In August 1928 a young guard at the District of Columbia jail named Henry Lesser had another guard pass a dollar to a prisoner who had just been beaten. The prisoner was Carl Panzram, a lifelong inmate from Minnesota who was waiting to be tried for housebreaking. Lesser followed the dollar with paper and pencils, and Panzram began to write. He handed the pages over in batches, and Lesser carried them out of the jail a few at a time. By the time the writing stopped there were 361 loose leaves of lined paper, never numbered in sequence, and a friendship that lasted until the morning Panzram was hanged.
Nearly a century later the traffic still runs both ways. People convicted of murder write to guards and detectives, to judges and reporters, to strangers who answer newspaper advertisements and to the authors who will one day put them between hard covers. People outside write back for a living, for a book, for love, for reasons they cannot always explain afterward. Some of those letters have reopened cases that had gone cold. Some have been read into the record, argued over by appellate judges or published on the day of a verdict. One was the start of a marriage that ended in a double murder. Across nine decades of American and Japanese prisons, the letters have done work their writers did not always intend.
Henry Lesser was born in 1902 in Fall River, Massachusetts, left school in the 10th grade and took a guard’s job at the District jail on March 1, 1928, according to the finding aid for his papers at San Diego State University. Panzram, born in East Grand Forks, Minnesota, in 1892, had spent most of his life in reform schools and prisons. What he wrote for Lesser, as the university describes it, was an account of theft, robbery, killings and sexual crimes, of the abuse he said he had suffered in institutions, and of plans he claimed to have made to kill large numbers of people. His argument ran through every section: he had done what he had been taught. Lesser’s wife later typed the manuscript in three parts, and Lesser annotated it, often noting whether he had been able to verify a particular event. Few of the claims were ever tested.
Panzram was sentenced to 25 years for housebreaking and larceny and sent to the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, early in 1929. He kept writing to Lesser from there. The university’s description of the letters says he wrote about daily prison life, the trinkets and small inventions he made, and his views on prison and on his own crimes. On June 20, 1929, he killed Robert G. Warnke, the foreman of the prison laundry, a quiet Army veteran from Cleveland who had served in Cuba with the Rough Riders and had worked at Leavenworth since 1921, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. In a later letter to Lesser, now held at San Diego State, Panzram mentioned killing his boss in the laundry.
Correspondence followed him into the trial. The university holds copies of letters between the psychiatrist Karl Menninger, who evaluated Panzram and judged him sane at the time of the killing, and Warden Thomas B. White. Panzram was convicted of first-degree murder in federal court in 1930 and sentenced to death. He then wrote to President Herbert Hoover and to the Society for the Abolishment of Capital Punishment, asking both not to try to save him, because he had been sane when he committed his crimes. Nobody intervened. His last letters to Lesser, the university records, mention a suicide attempt and his acceptance of the sentence. He was hanged at Leavenworth on September 5, 1930, the Bureau of Prisons records.
Lesser spent about four decades trying to get the manuscript published. He sent copies to H. L. Mencken, to the criminologist Sheldon Glueck and to Menninger; most of them sent it back. He left prison work in 1935, discouraged by the slow pace of reform, and later lectured on the subject using Panzram’s life as his example. In 1955 the writer Tom Gaddis took up the manuscript, and with the reporter James Long he finished the book that appeared in 1970 as Killer: A Journal of Murder. It sold poorly. In 1980 Lesser gave the handwritten pages and the letters to San Diego State, and he died in 1983. The guard who supplied the pencils had become the keeper of the record.
Albert DeSalvo never stood trial for murder. In 1965, while held at Bridgewater State Hospital, he confessed at length to psychiatrists, to Boston police and to the Massachusetts attorney general’s office that he had killed 11 women in the Boston area between June 1962 and January 1964, and two more. No physical evidence then tied him to any of those deaths. The Commonwealth instead tried him in Middlesex Superior Court on eight indictments involving four women who survived, and on January 18, 1967, a jury convicted him; he was sentenced to life. When the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts affirmed the judgments on January 4, 1968, it noted that the jury had heard his statements about the deaths only as part of the history he gave examining psychiatrists, under an instruction that they were not proof of those crimes.
At Walpole State Prison he wrote to one of the men who had questioned him. Phil DiNatale, a Boston detective who spent weeks checking the confession and never doubted it, kept letters DeSalvo sent him in 1967 and 1968. In one DeSalvo compared himself to "a radiator in a room without a safety valve." In another he wished that people "would wake up and realize it could happen to any one of them." DiNatale’s son showed the letters to CBS Boston in 2013, the year the case returned to the news.
DeSalvo later took the confession back. The accounts differ on when: Smithsonian magazine says shortly before his death, and an Associated Press account in 2013 dated the recantation to 1973. The author Casey Sherman has said he later came upon about 40 letters DeSalvo wrote to a Massachusetts family who visited inmates at Walpole, and that in them DeSalvo said he planned to recant in front of a New York Times reporter. DeSalvo was killed at Walpole in November 1973.
The letters did not settle anything. In July 2013 the Suffolk County district attorney announced that DNA from DeSalvo matched evidence from the January 1964 death of Mary Sullivan, 19. Prosecutors were careful to say what the finding could not do: DeSalvo had confessed and recanted and was never convicted of any of the killings, and no biological evidence had been located in the other cases. His correspondence with the detective survives as a record of what he chose to say to a policeman once he no longer needed to say anything.
Ted Bundy was convicted in Florida of three murders and sentenced to death in July 1979 and February 1980; the Supreme Court of Florida affirmed both judgments. For most of the next decade he denied the killings in the Western states that investigators attributed to him. Then in 1984 he wrote to a judge in Washington offering to help with the Green River murders, a series of killings of young women around Seattle that police had been unable to solve.
The letter reached Robert Keppel, a former King County detective then advising the Green River investigation. Keppel went to Florida hoping that Bundy would talk about his own cases too, and it became the first of three meetings, in 1984, 1988 and 1989. Bundy offered theories about how the unknown killer thought and what he would do next. When Gary Ridgway was eventually arrested and pleaded guilty to 48 of the murders, Keppel judged that much of Bundy’s analysis had been close to the mark, while concluding that a good part of what Bundy called his theory of the "Riverman" was "a projection of himself." Keppel told the story in The Riverman, published in 1995.
The correspondence had opened a channel that Bundy used at the end. In the week before his execution, with his appeals nearly exhausted, he confessed to Keppel and to detectives from several Western states, admitting 11 murders in Washington, though he could name only eight of the victims. He was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison near Starke on January 24, 1989, and pronounced dead at 7:16 a.m. An offer of expert help had become the route by which investigators finally heard him admit what he had done.
Tommy Lynn Sells, a drifter and carnival worker, was convicted of capital murder, with other charges, in the death of Kaylene Harris, 13, near Del Rio, Texas, on December 31, 1999; a Val Verde County jury returned its verdict on September 18, 2000, and he was sentenced to death. He later pleaded guilty to the capital murder of Mary Bea Perez, 9, in San Antonio. He told investigators about many more killings across the country, and he told some of it to the writer Diane Fanning, who was corresponding with him.
ABC News reported that in one letter Sells wrote about a killing "Maybe on a 13th?" Fanning took the hint to a Texas Ranger who knew Sells well. The killing that came into view was that of Joel Kirkpatrick, 10, in Lawrenceville, Illinois, on October 13, 1997. The boy’s mother had been charged with his murder, and on March 4, 2002, a jury convicted her; she was sentenced to 65 years, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Sells gave police a detailed confession, which ABC News dated to 2003 and the Registry to 2004, and the Illinois Times reported in September 2003 that he had "voluntarily confessed" in a book published that April.
An Illinois appellate court reversed the mother’s conviction on a point of state law about the appointment of special prosecutors. At her retrial in 2006 the jury heard the taped Sells confession, which the prosecution maintained was false, and acquitted her. She received a certificate of innocence on November 29, 2010. Sells was never charged with the boy’s death. He was executed by lethal injection at Huntsville on April 3, 2014. A question in a letter to an author had become evidence in a courtroom where its writer never appeared, and it helped clear a woman who had spent years convicted of killing her own son.
Robert Spahalski’s case turned in part on letters that had nothing to do with him personally. In October 1991, while Rochester police were questioning him about the death of Charles Grande in the Town of Webster, his public defender on unrelated charges, Richard Marchese, stopped the interrogation. On October 10 Marchese sent letters to the Rochester and Webster police departments saying his client was not to be questioned without him. Neither letter said that Marchese represented Spahalski on the Grande matter. He was not charged.
Fourteen years later, on November 8, 2005, Spahalski walked into the Monroe County Public Safety Building in Rochester, asked to see a detective and over the following hours confessed to four killings, three of them from 1990 and 1991. His defense argued that the 1991 letters had given him a lasting right to counsel on the Grande case and that the 2005 questioning was therefore barred. Judge Patricia D. Marks of Monroe County Court rejected the argument in August 2006, ruling that the officers who questioned him in 2005 had no actual or constructive knowledge of the letters and that none of them had worked the 1991 inquiry. A jury convicted him of five counts of murder in the second degree covering the four deaths, and judgment was entered on December 12, 2006.
On June 9, 2017, the Appellate Division, Fourth Department, unanimously affirmed. Its reasoning rested on the wording of the letters. They did not show that Marchese had entered the Grande case, and Marchese testified that he had never represented Spahalski on any homicide. The charges on which he had represented him were dismissed in 1992, and with them, the court held, any right to counsel that the letters might have carried.
By then Spahalski had a correspondent of a different kind. The writer Michael Benson came to him while researching killings of women in Rochester in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The two became pen pals, Benson wrote in 2016 in the Rochester magazine 585; they wrote about music, and Spahalski asked Benson to tell his story. Benson put him, and his identical twin brother, into the book Killer Twins.
Kendall Francois, a former middle school hall monitor in Poughkeepsie, New York, was arrested in September 1998 and charged in the deaths of eight women from the area between 1996 and 1998. After a court fight over whether he could plead guilty before prosecutors decided whether to seek the death penalty, which reached the New York Court of Appeals in May 2000, he pleaded guilty to the eight murders and was sentenced that year to life without parole.
Claudia Rowe was working in Poughkeepsie as a stringer for The New York Times when she began covering the case. She wrote the first letter herself, WBUR’s Here and Now reported in 2017. The correspondence that followed lasted for years, by letter and by telephone, and included visits to him in prison. In one letter Francois told her he wanted to know everything about her. Then he set terms. For every ten typed pages she sent him about her own life, he would answer any four of her questions.
Rowe said afterward that the relationship troubled her, and that working through it helped her settle problems of her own. She described him to The Stranger as swinging between "towering narcissism" and a "deeply abject sense of himself," a man afraid to look honestly at what he was. She began a book in 2000, set it aside for years and published it in January 2017 as The Spider and the Fly: A Reporter, a Serial Killer, and the Meaning of Murder. Francois did not live to read it. He died at Wende Correctional Facility in Alden, New York, in September 2014, at 43, of what prison officials called apparent natural causes.
The bargain he proposed is the plainest statement in any of these cases of what a prisoner can sell. He had nothing left but information, and he priced it in pages of someone else’s life.
Kanae Kijima met men through Japanese marriage-hunting websites and took money from them on the promise of marriage, according to the prosecution and the courts. On April 13, 2012, the Saitama District Court convicted her of murdering three of them, Takao Terada, Kenzo Ando and Yoshiyuki Oide, in 2009, along with fraud and theft counts, and sentenced her to death. The case rested entirely on circumstantial evidence, and she has denied the murders throughout. The Tokyo High Court dismissed her appeal in 2014, the Supreme Court rejected the final appeal on April 14, 2017, and the sentence became final that May.
She had already learned to use the mail. On the day of the verdict the Asahi Shimbun’s digital edition published a handwritten statement of 12,328 characters that she had posted in advance to a reporter at the paper, the psychiatrist and columnist Rika Kayama wrote later that year. It covered her upbringing, her life since her arrest and what she called messages to society, and it sharply criticized her interrogation and the prosecution.
In November 2013, after ignoring an earlier letter, Kijima began a long correspondence with an editor at the publisher Bungeishunju and told the editor she was writing a novel, the journalist Taeko Ishii wrote in Weekly Bunshun. Once she saw that her writing drew attention, Ishii wrote, she produced large numbers of letters, memoirs and stories and seemed to lose interest in her own trial. A blog of her handwritten entries, posted by a supporter, began appearing in January 2014; the magazine Shukan Josei dated the diary to December 2013 and said the posts stopped in May 2018. Kadokawa published her semi-autobiographical novel in March 2015. In 2024 she announced the diary’s return and began selling paid installments of a prison diet diary.
She has also married in custody. Agence France-Presse reported in April 2017 that she had married twice since her detention in 2009, and Kyodo reported that she had taken the surname Doi. When the novelist Asako Yuzuki used the case as the starting point for her novel Butter, Kijima called it "a vulgar book" on her blog, The Conversation reported. As of November 2024 she was held under sentence of death at the Tokyo Detention House, Shukan Josei reported. For a prisoner in her position the post has served as press office, publisher and a way to answer back.
Manuel Pardo, a former Florida trooper and Sweetwater police officer, was convicted by a Dade County jury on April 15, 1988, of nine counts of first-degree murder for killings in five episodes between January and April 1986. He testified at his trial and admitted all nine. He was sentenced to death, and the Supreme Court of Florida affirmed in 1990.
On death row he turned to the personal columns. In the 1990s, the Associated Press and CBS Miami reported, Pardo placed lonely-hearts advertisements in tabloid newspapers, corresponded with dozens of women and persuaded many of them to send him money. Reports in 2012 put the total at about $3,500, and the press took to calling him the "Death Row Romeo." FlaglerLive reported that his prison canteen account held $3,530 that year.
His last letter was addressed to everyone. Before his execution Pardo left a written statement in which, according to CBS Miami and the Associated Press, he accepted responsibility for killing six men, said he had never harmed any women and wrote that the number of death sentences made no difference to him. It contradicted his own sworn testimony of 1988 and the jury’s verdicts, and in 2006 the Supreme Court of Florida had relied on that testimony when it rejected a claim that his wife could have given him an alibi for the deaths of two of the women. Pardo was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison on December 11, 2012. The written word, which he had used for years to draw money from strangers, was his last attempt to revise the record, and the record did not move.
Richard Ramirez was convicted in Los Angeles on September 20, 1989, of 13 murders committed in 1984 and 1985 and dozens of other felonies, and on November 7 of that year he was sentenced to death. The California Supreme Court affirmed in 2006.
A following had formed before the verdict. Young women attended his trial and sent him love letters, and some visited him in prison, the Associated Press reported. Lieutenant Sam Robinson, a San Quentin spokesman, said in 2013 that Ramirez had arrived acting like a rock star and received more mail than anyone else in the prison. In 1996 he married one of his correspondents, a 41-year-old freelance magazine editor from Richmond, California, in a San Quentin visiting room. She declined to speak to reporters. He died at Marin General Hospital on June 7, 2013, of complications of B-cell lymphoma.
Ramirez needed nothing from his correspondents and offered them nothing that investigators could use. His mail mattered for what it said about the people sending it, and for the uneasy fact that the prison delivered it.
Phillip Carl Jablonski was in a California prison for the second-degree murder of Linda Kimball in 1978 when he placed a personal advertisement in a newspaper. Carol Spadoni answered it, and in 1982 they married at San Quentin, according to the California Supreme Court. (The San Mateo Daily Journal later called her a pen pal he met in prison.) He was paroled in September 1990. Spadoni and her mother, Eva Petersen, had both said that they feared him.
In April 1991 the two women were killed in Burlingame. A San Mateo County jury convicted Jablonski on April 25, 1994, of their first-degree murders and held true the special circumstances alleged, including a prior murder conviction. In May the jury ruled him sane. At the penalty phase the prosecution called witnesses to his earlier violence, among them a woman who had written to him through a prison letter program; her testimony was part of the evidence the jury weighed before returning death verdicts on both counts on June 17, 1994. He was sentenced to death on August 12, 1994, and the California Supreme Court affirmed on January 23, 2006, describing two more deaths from the same months, in Riverside County and in Grand County, Utah, as other murders he committed, offered at the penalty phase. Jablonski died in his cell at San Quentin on December 27, 2019, at 73.
In his case the correspondence ran the wrong way. The letters were not a channel for confession or for a book. They brought two women into his life, and the courts later had to deal with what followed.
Read together, the letters sort themselves less by the prisoner than by the person on the other end. A guard got a manuscript and spent his life trying to make the world read it. A detective got a few lines of self-pity that confirmed what he already believed and changed nothing in court. A forensic investigator got a letter offering help and, five years later, the confessions he had wanted all along. A writer of paperbacks got a question with a date in it, and a woman in Illinois got her life back. Reporters got bargains, statements timed to verdicts and long careers of being written to. Women who answered advertisements got requests for money, and in one case a husband who would kill them.
The courts have mostly treated the letters as evidence like any other, to be weighed for what they say and what they leave out. In Rochester the outcome turned on what two short letters from a lawyer did not say. In Massachusetts the judges let a confession into the record only as history. In Florida a final written statement could not undo a jury’s verdict. The prisons, for their part, kept delivering the mail.
• March 1, 1928: Henry Lesser begins work as a guard at the District of Columbia jail.
• August 1928: Lesser supplies Carl Panzram with paper and pencils; the manuscript begins.
• June 20, 1929: Panzram kills laundry foreman Robert G. Warnke at Leavenworth.
• September 5, 1930: Panzram is hanged at Leavenworth after writing to President Hoover asking that no one intervene.
• 1965: Albert DeSalvo confesses to 13 deaths in the Boston area; he is never charged with murder.
• January 18, 1967: DeSalvo convicted on eight indictments in Middlesex Superior Court; life sentence.
• 1967 to 1968: DeSalvo writes to Detective Phil DiNatale from Walpole.
• January 4, 1968: Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts affirms DeSalvo’s convictions.
• 1970: Killer: A Journal of Murder, built from Panzram’s manuscript, is published.
• November 1973: DeSalvo dies at Walpole.
• July 1979 and February 1980: Ted Bundy sentenced to death in Florida.
• 1980: Lesser gives Panzram’s manuscript and letters to San Diego State University.
• 1982: Phillip Carl Jablonski marries Carol Spadoni at San Quentin after she answers his personal advertisement.
• 1984: Bundy writes to a judge in Washington offering help on the Green River murders; first meeting with Robert Keppel.
• April 15, 1988: Manuel Pardo convicted of nine counts of first-degree murder in Dade County.
• January 24, 1989: Bundy executed at Florida State Prison after confessing to Keppel and others.
• September 20, 1989: Richard Ramirez convicted in Los Angeles; sentenced to death on November 7.
• September 1990: Jablonski paroled.
• April 1991: Carol Spadoni and Eva Petersen killed in Burlingame.
• October 10, 1991: Robert Spahalski’s public defender sends letters to Rochester and Webster police.
• 1990s: Pardo places lonely-hearts advertisements from death row.
• April 25, 1994: Jablonski convicted of two first-degree murders; death verdicts June 17.
• 1995: Keppel publishes The Riverman.
• 1996: Ramirez marries a correspondent at San Quentin.
• 1998: Claudia Rowe begins writing to Kendall Francois.
• September 18, 2000: Tommy Lynn Sells convicted of capital murder in Val Verde County.
• 2000: Francois pleads guilty to eight murders; life without parole.
• March 4, 2002: Joel Kirkpatrick’s mother convicted of his murder in Illinois.
• 2003 to 2004: Sells, after corresponding with writer Diane Fanning, confesses to the Lawrenceville killing.
• November 8, 2005: Spahalski walks into the Rochester Public Safety Building and confesses to four killings.
• 2006: Kirkpatrick’s mother acquitted at retrial after the jury hears the Sells confession.
• August 2006: Monroe County Court rejects Spahalski’s argument based on the 1991 letters.
• December 12, 2006: Judgment entered on Spahalski’s five murder convictions.
• November 29, 2010: Kirkpatrick’s mother receives a certificate of innocence.
• April 13, 2012: Kanae Kijima convicted and sentenced to death; her mailed statement appears in the Asahi Shimbun.
• December 11, 2012: Pardo executed after leaving a written statement disputing the verdicts on the women.
• July 2013: Suffolk County prosecutors announce DeSalvo DNA match in the death of Mary Sullivan.
• June 7, 2013: Ramirez dies under sentence of death.
• November 2013: Kijima begins corresponding with a Bungeishunju editor.
• January 2014: Kijima’s prison blog begins.
• April 3, 2014: Sells executed at Huntsville.
• September 2014: Francois dies at Wende Correctional Facility.
• March 2015: Kijima’s novel published by Kadokawa.
• January 2017: Rowe publishes The Spider and the Fly.
• April 14, 2017: Japan’s Supreme Court rejects Kijima’s final appeal.
• June 9, 2017: Appellate Division affirms Spahalski’s convictions.
• December 27, 2019: Jablonski dies on death row at San Quentin.
• November 2024: Kijima reported held at the Tokyo Detention House and selling a paid prison diary.