Damien Echols

Damien Wayne Echols (born Michael Wayne Hutchison; December 11, 1974) is an American writer, best known as one of the West Memphis Three, a group of teenagers convicted of a triple murder.

Damien Wayne Echols was born on December 11, 1974.

He lived with his mother and father until their divorce, when he was 8.

The family frequently moved and Echols would attend eight schools before the age of ten.

At the age of 13, he changed his birth name from Michael Wayne Hutchison, taking a new name and the last name of his stepfather Jack Echols.

The family settled in Echols's home in West Memphis, Arkansas, where Echols attended school.

He was still in the ninth grade at the age of 17.

Echols, with his habits of dressing in black and listening to heavy metal music, was a misfit within the local community.

He also wrote dark and expressive poems.

In 1993, when Echols was 18, he was arrested along with Jason Baldwin (16) and Jessie Misskelley (17) for the murder of three eight-year-olds: Steve Branch, Michael Moore and Christopher Byers.

They were convicted.

Their son was born on September 12, 1993, while Echols was awaiting trial.

On March 19, 1994, Judge David Burnett sentenced Echols to death by lethal injection.

On December 23, 1996, the Arkansas Supreme Court denied appeals from Echols and Baldwin.

In 1996, Echols met his future wife Lorri Davis, a landscape architect who learned about the case after seeing Paradise Lost in New York and wrote him a letter.

They began a romantic relationship, and in 1997 Davis quit her job, moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, and began working on Echols's case.

In May 1998, Echols won a hearing on charges that his defense counsel had been incompetent, but Judge Burnett ruled against him in June 1999.

In December 1999, they married in a Buddhist ceremony, held in the prison visiting room.

In 2005, he self-published his autobiography Almost Home with a foreword written by Margaret Cho.

Echols has one child, Damian Seth Azariah Teer, by his ex-girlfriend Domini Teer.

It has been reported that Jackson and Fran Walsh started to work on this project in 2005 and conducted their own private investigation.

The film received a nomination for Best Documentary Screenplay from the Writers Guild of America.

In 2007, new DNA testing became available that was not technologically possible at the time of the crime, and produced evidence that hairs found at the crime scene did not match Misskelley, Baldwin or Echols and possibly matched the stepfather of one of the victims.

Based on this, the defendants asked Burnett for a new trial.

In September 2008, Burnett denied retrials for all three saying the new evidence was "inconclusive".

Echols spent his time on death row at the Varner Unit Supermax.

In his first years, he studied Buddhism and was doing meditation five to seven hours a day.

Later, he became interested in ceremonial magic.

He spent most of the 18 years in prison studying magic.

The state's high court rebuked Burnett's 2008 decision not to grant Echols a new trial based on the DNA evidence.

In November 2010, after Judge Burnett had retired from the bench, the Arkansas Supreme Court ordered new evidentiary hearings for all three defendants based on the new DNA evidence.

In 2010, after DNA evidence raised the possibility that they had not committed the crime, they were granted an evidentiary hearing.

Upon his release from death row in 2011 under an Alford plea, Echols authored several autobiographies and spiritual books.

He has been featured in multiple books, documentaries, and podcasts about his spiritual works and the West Memphis Three case.

In August 2011, Echols's lawyers, Steve Braga and Patrick Benca negotiated an Alford plea, which allows the defendant to maintain their innocence while conceding that there is enough evidence to possibly convict them at trial.

Under the plea deals, all three were resentenced to time-served for the murders (18 years and 75 days) and immediately released from prison.

After the release from prison, Echols and his wife moved to New York City and lived in Peter Jackson's apartment.

They next moved to Salem, Massachusetts, and finally settled in Harlem, New York City.

In 2012, Echols published the book Life After Death, which became a New York Times Best Seller.

Also in 2012, West of Memphis, a documentary film directed and co-written by Amy J. Berg, and produced by Peter Jackson and Echols, was released in the US by Sony Pictures Classics.