Life After Death. By Damien Echols. New York: Penguin Group, 2013. ISBN 978-0142180280. 416 pp. Softcover, $11.88.
When it comes to true-crime autobiographies, readers can usually expect one or both of the following items within the pages: a guilty-pleasure of tabloid sensationalism surrounding a real tragic event or a commentary on the social factors leading up to the crime and punishment with the writer claiming innocence (or not). With Damien Echols’s Life After Death, I was hoping for my guilty-pleasure fix in the form of the small-town murder mystery of which he was convicted, as well as an opinionated commentary on the American Satanic Panic of the 1980s and early 1990s that many believe Echols to have been a victim of. To my surprise, and ultimate delight, Life After Death offers neither true-crime cliché en masse but instead transcends the genre with what may be the best true-crime autobiography ever written. Shunning the conventional formats, Echols drifts seamlessly through vibrant childhood memories, terrifying prison experiences, and poetic outpourings from a thoughtful young man who has had many lonely years to contemplate his own existence. Though we of the skeptical community may be initially a little turned off by Damian’s fervent endorsements of various religions and pseudoscience (which he piles under the repeated term magick), he speaks of these things with such eloquence and wonder that even us critical-thinking types will accept such ideas as fair game for a young man’s soul searching in a desperate situation.
If you’re unfamiliar with Echols and the West Memphis Three (WM3) murder conviction, here’s a quick rundown: In West Memphis, Arkansas, in 1994, a trio of impoverished teenage Goth kids (Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelly) were convicted of the murder of three younger boys (Steve Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers) in an alleged Satanic ritual. The shaky evidence, the seemingly prejudiced public opinion of the Bible Belt town, and the absurdity of the devil-cult hysteria led to a national outcry of unprecedented proportions. Documentaries were filmed, books published, and a gallery of celebrities, including Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, actor Johnny Depp, and Dixie Chick Natalie Maines, got involved in the case. The WM3 were finally released from prison in 2011 on an “Alfred plea” (a deal that allows the defendants to technically plead guilty while publicly maintaining innocence in return for a resentencing), and although theories abound, the identity of the killers remains a mystery.
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