Heck I wasted one question.Did John and Patsy find out the amount before the letter was written?
Each of them had an idea about it, in round numbers, such as 118. Or maybe 120. Or "over 100."
There was a woman who had been a partner in John's company - I'm not going to go into detail because I haven't thought about any of this in a very long time - but John fired her and I believe her husband was part of it, too. Don't hold me to that part.
They had lost a lawsuit to John for something and had to repay some money. It was divided into payments that she could make and she had paid it down to a balance of so many more payments, totalling $118,000.
It was believed that an alternate theory to the "John's bonus" theory about the sum of $118,000, was that *someone* may have been trying to implicate those people in the crime.
If I think of their names, I'll look for it. I want to say Carpenter, but that probably isn't correct. I don't have any of my reference materials anywhere where I could look it up.