Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [21]
The murders shocked but did not surprise Driver. He’d been telling people for months that he expected something dire to happen. When it did, his first thought was of Damien Echols, a troubled kid whom Driver had been watching for about a year. From that moment on, this third aspect of the murder investigation had a clearly identified focus—something the other two approaches did not. In the weeks that followed, that focus would only grow sharper.
The boy had come to Driver’s attention more than a year before the murders, when a woman called the Marion police to report that he was threatening her daughter. Damien, a high school dropout who lived in Marion’s Lakeshore Estates trailer park, was seventeen at the time; Deanna Jane Holcomb was fifteen. Deanna’s mother told police that her daughter had been dating Damien but that the two had ended their relationship earlier in the week. When police arrived at the Holcombs’ house, Deanna reported that since she and Damien had broken up, he had been harassing her and one of her male friends. According to the police report, Deanna claimed that Echols—“five-eleven, one hundred sixty pounds, brown eyes, dark hair”—said he was going to kill the other boy “and dump him in the front yard of her house, and then come back and take care of her, and then burn the house down.”50The girl’s mother told the officer “that she was in fear for her daughter’s life.” Later, Driver would recall that the girl’s family told him that Damien was “trying to get their daughter into black magic and this type of thing.”51
Lakeshore was one of the poorest neighborhoods in a county that ranked among the nation’s poorest 10 percent. While many homes there were neatly kept, with gardens and cheerful wind chimes, others slumped in neglect and dreary dilapidation. Most residents of Lakeshore Estates subsisted on some form of state and federal assistance, and the Echols family was no exception. Damien lived with his sister, mother, grandmother, and stepfather in a small two-bedroom trailer. Tensions in the household were simmering. The investigating officer drove to the trailer, and when the dark-haired teenager answered the door, the officer warned him to stay away from Deanna and her family.
But problems of the Echols family had also come to the attention of social workers. Exactly a year before the murders—on the same day, as it happened, that Judge David Burnett ordered the terroristic threatening conviction of John Mark Byers expunged—a mental health worker visited the Echolses and concluded that both Damien and his sister, Michelle, needed help. A report on the visit described the family’s problems as being “severe.”
Damien and Michelle’s mother, Pam, was thirty-four years old, twenty years younger than her second husband, Andy “Jack” Echols, who’d adopted her two children. In 1992, a caseworker assigned to the family saw it as verging on the breaking point. Damien’s breakup with Deanna, which he said had come at the insistence of her parents, exacerbated the tension. Within a month after the first incident, Deanna’s mother again called the police, this time to report that her daughter had begun to see Damien again.52An officer responded to the Holcombs’ house, and while he was taking the woman’s report, Deanna arrived home, accompanied by Damien. Her mother yelled at Damien to get off her property and to stay away from Deanna. The girl yelled back that she wanted to be with Damien. The officer reported, “Damien advised that he had just walked her home” after Deanna had become sick at school. But Deanna’s mother was furious. The officer warned Damien once again to stay away from Deanna.