To get the essence of Damien Echols’ character you need only look at the footage of him, aged 19, being sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit. “You will be administered a continuous intravenous injection of a lethal quantity of an ultra-short acting barbiturate, in combination with a chemical paralytic agent, into your body, until you are dead,” is how the judge put it. In this moment, Echols stood with his head tilted back, almost arrogantly so. His posture was loose under his black t-shirt. Even as his girlfriend ran screaming from the courtroom, he never lost his cool. Ever sardonic, even in the face of death.

It was in 1994 that Echols was found guilty of the brutal murders of three eight-year-old boys. Convicted along with him and sentenced to life imprisonment were Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr, aged 17 and 16 respectively. Commonly known as the West Memphis Three, the teens were accused of murdering the children as part of a satanic ritual, but there were questions hanging over their guilt from the beginning. The story gained worldwide attention through the 1996 HBO documentary Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, which detailed a series of investigatory errors that indicated that the conviction was made under almost entirely false premises.

In the proceeding years, the perplexing and sensational case became the subject of two more Paradise Lost documentaries, multiple books and vast media and celebrity attention, in turn generating the West Memphis Three an army of devoted supporters. Finally, on August 19, 2011, after 18 years and 78 days in prison, the men were released on the grounds of a lack of DNA evidence. Echols’ release was one of the most high-profile releases of a death-row inmate in American history.

Today, in an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Echols reclines in a floral armchair, next to a window overlooking Central Park. Dressed all in black, with skin of a striking pallor, he appears tired. He’s in New York as part of a press tour for his new memoir, Life After Death, and to promote West of Memphis, a new documentary by award-winning documentarian Amy Berg that highlights fresh evidence in the case. It’s been over a year since his release, but Echols has had little time to relax.

“People are always talking about this case like it’s extraordinary, but it really isn’t,” he says in his soft southern drawl. “This happens all the time – people get murdered, things get swept under the rug, and nobody thinks twice about it. We were three kids: bottom of the barrel, poor white trash. They thought they could just throw us in jail and we’d be forgotten. The only thing that made our case an exception was that there were film crews in the courtroom who caught everything on tape.” It’s an eerily poignant statement, given the recent string of criminal exonerations through DNA testing that have forced America to face the fallibility of its justice system. Since the first such case in 1989, over 300 people in the United States have been released from prison on the basis of new DNA evidence. Eighteen of them had served time on death row.

The bodies of the three young boys, Christopher Byers, Stevie Edward Branch and Michael Moore, were found in May 1993 in a drainage canal in Robin Hood Hills, a wooded area in the small town of West Memphis, Arkansas, where almost a third of the population live below the poverty line and more than one in four people have less than a complete high-school education. It’s Bible-beltcountry, the land of teased hair, where people are born but rarely leave, and where time moves slowly, or not at all.

When found, the bodies of the children were stripped naked, and each had been hogtied with shoelaces – right wrist to right ankle, left wrist to left ankle. They appeared to have been mutilated, specifically Byers, who was found castrated. Unsurprisingly, the grotesque nature of the murders had emotions in the town running wild, intensified by rumours of rape, forced oral-sex and genital mutilation. The murders happened at a time when an irrational fear of satanic cult violence was sweeping America, fuelled by sensational media coverage. Police officers in West Memphis felt the crime had “cult” overtones, which led them to suspect Echols – a self-proclaimed Wiccan whose black clothing, long hair and affection for heavy metal and the occult made him an outsider in the small, conservative town.

Looking for information on Echols, police questioned an acquaintance of his, Misskelley, whose IQ of 72 classified him as mildly disabled. After being interrogated for nearly 12 hours, Misskelley confessed to the crime, implicating Echols and Baldwin (Echols’ close friend) along with him. There was immediate doubt surrounding the confession, as many felt it was coerced out of Misskelley through leading questions by the police, and because parts of Misskelley’s statement were inconsistent with the facts of the crime. Though he recanted within hours, it played a major part in the three convictions.

If a trial is a contest of competing narratives, then this particularly dramatic narrative – rumours of murders performed as part of a satanic ritual – had the power to outcompete truth, implicating Echols based on his character and appearance rather than concrete evidence. In keeping with the convoluted nature of the case, the conditions of the three men’s eventual release were bizarre. Under a deal with the prosecutors, they had to plead guilty to the murders, while still declaring their innocence – what is known as an “Alford plea”. For everyone involved in the defence, the deal was bittersweet.

“There are so many people and things and situations that formed the chain that got me out of prison, that if you remove one single link in that chain, I’d be dead right now,” says Echols flatly. “And the very first link in that chain was the first documentary, which I really feel played a huge part in saving my life.” The original courtroom footage, referenced by Echols earlier, was the basis for what would become Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills. Seen by millions, the documentary rallied celebrity support: Johnny Depp launched a campaign for their release, rock stars Eddie Vedder and Henry Rollins performed benefit concerts to raise awareness and funds and Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson went so far as to finance a new investigation of the crime. But the heart of the movement was always about the kinship people felt with the three imprisoned young men, who became reluctant martyrs in the name of every kid who’s ever been picked on, singled out or called a freak. It’s a strange place to be in: solely by virtue of being wrongly convicted, you are suddenly a celebrity, a hero. But Echols always played the part well. He was the perfect bad boy: young, beautiful, irreverent, articulate. The courtroom footage of him is remarkable – goofing off for the camera, styling his hair, smiling charismatically, ultimately too innocent to think he could ever be convicted for a crime he didn’t commit.

There’s one particularly chilling interview with Echols on Court TV, filmed two years after his sentencing, in which an off-camera interviewer asks him if there’s anything he wishes he could change about his life before the trial. He responds: “I don’t think I’d change anything that’s ever happened in my entire life. I don’t think there was anything I could do to change (what happened). What, become a clone? Give up my personality? Give up my identity? Just march along like everyone else? I’d rather die.”

Following his release, Echols and his wife (who he fell in love with and married while in prison) moved to New York City, where they lived for a year before relocating to Salem, Massachusetts, last autumn. As the site of the most famous witch trials in history and a modern Mecca for alternative spirituality, it’s an all-too-fitting home for Echols, who became passionate about energy work and meditation while incarcerated.

“Salem is the only place in the world where I’m in the majority,” he laughs. “While I was in prison, I was ordained in the Rinzai tradition of Japanese Buddhism. I also had to learn Reiki and Qi Gong energy-working techniques, because on death row there’s no medical care, because there’s no point in spending time and money on someone you’re going to kill. I was in solitary confinement for ten years, I didn’t see sunlight for almost a decade, and I was eating garbage. There were times when I was so sick that I literally thought I was going to die before the night was over – times when I was in the most horrendous pain – and the only things I had to rely on were these energy techniques.”

Echols also devoted a large amount of his time inside to reading and writing. Despite dropping out of school in ninth grade (the highest formal education of anyone in his family), he is an autodidact who read obsessively from a young age, including thousands of books while incarcerated. “For the first few years I was in prison I couldn’t write, because I was so psychologically scarred by the way the police and lawyers had taken my own writing and twisted it, in order to use it against me,” he says, referring to things he’d written as a teenager which dealt with the occult, which were later used as evidence of his Satanism. “I really had to force myself to work through those emotional and psychological blocks to write.” In 2005, he self-published his first book, an autobiography titled Almost Home. While inside he also wrote lyrics with Pearl Jam and Michale Graves of the Misfits. His new memoir, Life After Death, avoids the details of the case, instead discussing his life on death row, as well as his childhood.

Something that is clearly absent from Echols’ story is his family, who do not appear in the documentaries. “I’ve never really been close to my family,” he says. “My father left when I was seven, and my mother gave me away to my grandmother when I was three years old because she couldn’t raise both me and my sister. So my grandmother was really the only person I considered family, but she died when I was in jail waiting to go to trial. I saw my sister maybe twice in the entire 18 years I was in prison. My biological mother came to see me a handful of times, but it was always pretty fucking horrible.”

However, in light of a new Hollywood film being made about the case, Echols’ mother and sister have suddenly appeared in the media, and have a book coming out detailing their side of the story. “The funny thing is, I haven’t known my mother or sister to read a book in their entire lives, but now they’ve apparently written one,” he laughs. “Somebody brought to my attention recently that they were selling t-shirts with my tattoos on them. They’re not making any effort to reach out to me, but they’re selling t-shirts, keychains, coffee mugs, and fucking cellphone covers.” Echols tells this story without revealing the slightest bit of anger. Always calm, always in control. “I don’t hate them,” he says. “I just want to stay as far away from them as possible.”

Filming is underway on the movie, the Atom Egoyan-directed Devil’s Knot, which stars Reece Witherspoon and Colin Firth and is based on Mara Leveritt’s book of the same name. It credits Baldwin and Misskelley among its executive producers, a fact which has led to a public falling-out between Baldwin and Echols. “That movie is foul,” says Echols. “They’re saying it’s based on Leveritt’s book, but nothing in it is accurate. In the screenplay there’s a scene where Reese Witherspoon, who plays one of the victim’s mothers, wakes up in the middle of the night and sees me standing in her bedroom with blood running from my mouth, from when I’d been chewing on the bodies. There’s another scene where I take a woman to a satanic orgy and cut her and drink her blood. And the people making the film say, “Oh, that’s just a dream sequence,” or, “It’s just illustrating what someone is thinking.” But you know when they make the trailer that those are the scenes they’re going to stitch together.” The movie also completely cuts Echols’ wife from the story, who, he says, did 85 per cent of the work on the case, and quit her job to work on it full-time. “But I’m not allowed to say much more about it,” he says, “because they’ll sue me.”

Since his release, Echols has also done some acting himself, playing a part in the upcoming IRL, about a girl’s (Sky Ferreira) dark adventures in NYC. The 20-minute short was directed by Grant Singer and written by Dazed contributor Patrick Sandberg. “I play a guy who works in a gun shop who tries to convince Sky that she needs weapons to protect herself against the monsters in the big city,” he laughs. “I liked doing it, mainly because it felt very ‘New York’.”

But Echols can’t devote his life to movies and meditation and casually hanging out with Johnny Depp just yet, for there is still work to be done. Because the West Memphis Three technically pleaded guilty, no further action can be taken in the case until the three are exonerated. West of Memphis focuses on this goal, and highlights a possible new suspect in Terry Hobbs, the stepfather of victim Stevie Branch. The film reveals that new forensic tests found DNA from Hobbs (who has a history of violence) at the crime scene, and displays expert testimony stating that the “mutilation” of the bodies, originally thought to be evidence of a satanic ritual, was more probably the result of post-mortem animal predation in the wooded area where the bodies were found.

In light of the accusations against him, Hobbs had created his own, early-2000’s-looking website, terryhobbs.com, with a header-bar that reads, “I am a quiet, laidback man who loves my children and is always there when needed. I love to play guitar and write uplifting music – every message is positive.” If you scroll down you will also notice off-putting photos of him “goofily” re-enacting stabbings in a wooded area with his family members, accompanied by such captions as, “The day was beautiful and we enjoyed it like a regular family. Nobody was fighting and there wasn’t any drama.”

“The person who killed those three kids is still out there walking the streets,” says Echols sternly. “I’m not pointing a finger at anyone, I’m just saying we should let the evidence speak for itself. Not myth or rumour or ghost stories, but concrete, physical evidence. There is significant evidence against Hobbs – there’s DNA evidence linking him to the crime scene and three eyewitnesses who say they saw him on the day of the murder, with all three boys.

“It makes me feel physically sick to talk about this,” he continues. “The only thing I can compare it to is being car sick. But as hard as it is to keep ripping open these wounds, I understand that it’s a necessary evil. I’m looking forward to the day when I can finally put this all behind me, but this isn’t the time. This isn’t that day.”

West of Memphis is out on December 21

This interview was taken from the January 2013 Issue of Dazed & Confused

Photography by Michael Avedon

A story in leather, lacquer, babycat, denim and pussy bows, Hedi Slimane’s first collection in five years takes a rock wardrobe and infuses it with the youth explosion that characterised Saint Laurent’s ready-to-wear line in the 60s, Rive Gauche. In many ways the tale here is one of genesis, as what the late Yves Saint Laurent did as the first couturier to propose luxury ready-to-wear with the spirit of the street, Hedi Slimane did from the late 90s to 2007, redefining menswear both in silhouette and attitude. Essentially, as Saint Laurent liberated women, Slimane did so for men.

Since 2007 the influential designer has concentrated on a parallel career in photography, introducing the monochrome illusive portrait – what the camera shouldn’t see – into contemporary culture. His images are charged with the ethos of what he began in fashion, demonstrating a talent for capturing the spirit of our time that goes beyond clothes, however sublime.

On his return to design, there is a notion of planets aligning. Slimane’s installation at Saint Laurent befits the wishes of both the late Monsieur Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Berg, to whom the debut women’s catwalk show was dedicated.

As stores are reconceptualised under Saint Laurent’s original helvetica logo, Dazed heralds a new fashion epoch by heading to Stockholm to shoot a 2012 youthquake on a group of professional and street-cast models. Here we present an extended image edit from the magazine editorial and meet the boys from the shoot.

CinematographyMartin Rinman
Edited byInessa Tsulimova

PhotographyFumi Nagasaka
StylingRobbie Spencer
GroomingSharin at Link Details
ModelsAdam and Peder at Nisch Management, Daniel, Hugo, Kimie, Martin at Stockholmsgruppen
Photographic AssistantHannah Richter
Styling AssistantUlrika Lindqvist
RetouchingColor One NYC
Special Thanks ToJane Glandal, Meghan Scott, Hjalmar Klitse

All clothes Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane SS13 menswear

The stories' lead protagonist, Hugo, soundtracked the film with his band Side Effects. Visit theirofficial Facebook page

Nineteen eighty-two; David Lindwall, birth, 3950 grams, 50cm. Since then the Swedish creative, based in New York has dabbled in a number of disciplines from band booker and denim rep to cutting his teeth as a model in Paris, djing, styling and designing. Since 2009, however, Lindwall's focus has been his label David Lindwall. Reborn. 1982, a heavy existentialist t-shirt line picked up by Dover Street Market that, somehow, even found its way onto David Beckham's back – the pap shots prove it. Our universe, like lightning, is recondite.

Expanding his collection to include outwear, hand knits and jeans for AW12, and his life from Brooklyn to upstate New York, we caught up with Lindwall to talk more.

Dazed Digital: Tell us about the AW12 collection. How has your label expanded?
David Lindwall: This year I decided to do a small collection for winter with the essentials, basically what I would like to wear instead of getting locked into design concepts for the collection. I knew I wanted to make amazing-cut designs in the best possible fabrics I could get my hands on. All made here in New York to support our local businesses. I ended up with a long boiled wool coat, a black leather biker jacket and a bomber jacket in a light boiled wool, working a lot with the details and inside of the jacket, something I hope you notice every time you put them on.

Also new this season is a few knitwear pieces – a hoodie in 100% ecological Alpaca (yarn is spun and knitted in Sweden) and a round neck jumper in 100% ecological wool. They're hand knitted, with no machines involved at all. A project that I’m super happy with the outcome of.

The design of the shirts is a play on the first 100% genetically modified human created in our Reborn. 1982 Laboratories and the general waste of resources in the world today, such as the USELESS (using less since 1982) t-shirt.

DD: What’s the moment your creative journey began? Has it been an incidental trip?

David Lindwall: It all started in my childhood, my father always let me use his tools and I was always making things in wood and welding at 12 years old. Then growing up into a 6’4” teenager my mum got tired of altering my clothes and said, "the sewing machine is there, feel free to find out how it works." I did. After working for some houses in Europe as senior designer (I have no formal fashion education whatsoever) I decided that the only way to do what you believe in is to do it on your own.

I remember the day when the brand actually began for real (more than in my head). I was in Paris doing the shows and I got talking to Adrian Joffe at the Comme offices in Place Vendme. I showed him some prints I’d done for a small t-shirt collection and he said, “these are great, you should make them and we could buy them for Dover Street Market.” That was the birth of David Lindwall. Reborn. 1982. Just like that on a sunny day in France. So to answer your question I guess you could say it was incidental.

DD: What have you learned along the way?
David Lindwall:I think the best thing I’ve learnt is that the fashion industry is a lot of smoke and mirrors. I had a good fashion education from modelling, seeing business that close with fittings and getting a understanding for what you actually need to have and the things that people perceive you to have made a big impact when I set up the structure of my own business. Getting to know the big designers in person and talking to them about their business and creative journeys, ups and downs, seeing shows both backstage and sitting in the crowd has been very helpful. Another thing that has been a big help is working for someone else when you make mistakes. Everything has a learning curve.My highlight is waking up everyday next to my wife and working on something that I truly in my heart of hearts love.

DD: You’ve lived across Europe and both sides of the US coast. Where feels most like home?
David Lindwall:New York, no question about it. Though I do at times miss living in Tokyo, a place I could see myself going back to again for a longer period of time.Our flat here in Brooklyn is really my first home, since I've travelled so much in previous years. About a year ago we bought a old Victorian farmhouse (that needs a lot of work) in upstate New York, on lots of land with a barn separate from the house. That’s where I’m starting to set up the new Reborn 1982 office and I can’t wait to get it all done. Just being up there amongst nature is amazing; fishing, hiking, kayaking, snowboarding, it’s a dream come true.

DD: Do we all have a capacity for rebirth?
David Lindwall:I would like to think so. Some might be closer than others.

DD: What would you like to be reborn as next?
David Lindwall:I’d like to be a shadow.

DD: Tell us something we wouldn’t expect of you...
David Lindwall:My bone marrow is dying and I have holes the size of ping pong balls in both my legs. Add to that some 300 stitches in my stomach and being 5 minutes from instant death on a operating table in my 20s.

DD: What else?
David Lindwall:I’m currently working with the brilliant talented photographer Mr. Brett Lloyd on a new project that will present itself at some point next year. Thoughwe could also talk about how productivity and profit is enslaving mankind and destroying our planet at the same time...

PhotographyBrett Lloyd
AW12 imagescourtesy of David Lindwall

Message by berserk message my inbox fills up with fragments of poems, jpegs of fiery abstract paintings, broken English and Cantonese characters, until I begin to feel stoned. You probably won’t have heard of Ami Hsu (阿米, 1980- ) and, like any self-respecting genius, Ami doesn’t seem to care. From the tone of her emails, neither is she fussed about how I came across this unGoogleable novelist-librettist-painter-poet with no website from Taipei City. At the beginning of our correspondence I sense marked disengagement. No sign-off. No small talk. When an answer doesn’t come to her, she’s disinclined to search herself for one: “(Last question: I don’t know)”.

Ami’s becoming well-known in Taiwan thanks to Yen Hung-ya (閻鴻亞), pen name Hung Hung (鴻鴻), a Taipei City-based translator, publisher, filmmaker and theatre director, poet and editor who charged himself with reviving poetry as a medium to “recover and conquer the land that all [the] propaganda and official language occupy.” Hung Hung chose Ami as one of his poets for Off the Roll, Poetry +, a group who “use the written word to…make very simple but powerful statements about life or about what is human.”

Previously untranslated and still without a UK publisher, Ami was a tip-off from the Templer Collection award-winning poet and translator, Matt Bryden, who, as well as waxing lyrical about her poems and paintings, had also warned me, “I only actually met Ami once. I was teaching in a language school in Bath about seven years ago and I made her cry. She ran out of the classroom. At the break I told my principal, and he said, Ah, so you've met the poet then.” I’d also read hazy things about on-going depression and an “episode” of mental illness in London, but now that I was in contact with her, Ami was unnervingly composed.

“I was a psycho in the UK, it’s my fate: a gift to my creation and also a curse to my spirit. I was missing about ten days in the London street [sic] till my sister picked me up… I wrote the days into my novel and poems. The illusion occupied me, a mad world becomes so real. The experience is beautiful, wonderful, and scary.” Her “split mind” clearly drives her –the first collection of poems, To Sing, To Dance, To Be A Wolf, full-length novel – “poetic, chaotic and disordered” –and exhibition of paintings were all inspired by this ten-day-long schizophrenic episode on the streets of London when she was studying away from Taipei City.

Early on in our interview Ami describes herself as having been “broken to a poem”, and throughout the course of our exchange, it’s clear this isn’t an affectation. When I ask her whether she thinks mental illness can facilitate strong art her response is beautifully disorienting. If she begins an answer in prose, more often than not it runs into verse: “Yes. It’s strong but short like a firework display. You can’t always depend on illness to create or you’ll die for it very soon. I have a poem about this:

All summer

Meteors crossed the sky

Polished my back, haunches, rump…

And finally the silver horn on my forehead

But everything reverted to darkness …”

Perhaps it’s got something to do with her stilted English, or perhaps they are little flashes of genius (a diamond in the rough), but I start to read poems in everything she writes. I ask her about love and pain, and why they always appear inextricably in her poems and paintings: “Blink, and love becomes pain. See it poetically. Blink, becomes love again.

I return to the flotsam and jetsam Ami left in my inbox and spot a typo I hadn’t noticed before –“Hi Sophie, Please find attacked.” From the streets of London to Taipei, through love and pain (“Loving you/Made me the best comic actress”), she makes madness real - and so palpable it’s unsettling. It is little surprise that when I ask Ami if all her work is confessional, she answers, “Yes. I like the word “confessional”. I like Sylvia Plath.” There’s a type of precarious brilliance that, in the western world, critics and readers of poetry often associate with Plath, herself “broken to a poem”, and it’s a Plath line that sums up Ami’s rough talent best: “Perfection is terrible”.

The pamphlet, The Desire to Sing after Sunset (trans. Ingrid Fan and Matt Bryden) is a hybrid collection of paintings and poems from 2009 to 2012 and which will be self published early next year. Take a look at the paintings in the gallery below and read two longer poems underneath

讓一切腐朽

蘋果變黃

老黃狗貪睡

蠟燭燒到了世界的盡頭

•

花朵隨著四季輪迴

祖母的肉身化成土壤

老舊的屋舍和社區老樹在政客的舌尖消失

唯有不經意與你路過婚紗街的午后

仍然是一半斜陽，一半天真

Let them all rot

An apple browns

An old dog drowses

A candle burns till the end of the world

Flowers reincarnate through the seasons

Grandmother’s flesh becomes dirt

Clapped-out houses and old trees disappear through politicians’ tongues

Only this afternoon, we passed through a street of wedding dress shops,

a little light still to the day, half innocent

命運一下子把我吹進荒廢花園

每一朵花都有各自的苦果

每一幅肖像都熱淚盈眶

飽受折磨的人，逐漸長成蒸好的熱饅頭

•

那種溫柔與勇敢

比方說，理髮師的手指

比方說，作他的妻子

比方說，在日子裡，失去一些詩

說真的，我去去就回來

每一個荒廢的日子，都值得記憶

Fate swept me into a disused garden

Each flower had its own bitter fruit

Each portrait’s eyes welled

Through suffering we gradually mature

Tenderness and courage –

For example, a barber’s fingers

For example, being his wife

For example, losing poetry in daily life

I’ll be back soon,

Each disused day is worth remembering