I FELL IN LOVE WITH A KILLER

Louise Burt, 55, struck up an unlikely relationship with a man serving life

As I scrolled through the profiles online, I stopped by a friendly-looking face. ‘He looks nice,’ I thought, reading Joshua’s bio. It was February 2018 and I was enjoying a day off from my work as a carer. I loved my job, and got great joy out of helping and caring for others. It had become a passion of mine. I’d even got a cat just so that I had someone at home to care for. My two grown-up sons had long left the nest, and single, I wanted to spend my free time doing something that I felt was making a difference. And now, as I scrolled through Joshua’s profile, I was hoping I could do just that. But the profile wasn’t for a dating website, it was for pen pals. For prisoners.

Joshua was an inmate at a prison in America and was looking for people to write to in order to combat his loneliness.

I’d come across the pen-pal website writeaprisoner.com after reading up about the controversial case of Gary Tyler, a 16-year-old sent to death row for the 1974 murder of a 13-year-old boy. He’d spent 41 years locked up, avoiding the electric chair after the US Supreme Court ruled the Louisiana death penalty unconstitutional. He was released in 2016.

The case had fascinated me and made me wonder how hard it must have been for him locked up for all those years, frightened and alone. Had he had someone to talk to? My curiosity had led me to researching pen pals for prisoners, and now here I was, ready to write to an inmate myself.

MAKING CONTACT

Joshua’s profile had caught my eye. He was 35, serving a life sentence in Ohio, and had warm brown eyes and a kind smile. With nothing to lose, I sent him a message, telling him who I was and that I was interested in writing to him.