When he gets some money together, Jason will get his college degree and then go on to law school. He figures he'll make a decent lawyer. "I don't know what's expected of me," he says. "I'm just gonna live my life and hope I spread some love and hope and freedom along the way."

···

Damien has always been the alpha male of the West Memphis Three, if only because the role was thrust upon him. First prosecutors portrayed him as a cult leader, at once an odd loner and a charismatic mystic able to convince his acolytes to kill. That was cruel nonsense. But when people react to the _Paradise Lost_films, they're reacting to Damien. When someone, anyone, celebrity or civilian, says That could have been me, they're not talking about Jessie or Jason. No one identifies with the mildly retarded kid bullied into confessing to a triple homicide; no one sees himself in the small, quiet boy with the atrocious misfortune of picking the wrong best friend.

Damien also suffered the worst in prison. He lived in the supermax facility of a prison outside the little town of Grady, Arkansas, confined twenty-three hours a day in a small cell. "Ten paces one way, eleven steps another way," one of Damien's death-row friends, Tim Howard, tells me. "'Course, I gotta get up on the bunk to get all those eleven steps in." Five days a week, for one hour, inmates on the row are allowed out alone into a yard, which isn't a yard at all but rather a concrete pad with block walls on three sides and a chain-link fence on the fourth that allows them to watch cars go by on the two-lane in the distance. They're locked up for everything else, including meals and showers. "It's changed a lot of people since they've been here," Tim says. "You can see it. It drives them a little nuts."

Damien's eyesight deteriorated badly in prison; he'd rarely focused on anything more than a few feet away and hadn't been exposed to natural light for the past ten years. When he was released, the sun struck him like a klieg, which is why he wears glasses with blue-tinted lenses. Almost two months later, he still waited until late in the afternoon or early in the evening to go running with his wife. He was up to three miles a day, an astonishing distance not for his wind—he ran in place for hours in his cell—but because he had to learn to walk again after shuffling around in shackles for so many years. He also had to figure out how to use a fork, since those aren't allowed on death row.

Damien explained those things several times in the weeks after he was released in a smattering of interviews, which, considering he'd spent nearly two decades on death row, was quite obliging of him. Not that he gets much credit for it. At a Q&A after a press screening of Paradise Lost 3, a reporter from New Zealand reminded Damien that he'd said he wanted to fade into the crowd for a while, live in obscurity. How, the reporter wanted to know, did he reconcile that with a promotional appearance for an HBO documentary about himself?

"That's the thing about being on death row for eighteen and a half years," he tells me a few minutes later. "You don't give a fuck about a snotty question."

He knows the media want a piece of his story, and he knows he doesn't have to give any one reporter anything more than he chooses to. Worse, he knows some people would like to own part of his story, to anoint themselves his savior, and he would like that to stop. "There are a lot of lawyers wanting to take credit," he says, "and most of them didn't have fuck-ass nothing to do with getting us out of prison." He does not mention names, but he does not mean his own.