Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [26]
Damien returned to Marion. He still had two and a half months before he would turn eighteen, and until then he would remain under Driver’s supervision. Driver imposed three requirements: first, that Damien was to come to Driver’s office at least once a week; second, that he was to observe a curfew; and third, that he was to enroll in the local vo-tech school and obtain his GED. Damien signed a contract agreeing to all three stipulations, and by the end of December, ten days after his eighteenth birthday, he’d earned his high school equivalency diploma and satisfied the other conditions as well.
But Driver was still not satisfied, and he was far from convinced that Damien was as harmless as his doctors believed. He thought Damien was looking for power. He felt that the teenager’s unusual appearance, his unconventional religious beliefs, and the satanic rituals that Damien denied—but that Driver was convinced he had conducted—were all the attempts of a social outcast to acquire some form of control. “He’d come from a horrendous family background,” Driver would later explain. “He’d grown up in very poor circumstances, and he’d been picked on by other kids. I think he took on this strange persona to keep people away, to keep them from picking on him. And he progressed from that to using his oddness to serve his desire for power.” In Damien, Driver saw a teenager with “a cold look to him.” He believed the boy had become one of those people “who could do things without remorse.” As he later told the West Memphis detectives, “The further I went with him, the more apprehensive I was getting.”
Damien, meanwhile, had begun dating sixteen-year-old Domini Teer, who lived near him in the trailer park. He got a part-time job with a roofing company. And he kept his appointments at the mental health center. On his first visit there, the social worker noted that he came dressed in black, wore a silver cross, and made “intense eye contact.” Damien grew to trust the therapist, and over time, in what he believed was the confidentiality of their sessions, he made several statements, which she recorded in her notes. “Damien reports being told at the hospital that he could be another ‘Charles Manson or Ted Bundy,’” she wrote. Another time: “Describes self as ‘pretty much hate the human race.’” And on another occasion: “Reports being harassed by local authorities, as ‘they think I’m a Satanic leader.’ He admits being caught with Satanic items and with handwritten books about witchcraft. Denies cult involvement. Has been interested in witchcraft for past eight years.”69
When Echols visited the therapist on January 25, 1993, the session focused on death. Afterward, the therapist wrote that Damien had raised the subject with a poem he’d written the week before. “The theme of this poem centered around death and power,” she wrote. “Damien explained that he obtains his power by drinking blood of others. He typically drinks the blood of a sexual partner or of a ruling partner. This is achieved by biting or cutting. He states, ‘It makes me feel like a God…’” At the end of the session, the therapist encouraged Damien to continue writing as a way of communicating his feelings. She wrote, “Damien is agreeable to doing this, though he continues to question the therapist on confidentiality issues and wants to be assured that he will not be misunderstood.”
Damien had reason to worry. As other parts of Gitchell’s investigation, for one reason or another, dried up, the belief that the boys may have been killed by satanists began to take firmer hold. Gitchell’s early remark about a cult was coming to the fore as the main theory