How I met a death row inmate and fell in love
By Sara Stewart
June 9, 2014
Lorri Davis and Damien Echols — now married for 14½ years — enjoy the wide-open space of Morningside Park last week. Photo: Rene Cervantes
“Yours for Eternity: A Love Story on Death Row,” out June 17, is a collection of letters between now-married couple Lorri Davis, 50, and Damien Echols, 40, who met and fell in love while she was an architect at a Manhattan firm and he was in prison for murder in Arkansas. After 18 years on death row, Echols was released in 2011, largely due to newly admitted DNA evidence. Davis, who resides in NYC with her husband, tells The Post’s Sara Stewart her side of their story.
Damien Echols (in a 1993 mug shot), one of the West Memphis Three, spent 18 years on death row.
In the winter of 1996, I was a single woman living in New York, with a great career and a rented apartment in Park Slope that I loved. I was a landscape architect at an architectural firm, doing these amazing projects in the Hamptons and Connecticut. I was making a good salary and really loving my work. One day in February, a friend invited me to see the New York premiere of this documentary, “Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills.” It was in the MoMA New Directors/New Films program, and I saw Damien’s long-haired mug shot in the ad. I thought he was a girl. I was like, “I don’t want to go see some movie about this girl who murdered all these kids.”
Damien Echols spent more than 18 years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. Known as one of the West Memphis Three, he was convicted in 1994, along with two other misfit teenagers labeled “Satanists” for their interest in heavy metal music and black clothing, for the murder of three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, Ark. The documentary focused on the badly handled case, the lack of physical evidence and the nature of a small Southern town’s rush to judgment.
In the theater when I saw Damien for the first time, I felt a kinship right away. Having grown up in a similar culture in West Virginia, I knew something horrible had gone wrong here on every level: the community, the case, the convictions. I thought, “There’s no way he could have committed this crime.”
I kept thinking about him after the screening. A week later, I decided to write him.
I tried to be very polite, and I just said I had seen the film and that it made a big impression on me. I asked if he needed anything.
I kept thinking, Maybe he won’t write back.
About a week later, while my parents were visiting, I saw the letter. We were heading out, and there it was in my mailbox. I stuffed it in my bag and I carried it around all day. That night, I ripped it open; I was so surprised at the tone of his response. It was so gracious. “From the very beginning of this situation, I’ve felt that there had to be a purpose for all of this,” he told me. That was the line that really moved me. He didn’t write like a guy who’s on death row but like a Southern gentleman.
We wrote many letters for several months before the word “love” was ever written. I think it was Damien who wrote it first, but we both reached that point at the same time. We just glided into love.
My work started to suffer, because my mind was somewhere else. I was writing letters all day. I’m very private, so I didn’t really talk about it very much to anyone. I told one close friend, “Do you remember that documentary? Well, I’ve contacted the young man in it.”
Damien and I talked on the phone for the first time about four months after we began writing. He called me out of the blue. I had heard him speak in the movie, but I was still shocked to hear his actual voice for the first time. We talked every day after that.
Eventually I felt like I was living a double life. I didn’t tell my family for a long time. I told only a few close friends. Nobody tried to talk me out of it; people who know me know I’m pretty strong-willed and I know my own mind.
I never felt for anyone what I feel for Damien. I’d had relationships before, but this was different.
Seven months after we started writing, I flew to Little Rock, Ark., for our first visit. I was led into a room with a glass partition when I saw him. It was very upsetting. He had lost so much weight since the documentary was filmed — he’s 5 foot 11 inches, and he only weighed 116 pounds then. His hair was really long, and he had long fingernails. I mean, he’s a gorgeous man, but you could tell that he was suffering greatly.
At the bottom of the partition was a metal grill with holes — that’s how we heard one another. My first words to him in person were, “Are you OK?”
You can’t touch in there, but we got out of our chairs and sat on the counter next to the glass to be a little closer. At first we just looked at each other. By the time I left, we were both really sad.
A year-and-a-half after we started writing, I decided to quit my job and move down to Little Rock. I didn’t tell my employer why I was leaving, and they were really shocked. But I wasn’t conflicted about leaving.
I rented an old Victorian, and I got a job with the Parks Department. My pay was a quarter of what I had been making in NYC. But I would visit him every Friday afternoon, from 1 to 4. And we could watch the same TV shows at the same time, such as “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
I would go through phases of jealousy about other people getting to visit him. Someone would come to spend the same kind of time at the prison that I spent with him — a friend or a journalist. It took me a long time to be OK with that, because we were so insular. He got a lot of mail, too. There was a whole bag of letters he got from strippers, who sent pictures. But that didn’t bother me as much.
A movie sparked our relationship and a movie — Henry Jaglom’s “Déjà Vu” — cemented it. The film was very romantic. I thought, That’s it. It’s time we get married. I had been in Little Rock for two years.
We had been talking about it before, and when he called that night the first thing I said was, “Damien, let’s do it! Let’s get married!”
My parents came to visit me shortly before the wedding and that’s when I told them about Damien and our engagement. They didn’t even know why I had moved down there. Nobody burst into tears or anything, but they were definitely concerned. It took them about a year to get comfortable with the news. Then they came to meet Damien — we all went to the prison together. Damien knew they were very nervous too, and scared. So he just tried to calm them down. He was a real gentleman.
Our wedding, on Dec. 3, 1999, was the first time he and I ever touched each other. It was great! It was shocking! Damien was shaking and sweating. He hadn’t been around that many people in six years. He hadn’t been touched by anybody in that time, other than being beaten in prison.
Even though I had to go home alone, I was just so happy and hopeful.
Now that we were married, it was easier for me to have access to his lawyers. I began raising funds and managing communications for his case. DNA evidence began to play a larger role, and it was a roller coaster for the 12 years that followed, with appeal after appeal. Then, in August 2011, it happened: Damien and the other two accused, Jessie [Misskelley Jr.] and Jason [Baldwin], were released under an unusual “Alford plea,” which allowed them to maintain their innocence while allowing the state to maintain there was enough evidence to initially convict.
A huge mob of supporters had gathered outside the courtroom, but Damien’s attorney got me permission to come into the room to be with him before the statements were read. Right afterward, we couldn’t even be alone — we had to do a press conference.
I remember us being driven away from the prison in this big black Mercedes van. Looking over and seeing him beside me — the disbelief of it! Being together, being able to hug, kiss or sleep together, is something most people may take for granted. We’re still blown away by the fact that we have that in our lives.
It’s been three years since his release. For a while, I was really surprised about how hard it was for him to be in the real world; even doing seemingly innocuous things like going to the bank were huge obstacles. Once I really understood the long-lasting trauma that happens when you’re locked up for nearly 20 years, it got better.
These days, we work together doing a few different things: We write, we do speaking engagements on the case and prisoners’ rights advocacy. When our documentary about the case, “West of Memphis,” came out in 2012, two of the victims’ families came out to support us, and did talks with us after screenings of the film. We are still involved in the ongoing effort to find the real killer or killers in the West Memphis case.
We just signed the lease on an apartment in Harlem. I feel like we’re finally going to be in a space that’s going to be a real home. It certainly hasn’t been easy for us — but it has always been easy being with Damien.
Damien’s love story
“She was not of my world. I come from this horrible place of poverty and degradation. Hearing about a person who went to college was [like] walking on the moon. New York doesn’t exist — it’s just something you see on TV. So Lorri was totally outside my frame of reference. I wrote back right after I got her letter.
“Seeing her for the first time was just a continuation of the process of falling in love. But it was hard. I could see the distress. There’s nothing you can do.
“I used to think, ‘One day, she’s going to leave. And these letters will be all I have.’ That’s why I had to keep them safe. I was convinced there would be a day when those letters would be all I had to remember her by.
“Things have been hard since I’ve been out, and I know they haven’t been easy for Lorri, either. I just want to spoil her now, because I couldn’t for so many years.”
http://nypost.com/2014/06/09/how-i-met-a-death-row-inmate-and-fell-in-love/
