Welcome to Double Take. I'm Les Silers.

Dear Juliana, first off, I think you have a very beautiful name. My name is Chad Skipper.

I am an inmate at Menard Prison. This is Juliana Chan Erickson reading a letter she received last

year from Chad. Menard Prison is in Illinois. My friend has signed me up as a free member on several different pen pal 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 prison pen pals.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 Menard

prison?

Like 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? No, no. I don't know what kidnapping is, but I don't know what

aggravated kidnapping is.

But she found the letter quite charming. So, Juliana wrote back, and they started to correspond.

What did, I mean, what did your family and friends say when they heard that you were writing to this guy?

Oh, I mean, they were very against this. They were not in favor.

I mean, most of my friends were like, get a PO box and don't give him personal information.

They were really worried that I would engage with them and then they would fall in love with me

and that I would send them money and gifts.

...