Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [126]
The lawyer continued. “As far as several things that Griffis was talking about yesterday—about satanism beliefs—are there any of those things that he was talking about that are your personal beliefs?”
“Not really,” Damien replied, though he added that he might share “some” characteristics with what Griffis had described. For example, the defendant said, “Some satanists may be arrogant, conceited, self-important. I might be that, but I’m not a satanist. I don’t believe in human sacrifices or anything like that.” Asked about the knife that was found in the lake, Damien said, “I had one sort of like that, but mine didn’t have a black handle. The handle on mine was camouflaged, and it had the camouflage case and everything. The blade on mine was black. It wasn’t silver like that.”
Asked how he’d felt during the past year, since being charged with the murders, Damien answered, “Different ways. Sometimes angry, when I see stuff on TV. Sometimes sad. Sometimes scared.” Asked about the time when he’d licked his lips at one of the pretrial hearings, he said, “I guess I just lost my temper, because, it was, like, when I went outside, everybody was out there, standing there calling me names, screaming at me, things like that. And I guess it just made me upset when I did that.”
“Did you kill any of these three boys?” the lawyer asked.
“No,” Damien answered, “I did not.”
The front-page headline in the next morning’sArkansas Democrat-Gazette announced:ECHOLS DENIES KILLING THREE BOYS . The next line read:ADMITS ON STAND AN INTEREST IN OCCULT . A photograph that ran above the story showed Jason smiling during the trial. The front page of the Jonesboro paper featured a photo of Damien smiling as he was led from the courthouse.
But there was less to smile about the next day, after Davis’s cross-examination. The prosecutor handed Damien a sheet of paper with several names written on it in an unusual alphabet. Damien acknowledged that he’d written the names. In response to questions from Davis, he said that one of the names was Aleister Crowley, a well-known writer on witchcraft. Davis identified Crowley as “a noted author in the field of satanic worship” and a writer who “believes in human sacrifice.” Damien did not disagree. He said he’d never read any of Crowley’s books, though, he added, “I would have read them if I had saw them.”
Asking about the incident in Oregon that had resulted in Damien’s hospitalization, Prosecutor Davis asked, “Did you threaten to eat your father alive?” Damien said the police were called because he’d been threatening to kill himself. Davis asked him about a reference he had made the day before to a medication he’d been prescribed. “Are you on that today?” Davis asked. Damien said he was—that he had been taking the antidepressant drug Imipramine for the past couple of years, and that it made him sleepy.
“Okay,” Davis continued. “Are you a manic-depressive?”
“Yes. I am.”
“Okay. Describe for us what happens when you don’t take your medication….”
“I cry. I stay by myself most of the time, closed up. If I don’t take the medicine, I get headaches. I get nauseous, just generally depressed.”
“And when you are in a manic phase…is that where you feel nearly invincible?”
“Yes.”
Davis started to ask about the incident when Damien threatened to claw the eyes out of Deanna’s boyfriend, but Damien’s lawyer objected. Davis countered, “Your Honor, they put on evidence yesterday about him being a quiet, passive, peace-loving Wiccan.” Davis said he wanted to show that Damien had another side. Burnett sided with Davis, whereupon the prosecutor asked, “Mr. Echols, when you have these mood swings and your medication is out of balance, do you have, do you get violent sometimes?”
“Only toward myself.”
Damien would be the only one of the three defendants who would take the stand in his own behalf. Many observers in the courtroom considered his lawyers’ decision to let