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asked Damien some preliminary questions, the nineteen-year-old answered in a voice that, oddly, sounded neither confident nor afraid. Price asked how Damien came to have his name. Damien explained that he’d changed his last name when Jack Echols adopted him and how, at the time, he’d been “very involved” in the Catholic Church. “And we was going over the names of the saints,” Damien said. “Saint Michael’s is where I went to church at—and we heard about this guy from the Hawaiian Islands, Father Damien, that took care of lepers until he finally caught the disease hisself and died. I was inspired by what he did.”

“Did the choosing of the name Damien have anything to do with any type of horror movies, satanism, cultism, anything of that nature?” Price asked.

“Nothing whatsoever.”

Price suggested, “Tell the ladies and gentlemen of the jury a little bit about the types of things you enjoy doing, your interests, hobbies, and things of that nature.”

“For a few years I really enjoyed skateboarding,” Damien said. “It was like all I did for a while. I like movies, about any type of books, talking on the phone, watching TV.”

“Do you like to read a great deal?”

“Yes.”

“What types of books do you like to read?”

“I will read about anything, but my favorites were Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Anne Rice.”

“During this time period, did you develop an interest in different types of religions, or what beliefs were you studying?”

“I have read about all different types of religions because I’ve always wondered, like, how do we know we’ve got the right one, how do we know we are not messing up.”

“After the time period you were really into the Catholic religion, did you start focusing in on another particular religion?”

“Wicca.”

Price asked Damien about some of his writings, which the prosecutors had already introduced. Damien identified one of the books as his personal journal. Pointing to quotes on the inside front cover, the lawyer asked Damien to read them to the jury “and then tell them where they came from.”

Damien began to read. “‘Life is but a walking shadow. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.’ That’s fromA Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare.277‘Pure black looking clear. My work is done here. Try getting back from me that which used to be.’ That is off a Metallica tape called,Injustice for All. It’s about how warped the court systems are and stuff like that. The other one was from aTwilight Zone. ‘I kicked open a lot of doors in my time, and I am willing to wait for this one to open and when it does I’ll be waiting.’”

Damien identified other items the state had introduced against him as a cover from the Metallica tapeMaster of Puppets and “a bootleg Metallica tape that most people didn’t even know existed, calledGarage Days Revisited . Damien explained that he and Jason “used to get copies of them on copy machines and get them enlarged bigger and have them for decorations in our rooms.” He said he’d kept the dog’s skull he’d found because “I just thought it was kind of cool.” Another picture the state had introduced was of a gold skull with wings. Damien identified that as a Harley-Davidson emblem he had.

Price asked why Damien had borrowedCotton Mather on Witchcraft from the library.

“Just to read it,” he said. “Most people by looking at the cover, they would think it was a witchcraft book. It’s really an antiwitchcraft book. It was wrote by a Puritan minister. It was on different ways that during the persecution era, they used to find ways to torture people or keep them locked up until finally they would say, ‘Yeah, I’m a witch,’ and then they would kill them.”

When Price asked if Damien had a driver’s license or had ever driven a car, the teenager answered no to both questions. When Price asked if he’d discussed the murders at a girls’ softball game, Damien replied that he had been at the ballpark, but that he had not talked about the murders there. When Price asked Damien his opinion of the testimony by the cult expert, Dale Griffis, Damien calmly observed, “Some