“But you feel like a specimen being studied. “We want the guy who did this shit to be in prison, and the guys who did this to us to be held accountable,” says Echols, who has spent the past four months promoting the film alongside his new book, Life After Death.
#PARADISE LOST TATTOO MOVIE#
The movie had a limited release Christmas Day, with a national rollout starting January 11. That’s where Amy Berg’s documentary West of Memphis comes in, presenting new evidence pointing to another suspect. And in 2011, after eighteen years in prison, Echols and his co-defendants entered an obscure “Alford plea”-meaning, more or less, that they pleaded guilty but maintained innocence-which got them out of prison, but not exonerated. Johnny Depp, Patti Smith, and Eddie Vedder got involved a Brooklyn woman fell for him, married him, and rearranged her life to help him and Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh funded a superlative new defense team and DNA testing. The movie made the West Memphis Three into a fashionable cause and Echols into a celebrity of sorts.
#PARADISE LOST TATTOO SERIES#
The 1996 film Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills-the first in a series of three-chronicled the ludicrous trial, revealing a charismatic, intelligent goth-misfit targeted by self-serving Bible Belt prosecutors and convicted with hardly any strong evidence. When he was 18, Echols, now 38, was sentenced to death by lethal injection after he and two other teenagers were accused of murdering (and mutilating) three boys in their Arkansas hometown. Like, what if someone comes in and goes, ‘I really wanna get this portrait of my daughter done.’ And I’m like, ‘Nah-you want an X.’ Or somebody says, ‘I really want this, like, field of roses.’ And I’ll say, ‘Nah-you want a field of X’s.’ ” “ ‘Look what I did today! I just got some sort of permanent fucked-up mark by Damien Echols.’ ”Įchols is a painter-an exhibition of works he did in prison using Q-tips and pen cartridges just opened at Sacred’s in-house gallery-but the only body art he can manage is a simple X. “People here started posting on Twitter and Instagram and stuff,” he says. In prison, Echols says, tattoos were a kind of armor when he fell in at Sacred after getting out, he ended up with multiple new ones, bringing his total to “around 30.” And though he’s unlicensed and inexperienced, lately he’s been giving them as well.
“After prison, this is the first place I started making friends,” he says with a lilting Delta drawl. Wearing prescription sunglasses and dressed in all black, Echols, the alleged “ringleader” of the so-called West Memphis Three, looks around the polished, welcoming space. “You know-come in for a tattoo, leave with hepatitis.
#PARADISE LOST TATTOO FULL#
I thought it was gonna be one of those grungy places in the Village or something that has, like, shelves full of glass dildos,” recalls Damien Echols of his first visit to Sacred Tattoo, just north of Canal.
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