Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [57]
Meanwhile, it became clear to Shettles that until the night of their arrests, Damien and Jason had never fully appreciated the seriousness of their situation.152To the irritation of the police, Damien had maintained an attitude of arrogance. He told Shettles that he’d felt safe; that he’d believed the police would never find evidence against him, since he had not committed the crime; and that eventually they would be forced to realize how stupid they’d been to hound him. With evident satisfaction, Damien told Shettles how, during one interrogation, he’d finally said that if officers would let him speak with his mother, he’d tell them everything he knew about the murders. Detectives had gotten excited and brought Pam to the station, and while Damien was speaking with her, they’d hastily set up a video camera to tape his expected confession. Damien had then smugly announced that everything he knew about the murders was “nothing.” Damien thought it was funny. The officers had been furious.
But Shettles suspected that Damien’s haughtiness had always been a facade. She noticed that his hands shook when he talked. Sometimes he cried. He told her he had little hope of being believed by a jury. She wrote, “He stated many times he prays that if there is a God, he will not allow him to live another day. He further stated he feels that he is going insane, but is not certain of what will happen to him mentally should this process occur.”
For the investigators, Damien’s psychiatric background was legally important, as well. At the time, Arkansas was one of five states that held bifurcated trials; that is, one part dealt with the question of guilt or innocence, and if a defendant were found guilty, the second part of the trial was held to determine his sentence. If Damien’s trial went that far, his mental health history might be used as a mitigating factor; evidence of mental defect might be presented to persuade a jury to spare his life or to reduce his time in prison. Part of Shettles’s assignment was to closely explore Damien’s mental health history.
He told her that he had suffered severe headaches as a child, some so intense that he would pull clumps of hair out of his head in an effort to ease the pain. Pam Echols reported that Damien had suffered several blackouts but that they’d never been diagnosed. There’d been his stays, as a teenager, in psychiatric facilities, and the outpatient counseling in West Memphis. Pam reported that after Damien’s last hospitalization, he’d been declared totally disabled by the Social Security Administration. Three months before the murders, he had begun receiving Social Security disability checks of $289 per month. These were stopped after his arrest.
Descent into Madness
As the summer intensified, so did Shettles’s concern for Damien’s mental state. By mid-July he told her that he was sleeping as little as two hours a night. Noting that he was “noticeably shaky,” she wrote, “He can quote many songs and relates lyrics of songs to his feelings. He quoted lyrics from a Pink Floyd song called ‘Comfortably Numb’ and an Ozzy Osbourne song called ‘Road to Nowhere.’”
The titles were sounding increasingly apt. By August Damien was hallucinating. Soon he was showing signs of full-blown paranoia. He wrote in a letter to Shettles, “I think the police are up to something. They are doing something to the food and putting some kind of gas in the vents. I think they are doing something to my medicine.” When Shettles visited the jail in mid-August, the sheriff informed her that Damien had begun a hunger strike. When she went to Damien’s cell, he told her that “the reason he had gone on the hunger strike was he had no desire to go to trial and he did not feel he would receive a fair trial.” She wrote, “As I