including Lorri Davis - the New York landscape architect who would later become his wife.Hear from members of Arkansas Take Action Free the West Memphis Three Free West Memphis 3 (Arkansas Take Action) West Memphis Three Case -Document Archive"After she found me, I just decided I'm not gonna stop growing. I'm not gonna stop learning," Damien says."I had never met anyone as fascinating and anyone who captured my attention as much as he did, so, I wasn't gonna let him go," Lorri says of the man she married without ever having touched or kissed prior to their wedding. "It wasn't a tough decision at all… and there's never been a moment of doubt about it."Damien explains that the relationship requires some creativity, "because there is no physical intimacy, like people depend on. So we may, for example, set a time every single night and drink water at the exact same time… We're both doing this. We're both connected in this moment. " "What do you say to people who say, 'You haven't had a real marriage, you haven't had a real relationship yet?'" Moriarty asks Lorri. "I'd say you don't know us," she laughs. "That's what I would say."Lorri doesn't entertain the possibility that Damien may never get out. Her confidence is based partly on attention people like Johnny Depp have brought to the case."Is there something about the way that Damien Echols was treated as a teenager that you can relate to?" Moriarty asks Depp."Oh, I immediately related to Damien, what he went through growing up," he replies. "He comes from a small town in Arkansas. I come from a relatively small town in Kentucky. I can remember kind of being looked upon as a freak. Or, you know, different, because I didn't dress like everybody else. So I can empathize with being judged on how you look, as opposed to who you are.""Is there any side of you that is concerned that, if in fact these guys are innocent, why wouldn't there be a new trial?" "That's a mystery to me," Depp says. "The most courageous action that the state could now take is to admit that they made mistakes and then correct these errors."High-profile attorney Dennis Riordan now heads Damien's legal team. "This was a death conviction that was returned without one single piece of credible evidence," Riordan says.Take that knife that was fished from the lake. Riordan says the state pathologist testified that before the victims drowned, they could have been tortured with it.But when the current defense teams asked seven prominent forensic scientists to examine the evidence, all seven came to the same stunning conclusion: animals - not humans - caused the wounds and scratches on the boys' bodies after the victims were dead. "If the injuries to these children were caused by animals after they died, then did the knife play any part in this at all?" Moriarty asks Riordan."No, there's absolutely no evidence in this case - credible evidence - that ties this or any other knife to these offenses," he says. "The focus of this is so important, because the notion that there was a sexual mutilation of one of these children naturally just shook the state of Arkansas and it added fuel to this whole notion of Satanism."Prosecutors turned down "48 Hours'" requests for interviews.Read a statement from the Arkansas Attorney General's OfficeIn court documents, they defend the state's trial evidence and accuse the new experts of "second guessing." But faulty testimony, says Riordan, was just one of the reason that Damien Echols was convicted. He charges there was also jury misconduct. Riordan points to a juror's notes, which seem to indicate that the jury improperly discussed Jessie Misskelley's confession. He says it proves that even though the confession was never introduced at trial, it was part of the deliberations.Riordan says, "The jury foreman said to himself and other jurors, 'He's guilty because Jessie Misskelley said he is. I read about it in the newspaper. I saw some report of this on television.'"According to four sworn affidavits obtained over the past six years, that foreman admitted taking Jessie's confession into consideration - even calling it the "primary factor" for his decision."That was absolutely scandalous to convict somebody on evidence that hadn't even been produced in the court," Riordan says. "The irony of it is that the jury didn't learn what hogwash the Misskelley confession was because they weren't supposed to be dealing with it at all."It's not just the defense calling it hogwash. An independent academic analysis of Jessie's confession concludes that he did not appear to have "knowledge of the crime." Lorri says that's because Damien, Jason, and Jessie did not commit the crime."Three teenage boys? There's no way they would have been able to come home not being covered in mud, their clothes, their shoes, and possible blood spatter," Lorri says. " I don't think for a minute they would have been able to cover up their tracks." Now, more than 16 years after the murders, the defense is focusing on its new evidence - DNA evidence that points away from the all three convicted men.That DNA may be all that Damien needs."When children are murdered," says Lorri, "when do you not look at the families?"
Free the West Memphis Three
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Produced by Gail Zimmerman and Lisa Freed