Episode 9: "Damien admits to a history of violence." #WM3 The Case Against with Gary Meece

While Damien Echols has consistently downplayed his violent history in softball media interviews, the records, as usual, tell a very different tale than heard from Echols and his supporters.   "DAMIEN ADMITS TO A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE."         The central figure in the investigation, prosecution, incarceration and release of the West Memphis 3 was the flamboyant and problematic Damien Echols, whose boyhood ambition to become a world-class occultist put him out of step with his peers in the Arkansas Delta. Quickly pegged as a likely suspect in the murders from multiple sources, including his own all-too-knowing initial interviews with police, Echols seemed to have adopted his black-clad “figure of the night” persona as a defense against often-rough circumstances. Becoming a self-proclaimed witch and part-time vampire made sense to a mentally ill misfit who could turn his outsider status into a means of drawing attention to himself. Intrinsic to this dark image was the creation of the impression that he was capable of great and weird violence. For those who knew him, it was not surprising that he fulfilled his self-created legend as a dreaded monster. He worked hard at becoming the terror of the town. On the road to infamy, he built up a history of violence that gave credence to an ability to torture and kill. 'According to his discharge summary from Charter Hospital of Little Rock in June 1992: “Supposedly, Damien chased a younger child with an ax and attempted to set a house on fire. He denied this behavior. He reported that his girlfriend’s family reported this so that they could get him in trouble. He was also accused of beating a peer up at school. Damien admits to a history of violence. He said prior to admission he did attempt to enucleate a peer’s eye at school. He was suspended subsequently from school. He was suspended on seven different occasions during the school year. He related he was suspended on one occasion because he set a fire in his science classroom and also would walk off on campus on several occasions. He was disruptive to the school environment. He was also disrespectful to teachers. He has been accused of terroristic threatening.” Echols had gotten into trouble in one in- stance for spitting on a teacher. Much of this history of violence came from Echols himself. His teenage acquaintances told grisly stories about Echols’ casual cruelty. Joe Houston Bartoush, Jason Baldwin’s cousin, offered another insight into Echols’ violent character; a portion of Baldwin’s “alibi” centered on the fact that he had cut the lawn of his great-uncle Hubert Bartoush, Joe’s father, on May 5. On June 14, 1993, Detective Bryn Ridge was interviewing Hubert when Joe Bartoush volunteered a statement. Joe,  in his early teens, said he and Echols had been walking down the road west out of Lakeshore into a field when they came upon a sick dog. Echols grabbed a brick and began attacking the dog. Joe told Ridge: “On 10-27-92 I was at Lakeshore Trailer Park with Damien Echols when he killed a black Great Dane. The dog was already sick and he hit the dog in the back of the head. He pulled the intestines out of the dog and started stomping the dog until blood came out of his mouth. He was going to come back later with battery acid so that he could burn the hair and skin off of the dog’s head. He had two cat skulls, a dog skull and a rat skull that I already knew about. He kept these skulls in his bedroom at Jack Echols house in Lakeshore. He was trying to make the eyeballs of the dog he killed pop out when he was stomping. Damien had a camouflage survival knife to cut the gut out of the dog with.” Joe was sure of the date of the dog killing because he had skipped school that day and had been caught. Joe said Echols had used the survival knife to carve his name into his arm on another occasion. A similar survival knife recovered behind the Baldwin home, known as the “lake knife,” was a highly publicized piece of prosecutorial