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Chapter Five

The Prime Suspects

WHILE A THERAPIST MIGHT HAVEviewed some of Damien’s views as unhealthy, most people in the region, had they known of them, would also have considered them unholy. Here, as throughout the Mississippi delta, the spiritual landscape was rigorously Christian and rigorously literal. Here, to a greater extent than almost anywhere else in the country, angels were regarded as God’s emissaries, hovering invisibly close at hand, and children were warned to be on guard against Satan, whose evils were just as near. A belief in possession by demons was common. It was, as one scholar noted, “an extension of the general Southern view that the devil is very real, the devil has great power and is vibrantly at work in the world.”70

While not everyone in the Mississippi delta viewed the cosmos in such stark terms, most residents of east Arkansas did. Most attended a Christian church, and the churches most of them attended belonged to the conservative Southern Baptist Convention.71On Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights, in cities and along country roads, believers filed into white-steepled buildings, some grand and many humble, where preachers warned of a fiery hell and taught that redemption could be found only in the blood of the Savior, Jesus Christ. In such an environment, the ideas that Damien Echols was confiding to his therapist were beyond strange—they were blasphemous.72The fact that Driver had seen Damien’s writings and read some of his psychiatric reports brought what otherwise might have remained privileged therapeutic conversations to the attention of police.

Driver and Jones

Even though Damien had complied with Driver’s requirements that he check in once a week, obtain his GED, and receive counseling at the mental health clinic, and despite the fact that he was now eighteen and no longer the juvenile officer’s responsibility, Driver’s interest in Damien intensified with the start of 1993. The juvenile officer continued to find instances of what he took to be satanic rituals.73

When the bodies of the three eight-year-olds were discovered, one of them mutilated, Driver immediately started “to zero in on Damien and his group.” He viewed Damien as a prime suspect, and he shared his opinion with his assistant Steve Jones and with Detective Donald Bray of the Marion Police Department. Bray’s office stood across the street from the courthouse where Driver’s office was located. “Don Bray was the first person who really listened to what was going on,” Driver later noted. “He was interested in what we saw as the occult portion of the crime. I think the West Memphis police took a little longer to come around.”74

Since Driver viewed Damien as a leader of cult activities in the region, he was also interested in Damien’s friends. Besides Damien’s girlfriend, Domini, the suspected cult leader was known to have only one truly close friend, sixteen-year-old Jason Baldwin, a former neighbor who shared Damien’s interest in skateboarding and heavy metal music. The two had known each other since Jason was in the seventh grade and Damien was in the eighth. They had met in study hall. At the time, both lived in Lakeshore, “a dirty, grungy type place,” as Baldwin would recall, where police were always patrolling.75“I wanted out of there,” Jason later said. “A lot of people there didn’t know where they was going in life. I guess they was just on autopilot. They didn’t think ahead.” Though Jason would later say he and Damien were both like that, at the time they met, “we thought we was the coolest people in school.” Part of what drew them together was, as Jason later put it,

Others didn’t like us. They’d been accusing me of being a satanist since the sixth grade. It was because I had long hair and wore concert T-shirts, with bands like Metallica and Guns n’ Roses, and Ozzy Osbourne and U2. Damien and I kind of dressed different. I basically wore blue jeans or Bugle Boy jeans, with