Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
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There's no place to escape to. This is the last. On the left. That's when the cannibalism started. You know when you're watching something and you're like, I'm just so glad that's not me. Yeah. Yeah.

Most of the things I watch, I think, is that's the reason why I watch it, is so I can say I'm glad that's not me. Just watching all of the... Because it's been so long since I'd seen Paradise Lost, and watching it all again is just like, you just forget how much of a nightmare scenario. Yeah. Do you remember that movie, The Bear, where they just follow the bear around and it's cubs and stuff? Yeah, yeah. That's the last time I watched something where I was like, I wish that was me. Yeah.

Welcome to the last podcast on the left, ladies and gentlemen. My name's Marcus Parks. I'm here with Henry Zebrowski. I'm looking out for the Satanists, and I think that we get blamed for a lot. And one of the big things that we do tend to get blamed for is it's poking the holes in the gloves. Yeah. And we shouldn't do it. If gloves are fishnets, unfortunately, and this is me speaking as a Satanist,

They don't do their purpose as a glove. Yeah, Satanists have very cold tops of their fingers. They must. And, of course, the bearish Ed Larson. How you doing? Sorry, I just thought you were a pot of honey. Very funny. Don't eat it. Not the first time that's happened, not even this week. Oh, God. Is that for the guy, the old man who tried to give you the records? Is that what he called you?

And today we have a very special episode. We have a very special interview. I can't believe we were able to talk to this guy and his wife. Today we have an interview with Damien Echols and his wife,

Laurie Davis. They were wonderful to talk to, but we wanted to set some context of what we were talking about because we did the West Memphis Three. We covered the story. Well, that's who Damien Echols is. He is one of the West Memphis Three who were falsely accused of killing three children way back in 1993. And we covered this many, many, many years ago. And we never had the opportunity to speak with Damien Echols about his experience. And now I feel like now that we're a little bit more older, a little bit

Wiser. Wisened. So it's a little bit easier to talk with him about this very heavy subject. But, I mean, it was, he's compelling as ever. He is a very, very interesting and smart individual. I can't believe he has such a great disposition. I would hate the world. Oh, why would you be talking to me?

Well, for those of you who aren't familiar with the West Memphis Three, you just need a little bit of a refresher. Back in 1993, three children named Stephen Edward Branch, Christopher Mark Byers, and James Michael Moore were murdered together. They were children all around eight, nine years old.

And their dead bodies were found mutilated in basically a wooded area in the town of West Memphis, Arkansas. They were seen because they were first discovered missing bodies.

That one evening, the evening of May 5th, Christopher Byers, Michael Moore and Stevie Branch. And they said that they were missing. They went looking for them to begin their search at the Robin Hood Hills, which was like right near where all of these things, what would come to be known as the West Memphis three would be where they lived. It was just like weird kind of like middle next to a highway, kind of like embankment forest.

I mean, it's just one of those pieces of woods. It's kind of like where Kaylee Anthony was found. It's just like a piece of woods where kids go to play. And so their bodies were found and it was an absolutely horrific crime scene. I mean, the kids had been bound. Their bodies had been hogtied. Yeah. Yeah. Hogtied specifically. And.

And their bodies, you know, as it would later come out, you know, had been eaten by snapping turtles quite a bit. And so, of course, the cops on the scene were small town cops. No fucking clue how to handle something like this. And they just make a mess of this crime scene. They trample all over it. They're in shock. Oh, yes. But at the same time, one of the investigators on the scene turned to another and said, oh,

Well, it looks like Damien Echols finally killed someone. And that man was probably Jerry Driver, but we're not going to get into the full, all of the guts of the case. Who was a local security guy? I think he was a high school security officer? Something like that. Like, he had basically turned him, he had made himself like the local Satan squad. He was convinced that the West Memphis area was saturated with Satanic covens doing the will of the devil. You know, it's not there. It's in New York.

It's in LA. It's going to be a place that's nice. Now, did they ever find out? We know that Damien is proven innocent. Did they ever find out who did this? Absolutely not. And that's one of the things we're going to be talking about today in our interview with him. The possibility of maybe finding out sometime in the very near future who may have done this.

But the point is, is that before the investigation even started, eyes were already on Damian Echols.

Oh, immediately. It came from Jerry Driver, who was a local juvenile officer. He was convinced that Damien Echols was a part of a satanic cult that also featured Jason Baldwin and Jesse Miskelly. He was convinced that they were up to no good, basically because he had found Damien Echols once making out with a chick.

They had ran away together when they were in middle school, and he had it out for him ever since. But it was a lot more complicated than that. But, you know, they just had it. It's weird in that way how it does start in a very stupid place and puts a man on death row for 20 years. Yeah, and this is during the Satanic Panic, right? Well, that's the thing about this is that, you know, like...

The West Memphis Three were Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jesse Miscali. Jason Baldwin and Damien Echols were best friends. And they're, you know, a couple of kids in a small town. They listen to Metallica. You know, they wear black. They're goth kids, basically. And really, like, Jason Baldwin really isn't even that much of a goth kid. He just likes Metallica. He likes to draw, you know? Technically, you'd call him a hesher.

Yeah, a hasher, exactly. And Jesse Miskelly, he had been lumped in because he had, I think the quote that Driver said was that he had spiky hair and stuff. Yeah, and he was like following them around. Jesse Miskelly was... Well, kind of, but he said that he was...

he knew enough to say hello to him, but he said he, he said Damien Echols actually scared him. Oh yeah. But he was like kind of pallied around and sort of, or they were familiar with each other, but also remember that Jesse Miss Kelly had a bit of a learning disability. Yes. Um, and so they were all arrested, subsequently arrested. They could not find the, there was no,

there was evidence, but they didn't do anything with it. They had the shoelaces. This was before proper DNA testing could be done. So they had found some portions of material on the shoelaces, but all they could get from it was blood type. That was the only thing they had back in the day. They were found stuck in the mud. So when they were pulled up, they had sticks that were stuck in the mud with them that

kept their clothes underneath the surface. And when they pulled up, this is why they jumped to conclusions that it was satanic fraud.

was because of the quote-unquote genital mutilations on the boys. Not only were they hogtied, but their genitals were mutilated. And so this was pulled into this a part of their, they did a big, you know, torture-style ritual. And of course, the people with the Marilyn Manson shirt would know exactly how to do that. Mm-hmm.

But it wasn't them. It was turtles. We're pretty certain that it was turtles. Yeah, it's pretty certain because turtles will go after the fleshiest parts of the body first. And based on the bite marks and based on turtle activity and the fact that just snapping turtles are just everywhere in the Robin Hood Hills area points towards most likely being snapping turtles that did the mutilation. I will say snapping turtles...

Look very satanic. They do. They're very scary. They're very scary. They're very, very scary. Basically, what it all comes down to is that, you know, Damien Echols had kind of been talking shit around town, being the scary kid saying, yeah, yeah, I killed those kids. Whatever. Super evil. Yeah. Yeah. Like basically puffing up his chest a little bit. Just kind of fucking with people. We all knew a bunch of kids like that. Of course. Yes, of course we did. Yeah.

But at the same time, Jesse Miskelley had been brought in to be interrogated and

And gave a confession to the police saying that he did it along with Damien and Jason Baldwin. And this is a textbook case of police coercion when it comes to Jesse Miskelly. They, you know, lead him on at all points. If he makes if he says the wrong thing, they'll correct him and he'll say, oh, yeah, that's right. That's right. You're right. You're right. And eventually, you know, and they keep telling him the whole time, like, hey, Jesse, as soon as you tell us this.

You're going to go home. All you got to do is tell us what happened, and you can go home. To the point where he confessed to a triple murder, or at least being involved in a triple murder, witnessing a triple murder, and then sat down and was taken back to his jail cell and sat down. He's like, all right, my dad's going to come pick me up any second now. No idea of the consequences of his actions.

And so based off of that confession and also based off of the testimony of a woman, an older woman who said that she had gone to a Wiccan black mass with Damien Echols and Jesse Miss Kelly a few months before. By the way, that was absolutely false. She recanted her entire testimony when it came to that. Turns out she'd just gotten blackout drunk and went to a party in a field and had blackmailed

used that as the framework for like, oh, I went to this Wiccan, you know, this Wiccan party, this Wiccan sacrificial ritual with these other two guys. And so, you know, during the trial, it was,

All they had were these confessions. And there was also, they said that they had found these threads, uh, on the kids' bodies that were, they said, microscopically similar, uh, to threads that were found in Damien's trailer. Um, which pretty much just proved that they all shopped at the same Walmart. Yes. You know, like it wasn't any, there was by no means anything forensic, uh,

to link these guys to the crime in any way whatsoever. And there's like, you know, and you can go back and listen to our series to, you know, we go through every single piece of evidence that shows the evidence that shows how they couldn't have done it. Yeah. The part that tripped me out the most was the stuff with the knife.

When the prosecution basically said that this was the knife they used and they found it, but we all know that that knife was tossed in a lake a month before the murders even took place. Yes, exactly. And so all three of them were found guilty of this triple murder.

Jason and Jesse were sentenced to life in prison, but Damien was sentenced to death. He got full on got the death penalty. And so Damien Echols spent the next 18 years on.

on death row. And that's going to be a lot of the conversation we're going to be talking about today is his time on death row. The way he processed it, what he learned from within, how he grew while on death row, and kind of looking back, where is he at now? Exactly. Exactly.

and how his wife, Lori, was there for him, you know, and is currently helping him out with this new kind of breakthrough that they're hopefully going to get in this case. But Damien was released in 2011 along with Jason. On an Alford plea. Yes, along with Jason and Jesse on something called an Alford plea. Basically, an Alford plea is a way for...

It's basically a way for someone to get out of jail and at the same time the government not take any responsibility whatsoever. They essentially be able, he essentially says, okay, I admit the state has enough evidence to convict me, but I am innocent.

I'm going to declare this kind of semi version of guilty in order to get off. Yeah. And get out of jail. Yes. And that's how they got out of jail was on this Alford plea because they spent, you know, there were, you know, Metallica came to his aid, Eddie Vedder, Johnny Depp. Oh, it became a fucking map.

Massive cultural phenomena. A cost celeb. You know, Paradise Lost was the first time that Metallica ever allowed the use of their music to be licensed in a movie. Yeah, because Lars is not the nicest man who's ever lived. Of course, until they really got the opportunity to really let themselves shine in Mission Impossible 2. Oh, yes. That really was it. Yeah, they really had it down there.

So we're going to start our interview right now with Damian Echols and Laurie Davis. And we're going to start by talking about what got him into trouble in the first place and possibly the thing that we're in the middle of right now. Good old fashioned satanic panic. So,

As somebody who was, I would say, directly affected by the satanic panic of the 1980s and the 1990s, probably the most high profile person to be affected by the satanic panic. Do you think that America is in the grips of another satanic panic or that another one is coming?

It's hard to say. I mean, if it does, it won't look like the last one looked. You know, the same thing might happen. You might have, like, groups of people that are persecuted for various reasons, but I don't think it's going to look exactly like it did back then. You know, back then, it was, like...

People today, if you look back at the way the satanic panic looked back then, most people today would think that just looks fucking cheesy. You know, you had all the people like accusing, you know, Ozzy Osbourne of making people commit suicide by putting backwards lyrics in his music and all this kind of stuff. Nobody would take anything like that seriously now. So I think if something like that does happen, it's going to look completely different.

All right. So like for you, like the satanic panic of the 90s, like how did that trickle down from a national level down to your local authority figures? Because, you know what? And what's incredible to me about your story is like how there were people that were in your life even before the murders, right?

that seemed to believe that they were battling a personal war against Satan himself. Like, how did that manifest itself? And they definitely weren't because Satan would have won. I think it kind of trickled down in things like you had, I don't even know where these guys came from, but you had people going into these small towns and doing like seminars for the cops.

on how they could recognize like satanic activity in their neighborhood. So it was coming like trickling down is a really good way to describe it because it was coming down from somewhere else. And, you know, being put in basically like

put into people's heads, put into the cops' heads. Even if the cops had never even thought about it, they had these people coming in and saying, look, this is going on and this is what you need to be on the watch for. And they're like, oh, OK, well, you must know more than we do. So we're going to do what you say. You know, I know that you got a lot of harsh treatment when you win, specifically by the guards. They seem to sort of take enjoyment of what you said, getting you used to the water. Essentially, I think you said in your interview with Henry Rollins,

I think one of my questions is, though, like, do you feel like you got any different treatment from the prisoners or anything when you first go in there as the like minion of the devil himself? It was a different situation for me because I was on death row and death row is not like.

the rest of the prison. You know, there's almost a sense of, like, not exactly camaraderie on death row that you don't have in the rest of the prison, but a sense of unity in that we all have a common enemy. You know, we have someone trying to kill all of us, and we are all trying to stay alive. And people on death row look at it as...

You know, like if they, the guards, the administration, whatever, are doing something to you, even if I don't like you, I'm going to try to do something about it because if they're doing something to you, they'll do the same thing to me. And you don't really have that in the rest of the prison. So it was like in a lot of ways, I was really fortunate in getting the death penalty. Would you say that death row is safer than general population?

I don't think there's anywhere in prison you can call safe. I mean, I think I had been there for, I think, maybe three months the first time I ever saw someone get stabbed to death.

So you still have stuff like that going on. You know, you're not by any stretch of the imagination in a safe place, but it's still like a completely different vibe from, you know, general population, say, where you're dealing with, you know, 2000 people that are there for everything from meth to stealing cars to killing old women, you know, whatever it is.

Yeah, I mean, I do want to get back to the small town stuff. But while we're on the subject of death row and camaraderie, like one of the things that I found really interesting in your writing is how, you know, when you wrote about some of these other inmates, like there seemed to be not necessarily a sense of fondness, but definitely a sense of like familiarity with these other people. Like, were there people that you were with on on death row that you miss or that you mourn? Yeah.

Honestly, I would have to say no, just because... There was nobody that was like super hilarious? Yeah, yeah. It wasn't like a deliberate hilarious. It's, you know, people that are so fucked up that you can't, you know, like, I think I wrote about this, but there was a guy that had like one tooth and he wouldn't drink coffee because he said it would stain his tooth. Yeah.

He's not trying to be funny. Like he's dead serious. But if you have, you know, even average intelligence, you're going to find that funny. Yeah. But at the same time, looking back on that stuff now, you know, it really is like that was another person. You know, the person that lived in there, the person that survived that stuff.

died the day I walked out of prison. So it almost feels like when I try to remember these things now, it's almost like, you know, trying to remember someone else's memories or even a past life or something. And you're sitting here with Lori Davis. You're honestly extremely brave, powerful wife. You guys have been at your partnership. You've been working together a long time. And was there a part of you when he left prison that did you miss the Oz version of him?

Where you're like, damn, you used to really have that swing and walk. That's a really interesting question because Damien really did. I mean, that was one of the things about him that enabled me to be with him, to stay with him, was...

I mean, he commanded that place. He didn't, I'm not saying that there weren't times when things were really scary or he was in danger. It was always, and it was always stressful to think of what could be happening to him. But there was something about him that just commanded his space and he was able to hold his own. And that was the hard part about when he got out. He didn't know the world. He didn't understand any of

the systems out here or how to do. I mean, most of, I mean, here's the thing. He survived in a place. Most of us would never survive. Oh yeah. For all those years. For 18 years. Correct. Yes. And then he gets out and everything crashes. His brain just crashes and he can't, it, he, like he said, he was a different person to me, but then I became a different person too, because I,

You know, I say this sometimes. I had become weaponized to do the things that I needed to do. I wasn't like that before I met him. And so suddenly we're these two people who have these abilities that we don't need anymore. Right.

It's interesting. How do you put down the sword? At what point do you say, we're safe? That's a really good way of looking at it. That's what it felt like. It's like you get used to...

living in hell. You get so used to living in hell that you get up and you don't even think about it in the day. And then when you get out, suddenly you're having a nervous breakdown because you've never used a debit card before. And you're having to figure out how to do that. You know, all these little things that people out here take for granted that they grow up knowing how to do. It was like, I had to figure all of that stuff out, like, like, like figure out a lifetime's worth of, uh,

you know, operating in the world in days. And it completely and absolutely destroyed me. I have almost no memory of the first two years that I was out of prison because it like mentally crippled me so bad. It really did something to me. I didn't realize what it was at the time, but in hindsight, I realize now what was happening was I was having a nervous breakdown. I just didn't

Like, I would try to tell Lori, something is wrong. Something is wrong. And she would say, what? And I would say, I don't know. I just know something is wrong. And it would manifest itself in ways like, you know, when I was in prison, I would read like nonstop. Like sometimes I would read like five books a week. What else are you going to do in there? You read, you work out. Yeah, yeah.

And the day that I walked out, I couldn't read anymore. Like I would read the same page of a book over and over and over. And I could not retain what I had read when I got to the bottom of the page. I knew something was wrong with me. Like I wasn't thinking right. I couldn't, you know, I would go to dinner with someone and then reintroduce myself to them the next day because I could not even remember it. So I knew something was going wrong there.

And I knew I was absolutely miserable, but I could not figure out what it was until years later. Looking back, what fixed it? Was it ivermectin or brought it all back around? Honestly, like what? When did you notice? Like, I actually I'm OK. Like, I might be OK.

I think it was two things, really. One was, you know, kind of going back to the satanic panic thing for a minute. When I was in prison, one of the things that allowed me to survive in there was the fact that I didn't even think about being in prison for days at a time.

And the reason for that was because I had built a life for myself inside there. I had stuff that I was doing, like immersing myself in to the point where I didn't even think about the fact that I was in prison. And one of those things was Western hermeticism or ceremonial magic. You know, and it was when I was practicing this, by the time I walked out, I was doing it for like eight hours a day sometimes.

And it feels like you're on this adventure where you're constantly having all these experiences and learning stuff and everything.

It's like being on the quest for the Holy Grail to the point where I was content even when I was on death row. Not saying I didn't want out, didn't want my name cleared, didn't want to go home, but I was content even while I was there. When I walked out of prison, that was one of the things in addition to like reading and losing my short-term memory. It was like I could not do the ritual work that I had been doing for hours a day that had held me together. Suddenly, I could not do it at all.

And that was another big contributing factor to like the disintegration that I went through. What really started to stitch me back together was whenever I could slowly start returning to the ritual work, pulling my attention away from the world. I'm trying to figure out how to operate in the world, bringing my attention just back to doing the ritual work.

and doing that for hours a day. That was one of the things that started stitching me together. The other thing was martial arts, karate. Karate and boxing were two huge steps in returning to any state of being normal. Right from your grave.

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I'm hearing from you again and again. It seems like the word that keeps coming back to me is reality. It seems like over your life, the nature of reality has changed so many times. And when all of this stuff was starting to happen way back when, way back in the 90s, you know, before you were arrested or even afterwards, at what point did it finally hit you like, oh shit, this is real? I don't think it's a one-time thing. I think it, you know...

You know that you're in serious shit whenever they arrest you. But you still keep thinking, you know, surely somebody's going to realize something's going wrong here and fix this. At any minute, somebody's going to step in and set this right. You know, someone with an IQ of more than 15 is going to intervene in this situation and write it. And you keep waiting on that to happen for

For years, you wait on that to happen. And for some men in there, I don't think it ever fully sits in. They go all the way up to the point of being strapped to that execution table thinking, okay, at any minute now, this is going to stop. At any minute, something's going to change. So, I mean, I don't think there is ever one moment that you can pinpoint. I think it's a gradual process. And for me also,

You know, this is going to sound weird in a way, but there's been a few times in my life when I've met

a very small, very small number of people or been in a very small or handful of situations whenever I've been in a place or something, whenever I knew, you know, like a lot of times we don't realize in our lives that something is important until we look back at high in hindsight. Oh, yeah. We don't realize while we're experiencing that this is going to be a pivotal moment in the trajectory of my existence.

But one of those times was the very first letter that I got from Lori, like the very first letter that I ever got from her. I knew to the core of my bones, this is not just another person. This is not just another letter. And one of the ways that I knew that it felt like something clicked into place. And I had this feeling of they can't kill me now.

They can still hurt me. They can still fuck me up, but they cannot kill me. It was just like a certainty that went all the way to a soul level. So that also kind of prevented me from, you know, giving in to despair or, you know, experiencing that moment of complete loss of hope and all that kind of stuff, too.

I also wonder if that, like, I find it also fascinating the idea of using hyper methods of concentration.

to save you, to pull yourself up and out. And that really, like, what a very interesting thing to roll you into ritualistic magic, which is legitimately all about a harness of self-awareness and perception. Well, you know, a lot of people, whenever they think of magic, they have all these, like,

woo-woo conceptions, like stuff they've seen in movies or whatever. They don't even, you know, realize like what it really does to you and what it really is.

So, you know, for example, whenever you start, first off, the very basic beginning levels, you're working your way extensively through levels that correspond to the elements, like earth, air, fire, and water. And then from there, you move on to the planets and then, you know, astrological signs and fixed stars and things like this. But whenever you're doing this, like, for example, when you start working on the elements and you start invoking earth, right?

For example, one of the things you do is you start doing ritual work every single day repeatedly to invoke energies that correspond to the element of earth. Well, what starts happening is the aspects of yourself that correspond to that particular energy start to change. So, for example, with earth, one of the things you find yourself doing is, you know, you're invoking this energy every day and you start to think, you know what?

Maybe I really should start to exercise a little more or maybe smoking cigarettes isn't the greatest idea. I think I'm going to quit. And those are all things that I did in there. So those were aspects of myself that started to change. And I saw that and I realized, holy shit, this isn't just make believe stuff.

you know, bullshit. This is actually doing something to me. This is changing me in some way. And the same thing starts happening. Like when you start invoking water every single day, the aspects of you that correspond to water start to change, you know, that includes stuff like your, uh, you know, your, your emotions, your unconscious, your subconscious, and, and like, uh,

you know, working through like artistic mediums, you know, so you're invoking water every day. The next thing, you know, you just think, you know what? Maybe I think I might like to start doing some painting. And I did that. I started buying, you know, I couldn't get paintbrushes or anything. So I started using Q-tips.

And I bought paint from other inmates that were like smuggling it in to the prison. And I started doing paintings and even having art shows while I was in prison. So it's like when you're working on magic, it changes every aspect of yourself. You know, like when you're invoking air every day, air corresponds to like your intellect.

your ability to use logic and reason. And when I was doing that, that was when I woke up one day and I decided, you know what? I want to have the same frames of reference that everybody else has. So I'm going to start just...

I read everything under the sun from Camus to Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Freud. I started taking psychology classes, sociology classes, German classes, you know, all of that. You really did prison really well. That's a great, this is a great plan. Yeah.

I got to ask, I guess it's kind of a weird thing to ask someone because obviously the worst thing that could happen to anyone other than being the victim of a crime is being wrongfully imprisoned for one. But where do you see yourself if this never happens? Are you a better person because of this like now?

Are you a better person now than you think you would have been if this happened? I think he might've skipped the 18 years of death row, but I feel like, I don't know. I don't know. You know, that's, I, it's one of those things that to, I think to most people when they look at my life and they look at, you know, things like that, that looked like blatantly, obviously horrific things. They, they probably think that I had a shitty life, but I,

Honestly, if somebody told me, you know, I think a lot of people got it worse than I did. You know, if they told me you can do 18 years in prison or you can work at McDonald's for 18 years, I'd be like, fuck, send me to prison. In a lot of ways, I think I really was fortunate in, you know, it took me out of a situation where,

And nobody in my family has an education beyond the ninth grade. When I was born, my mom was 15. My dad was 16. You're not going to find any college graduates, even high school educated diplomas or anything in my family. So looking at the trajectory of the lives of everyone around me,

I didn't have anything to look forward to. You know, there was nothing that that looked like my fortune was going to be any different from, you know, the people in the environment that was around me. And something happened where I was plucked out of that world and it stopped.

saved me in a lot of ways. So yes, I went through some horrible shit, but at the same time, I was really, really blessed in a lot of ways. Well, the fact that you're not smoking crack and selling like high-tech pillows and being in the Trump White House, like literally the fact that you skipped that shows that you did something, I think, correct. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I want to ask you, Laurie, like I know when

the two of you got married, you moved down to Arkansas from New York City to be closer to Damien. Did Damien have to give you a kind of like Arkansas primer? I'm like, here's what. No, because I grew up in rural

I can't say that word ever. Rural. Me neither. Don't worry about it. I grew up in West Virginia. I grew up in... Ah, yeah. Okay. I grew up in rural Texas. Yep. I get you. Were you a goth, Lori? Like, when you said... Were you full gothed out? You mean when I was growing up? When you met... When you, like, guys met or, like... No.

No, I was, we were polar opposites. Really? It just didn't make any sense at all. Do you feel the pressure now though? Like, do you feel like, well, I got to goff it up now. Yeah. Yeah.

Here's the thing. I mean, I mean, I never knew how to dress. I didn't have any senses. I just didn't. Well, according to him, I didn't have any sense of style at all. And Damien. So, I mean, I just started after he got out. I said, why don't you just start buying my clothes? So he did.

and he still does to this day. That's amazing. He has a much better... I mean, I dress better now than I ever... I mean, my whole wardrobe, yes, is black, but I actually really love to... And now he's got me... So we both just wear uniforms all the time. Like, I have the same...

10 pairs of pants and 10 shirt. That's, that's, that's not even an exaggeration. That's, that's literal. Like I reached a point where I did not want to have to think about clothes anymore. So I got like five pairs of the exact same pants, 10 of the exact same shirts, you know,

about 10 of the exact same kind of underwear, socks, everything. So you just pick up the next one in line and don't have to expend any energy planning on what you're going to wear that day. It was funny though, when we got married, um,

all the goth girls online. They were so pissed. I mean, they were... She doesn't even... She doesn't know. She wasn't on Warped Tour when I was there. They weren't going to sit around and learn about Buddhism like you did. And I wore this like... It was kind of a... It was like a red kind of... I mean, it was pretty, but it was this red kind of flower dress. There were all these comments.

online about sure that drip, you know, it's just on. Unbelievable. So, Lori, do you also practice like ritual magic? I have a practice. It's not exactly the same as Damien's. It's different, but it's still, it's

In the same vein. The same results. Sure. Hopefully. Yeah. Yeah, because we all, because me and Henry have both, you know, practiced ritual magic in the past as well. And, you know, it's different for absolutely everybody what works for them. Yeah. As I'm getting older, it's changing. Yeah. That's for certain. Yeah. I'm more of a fan of practical magic. The movie. The movie with Sandra Bullock. He's really been, he has a full theatrical poster tattoo on his back. Yeah.

Of the poster. Well, speaking of different kinds of magic, like one of the things I was so surprised to read about is that you found a theosophist on death row, a guy who actually studied Madame Blavatsky. That's crazy, dude. That's insane. What was his, how did that conversation begin? And like, what was that guy, what was his deal? So he and his best friend, his best friend was a Zen Buddhist monk.

who got into a gunfight with the cops and got two of his fingers shot off. The exact opposite. Normally, you don't normally hear that's how a Buddhist dies. They shot off two of his fingers, so everybody on death row used to call him Three Finger Woo.

But he had a Zen teacher, a Zen master that would, you know, he was the head abbot of a 300-year-old temple in Japan and would come back and forth to teach him. And when you're executed, the only person that's allowed to be with you is your spiritual advisor, like no family, no friends, any of that. So this Zen master came over to be with the theosophist's best friend whenever he was executed.

After he was executed, he was allowed to come back on death row and tell us what the guy's last words were and how he held up during the execution, all this kind of stuff. And we just started talking and then started corresponding with each other. And his teacher became my teacher.

And before I left prison, by the time he was executed, he had become an ordained priest in the Rinzai Zen tradition of Japanese Buddhism. And I followed the same route, trained for years while I was in there with the same teacher, got ordination while I was in there. But those two guys, the day that I walked in the door on Death Row, those two guys were the first people to approach me

And they gave me just this pack that had stuff in it that you need on your first day in prison. You know, like, for example, stamped envelopes so you can write to your family and let them know where you are or a bar of soap, you know, stuff like that. And one of the very first things that they said to me whenever I got in there is you can either turn yourself into a monastery and work on yourself or you can be like the rest of these guys and you can sit in here and go stark raving insane.

Yeah, that is such a it's just an amazing tool to be able to use. And now, like, how do you find it's changed that now that you've been out for a decade plus, like are like, do you still kind of have that same mindfulness about you? Or is like, I know you still practice, right? And that's what you teach on your Patreon. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think what it was like, what?

Part of what was so destructive to me about getting out of prison was getting away from that, you know, being introduced into this world where so much is happening. And there's, you know, I went from solitary confinement, like the last year,

Nine years that I was in prison, I was in solitary confinement. I went from solitary confinement to the streets of Manhattan literally overnight. It was like being bombarded with everything you can imagine. And I kind of wanted to make up for everything that I had missed and not experienced. I lived on the streets of New York for years.

years when I first got out. I wanted to see everything, do everything. I would go stand in drugstores and just look at all the ink pens and the chocolate bars and just the stuff that I hadn't seen in years and years. And it

It got me further and further away from having a consistent routine. Like part of what started allowing me to heal was getting back to the same things that had allowed me to find contentment and growth in prison, which is in a lot of ways shutting myself off from the world. You know, really, other than like...

Whatever I'm doing, you know, work-wise, like whether it's being on Patreon and doing live streams on there or writing, you know, the occasional book and have to do like a book tour or something. For the most part, I found that I am the most content when I am living a very monastic kind of life.

You know, I get up every single day and I start practicing karate every single morning. And that's pretty much what my days are dedicated to now. And as long as I do that, I find that I am probably happier than 90% of the people that I come across in the world. I find that that is the key. I'm stumbling upon it in my older life. But this idea of...

It's about a sense of discipline, but it's getting rid of the stink off the word discipline. Yes, yes. You have to get to love it.

Like you have to realize that this discipline, you know, it might be hard. Like it's a sacrifice. You sacrifice going on, you know, drunken benders or football games or, you know, whatever it is that people do. You sacrifice a lot of that socialness that people get lost in. But it comes with, you know, a hell of a reward if you do.

Do you ever feel like it was also intoxicating? Because when you got out, you were like essentially best friends with like Eddie Vedder, Henry Rollins, like all these like rock stars came out when you guys first got it. Like, do you find that like that also must have been very intense and distracting? It was, you know, in a lot of ways, you know, this this sounds kind of odd. I'm very, very

very appreciative to all those people more than I could ever say, you know, they've been from everybody from Johnny Depp to Eddie Vedder to Henry Rollins, Margaret Cho, you know, so many people, Peter Jackson, you know, more people than I can even name, um,

I would be dead if not for these people. And I appreciate everything they did. But one thing I realized very quickly is I do not like being in those worlds, you know, Hollywood worlds or, you know, being caught up. And why, though? Yeah.

It's one of the most pure... What are you talking about? It's not a season of other free rapists and criminals and racketeers. How were the Puff Daddy white parties? You had to see everything. Conversation gone bad.

But when you first came out, did you feel a pressure to participate in those sorts of worlds?

Kind of just because when I walked out of prison, you know, I didn't have a penny to my name. I didn't have a suit of clothes to change into. I had nowhere to go. I had absolutely nothing. So if it wasn't for like the generosity of, you know, a lot of these people helping us out and even like giving us a place to stay until, you know, crazy story. We ended up staying in an apartment in New York. You know, Peter Jackson is.

He and his wife, Fran, they had this apartment in New York and they're like, you know, that's how we ended up in New York. They're like, why don't you go and stay there in our apartment, you know, until you figure out what you're going to do, you know, what what's your next step is going to be, all that kind of stuff. And then now it's the apartment that Taylor Swift lives in. She bought that apartment and that's where she lives. So you do feel a sense of of pressure, right?

in that you want to show your appreciation and make people happy and all this kind of stuff. But at the same time,

It's just that's that's that's not my scene. That's not a thing that I enjoy. You know, I don't like parties. I don't like fancy dinners. You know, one time we went to that concert that they had in New York after Hurricane Sandy. And I mean, everybody was there. I remember that. Kanye West, the Rolling Stones, the Who.

Roger, like everybody's at this thing, right? And we're sitting there and we've been there for probably 30 minutes. And I was thinking, you know what? I've got...

part of a pizza in the fridge at home that I'm actually eating right now. And we got up and left. Yeah, man. Yeah. Hey, you enjoyed it. That makes you a real New Yorker, though. Yeah. Now, currently, you're working with the Innocence Project, correct? Yes. Yes. Now, one of the things I learned, I've had...

many long conversations with Jason Flom, who also works with the Innocence Project. And the one thing that I learned from him about death row that stuck with me is that it is suspected that one out of 20 people on death row is innocent. Right. Did you know anyone else on death row that you thought might have been innocent? Yeah, at least...

You know, there were there were at least two that were just straight out flat up innocent, you know, that had nothing to do with anything they were charged with at all. But there were other really weird cases. You know, for example, there was a guy that was on death row because his brother had committed a murder and he was taking the fall for his brother because his brother was at home taking care of their mom. And so, yeah, stuff like that. You also have people that are they get out.

One of them got out. One of them, I believe, was executed after I got out. Wow. Yeah. The holiday season is just around the corner. We're all looking for ways to spend and stress less. Yep. HelloFresh makes mealtime nearly hassle-free. Nearly.

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Well, I mean, concerning your magic and, you know, in this type of environment that you're talking about, like, you know, it's...

The type of magic that you write about and you talk about, you know, it was born in a very dark place, arguably, you know, one of the darkest places you can be. But it seems very radiant is a word I'd describe as, you know, it's very radiant. There's, you know, you talk about angels and those sorts of like other beings that you have regular communication with. Like, why do you think that that sort of philosophy was born from such a dark place?

I don't know. Well, I take that back. I think it's you've always had elements of society that want to keep people under their thumb, you know, that that don't want you to be fully conscious, you know, that that

basically want you to remain in slavery for your entire life. And they demonize things so that you don't look in places where you'll find something that's going to bring you out of that, that's going to wake you up from that. But that's exactly what

magic is. You know, I think one of the best descriptions I've ever heard of what you're doing whenever you are practicing this work was by Beethoven. And I'll mangle this. This isn't I won't get it exactly right, but it was something along the lines of he said that the greatest thing that we could possibly hope to do is approach divinity as closely as we can gather its rays and disseminate them out to mankind.

And different people are going to do that in different ways. You know, Beethoven obviously did it through his music. Other people may do it through writing. Other people may do it through visual art. Other people may do it through podcasts. Whatever it is, it's a way— Other people.

But that's what you're doing when you're, you're practicing magic and you're doing the exact same thing that all the prophets in the old Testament talk about in like this veiled language, you know, like in the book of Enoch and the prophet Ezekiel, you know, where they're talking about like, uh,

approaching the throne of God and, and all this sort of Jacob's ladder, you know, that's what, when you're talking about these, these, the levels of magic where you start off with the elements and then you move up through the planets and then the astrological work and the fixed stars, all of that, what you're doing is step-by-step ascending, um,

In the Bible, they use the metaphor of Jacob's ladder. You know, Jacob goes to sleep and he sees this ladder that ascends from earth to heaven. And there's these angels that are constantly coming up and going down, ascending and descending. Like that's like a metaphor for this work, climbing one rung at a time from each element to each planet to each planet.

astrological sign to each fixed star until you reach like the throne of, of God and, and bathe in that divine energy. Have you gotten there? What's that like? Those are things that I used to talk about a lot.

And I stopped doing it. I won't say any names, but I did a podcast one time where I was taught, and this was a huge podcast, and it's supposed to be about spirituality and all this kind of stuff. And the guy asked me pretty much something along the same lines of what you just asked. So you fixed it then? You're with the Godhead then? Yeah.

I started talking about some things and I could tell by looking at his face, like he was like, this guy is fucked up. That podcast never aired. Oh, we're putting this out. We're putting this the fuck out. Maybe twice. I actually wonder if like, cause I do, I believe that partially what we are going to face in the next couple of years is it's going to be difficult for people that are of our persuasion.

to handle kind of definitely both the messaging and the temperament and just the straight vibes are going to be off for the next couple of years. What do you think is a good way to give people advice about finding that strength and peace within during an extremely turbulent time?

All you can do is stop worrying about what other people are doing and find something to pour yourself into heart and soul that is going to make you a better person. And by better person, I mean like more physically fit, smarter, you know, a little more emotionally mature. Like if you...

Just pour your energy into something that you love, whatever it is, whether it's yoga, martial arts, ceremonial magic, whatever, hiking, whatever the hell it is. If you pour yourself into it and strive to the best of your ability to get there,

1% better at it every single day, then you're going to find that you don't fall into those angsty traps that swallow most people up nearly as much as most other people do. That's one of the things about ceremonial magic, the things you realize. One day you think,

Wow, I don't get pissed off nearly as much as I used to. And if I do, it passes a lot quicker. Or you know what? I don't fall into those random bouts of angsty depression that I used to like when I was a teenager in my early 20s. Like that, it's like it just stopped. Like you realize that

Looking back in hindsight, you don't always realize the changes that are occurring in yourself when you're going through them. But when you look back in hindsight, you realize, wow, something was really happening there. That's the only thing that I tell people is usually people who I'm very wary of people who want to save the world. Usually those are people who aren't doing a lot of internal work.

What I usually advise for people who are just miserable, you know, due to external situations, circumstances, whatever it is, is find something that you love and pour yourself into it with everything you have. And you'll find that the world gets like 90 percent better.

And I also feel that to my fellow magicians or people who want to do this and do this type of work is that what you don't know is that according to especially people like Gurdjieff and these other things is that you can turn doing your laundry into a meditative exercise that benefits you spiritually, physically. Like there's a thing about it. It's how you do things. Yes, exactly. You know, that's the thing about like martial arts. And one of the things that I love

so much about karate is like when you're practicing, you are building like a kind of discipline that theoretically and hopefully will eventually start to leak over into every other aspect of your life. Like you will approach doing your laundry with the same level of clarity and commitment and dedication as you do whenever you go into class to practice.

It's time to kick stains his ass. I got to go in there and kick the shit out of my wife's panties. So as far as what's going on with y'all now, like y'all have had a huge year, uh,

You've had a big, you've had a really, like a huge hurdle has finally been crossed as far as finally clearing your name. Like, tell us about this ruling that occurred in April of this year. Well, that was one of the reasons I wanted Lori to do this is because I, here's the thing. I pay very, very little attention to my case at all. Like, I can tell you almost nothing that's going on at any given time.

period of time, just because I found that the more I paid attention to that stuff and the more that I focused on the details of what was happening and what could be happening next and when is this going to happen and when's the timeframe for that, the more I paid attention to that, the more it pulled me out of like that monastic kind of life and made me focus on the things that made me miserable again. So Lori really does have,

handle like 95, 98% of everything going on in the case. And that's why I wanted her to be here so that she could, I knew you were going to ask that question and I was going to have no answer to it.

That's amazing. Thank you, Laurie, for all that you do. Yeah, so please explain, because we want to know, because I know that we try to... I'm not even going to try to explain what the Alfred plea is and all that stuff, because I feel like it's one of these things. So it's like, does this change that? We don't know yet. I mean, that will be... I mean, once we get the testing done and...

First of all, tell us what the testing is and what you guys finally got over the line. Some people have no idea. Yeah. So let me start with just even a little bit of backstory. So we, because it's been, I mean, it's been a long, hard road to get here. So we asked for, to test...

evidence in 2019 because of a new technique called MVAC. And so but there's a lot of new techniques that are that are even around now. So anyway, we one thing after another and we ended up it just was I mean, dealing with Arkansas was a nightmare. And we ended up finally they told us that the evidence had been lost, stolen or burnt up in a fire.

And the evidence was a shoelace, correct, from the crime scene? It was, yes. All of the laces that tied the victim. So that would have, there were, let's see how many sets of shoelaces that would have been. Six. Six. So we ended up having to sue the state in order to get access to the evidence to see if they had it. And it turns out they did.

So then we had to go to court to ask if we can test the evidence. And that's why we ended up in the Supreme Court, which that, I mean, all of this took, we got that ruling last April, this past April. So that would have been.

From 2019 to 2024, that's how long it took to do this. Damn! Yeah. And then people, I know people have been getting, because that was huge when that Supreme Court handed down that ruling, but that was just the beginning. That's telling. And we've been so truly blessed with what's going on in Arkansas right now because the prosecutor is actually working with us. A wonderful prosecutor named Sonia Fonticello.

Oh, it's a prosecutor who actually wants to find the people who committed the crime? What a fucking novel idea. Yeah, exactly. Honestly, Casey Anthony's got nothing going on. She can maybe help. She can get in there and have her search. So, but now it's taken, and people don't understand why it's been taking so long. They're like, well, you know, they said you could test it. Just why don't you test it? But...

Our lawyer, Steve Braga, who has just been he's he's just been he's the most amazing lawyer. And it was Damian who sued the state and took this to court. Jason and Jason Baldwin and Jesse Miskelley were not a part of that lawsuit.

So we knew at some point they were going to have to come on board. So for the last few months, what we've been doing is coordinating with their legal teams so that we all have an agreed upon order with the prosecutor. We haven't, we're not there yet. We're close. We're thinking we're probably going to have an agreed upon order. And this means

All the evidence is going to be tested and all of the techniques we're going to use, what labs we're going to use down to what scientists we're going to use. So it is going to be a very, very tight order.

And we've been working with the Innocence Project to get recommendations and other experts across the bed. I mean, really the best people have come aboard to help us. Couldn't have a better team. And finally, everyone's, we're moving toward an agreement. Probably we'll have it in December. They're thinking we'll probably start testing in January. And we'll probably have results soon.

They're thinking earliest could be late February. So this is amazing. And I can't discuss all of the evidence that we're going to be testing. I can say that the ligatures are part of it and hairs, but there's also going to be other things tested. It's going to be

That's what a journey. Keep in mind. This is crazy. It's what, 30 years now? But keep in mind also, this is one of those things like, you know, even when the DNA testing does come back, like say it comes back in February, you know, people that haven't

spent most of their lives tangled up in the legal system don't realize how slowly this all moves. I mean, keep in mind that when the first round of DNA testing was done, the testing that got us out of prison, they found out that the DNA at the crime scene did not match me, Jason, or Jesse. I sat in prison for another three years after we knew that.

So that's kind of how slowly this stuff moves. Well, especially for them to tell themselves they're wrong because I don't think the government does it. They don't like it. Isn't that the whole point of the Alford plea? Is for everybody to just sort of say, like, no one has to be wrong. Yes. Do you have, obviously you can't reveal anything, but do you have a good idea who you think might have been responsible for this crime?

Everybody kind of has their own ideas. This was one of the things my lawyer told me. Oh, my God. Do the two of you have different ideas? Whoa. Do you guys both? Do you guys fight over dinner about who actually did it? This was one of the things that my lawyer even said. I asked him before we came on, is there anything I can't talk about? And he's like, don't go on saying who you think, but...

You definitely don't have to give any names, but do you think you know? I've always had a really... I've had a sneaking suspicion about someone that was very, very shady and that I don't think anyone else has ever looked at this person before. Is it possible that we're going to end up... Whoever it is is probably at this point. They might be dead.

I think they're still alive. Okay, got it. Got it. Good. Hopefully they're scared. Hopefully they know what's coming because it's like we can go through, especially a crime of that nature, the fact that there was as little, there definitely was evidence. But as you've alluded to, which is why we didn't go hardcore into the details of your case, because largely our audience is very well aware and it is just...

The crime scene itself was so insane and so horrible. Like, just the idea that three children ostensibly would have done it is wild. Yeah. But that's what I mean about how, like, I found that the thing that kept me from going insane was building a world for myself where I was focusing on something, you know, like, other than the case. Yeah.

Because, you know, like I said, I sat there for three years after the first round of DNA testing showed that it didn't match us. You know, if I would have been focused every day on, OK, the DNA wasn't mine, they're going to let me go home now. Right. Like I would have lost my mind in that three years if I would have focused on that. With you and the other guys, are you are you sort of like how do you put it? Like, are you friends with.

with the guys like that you were like with like, or is it one of those things where you're just still kind of connected, like in terms of like your relationship? I think it's more that I think it's more the latter, like just being connected, you know, keep in mind that I didn't even like when we were in prison, they didn't even let us see each other. So, you know, you're talking about someone like when I was a teenager and

Jason Baldwin was my best friend, but, you know, I didn't even see him for 20 years while I was 18 years and 76 days. You know, it wasn't like we were hanging out and having conversations. And, you know, he was 16 years old when he went to prison. When he came out, he was an adult. You know, he's not the same person that he was then.

You know, I always think if you're friends with the same people that you were friends with when you're 16, that you are when you're 50, which is what I'm about to be, something's probably went wrong in your life. Probably not a lot of growth happening there or something. But yeah.

you know, for the most part, it's like, we're probably just connected by the case. Like, I don't even know where Jesse is now. Honestly, you know, he just, I didn't know if you guys all got together and played pool or, but then I feel like, why would you want to review? Why would you want to go back?

Kick it about the good old days. Yeah. Also, what are we going to really do about these satanic cults? I really want to. I think it's time we can really crack down on them because you and I can infiltrate these people. They think that we're a part of them. And we can flip them.

Well, Damian, Lori, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been an absolute pleasure to have both of you. Thank you guys so much for having us. This has been a pleasure. It's been fun. Yeah, dude. And honestly, so anything you want anybody to look up just in terms of you want to lay out your Patreon because you're doing what are you doing on the Patreon just so the people know? I do live streams. And honestly, I do a little bit of mostly what I try to do is help people focus on things that are going to make them more

happier, feel better. And a huge part of that is ceremonial magic.

You know, I try to help. There's been people on there that have been with me for years that we talk about their practices. I only do live streams on there because I like interacting with people. You know, I don't just like doing videos. I like, you know, the back and forth, the conversation. So it's everything from martial arts to ceremonial magic to philosophy. You know, anything that's going to make you a better, wiser, stronger person. Awesome. No feet.

No who? What? Feet. No feet. He's alluding to the possibility of you selling pictures of your feet for sexual masturbation purposes. I don't think anybody wants to see my feet. You'd be surprised. If you want, we can talk.

I know some guys. You ever heard of prisonfeet.com? No. You're going to love it. Somebody told me one time that my feet looked like the halfway transition point in that movie, The Howling, whenever they're... Half, half...

I'm so turned on right now. Before we go, please tell us the names of your books that you've written on magic and the books you've written about your time in prison. They're fantastic. If you're interested in the prison stuff, my life story in general, the first one was called Life After Death.

Then there was another one that is just a book of mine and Lori's correspondence, like our letters while I was in prison. And it's called Yours for Eternity. Do you still write letters or do you move on to email? We've moved on to texting each other memes for the most part. True love. That's what marriage is. The magic books would be High Magic.

Angels and Archangels, A Magician's Guide, and Ritual. Dude, you are a wonderful resource. And thank you so much, Laurie, for being here, too. Like, this really has been this. We've been trying to do this a long time, so I'm glad we got to do it. Yeah, yeah. You truly are an inspiration to people everywhere. So thank you for what you do and for speaking out. Thank you guys so much for everything. Oh, yeah. Hail sweet Satan. This is great. Oh, no.

Wow. Wow. What an incredible interview. Yes. I mean, it was I feel like a smarter person. He's a very inspirational person. It's good to be around him. Yeah. And it's an absolutely harrowing story, but it's extremely inspirational at the same time. I mean, for a man to find peace like that, I mean, the strength that it must take to find something like that is fucking incredible. I don't have it.

I would die in there. I know that for a fact. Go to Patreon. So go to patreon.com slash last podcast and love to watch us talk and to see us live. You can go see our live stream every Tuesday at 6 p.m. PST. That's right. Live, baby. We're coming to Brooklyn next week. I can't wait. King's Theater, one of the coolest venues in America. It's going to be amazing. That's going to be December 7th.

in Brooklyn at the King's Theater. Come hang out with us. Yep. And Atlanta, Dallas, Nashville, Detroit, Toronto. We're coming to all your cities next year. So go to lastpodcastontheleft.com to see when those shows are. And how game, you fuckers. Hail Satan, you pieces of shit. And remember, Satan's not going to fuck you like that. Nope. He's not going to. Eye contact. Yep. Hail Damien Echols. Yeah. Yeah.

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