Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [22]
The story of forbidden love might have ended there. But during a thunderstorm six nights later, Deanna’s mother called the police again, this time to report that Deanna had run away from home—presumably with Damien. Officers headed for Lakeshore Estates, where they found the teenagers, both “partially nude from the waist down,” in an uninhabited mobile home.53Damien’s friend Jason Baldwin was with them. Damien and Deanna acknowledged that they had planned to run away. But since neither Damien nor Deanna owned a car—or even drove one, for that matter—they had sought refuge in the trailer to wait out the storm. Nothing was reported stolen, but police charged the pair nonetheless with burglary and sexual misconduct. Damien and Deanna were taken to the county jail, and Driver was notified. Someone from the juvenile office went to the Echolses’ trailer and asked to search Damien’s room. Pam Echols granted her permission, and the juvenile officer walked out with notebooks containing Damien’s writings and drawings. Pam said she was told that they would be returned, but that they never were. The notebooks, which included the poem above, were placed into Damien’s juvenile record. Driver considered them evidence that the boy was veering dangerously toward an interest in the occult.
Deputy prosecutor Fogleman filed charges against Damien for the incident at the trailer.54While Deanna was released to her parents, Damien was ordered to be held in a juvenile detention center about an hour north of West Memphis. Though Damien obeyed the center’s rules and, according to records, treated its staff with “the utmost respect,” word circulated that he and Deanna had intended to conceive a child and that after its birth, the child was to be sacrificed in a satanic ritual. When Driver heard the rumors, he contacted a psychiatric hospital in Little Rock and drove Damien there himself.
For Driver, it was a relief to have Damien in a hospital more than a hundred miles away. Driver didn’t know if the rumors about Damien were true, but Damien’s own statements had been enough to convince him that the boy was headed down a dangerous path. For starters, Damien had told Driver that he was a witch. “I think his claim was that he was a Wiccan,” Driver later said, “and he worshiped goddesses.” The boy also dressed mostly in black. To Driver, “he looked like one of the slasher-movie-type guys—boots, coat, long, stringy black hair, though he cut it short sometimes.” As Driver saw it, Damien was part of an alarming trend in the county, one that was drawing not just Damien Echols but many teenagers toward Satan.
Even with Damien hospitalized, Driver noted with growing concern that “his modus operandi continued” in Crittenden County. Driver concluded that Damien was a leader or central figure in a group devoted to what Driver termed “occult-related activity.” Driver and Jones found pentagrams and other “cult-related” graffiti under railroad bridges, on fortifications alongside the interstates, and in an abandoned cotton gin east of Marion that kids had nicknamed Stonehenge.55
Driver knew that some of the goings-on could be chalked up to adolescent mischief. He recognized that “a lot of this devil worship stuff was an excuse to drink and have sex” and that some of the kids who were involved were “dabbling, doing it as a lark.” But others, like Damien, appeared to Driver to have gone beyond mere dabbling. Driver’s concerns were not uncommon at that time.56
By the late 1980s, interest in the suspected prevalence of satanic ritual abuse, or SRA, as it became known, had grown so intense in the United States that the subject was discussed in settings as diverse as psychological conferences, religious tent revivals, police training seminars,Ms . magazine, and television talk shows, where the words “satanic,” “occult,” “ritualistic,” and “paganism” were often ill defined or used interchangeably. Fantasy role-playing games, such as Dungeons and Dragons, as well