How much is Damien Echols worth?
| Net Worth: | $750 thousand |
|---|---|
| Profession: | Professional writer |
| Date of Birth: | 11 December 1974 |
| Country: | United States of America |
| Height: | 1.75 m |
About Damien Echols
In 1993, when Echols was 18 years old, he was arrested for the murder of three children who were 8 years old: Steve Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers. Along with Jason Baldwin, who was 16, and Jessie Misskelley, who was 17, Echols was charged with the crime. They received a guilty verdict.
On December 11th, 1974, Damien Wayne Echols was brought into this world. Until the time of his parents’ divorce, when he was 8 years old, he had been living with his mother and father. Echols went to a total of eight different schools before he became ten years old since his family moved around a lot.
Echols was given a sentence of execution by injection of fatal drugs by Judge David Burnett on March 19, 1994. The appeals that Echols and Baldwin filed were dismissed by the Supreme Court of Arkansas on December 23, 1996. Echols prevailed at a hearing in May 1998 on allegations that his defense counsel had been incompetent; but, Judge Burnett ruled against him in June 1999. Echols was found guilty.
In the year 1996, Echols met the woman who would eventually become his wife, Lorri Davis. She was a landscape architect and had learned about the case after seeing the movie, Paradise Lost. She wrote him a letter. They started a romantic relationship, and Davis eventually left her employment, relocated to Little Rock, Arkansas, and started working on Echols’s case in 1997.
They wed in a Buddhist ceremony in December of 1999, and the wedding took place in the visiting room of the prison. He published his autobiography, Almost Home, under his own name in 2005, and Margaret Cho contributed a foreword to the book.
In 2007, new DNA testing became available that was not technologically possible at the time of the crime. This testing produced evidence that hairs found at the crime scene did not match Misskelley, Baldwin, or Echols, and instead possibly matched the stepfather of one of the victims. This evidence suggested that Misskelley, Baldwin, and Echols were not responsible for the crime.
In light of this, the defendants submitted their request for a new trial to Burnett. Burnett stated that the additional evidence was “inconclusive” which led him to deny retrials for all three defendants in September of 2008.
Following Judge Burnett’s retirement from the court in November 2010, the Arkansas Supreme Court issued an order mandating new evidentiary hearings for all three defendants, basing those hearings on the newly discovered DNA evidence. The decision that Burnett made in 2008 to not award Echols a new trial based on the DNA evidence was criticized by the highest court in the state.
During his stay on execution row, Echols resided in the Varner Unit Supermax prison. During the first few years of his life, he became interested in Buddhism and practiced meditation anywhere from five to seven hours every day. In later years, he developed an interest in the ceremonial side of magic. He spent the majority of his 18 years behind bars researching various forms of magic.
Echols and his wife relocated to New York City soon after Echols was released from prison, and they stayed at Peter Jackson’s apartment there. After that, they relocated to Salem, Massachusetts, and finally made their home in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. Life After Death, which Echols published in 2012, quickly rose to the top of the bestseller list at the New York Times.
Yours for Eternity was published in 2014 and is a collection of letters sent between Echols and Lorri Davis when Echols was doing time in a federal correctional facility. In 2018, he wrote a book titled High Magick: A Guide to the Spiritual Practices That Saved My Life on Death Row. This book detailed his spiritual experience when he was incarcerated. After that came Angels and Archangels: A Magician’s Guide, which was released the next year in 2020.
Echols’ life serves as inspiration for the character and plot of Eddie Munson in the fourth season of the Netflix original series Stranger Things. Like Echols, Munson is falsely accused of committing a murder solely on his appearance. The documentary titled “Paradise Lost” is rumored to have served as a source of motivation for the writers.
Summing-Up
Echols has written a number of autobiographies in addition to spiritual books since his release from execution row in 2011 as a result of an Alford plea. His spiritual efforts and the West Memphis Three case have been the subject of numerous books, documentaries, and podcasts, and he has been featured in many of them.
