Kate had spent three years behind bars at Lowell Correctional Institution, Florida’s largest women’s prison, when the letters from Richard Rawls started to arrive.
Men had written to Kate in prison before, but this time was different. Although she had never met him, Rawls made her feel special. He wrote that he’d seen her mugshot online and couldn’t stop thinking about her. Somehow aware that she was getting out soon, he offered her money, a home and unconditional love when she was released.
The letters promised Kate a future she never imagined possible – a way out of the cycle of prostitution and incarceration that had defined her life after a childhood of chaos and abuse. Soon, Rawls stopped signing his letters “Rick”; instead, he urged her: “Come on home to your daddy.”
“When you’re in prison, all you think about is getting out,” Kate says. “The hours go by and it really hurts to know that nobody thinks about you in there.
“So when you get a letter it’s like a gift from God. He told me everything that I wanted to hear. He said I wasn’t going to be a prostitute any more, that I could go home with him and live at his house, and that he would be the love that I was searching for.”
When Kate walked out of prison, Rawls, a career criminal and convicted felon with more than 47 charges for sexual battery, child abuse, drug possession and assault, was there to pick her up. Just as he had promised.