Reply All - #64 On the Inside

Episode Date: May 12, 2016

For years, Paul Modrowski has been writing a blog from inside a maximum security prison. Only thing is, he was arrested when he was 18 and has never seen the internet. Sruthi Pinnamaneni reaches out to him with one small question that alters the course of her next year. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm PJ Vote, and I'm Alex Goldman. Hey, guys. Hey, Shrithy. I'm in Trinth, I, too, am here with a story. You have been working on a story for, I think, my whole life. That's definitely what it feels like. It started off really small.

It was last February. I'd been looking, I'd been trying to contact somebody in prison. this was for another story. And I just happened to stumble upon this thing that altered the course of my whole next year. It's a blog by this guy named Paul Madrowski. He's in a maximum security prison. He has a life sentence. And for years, he's been keeping this blog.

Where's the prison? The prisons call Stateville. It's in Illinois. What does he do? So Paul, he was linked to a murder that happened. happened back in 1992. And on his blog, Paul says he had nothing to do with it. But it's actually not at all the focus of the blog, which is why I found it so interesting. Like, you know what? Let me show you the blog. Yeah. Okay. It looks very unpolished. Right. It's on BlogSpot, which is like, and it looks like a BlogSpot blog. Like this was made using a template. Right. And each one of these posts is like super long. This guy likes to write. Oh my God. Yeah. That's just one post. And here's the whole table of It's like Ebola, the NFL under siege, the fireworks show, simple pleasantries, Malaysia, Flight 17. He's a blogger.

Potatoes and paranoia. Cosette tapes. Yeah, his range is pretty astonishing. Okay, so how does a person who's in a maximum security prison write a blog? I mean, they don't have internet, do they? No, the prison that Paul is in doesn't allow any of its inmates. to access the internet. So no email, no Facebook, nothing. So that's actually the first thing that interested me about Paul, the fact that he was able to make this blog from a place where

he couldn't see or use the internet. And so it turns out that he uses this arcane piece of technology called his mother. Hi, Linda. Come on in. Thank you. I get you something, coffee something. This is Paul's mom, Linda Medrowski. I sent producer Kalila Holt to meet her in her home in the Chicago suburbs. It's the only light bulb I got here. Uh-huh.

Okay. Is this lava lamp, Paul's lava lamp? Yeah. Linda is a 67-year-old retired accountant, and she lives in this stately white brick house with her husband. Kalila said it was just filled with Paul. You know, Paul's underwear and stuff are so weird. I bought him some new things thinking he'd be coming home for sure. Are these all his books?

Yeah. I like that it's like a book about Hitler and then Danielle Steele book. Nice, like diverse range. Paul was arrested right after he turned 18. That was 23 years ago. So Linda took Kalila to this old PC that she has in her office. I'm an internet addict. Yeah?

What do you like to do on the internet? Oh, I don't want to call a gambling. I'm real into the stock market. So I'm watching the stock exchange constantly. Oh my God, I invested in this one and it's going down. And, you know, it's addictive. And it's right here at this computer, this old PC, where Paul's entire blog has been published. Here's the way it works.

Paul handwrites every single post. He does it very carefully without any mistakes. Once he's done, he will mail the post to his mother, and she types it out word for word. And she gives it all this care and attention because she's just so proud of her son's writing. It may be how smarty is, you know, and so well written. This is a dead man's boots. Paul wrote this right after he turned 40. Since 18, I've languished in the maximum security prisons of Illinois.

During this time, all my dreams, hopes, and aspirations have faded away. Everything, in fact, I once valued, is gone. Regularly, I try to recall the past when my life had meaning, but those memories are blotted out by stark reality. There is no light at the end of this tunnel. Only a growing black void. I never wanted to seed the day my body and mind succumbed to old age. 40.

And yet now, I have gone the distance with nothing gained but misery, hatred, and immense sorrow. That's good writing. Yeah. Yeah, that's impressive. It's so from the heart. He's not a fake. He tells it like it is. So the reason that I got so into Paul's blog is not Paul's writing about getting old.

The reason I got so into it is because it's just filled with all this wonder and precise observation. For example, the fan story. That's a post about Paul Madrowski versus a small plastic handheld fan. One of the blades of the fan breaks. And in order to fix the crack, Paul needs something like super glue or tape, neither of which you can have in prison. Right. And so the way he fixed it was he takes the wires from inside the fan. He shorts them. He like puts them together to create little sparks.

He takes a cue tip, puts Vaseline on it, gets the sparks on the cue tip to make a little flame. And then he takes a plastic spoon, melts the plastic onto the broken part of the fan and fixes it. Oh my God, that's incredibly resourceful. Yeah. And at the end of this whole ordeal, you know, he spent half the day doing this. And then he writes, the blade did not look pretty, but if it worked, this is all that matters. The blade stayed together until I put the fan on high speed. It then broke violently. I surveyed the damage.

I could not melt it back together again. Mission Impossible, number one, ends as a failure. However, I learned of a man whose fan died, and I convinced him to give me one of his blades. And so I find myself talking to myself this way sometimes. Like I'll be doing something in the kitchen. and I'll be like, I take a blade out and I sharpen it. Really? And then I put it against the onion skin.

You know? Yeah, really, because I find it, I don't know, there's something about it. It's like there was a lot of emotion there, but that it was being kind of strapped in by these words. And so I spent the next week devouring this entire blog, like hundreds of entries. And just when I'd finished all of them, I see this new entry pop up on the blog. It's called my final post. After six years of writing this blog consistently, Paul says he's done with it.

There will be no more posts. Of course, I called his mother, Linda, and she was very upset. She just couldn't understand it. I wanted to talk to him. I signed up for the prison telephone system. I wrote Paul a letter saying, hey, I'm a reporter.

I'd like to talk to you about this blog. And then I waited. And I waited. And then a couple months later, this is July of last year. Hello. This is a prepaid collect call from... Paul, Adriolski. An inmate at... Stateville Correctional Census.

This call is subject to recording and monitoring. To accept charges, press 1. Thank you. Hello? Yes. Hi, Paul. Can you hear me okay? I can hear you fine. Okay, I'm going to do a thing that we always do when we start recording just to check the quality of your long.

line. Can you tell me what you had for breakfast today? I added some peanut butter. Some peanut butter. Maybe throw a sausage on there. Or maybe a... Sounds like a balanced breakfast. What's that? I said sounds like a balanced breakfast, ish.

So we talked for 30 minutes and it stayed exactly that awkward the entire time. My guess is that It's for this reason. As Linda explained to me, Paul is autistic. He was diagnosed as a child, and he doesn't actually talk about it a lot on the blog. He mentions it and posts here or there. I didn't know that much about autism, but at that moment, like, during that phone call, I thought, oh, maybe that's why we're having trouble. Or I'm having trouble really engaging him.

Right. Because, like, he, like, in person, or not in person, but over the phone, he might have a harder time communicating than like on a page. Yeah, exactly. He's in prison where it's super loud and he told me that, you know, noise really bothers him. And also, like, he doesn't know who the hell I am. Like, who are you? What's a podcast? So anyway, we wrapped up the call and then a week later, Friday morning 11 a.m., he calls me back. Hey, Paul. Yes.

How are you today? You don't want to answer me that. Bad day. Every day. Every day. This time the conversation goes much better. He's still a little stiff, but we're having him back and forth. We talked about his daily routines, and I asked, of course, why he shut down the blog. It turns out that Paul and his mother have been in this long, simmering argument, which just boiled over.

So just to refresh your memory on how this whole blog worked, Linda was supposed to transcribe the post that he wrote out. She's supposed to transcribe it exactly, type it into the computer. And then what she'd do, once she hit publish, she'd print out the post and send it back to Paul so that he could see what the thing looked like on the internet. Right. The problem was when Paul got this printout, he'd notice all these subtle changes. Like this thing he'd written, that was gone, or this other thing, it was softened. He'd been edited. So what he did was he would take this printout, mark it all up.

I'd make changes and alterations, and then I'd make angry remarks about how she took out this or she did this and that. And he would mail it back to his mother. And this took me a while to understand, but there were times when his mother would just flasked. out refuse. She'd say, no, I'm not going to change it. There's nothing you can do about it. So she was putting stuff up in his name that actually wasn't things that he said? Like, how deeply was she changing them? There were some things that were just spelling corrections, grammar corrections, and then there were bigger things. She blog that I'm an atheist. I don't believe in God. I've never believed in God since I've

been 13. I think I'm an evil person because I'm an atheist. No, I believe that I have more values then those hypocrites that believe in God. I refuse to say he's an atheist. I can't believe it. I won't believe it. I won't have it. And I am not going to publish it for the world to see. You know, I should show you the picture of him.

It is first of the communion. Walking down the aisle in church. Okay. Every Friday after school, we had Bible study. Every Friday. that Paul knows his Bible backwards and forwards. He was just such a good kid. No, I'm not telling the world.

My son thinks he's an atheist. It's a knife in my heart. I'm in this cage pretty much 24-7, and I do everything these guards tell me, and I have very little ability to express myself or be who I want to be. And Paul says that the one thing he had in this world was his blog. And now he feels like even that isn't his anymore.

I got to say, I don't blame him for being upset about this. I mean, he's in jail for the rest of his life. The only means of expression he has to the outside world is this blog, just this blog. And his mom is making what seem like totally arbitrary changes to it. Well, they're not arbitrary. They're not arbitrary. In her mind, she's protecting her son. Yeah, like a lot, I know people who could use someone not letting them post things on the internet.

I don't know who you could possibly be talking about. But it would also be frustrating. Like if I had to send everything I wanted to write online to my mom first. Yeah, exactly. And on top of that, imagine if you could never leave this tiny studio that we're sitting in right now. Right. It's like your editor actually feels like another warden in some ways. Yeah.

So Paul was understood. understandably very frustrated. These fights with his mom, they just kept escalating over mail on their telephone calls when she would visit. And it got to the point where he said, you know what, you think this is your blog? It is not. And I'm just going to stop writing it. And you know what? I want you to take this blog off the internet, like delete it.

And his mother, she said, no. It's a work of art. I won't do it. Is it like the fact that they're fighting over it, is it a containment? fight or is it like they can't have conversations because they just argue about the blog? So Paul actually says that this whole thing, it kind of wrecked his relationship with his mother. He couldn't talk to her, didn't want to see her. And when he and I finished talking about this whole fight, we kept talking.

Because there was something about Paul. He was just different than the person I'd imagined from reading the blog. and he was also different than my assumptions about a person who's serving a life sentence. So I thought, you know, I'm going to keep talking to Paul. Hello. This is a prepaid collect call from... Paul. This is going to be a really interesting story about a man with a really interesting prison blog. Hello.

Yeah. That was my plan. It seemed easy, straightforward. I had no idea. Welcome back to the show. Before the break, Shruthi and Paul Madrowski, a prisoner in Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois, started talking on the phone every week. So every Friday, 11 a.m., he would call me.

I would go run to the studio, hook my cell phone into the computer. Paul would be sitting in a cell, his cellmate just a couple feet away, and he'd be using a telephone handset that the guard had brought him into his cell. Paul would first wipe it off with a disinfectant. And then we would talk for an hour.

And we would talk about a whole bunch of things. I used to read a lot of philosophy. One of my favorite writers is Friedrich Nietzsche. Uh-huh. I heard of him. We would talk about his favorite subject, which is politics. Donald Trump, he comes off as a very strong person. He comes off as a dominating person.

Some people call him a bully. But I want a bully to represent the interests of the United States abroad. These conversations about Trump would generally turn. turn into Paul talking about race, about immigrants, about how they're destroying the country, which was a little awkward for me. I'm not a white person, as you probably figured out from my name. So I'm an immigrant. You're not white. I thought you were Caucasian.

I know you're from South India. There's a big difference between the immigrants that are pouring over the border and certain people such as yourself that have skills. as Donald Trump would say, they're not sending their bets to America. If I disagreed with him, I'd push back, and he started making a lot of assumptions about me. You like Bernie Sanders, admit to it. You're a socialist. I'm not a socialist. But I don't vote. I'm not an American citizen. Do you vote in India? Did you vote for the socialist party there?

No. Have you ever voted in India? I left India when I was 16. I've never voted. What a crime. We'd have these, you know, kind of, he was funny. He was funny. And this bone-dry way of speaking. I couldn't help but laugh sometimes.

So this goes on through August. I had one little bird that used to come to my cell. He would sit right on a beam on my bump. And he would chirp at me, wake me up. And then September. I was a Schwarzenegger fan when I was a kid, especially when that movie Conan the Barbarian came out. Paul had been sending me letters every week, sometimes two or three letters every week,

these handwritten, you know, long pieces of writing, which were very detailed, kind of like his blog posts, stories about his life before prison when he was a teenager. Hey, so I got your letter and I like how you put a smiley face in there? Yes, I never use them, but I did it. I laughed, but mostly because you used a smiley face and I thought that was funny. that you did? Because you're not, you're not exactly a smiley-faced kind of person. No. No. Over the course of these conversations, I noticed this big contradiction in Paul.

He'll say anything racist or offensive that comes to his mind, anything he wants. But at the same time, he's so concerned about how he comes off to other people. Do I come across is having autism? I thought that when we first started talking, you did have a way of speaking that was really, like, monotone. But it's really changed over the months. Like, I feel like now when we talk, you sound 100% like anyone else. Yeah, I noticed indifference. It takes me a while to connect with them, and then I'm more expressive in that way.

But to people of strangers, I probably do come off as very cold and aloof. I know that happened during my trial, my jury. They believe that I was so cold and indifferent, and I didn't care about this person. And then the state's attorney, in closing arguments, he went on and on about, look at his demeanor. Look how he doesn't show any emotion. He's looking through his eyes. He's sold. Paul claims to be innocent.

And this was the crazy thing for me to realize about Paul, that he thinks the only reason he's in prison is because he, holds his face a certain way or expresses his emotions differently. So how much did you guys talk about his case? It would actually come up a lot. And Paul would get so angry. It's almost like he would short circuit. And me, you know, I'm not a crime reporter. This is a show about the internet.

But at some point I realized everything with Paul just comes back to his case. It's all he cares about, especially now that he doesn't have a blog. And so last fall, I started to really look into Paul's case. And it turns out that it's wrapped up in one of the biggest cases in Illinois history. It's notorious. It's also really complicated. Every time I thought I understood it, the whole thing would change Rubik's Cube-like into a different thing. And it started off when Paul was a senior in high school with this thing called the Browns' chicken massacre. In the North Chicago suburb of Palatime, police are still searching for clues

in this weekend's bizarre mass murder. A door to the restaurant was open. The victims were mostly high school students who worked there at night. Somebody went into a fried chicken restaurant, shot the seven people who worked there, and put their bodies in a freezer. No clues. All the blood in the restaurant had been meticulously mopped up, and nobody had any idea why somebody would do this. The overwhelming emotion in Palestine, is still fear because the killer or killers have not been caught. I remember this. I was very young, but, I mean, I lived not far from Chicago, so it was almost local news, you know.

And we would get a lot of Chicago stations, so I remember it being on the news all the time. And they put the bodies of the people they killed in the freezer at the restaurant? Yes. So, okay, so this happened. So it's all over the news all the time. they're trying to catch the guy who did this. They have no idea, no leads, they don't even have a weapon. Shortly after the Palatine massacre,

police find really close by in the woods another body, this time with the head and the arms cut off. Yeah, and because these horrible crimes happen just within weeks of each other, so close together, people are convinced that who have, is behind this body, whoever killed this person must be linked to the person who shot up the Palatine chicken restaurant. It sounds so much like Fargo, like the movie and the TV show, like where it's just this

small Midwestern town and then horrible stuff starts happening. It feels like it's being like visited by evil. Yeah. So they, the town actually ended up bringing in the FBI. So there's the special unit of the FBI that deals with serial killers. It's the one, it's the same. task force you see in Silence of the Lambs. So they're brought in to help the police find the people who did this.

Months go by. Finally, the investigators get a lead, which takes them right to Paul's door. But that's a story for next week. Shrithy Pinnameney is a producer for our show. Next week, On the Inside, Part 2. The Bizarre case of Paul Madraski. Reply all is PJ Vote and me, Alex Goldman. The show is produced by Tim Howard,

Shruthy Pinnamini, Fia Bennon, and our brand new producer, Chloe Percinos. Chloe, welcome to the show. Sorry that we worked so much. We're edited by Peter Clowney. Production assistants by Mervin de Gagnos. Our show was mixed by Rick Kwan. Matt Lieber is the salsa dancer emoji.

Special thanks this week to Sue Basko and Kalila Holt. Our theme music is by Bracemaster Cylinder, and our ad music is by Build Build Buildings. On Saturday, May 21st, in New York City, I will be doing a live conversation with comedian Paul Shear, who you might know from the How Did This Get Made podcast and the league and a million other amazing things. It's part of New York Magazine's Vulture Fest. And you can get tickets by going to our website or just by Googling Vulture Fest reply all.

You should come. It'll be a lot of fun. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.