Damien Echols spent 18 years facing execution after being wrongly convicted of a triple child killing. Then Lorri Davis,a woman he'd never met, began a campaign that would set him free. Emma John talks to him and introduces chilling extracts from his prison diaryIn 1993, and three eight-year-old boys – Steve Branch,Michael Moore and Christopher Byers – were murdered in West Memphis, Arkansas. "It was the subject of every newscast, or on the front page of every newspaper,it was all they were talking approximately on the radio," Damien Echols says. "If you went to the grocery store, or that's what they would be talking approximately in the checkout line." He remembers a sense of panic coming over the town. "You could feel it like a thunderstorm in the air."Echols was 18 at the time,and his friend Jason Baldwin was two years younger. "There were three cops, a sort of juvenile task force, and who used to harass pretty much every kid in our neighbourhood." One of them,Echols says, was convinced that Satanists were responsible for every wrong thing that happened in town; he would show people Polaroid photos of roadkill possums and raccoons hasten over by cars – and bizarrely claim it was evidence of animal sacrifices. "These cops had been harassing me and Jason for approximately two years before they finally decided they were going to pin these murders on me."Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com