![]() ![]() Her defining quality was her softness, an old friend of hers explained, adding that it was as if she had come from some other, gentler world. She daydreamed about the life they’d share once Echols was exonerated, all the mundane pleasures of cohabitation, how she would send him to the store with a grocery list and make him buy her tampons.ĭavis knew that playing a bigger part in Echols’s legal defense would require a forcefulness that did not come naturally to her. ![]() If it hadn’t been clear to her before, it was now: This man, and his case, was her future. They spent a lot of their three-hour visit just looking at each other. Even with a thick pane of glass between them, Davis felt Echols’s presence. At the end of the month, she flew to Arkansas. “I can feel a path opening before me.” In early July, they spoke on the phone for the first time. “I know I’ll be leaving here soon,” Echols wrote Davis on June 18, 1996. That June, Paradise Lost was released on HBO, and the case received a flurry of publicity. It felt almost magical, how easily an envelope could travel from Arkansas’s death row to her row house in Brooklyn, as if the many obstacles between them didn’t exist at all. She hid secret messages underneath the stamps. ![]() Davis started kissing her envelopes before putting them in the mailbox. Getting to know someone through letters, with all their slow, romantic materiality, was deliciously old-fashioned. They wrote to each other with increasing frequency, every few days, every other day, every day. Their early letters were the correspondence of two intense people trying to not let their intensity show too much, for fear of scaring the other person off. It felt almost magical, how easily an envelope could travel from Arkansas’s death row to her row house in Brooklyn. “I hope it doesn’t freak you out to have someone that you don’t even know mooning over you so much,” she wrote. She asked about his appeals, about his “girlfriend (wife?),” about what his days in prison were like. A few days later, before he’d even had a chance to reply, she sent another note. The letter she finally sent was full of apologies and disclaimers: She was sorry for intruding, and she assured him he didn’t have to write her back. That was exactly the kind of monster Davis didn’t want to be. “Change his diaper for us, Damien!” one called out. He’d been born while his father was in custody, and Echols had a shy, proud, weirded-out look on his face. In one courtroom scene in the documentary, Echols was shown cradling his infant son for the first time. It might seem ludicrous now, but after the Manson murders and Jonestown suicides, it was not such a stretch to imagine seemingly normal people behaving in aberrant, homicidal ways, particularly if they were in thrall to a malevolent leader.Ī Satanic Panic, fueled by the rise of the religious right, peaked in the mid- to late 1980s-and stuck around in places like West Memphis, so that in 1994, a teenager like Echols with a propensity for wearing long black jackets, carrying a staff, and doodling pentagrams and horned figures in a journal, but also with a decent alibi and no evidence tying him to the crime, could be convicted of murder and sent to death row.ĭavis didn’t want to seem like a tragedy groupie. ![]()
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