The Year I Was Pen Pals With A Serial Killer

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There was a year in my life when I was actually pen pals with a serial killer. The man was serving a prison sentence in Wyoming.

I had written about one of his many crimes. It was the kidnapping of two teenage girls. A crime that everyone was fairly certain he’d committed. But there were no bodies, thus no proof.

It sounds quite odd, I know.

Question: Why would I be corresponding with a serial killer who had committed violent crimes most of his life?

Answer: Because I wanted to know if he’d eventually tell me where their bodies were to give their families some degree of closure.

I would never have thought of myself being in that unenviable position. But that’s what happened.

The Crime He Was in Prison For:

This man was in prison in another state for kidnapping two young girls.

One 16-year-old girl he’d kidnapped managed to escape from the house where he had taken them in Wyoming. She ran to a neighbor’s house for help.

As they waited for the police to arrive, the man took the other girl, who was 12. They were gone before he could be apprehended. She was never found.

Just like the girls in Oklahoma who went missing from the Oklahoma State fair, where Royal Russell Long had been working.

We will never know how many missing girls this man might be responsible for.

But just three days after Charlotte Kinsey and Cinda Pallett’s disappearance, Sheryl Vaughn and Susan Thompson, both sixteen, were reported missing. The vehicle they were driving was found abandoned along a highway near Newalla, Oklahoma. 

They, too, vanished without a trace.

The Surviving Victim:

The surviving victim who got away later testified against Long. He was serving two life sentences when he was brought back to Oklahoma to be tried for the state fair kidnappings.

A forensic chemist testified about the hairs found, along with a bloody imprint. All was circumstantial evidence.

Without bodies, without the knowledge of the whereabouts of the Oklahoma girls, he managed to slip through the judicial cracks. 

During the trial, he taunted the parents, saying he was the only person who had any knowledge of what happened.

Definition of a serial killer: “The unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s) in separate events.”

For a variety of reasons, I became enmeshed in this bizarre and tragic scenario.

I had interviewed the family of one of the girls kidnapped in Oklahoma City. I’d published a detailed account of the day the girls were kidnapped from the fairgrounds.

And I Moved On:

And then another case caught my attention, and I moved on. I thought I’d gotten past what I felt that day, standing in that missing girl’s bedroom. 

It was such an eerie and inexplicable feeling, standing there among her personal things. Her bedroom was left as though she might walk back through the door any minute and continue her life. As if it had not been so cruelly interrupted.

Try as I might, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. 

Those poor parents had no closure whatsoever. It had to be hell on earth. 

And so it was, a few years down the road, that I got it into my head to write to this man in prison. 

I didn’t think he would write back. I figured he would blow it off. But he did write back.

What ensued was a year-long period during which we were, for lack of a better word, pen pals.

I’d asked my most pressing question (where are they), and he charmingly evaded the answer. But he promised more to come, so I felt an obligation to stick in there. On the off chance that he just might slip up or give a clue. 

Of course, he didn’t. He was too cunning for that.

He wanted me to come visit him and promised to tell me more about what happened when he met me in person. 

He claimed knowledge of what happened to those girls. So what could I do?

I was planning to go. But the authorities nixed it at the last minute.

What Do You Write to a Serial Killer?

And so what do you write to a serial killer, you must be thinking? 

Well, what you want to write, and what you do write, are two very different things in a situation like this. 

I wanted to ask him why he took it upon himself to cut short the lives of innocent girls for his sick perversions. 

But of course I did not. 

I was…kind, I guess you might say. Or I was as kind as I could manage to be without retching every time I held one of his letters in my hand.

I read his words, and I responded in kind. I asked my questions. He evaded them.

He wrote poetry for me. 

I was not impressed. I was sickened. 

Still, I plodded on.

A Woman Began Contacting Me:

Soon, a woman began contacting me who regularly visited him in prison. She took him things, creature comforts from outside the prison walls, and she gave him money. This woman said she was certain of his innocence.

I’ll never understand what it is about serial killers that attracts a certain element of women to them. They even marry them, knowing they’ll never get out of prison. Or that they’ll be executed.

A few years after I stopped writing to him, he died of a heart attack on the prison lawn. He took the knowledge of where those two girls were with him to the grave.

You have to realize that it doesn’t matter if you live in a big city or a small town in America. No place is safe from these types of predators. They will always find opportunities to get what they want.

And they won’t stop committing these unconscionable crimes until they’re incarcerated permanently. Or they’re dead and take their secrets with them.

Note: I wrote more about this case here.