An Australian woman is waiting for her visa so she can move to the US to be with her new husband, whom she met when she wrote to him from behind bars.
Chloe, from Melbourne, was 18 when she started browsing the Write a Prisoner website in 2020 during Covid lockdowns after seeing TikTok videos of people trying it.
Her intention was just to relieve some boredom as she was in a relationship at the time and said she wasn’t worried about any danger as her pen pals were behind bars, across the ocean and would be denied entry into Australia.
Her family were less relaxed about their pen pal relationship, with one exclaiming: “Oh my God, Chloe, so you can get murdered?” when she told them.
But Chloe persisted and her emails with a prisoner named Rondell from Cleveland progressed to phone calls and then to her traveling to meet him in prison.
“I found my husband, my life partner,” Chloe said. The SBS feed.
The young woman, now 23, married Rondell during her last trip to the United States and is now making arrangements to move there permanently.
Rondell had been in prison for seven years for manslaughter when Chloe first wrote to him, telling him she specifically stayed away from inmates whose crimes were against women and children.
Chloe said she was writing to her pen pals in the US out of boredom during Melbourne’s Covid lockdowns.
Rondell was 19 and had been arguing with a 17-year-old boy when his friend pulled out a gun and shot him, according to 2013 news reports.
Both fled the scene and were later arrested. Rondell was sentenced to 14 years and his friend is serving a much longer sentence for murder.
Chloe said she took Rondell for what he looked like rather than judging him by his past.
“We got into very deep conversations very quickly,” he said.
‘We talked about all kinds of topics, what we wanted to do with ourselves, our goals, aspirations, our opinions on certain things in life, politics, global issues, things that I felt I couldn’t talk about with anyone else.’
The couple separated for a while during their three years together, but later reunited after realizing they missed each other.
Rondell is now free after serving 11 years.
Years later she married her prison pen pal and is waiting for a US visa, but others have warned her story could have been very different.
Another woman who spoke to SBS under the alias Sam told a very different story of her experience writing to an Australian prisoner.
She said the man charmed her and told her he was a patched-up member of the biker gang and that she was flattered to receive his letters.
Upon his release, she found him, but he quickly disappeared and then contacted her again when he needed money.
This progressed to taking away her phone, locking her in her house, threatening her with violence and beating her.
He has since been arrested again and police told Sam he was never a member of a biker gang and had previously been incarcerated for domestic violence offences.
If you or someone you know is affected by domestic and family violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732.