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day or so before I was arrested and put on trial for murder. I was eighteen years old, and the cops had been harassing me non-stop for weeks. My mother asked me one day after lunch, 7
    Damien Echols
    8
    “Why don’t you take your shirt off and go in the back yard so I can take pictures?
    That way, if the cops beat you we’ll have some before and after photos.” Nodding my head, I made a trip to the bathroom where I took my shirt off. When I looked into the mirror over the sink, it hit me that I looked exactly like the man I’d seen all those years before in the dark apartment. Mirrors have always made me a little uneasy for some reason and this incident did nothing to change that.
    The other bit of bizarre happenstance took place after we had moved from Mayfair and into a small trailer in the countryside. I slept in a tiny bedroom at the very end of the hallway. There were no windows, and only one way into or out of this bedroom. Fire exits? We don’t need no stinkin’ fire exits.
    Late one night something woke me up. It wasn’t a noise, as the entire place was deathly silent. I rolled over and found myself face to face with a strange woman who appeared to be fast asleep in my bed. I was paralyzed with fright. So scared that I couldn’t move, couldn’t scream, couldn’t do anything. All I could do was stare at this sleeping woman, my eyes bulging in terror.
    When the fear gave way to self-preservation I jumped from the bed and fled to my parents’ room, wailing like a fire engine. My mother and father bolted straight out of bed to the sound of me screaming, “There’s someone in my room!” My mother gave my father a scared look, but he was already on his way down the hall.
    There was no woman found, and no way that anyone could have gotten past my parents’ room to leave. There was no window to crawl out of and no back door to flee through. My parents pointed out these facts to me numerous times over the subsequent weeks, but I still couldn’t sleep more than an hour at a time.
    I never slept the whole night through until after we moved, which we fortunately did very soon.
    As I write this now I’m reminded that strange things happening in the night weren’t all that uncommon in our house, no matter where we lived. In her teenage years I remember my sister waking us all up by screaming at the top of her lungs. Even a wordless shriek of terror would have been less jarring than what she screamed. Imagine being awakened in a dark house at two AM by bloodcurdling screams of, “There’s snakes in the bed!” It happened to me more than once. She still insists they were there.
    IV
    Now I believe my mother and father just weren’t meant to be together. Perhaps they weren’t meant to be with anyone. My father has now been married and divorced about five times, and my mother follows closely behind in her number of failed relationships. The trouble between them began when I was in second grade.
    My grandmother had gotten remarried the previous year to a respectable man named Ivan. He’s the one I always remembered as being my grandfather on my mother’s of the family. After the wedding my grandmother moved from her apartment to Ivan’s house, which was in the nice, middle-class section of West Memphis. He was a nice man, in a nice house, in a nice neighborhood. There’s not a hell of a lot more to say about him, other than that I grew to love him over time and cried like a baby when he died a few years later.
    They hadn’t been living together long when we moved in with them. By “we”
    I mean me, my mother, my father, and my sister. It was supposed to be a short-term arrangement while my father found us another place. We had been hopping from place to place recently, and in a period of months we moved to six different states before finally crashing to a halt with my grandparents.
    My mother and father slept on the bed in the guest room while my sister and I slept on the floor next to them. I remember my