Dear Dayly,

You’re right, I do get a lot of letters from crackpots and weirdos, but ‘Are you my daddy?’ is a subject that had not, until your letter, appeared among their writings. Regardless of the answer, your letter was a breath of fresh air in what is for the most part a monotonous stream of public grumblings and pleadings. Most people write to tell me how awful my crimes were, particularly the Inglewood massacre, in case the idea hadn’t occurred to me. Rarely if ever are these letters from actual victims of the crime; mostly grief tourists wanting to vent their supposed pain. Much of what I’ve received lately has been people writing to see if the $3 million you mentioned was mine, or if indeed there are other caches of my stolen money buried across the state. The find has tripled my mail intake.

It’s true, your mother Emily Lawlor and I had a brief thing around 2000. She was a bit of a young punk. Smart-ass, but sweet about it. People called her ‘Sneak’ back then because she was real light-fingered, but she mainly stole to support what I thought was a rather minor drug habit. I’m sorry to hear she is an addict now. I’m not surprised you have ‘mixed feelings’ about her. It’s a hard life, having been given up. My mother was a prostitute, and I was raised by my grandparents in Utah. Most people don’t bother looking into my history to try to figure out why I did what I did, but that was a big reason; the abuse and neglect I suffered at the hands of my grandparents and the feeling of abandonment when my mother dropped me on their doorstep at age six and drove away forever. You might be interested to know that I’ve been seen by plenty of psychologists over the years, and have been tested to have an IQ of 142. There have been no findings to support a brain malfunction or tumour or psychological condition to account for me killing all those innocent people that day in Inglewood. I’m just a broken man who was pushed too far.

So, yes, it’s possible you may have some claim to my DNA. Whether or not you want to confirm that is something you should probably think hard about.

I’ve never had contact with Sneak in here, and I’m surprised by that, now that you say she’s an addict. There are a lot of former and current addicts in here, and all they ever want to ask me about is the money. I hit a lot of banks over a long stretch of time. The theory is that if I was stockpiling money from all my different jobs, surely it would be stupid to put it all in one place. But even if there was, say, another large cache of money hidden in Los Angeles or its surrounds somewhere, none of these guys would be able to spend a fraction of it in here. There’s only so much commissary you can eat, and they’d be relying on someone on the outside to take care of the rest of it for them without running off. A lot of times these guys just want to know the answer to a question. Questions and secrets can eat away at you in prison, with us all sitting in our cells twenty-three hours a day with nothing to do.

Most guys on the row are indigent, meaning they live off what the state provides for them in postage, commissary and phone call allowances. Some of the more notorious inmates, serial killers for example, smuggle out pieces of themselves to a broker to sell online. My neighbour on the left gets about $50 on the internet for a lock of his hair. He’s got about six rape/murders under his belt. I have a broker who sells my letters for a lot more than that. People are convinced that one of these days I’m going to drop a hint about more hidden cash, disguised somehow in a letter. They think perhaps I’ll write a message in the first letter of every line, or gradually leak numbers that translate into longitude and latitude. I’ve heard you can leave invisible messages in paper with lemon juice. But I’m not that stupid. The first person to notice something like that hidden in a letter would be a guard. They read, scan and chemically test our mail, and there’s no way I’d risk one of those bastards getting any of my money. If I wanted to give some secret information to someone, it would have to be in person.

This is all hypothetical, of course, based on the public presumption that there’s more of my money out there. I stole a lot more than I ever spent or gave away, including what was found. But you know how ignorant the public are. They’ll latch on to an idea just because it’s exciting and romantic.

I hope you write back, but, like I said, think about whether or not you really want to know the truth of your parentage. I can tell you, some parents aren’t worth knowing. And think about selling this letter on the internet. A smart cookie like you should be able to figure out where. Some places, you can get up to $500 for them. At least, that’s what my broker tells me, but there’s no way for me to know if he’s holding back.

Take care,
John Fishwick

P.S. Why anyone would rescue a gopher or a pigeon is totally beyond me, but your photo is cute. You’ve got my eyes. Tell Sneak I say hello, next time you talk to her.