By JUDY L. THOMAS
The Kansas City Star
Porter
In recent letters from prison, Dan Porter told a friend that he was about to be moved from segregation to the general population and said that no matter where they put him, he wouldn’t be safe.
“After me telling you that I was going to the hill and not PC (protective custody), I thought you would write more since after I get moved and go out into the yard all them stingers will be waiting for me,” Porter wrote to longtime friend Mike Hart, referring to a form of torture that he’d heard some prisoners occasionally inflicted on others.
The spelling and grammar from the excerpts quoted here are uncorrected.
“And I already heard there waiting for me in PC or on the hill. So I’m not safe no matter where I go. And most of all these guys here are never going home. So if they stab or kill someone what will they do to them? Nothing.”
On Tuesday, police confirmed that they had found the remains of Porter’s children, Sam and Lindsey, in a shallow grave in Sugar Creek.
Hart, a longtime friend and former co-worker of Porter’s, has written to Porter regularly since Porter’s arrest three years ago for the kidnapping of his children. Recent letters indicate that Porter was becoming more isolated from the outside world.
“What is going on?” he wrote in a Sept. 4 letter from the Crossroads Correctional Center in Cameron, Mo., where he is serving a 38-year sentence. “I mean where are your letters? Are you getting tired of writing or what?
“I’ve written Devin and Sarah (his half brother and sister-in-law) 5 times and waiting for them to write back. It’s like their starting to write less and less but then again everyone is writing less and less. Even you. Haven’t heard from mom for a long time.”
Then he made a request.
“Maybe you could help me out and get me some pen-pals from the internet or sign up yourself on some kind of dating service and fish for me some female companionship. They can be old and they can be so ugly that they have to trick or treat from the telephone. I don’t care if their old fat and ugly.”
Porter mentioned that he had recently acquired a “celly,” or cellmate, after being alone for 15 months.
“And we’ve been playing cards and the loser has to do 25 push-ups and we’ve been doing 200 to 600 every day and it sure makes a guy hungery.”
He also talked about dying.
“I’m getting word to Devin, because he is the one that they will contact when I’m gone and I don’t want him to have to pay the bill of the expense of burying me,” he said. “Just let this place cremate me and throw me in the ditch or what ever they do.”
In his last letter, dated Thursday, Porter complained that Hart hadn’t sent him a subscription to National Geographic.
“Well, you did it to me again there, Lucy, you pulled the ball away just as I went to kick it,” he wrote. “I told everyone that I was getting the National Geographic and one time you even said it was on the way.”
Then he spoke of a “project” he was working on.
“And I’m just about done. So you will know soon. Perhaps in another week or two.”