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In fact, the juvenile parole officer assisting at the crime scene went so far as to say, "It looks like Damien Echols finally killed someone."
In a report on Echols by TruTV, the day after the boys' bodies were discovered, Lieutenant James Sudbury of the West Memphis Police Department and Crittendon County Juvenile Officer Steve Jones spoke about the crimes, agreeing that they thought the crimes had strong overtones of a cult killing.
Jones then informed Sudbury that there was one person he knew who was involved in cult activities that he thought could be capable of committing such a crime. He named Damien Echols.
The two men then went to Echol's trailer park home, where his mother and father gave them permission to speak to her son, who was 18 at the time. That was the first of many interviews they would have with Echols.
According to an account by TruTV, Damien Echols had led a troubled life. Because of his father's work, the family constantly moved from location to location. Consequently Damien became introspective and quiet, never really making friends.
Damien's real name was Michael Wayne Hutcheson. After his parents divorced, his mother married Jack Echols, who adopted him, and they moved to West Memphis. He continued to go by Hutcheson for the next five years, however. When he had heard nothing from his birth father during that time, he dropped his birth name and began to go by Echols.
He was a bright, intelligent boy who made good grades until junior high when he began to suffer periods of depression. He kept searching through various religions for something to take away the emptiness he felt inside, becomming a Catholic at one point.
It was then that he took the name Damien after Father Damien a 19th-century Catholic priest who cared for lepers on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. The rumor mill in West Memphis would report that he had named himself after Damien in the series of "Omen" movies.
He could find no real satisfaction in Catholicism either in the end, though, and continued to suffer severe bouts of depression, trying to kill himself several times.
He began dressing all in black, including a black overcoat that he wore constantly. He also often wore grotesque make-up. In high school, he finally dropped out. He had only one close friend, James Baldwin, although he did have a girlfriend.
It was only after he read about the Druids and Stonehenge that Damien began practicing Paganism. The idea of worshipping the elements of nature and Karma made sense to him.
After his mother divorced and remarried his father, Damien and his girlfriend ran away.
TruTV relates the following this way:
His first contact with police came about when he was seventeen. He and his girlfriend at the time decided to run away from home together.
On their first night they broke into an abandoned house for shelter. Within an hour police were there. Damien was arrested and was subjected to a number of psychological tests.
From there he was sent to Charter Hospital in Maumelle. During his stay there he was diagnosed as manic-depressive and was prescribed the anti-depressant drug Trofanil, which he continued to take until he arrived on death row.
It was after this arrest that Damien first met Jerry Driver, chief Juvenile Probation Officer for Crittenden County and partner of Steve Jones.
According to Damien, in a later interview, Driver had been convinced that Satanic cults were behind many criminal activities in the area and was determined to prove his theories.
Damien and Driver's paths would cross many more times in the future as Driver would investigate Damien in regard to a variety of unsolved crimes in the area, none of which he was able to pin on Damien.
In December 1992, Damien sat for and passed his G.E.D test, fulfilling the terms of his probation. As soon as he was released from hospital, Damien moved in with his girlfriend Domini Teer in West Memphis. At the time of the murders Damien claims that he was dividing his time between his parent's home and his now pregnant girlfriend, Domini's home.
(To Be Continued)
This information provided by:
https://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/famous/memphis/suspect_4.html
