Free The Moth by Unknown Page A

diseases; there are now sister camps throughout the United States and the rest of the world. Hotchner’s evocative memoir about growing up in St. Louis during the Great Depression,
King of the Hill,
was made into a movie in 1993, the screenplay adapted and directed by Steven Soderbergh.

DAMIEN ECHOLS
Life After Death
    W hen I first arrived on death row, the guards decided they were gonna welcome me to the neighborhood. So they took me to the part of the prison they call “the Hole.” It’s a very small, very dark, filthy part of the prison that’s in complete isolation. And for the next eighteen days they beat the hell out of me. They used to come in at about twelve, one o’clock in the morning, and they would chain me to the bars of the cell and beat me with nightsticks. They beat me so bad at one point that I started to piss blood. I still wake up at night sometimes now dreaming that I’m pissing blood again.
    They starved me. They tortured me.
    Eventually word of what they were doing started to leak out into the rest of the prison. Other prisoners started to hear about it. So they went to a deacon from the Catholic Church, who used to come to prison to bring Catholic inmates Communion, and they told him what was going on. And he went to the warden’s office, and he told the warden, “I know what you’re doing to this guy. I know you’re killing him. And if it doesn’t stop, I’m going to go public.”
    So that night they took me out of the Hole and put me back in a regular prison cell. The other prisoners told me later that they had expected to see me carried out in a body bag any day. And I think the only reason they didn’t murder me is because they realized they were being watched.
    When I was a kid, my family was incredibly poor, beyond dirt-poor. When we did finally move into a trailer park with running water and electricity, we thought we were really moving up in the world. I used to take refuge in books and music. Reading became a sanctuary for me. It allowed me to escape the world I lived in for a little while. I’d read Stephen King novels over and over, listen to music like Iron Maiden. I started dressing in black all the time because it was like a security blanket for me. It made me feel a little safer in an unsafe and scary world. I didn’t have many friends; in fact, my only real friend was this skinny blond kid with a mullet named Jason Baldwin, and Jason was with me the night I was arrested.
    It was me, Jason, my sister, and my girlfriend sitting in the house, in the living room watching movies, when the cops started beating on the door. Hammering on it. And when I opened the door, they were pointing guns at me. They swarmed into the house like ants. They stampeded over everything and pawed through every single possession my family owned. They put me and Jason in handcuffs, threw us into the backs of cop cars, and took us to jail.
    I spent all night in a cell about the size of a closet. I wasn’t allowed to go to the bathroom, wasn’t given so much as a drink of water. Every so often a cop would come in and ask me if I had anything to tell him, or if I was ready to make my confession yet. This went on all night, until the next day, when we were given an arraignment hearing. At this hearing the judge tellsme that I’m being charged with three counts of capital murder. That I’m being accused of killing three children as part of a satanic sacrifice. He says someone has confessed, but he refuses to read the confession in the courtroom. Instead, I am put in a broom closet somewhere in the back of the jail and given a transcript of this confession.
    I’m only eighteen years old, and I’m in complete and absolute shock and trauma. I’m suffering from sleep deprivation. My life has just been destroyed. But even reading this thing, I could see that there was something wrong with it. It made no sense. It was like some sort of bizarre patchwork Frankenstein thing that they had stitched together.