JULIANA: Oh … they were very against this. LES: What did your family and friends say when they heard that you're writing to this guy?

I don't know what aggravated kidnapping is.īut she found the letter quite charming. LES: And so did you know what aggravated kidnapping was? So I got this letter from Chad Schipper, he apparently was convicted of aggravated kidnapping. And I think that's kind of scary, because I'm like, Is my address floating somewhere? In Menard prison? Like, the prison, prisoners are exchanging addresses of women that are willing to write to them. JULIANA: I got a letter in the mail from a guy named Chad, who I had not written to, and somehow found my address. She found a couple of inmates willing to correspond with her, wrote the article, and thought that was that. So I reached out to, I don't know, one of these websites like prison pen. JULIANA: 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.

In 2016 Juliana was working on a magazine feature about loneliness. Your name struck me for some reason, so I decided to write to you.” JULIANA: “My friend has signed me up as a free member on several different penpal websites. This is Juliana Chan Erikson reading a letter she received last year from Chad. JULIANA CHAN ERIKSON: “Dear Juliana, First off, I think you have a very beautiful name.

Penpals tell me why live