AUGUST 2020

People close to me were sometimes concerned to hear that I wrote to men in prison. 

I kept the stories of the lives of the inmates I wrote to mostly to myself. Their lives and crimes varied from stealing cars since they were eight years old all the way up to murder. And every one of them had my home address. 

In early 2020 I was writing to four men in prison, two in Illinois, one in Georgia, and one in Florida. I had met the first three through an online ministry that created inmate profiles for potential penpals. The fourth one had gotten my name from, Juan, an inmate who had been released and had given it to him in case he wanted someone to write to. At the time, I was in my late 40’s and ‘Tiger’ was in his late 30’s. For me, it was the perfect way to live out my Christian faith doing something that I enjoyed—writing letters. Being a stay-at-home mom, married to someone who had abandoned mainstream Christianity despite that we had met and married in a church, it was the only opportunity I had at the time to have any meaningful connections. 

I didn’t know it at the time, but due to all the unnecessary sacrifices I had made to keep my marriage going, I was dying inside, but too busy just surviving to realize it. 

One of the things I did to try to hold onto my sense of being a valid person was to create a blog to process some of my own experiences. Rather than their dark pasts repelling me, I found that the honest stories of the people in prison helped me to start climbing out of my own pain. In an effort to maintain a certain middle-class respectability, I hadn’t reached out to anyone, including my own family, to tell them what was really going on in my life. But with these prisoners who had lived unconventional lives, I could truly be myself, and that was the first step back to wholeness. 

There was just one area where we had some misunderstanding. Out of the five men I wrote to, four of them wanted our friendship to become romantic and/or sexual (at least on paper). Out of those four, two of them respected it when I said that wasn’t the reason I was writing to them. Almost ironically, the two inmates who respected these boundaries were in the age range that I would have been interested in if I had been looking for someone. 

The two who ignored it when I said I was far more concerned about freedom than I was about getting into another relationship were both significantly younger than me. I’ve never had any cougar tendencies. Coincidentally, the two who kept pushing for more were the ones who had known each other, Juan and Tiger. And whenever I pointed out that I was far too old for a tryst with them, each of them said I was like wine, aged to perfection. Flattering, but not really what I needed as I slowly started extricating myself from the relationship that had defined me for the last twenty years of my life. 

Tiger knew about my blog and asked me if I could create one for him. It was easy enough to do and I just cut-and-pasted his own words into it. His family and friends were able to read about his ongoing legal struggles. It did seem to me as if he had been over-sentenced with two life sentences for a convenience store robbery. But as time went on, he had me contacting innocence clinics and anyone who was interested in the flaws of the American justice system. None of it seemed to help him and it was taking up a lot of my free time. 

And then the covid crisis hit. The covid crisis and subsequent lockdown put my divorce on hold and also meant that six people in my home were living on one government cheque.

At the same time, Tiger started talking about his new cellmate, his new ‘celebrity’ cellmate. With all that was going on in my offline life, I didn’t pay any attention. But in the same way Tiger wanted me advocating on his behalf with any agency that might take on his case, he kept insisting that I look into his new cellmate’s case. His cellmate claimed he was innocent. Tiger wanted to know if it was true and asked me to read everything online that I could find about the case. 

I have that stereotypical Canadian quality that desires everything to be amiable. At the same time, I can be pretty stubborn. Classic passive-aggressive. 

I searched “Adam Frasch” online and did a quick survey.

It was a case down in Tallahassee, a doctor had killed his wife. There was a swimming pool. Something about exotic dancers. Not my cup of tea. Because if I had any spare time for anything, I wanted to literally be sipping tea and reading a good book, not back issues of the Tallahassee Democrat. Ironically, I didn’t realize that I had stumbled on the very thing I loved—a case worthy of Perry Mason with just a hint of Miss Marple. 

At that point, my mind was on money and the lack of it. Just buying groceries had become contentious. What is a necessity? What is a luxury? My soon-to-be ex on one side and me and my now almost grown children on the other side could get pretty vitriolic as to what food items qualified as necessities. Our list was far more expansive than his!

But one thing that definitely belonged on the luxury list was non-food items like JPay stamps.

It costs money to buy virtual stamps from the prison email system, JPay. We didn’t even know if we could afford the internet, never mind virtual stamps! I still had some stamps left in my account and I suggested to Tiger that I drop down from a weekly letter to a monthly letter, at least until the world got back to normal. 

He immediately turned to his ‘millionaire’ cellmate and asked him to send me some money for stamps. A bold move, I thought, considering who was I to Dr. Adam Frasch? But it actually happened and I received $25 in the mail a few weeks later. Tiger asked if I could do a blog for Doc, too. 

More work for me. 

The truth was, I had actually been relieved to have an excuse to take a break from Tiger’s ongoing and overwhelming requests to contact every agency in the US that might be able to help him pro bono. This new influx of funds that could buy me 70 virtual stamps along with yet another demand on my time was not initially regarded by me as a Godsend.

Nonetheless, I dutifully wrote a thank you letter to Dr. Frasch.