While Damien Echols has consistently downplayed his violent history in softball media interviews, the records, as usual, tell a very different tale than heard from Echols and his supporters.
"DAMIEN ADMITS TO A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE."
The central figure in the investigation, prosecution, incarceration and release of the West Memphis 3 was the flamboyant and problematic Damien Echols, whose boyhood ambition to become a world-class occultist put him out ...
While Damien Echols has consistently downplayed his violent history in softball media interviews, the records, as usual, tell a very different tale than heard from Echols and his supporters.
"DAMIEN ADMITS TO A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE."
The central figure in the investigation, prosecution, incarceration and release of the West Memphis 3 was the flamboyant and problematic Damien Echols, whose boyhood ambition to become a world-class occultist put him out of step with his peers in the Arkansas Delta.
Quickly pegged as a likely suspect in the murders from multiple sources, including his own all-too-knowing initial interviews with police, Echols seemed to have adopted his black-clad “figure of the night” persona as a defense against often-rough circumstances.
Becoming a self-proclaimed witch and part-time vampire made sense to a mentally ill misfit who could turn his outsider status into a means of drawing attention to himself.
Intrinsic to this dark image was the creation of the impression that he was capable of great and weird violence. For those who knew him, it was not surprising that he fulfilled his self-created legend as a dreaded monster.
He worked hard at becoming the terror of the town. On the road to infamy, he built up a history of violence that gave credence to an ability to torture and kill.
'According to his discharge summary from Charter Hospital of Little Rock in June 1992: “Supposedly, Damien chased a younger child with an ax and attempted to set a house on fire. He denied this behavior. He reported that his girlfriend’s family reported this so that they could get him in trouble. He was also accused of beating a peer up at school. Damien admits to a history of violence. He said prior to admission he did attempt to enucleate a peer’s eye at school. He was suspended subsequently from school. He was suspended on seven different occasions during the school year. He related he was suspended on one occasion because he set a fire in his science classroom and also would walk off on campus on several occasions. He was disruptive to the school environment. He was also disrespectful to teachers. He has been accused of terroristic threatening.” Echols had gotten into trouble in one in- stance for spitting on a teacher.
Much of this history of violence came from Echols himself.
His teenage acquaintances told grisly stories about Echols’ casual cruelty.
Joe Houston Bartoush, Jason Baldwin’s cousin, offered another insight into Echols’ violent character; a portion of Baldwin’s “alibi” centered on the fact that he had cut the lawn of his great-uncle Hubert Bartoush, Joe’s father, on May 5.
On June 14, 1993, Detective Bryn Ridge was interviewing Hubert when Joe Bartoush volunteered a statement. Joe, in his early teens, said he and Echols had been walking down the road west out of Lakeshore into a field when they came upon a sick dog. Echols grabbed a brick and began attacking the dog.
Joe told Ridge: “On 10-27-92 I was at Lakeshore Trailer Park with Damien Echols when he killed a black Great Dane. The dog was already sick and he hit the dog in the back of the head. He pulled the intestines out of the dog and started stomping the dog until blood came out of his mouth. He was going to come back later with battery acid so that he could burn the hair and skin off of the dog’s head. He had two cat skulls, a dog skull and a rat skull that I already knew about. He kept these skulls in his bedroom at Jack Echols house in Lakeshore. He was trying to make the eyeballs of the dog he killed pop out when he was stomping. Damien had a camouflage survival knife to cut the gut out of the dog with.”
Joe was sure of the date of the dog killing because he had skipped school that day and had been caught.
Joe said Echols had used the survival knife to carve his name into his arm on another occasion. A similar survival knife recovered behind the Baldwin home, known as the “lake knife,” was a highly publicized piece of prosecutorial evidence. His former girlfriend also described Echols having a similar knife, and Echols testified that he had owned “a bunch” of Rambo-style camouflage survival knives.
Heather Cliett, Baldwin’s girlfriend, told investigators of similar animal cruelty: “States that one time at
'The Case Against the West Memphis 3 Killers, Vol. I'
the skating rink Damien told her that he stuck a stick in a dog’s eye and jumped on it and then burned it.”
Timothy Blaine Hodge, a 14-year-old ninth-grader at Marion who lived in Lakeshore, had known Baldwin for some time but only knew Echols since his return from Oregon. “I’ve heard Jason say that Damien was in the crazy house in Oregon. Damien and Jason were always together. They spent a lot of time in West Memphis at Wal-Mart. They stole a lot of stuff. I always seen just Jason and Damien and Domini together walking around Lakeshore. There was a big black Great Dane dog at Lakeshore that I was on the trail over the bridge to the right as you go over the bridge. It was dead. Its intestines was strung out of his butt. A boy named Adam told me he heard Damien did it.”
Chris Littrell, a neighbor of the Echols family and a Wiccan, told the police that Echols liked to stick sharpened sticks through frogs to see how long it took them to die.
He said Echols claimed that he had burned down his father’s garage and then stood in the flames chanting.
Echols told Murray Farris, another teen who was a Wiccan, that he once poured gasoline over his own foot and set it aflame.
Reports of Echols planning to sacrifice his own child in a ritual were persistent. Littrell told police that Echols did not intend to kill the baby that Domini was expecting, as the child would entitle him to a larger government check.
The story surfaced after Echols was arrested with Deanna Holcomb as they attempted to run away.
Jerry Driver, the juvenile officer in charge of the Echols case, mentioned the baby sacrifice rumor on June 1, 1992, in a phone message to Charter Hospital, where Echols was taken for his first hospitalization for mental illness. The message read “Court-ordered to Mid South Hospital. Suicidal, self-mutilating -- made pact ... girlfriend & Devil to sacrifice 1st born.”
A psychiatric evaluation at Charter dated June 2, 1992, stated: “There was a conversation that concerned staff at the detention center. Reportedly Damien and his girlfriend were going to have a baby and then sacrifice the child. Damien denies this type of behavior.”
The discharge summary on June 25 repeated that information, as did the discharge summary on Sept. 28 after his second trip to Charter. The Sept. 28 discharge summary also noted that Echols had been on probation for threatening his girlfriend’s parents and for a charge of second-degree sexual misconduct stemming from having sex with his underage girlfriend.
Driver’s dealings with Echols dated from that ar- rest on May 19, 1992, when Damien and Deanna were found partially clothed in an abandoned trailer at Lakeshore.
In a series of contacts with law enforcement over the next year, Echols described a network of occultists active in Crittenden County. In turn, Echols consented to have his home searched and officials confiscated Echols’ notebook, full of somber and morbid poetry, and artwork from his bedroom, full of demonic and occult images. Driver believed a drawing of four tombstones, with a baby’s foot and a rattle, under a full moon, indicated Echols’ plan to sacrifice his own child.
Deanna told West Memphis police on May 11, 1993, well before the arrests: “I found out that he planned to kill our first born if it was a girl. Damien would not do it. He is a coward and would have tried to get me to do it. That’s when I knew he was nuts and I had nothing else to do with him.”
Stories about Echols drinking blood were similarly persistent and pervasive.
The West Memphis Evening Times ran a story quoting an anonymous girl who said she had seen Echols drink the blood of Baldwin and Domini. The same story quoted a Lakeshore resident who said that dogs had come up missing in the trailer park. Schoolmates often asked Echols if he drank blood, and he didn’t deny the practice.
The Sept. 28 discharge summary from Charter noted that, “While at the Detention Center, he reportedly grabbed a peer and began ‘sucking blood from the peer’s neck’. According to Damien, he relates that the peer was aware that he was going to do this. Staff reports that Damien was not remorseful for his behavior.
Damien indicated that he sucked blood in order to get into a gang. He denies it was any type of ritual. …
“Damien laughed when he was called a ‘blood sucking vampire’. He relates that he does not know why people think this.”
After an office visit on Jan. 25, 1993, his therapist noted that Echols believed he obtained power by drink- ing the blood of others, that the practice made him feel godlike.
At trial, John Fogleman asked Dr. James Moneypenny, a psychologist from Little Rock testifying for the defense, “In your business, is it not unusual to find people telling you about drinking blood, and that they do it to make them feel like a god?”
“It’s highly unusual,” said Dr. Moneypenny. “It’s what?”
“It’s not usual at all,” said the psychologist. “It is very atypical. I think that represents some of the extremes of his thinking and beliefs and what it has come to for him.”
Driver found that Echols was not the only blood- drinker in his circle of friends. Driver had transported Domini to Charter Hospital after she broke probation on a shoplifting charge. “She discussed with me the blood- drinking and said ‘Why should I not drink blood, because my mother drinks blood?’ and I thought, now that’s a strange thing to say.” Domini, consistently dismissive of the most damaging evidence, denied making this statement.
While there is little else to suggest that Baldwin was an avid blood-drinker, testimony from a fellow detainee at Craighead County Juvenile Detention Facility centered on a gory confession made to Michael Carson.
Carson, a 16-year-old admitted drug user, testified, “I said, just between me and you, did you do it. I won’t say a word. He said yes and he went into detail about it. .... He told me how he dismembered the kids, or I don’t know exactly how many kids. He just said he dismembered them. He sucked the blood from the penis and scrotum and put the balls in his mouth.”
Carson stood by his testimony when reports sur- faced in 2000 that he had committed perjury. Carson said he didn’t cut a deal in exchange for the testimony. He had passed the polygraph before testifying.
Christy Jones, a friend of Misskelley’s who had attended school with Damien, told police on Oct. 1, 1993, about Damien “I saw him cut his arm with something and he then sucked the blood out of the wound. I had heard that Damien was weird and part of a satanic cult.”
The evidence of his cruelty to animals continues to dog Echols. When such talk surfaced on Twitter in 2013, Echols referred to the many stories as “animal lies” and suggested that, if the stories were true, they would have showed up in the court record.
After all, Damien’s dad, Joe Hutchison, had told the “Paradise Lost” documentary filmmakers: “This boy is not capable of the crime that he’s been arrested for. I’ve seen him take a little kitten and love it just like you love a little baby.” Considering that Echols intended to sacrifice his own little baby, Hutchison’s statement held a certain ironic truth.
Documentary filmmakers have made no mention of Damien’s history of torturing animals, drinking blood and planning human and animal sacrifices.
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https://www.facebook.com/WestMemphis3Killers/
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