Welcome to Double Take.

I'm Les Sillers.

Dear Juliana, first off, I think you have a very beautiful name.

My name is Chad Skipper.

I am an inmate at Minard Prison.

This is Juliana Chan Erickson reading a letter she received last year from Chad.

Minard Prison is an Illinois.

My friend assigned me up as a free member on several different penpal websites.

Your name struck me for some reason, so I decided to write to you.

In 2016, Juliana was working on a magazine feature about loneliness.

I just thought, I want to contact prisoners because I feel like they're the loneliest

people I could think of, and they have time on their hands.

So I reached out to, I don't know, one of these websites, like prisonpenpales.com.

She found a couple of inmates willing to correspond with her, wrote the article, and thought

that was that.

Then, in 2020, I got a letter in the mail from a guy named Chad who I had not written

to, and somehow found my address, and I think that's kind of scary because I'm like,

is my address floating somewhere in Minard Prison?

The prisoners are exchanging addresses of women in, they're willing to write to them.

So I got this letter from Chad Skipper.

He apparently was convicted of aggravated kidnapping in, so did you know what aggravated

kidnapping was?

...