by Erin Banks
CrimePiper’s previous article, “How To Write To An Inmate” remains among our three most popular, as well as most loathed pieces. Half the emails we have received since its publication center around the question how we even dare support the “lowest of the low” of society by giving them a platform. Yet others come to us looking for addresses of offenders not listed at the bottom of the post, or excitedly relay to us their interactions with their newfound pen pals.
Lately, however, there have been several stories individuals shared with us that have driven home the point there is more to address as it pertains to how to stay safe once one has come to the decision to approach inmates.
True Crime in general is filled with a colorful array of personalities. Some of them are victims attempting to comprehend the incomprehensible – the question why they were targeted and how they could ever repair their lives after the fact.
Naturally, extreme subjects also invite extreme personalities, and so it comes as no surprise that those with extreme emotional and mental realities would also enter the playing field. In part in an attempt to understand themselves, but in equal parts to find new supply, new victims.
Likewise, we know from offenders such as Ted Bundy that he enjoyed learning about his peers, even offering his services as someone with a “Ph.D. in serial killing” to Detective Robert D. Keppel and Dave Reichert when they were working on the Green River Killer case.
With the advent of social media, some inmates have smuggled more than drugs, sex workers or other contraband into prison. On November 4, 2021, the Facebook page AkademicsTV shared a video clip of what appears to be an inmate in his cell, teaching the public about how inmates use batteries in a homemade device to charge their smartphones.
From a few of my acquaintances who regularly interview inmates, I learned that they engage in a very dicey and uncomfortable dance of giving offenders a voice so that others may understand what prison life is like, of granting True Crime consumers an unfiltered look into their minds, and the concern that some of their readers or listeners would not be able to look past the criminals’ charm and their more liberal way of presenting the truth.
Some interviewers do not comment on this because inmates may be part of a larger network of people who also operate on the outside. One may only look at what happened to author Sondra London, whose life was threatened by Gerard J. Schaefer after they’d had a falling out.
Now, there are different sides to the business ventures some inmates may be involved in. There are those who write to them in order to then sell the responses to murderabilia websites, whose owners make a fortune off of these letters. Some of these owners correspond with inmates themselves, and share a certain amount of the proceeds with the offenders by donating to their JPay or sending money to their family’s and friends’ PayPal addresses.
On the flipside, some inmates may find themselves so swamped with letters that they simply lack the time or funds to reply. Yet they may still crave the public attention exchanging letters with others assures them, and sell the addresses of some of those who wrote to them to other inmates, who then pose as them.
I have witnessed friends excitedly put online letters they received from an inmate friend, completely oblivious to the fact that the handwriting and vernacular did not match those letters that were already in the public domain.
The same may occur with inmate artwork. Years ago, there was an uproar about John Wayne Gacy’s artwork when some of his pieces were found not to be authentic. Apparently, Gacy had paid fellow inmates as well as friends and “fans” on the outside to manufacture paintings and sell them as his. The story swiftly died down, and I will not comment further on why or how, but nowadays we see many of the same paintings that Gacy definitively did not paint shared on social media – and they’re still being accredited to him.
Gacy was neither the first nor last to perpetrate prison art scams. There are others who more or less sneakily sell others’ artwork as their own.
There are cases friends and I uncovered, in which inmates had access to a smart phone, flipping photos and art from Deviantart and similar pages vertically before running the photos through an app that would give the impression they were paintings. They then printed out the image in question to merely paint in the borders and/or background. In other cases they added some individual elements (horns, wings etc) with actual acrylic paint. The latter part also ensured that once the images were run through a reverse image search app, one would come up empty-handed. The offenders then simply added their signature on the supposed painting and sold it for up to $350. Multiple layers of acrylic paint sealer helped conceal the fact that the artwork was missing actual brushstrokes or just contained a few splishes and splashes of real paint.
In fact, some inmates do not even reprint or sign the artwork themselves at all, instead relying on friends on the outside to do so, working with a name/signature template that gives the impression the artwork was manufactured by them.
Several of my friends believed that they had nothing to fear by corresponding with lifers, yet one ought to remember that inmates may at times be affiliated with gangs, organizations or just individuals which also operate in the free world.
I’ve spoken to people who received a commissioned piece within one day of ordering it, for which it had to travel from one end of the US to the other. That is simply impossible to achieve. – So if you are among those who gave out their addresses, check whether the envelope was actually stamped. In some cases I know of, it wasn’t. Meaning someone on the outside went to the home address of the person who had reached out to the inmate and placed the response letter in their mailbox. Scared enough already? Good. Do. Not. Give. Out. Your addresses to anyone in prison or jail, or any of their friends on the outside. Period.
Some inmates own YouTube channels, or blog (the late Joseph E. Duncan III gained infamy with his “The Fifth Nail Exposed” blog). They may decide to write an autobiography or even novels to sell via their friends’ PayPal accounts. Be prepared to possibly read wildly exaggerated accounts of their crimes. An average antisocial crook may fabricate a story of how they were involved with a large crime syndicate that they single-handedly took down. Some will concoct stories of childhood abuse never before mentioned, or even disputed by their own families, to explain away their crimes. In short, you never know what you may be served when talking to inmates. Some may be genuine, some may have a deep yearning to change if they’re eligible for parole, but it’s advisable to always keep in the back of your mind that you may be taken for a ride. That doesn’t mean that the interaction was for naught, that it served no purpose. You just may have learned very different life lessons than you had originally expected. You are in the unique position of gleaning insight into how many inmates think, act and experience emotions.
So as for anything art, literature, letters, the same principle applies to anything else offenders might offer to send or sell to you. Some of my friends stated they felt safer purchasing items from murderabilia dealers. There are places, such as the Hyaena Gallery in California, which go to great lengths to try and verify that a painting was indeed manufactured by a specific inmate. Many, if not most, of the larger murderabilia sites also do their best in ascertaining that what they are selling is legitimate. However, not all of them do so or even have the means and time to do so, and not all are even greatly bothered by the fact that they might possibly or knowingly slap a seal of approval and verification on forgeries.
One of the people who shared with us their disappointment over having received an obvious print, rather than a painting, said, “Why would they even do this? I was upfront about what I wanted, I was completely honest about what this painting would mean to me, and they ripped me off!”
The simple answer is that once you engage in contact with someone behind bars, you entered the playing field of people who may be very skilled in manipulating others. Prison life comes with many pitfalls. The inmate whom you commissioned may have to pay individuals or a group of people in order to remain unharmed behind bars. They may have developed a drug habit and finance it by selling arts and crafts to True Crime aficinados. Or they may simply use the money to buy everyday necessities and support their own families on the outside with the money.
Most importantly, I would advise against confronting the offender in question if you came to the disappointing realization that you inadvertently bought a forgery. I know of one case in which this caused great grief to the person who made public they had been duped. They saw themselves face to face with a large group of the offenders’ supporters, fans and friends, who started pressing them to take down their social media post, and intimidated them further by threatening to pay them a visit in person. Even if you confronted the offender one on one, be prepared to be threatened, regardless of this person knowing where you live or work.
Once you start down the road of interacting with offenders, see to it that all your social media settings are up to date and set to private. Do not permit tagging, for a co-worker could publicly tag you and give away where you work and what city you live in.
Hide your liked pages and groups. Be careful about commenting on public pages, specifically local news’ pages, as Facebook in particular as a habit of “suggesting” these posts and your comments to your friends. The inmate or their friends may just be among them. If you post photos of your recent Thanksgiving Family Dinner, either make certain that the post is set to be viewed by people you personally know or at least fully trust, or that local brand names or store names are not visible on any packages, jars, plastic bags in the images. (And yes, this suggestion was sparked by an offender with Facebook access looking through a friend’s every photo until he could reliably pinpoint where she lived and which grocery store she shopped at.)
As for what inmates share with you about their lives, some of it you may be able to verify by browsing through their appeals, court transcripts, or by reading their psychological assessments found on pages such as Find A Law or Archive Org. Be prepared to discover that some of them still concoct “sob stories” in order to sway you to send them money or do them favors.
I once helped a friend of mine who was doing a stint in jail get access to an email address so it would make communication easier. What could possibly go wrong, right?
First of all, if law enforcement or prison officials uncover that the inmate in question has access to the internet, complete with an email account, it’s fairly easy to determine its origin. Many email providers log the IP address, the time zone and region of where the account was created. So whatever emails the offender sends out may still be logged with your time zone and region, even if they may be thousands of miles away from where you are located. If they ever engaged in criminal activity involving this account, you may run into unanticipated legal trouble.
In other words: Don’t be as gullible as I was. Now, I’m still very close with the person I did this favor for, and know I have nothing to fear from them, but don’t assume it will go that way for you if you approach an inmate, especially a violent offender or serial killer.
Related article by Victoria Hart:
Why Does True Crime Give A Platform To Offenders
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Header Photo: mix1051utah.com
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