Gabriel's Blog Post

This post, a prisoner backstory, was inspired by our virtual tour of Eastern State Penitentiary. 

The facts: Laraden Henry was convicted of murder and sentenced to a minimum of nineteen-years imprisonment. After serving four years, Henry died from a brain disease brought on by epilepsy. 

The backstory:

It was a cold, rainy morning in York, England. The year was 1899, and Mrs. Henry gave birth to me, the notorious killer Laraden Henry. I lived down a narrow, cobbled street, with hardly even a roof over my head. There were five other boys that also lived on our street. Our parents didn’t have enough money to send us to a private school, so we all went to the local public school down the street. However, even though we were financially struggling, we still found ways to have fun on this dirty, worn out street. After school, we would meet up together on the corner, walk to the main city, then separate to pickpocket the men returning from work. After about an hour, we would meet up on the corner and then go to the store and buy rubber balls. We had a makeshift bat and we would set up rubbish bins for our bases. We ran and laughed around the bases, and we had so much fun that sometimes we would play all through the night and into the next morning.

It all suddenly changed when I turned 13. My dad got a job in America and I was forced to leave my family, friends, and memories behind to pursue a new life in America. We settled down in a small city Omaha, Nebraska. When we arrived, everything was new to me. The food, accent, culture, I mean everything was different. In Nebraska, I envied the other kids' joy. The only way I could become happy was to see people feel the same pain I felt having my childhood taken away from me. As I got older, I started to see these visions, an inner voice telling me to hurt people that were happier than me.

When I turned 18, I left Nebraska and moved to St. Louis, Missouri. I began to work in a coal mine and it was there that I met my first victim. John Di Angelo and I worked a late shift every Thursday night and began to develop a good friendship, at least that’s what he thought. One night it was just John and me alone in the mine. We were making sure everything worked because the mine needed 24-hour maintenance. It was also required that at the mine, everyone should wear a mask because the conditions were very harsh. I tiptoed up behind John while he was making sure everything was working right, and I got my shirt and strangled him till he made no sound. I then got a rock and crushed it up, until it was a very smooth powder that could go in his lungs to make it look like he died choking on coal debris.I then placed his mask in a different part of the cave to make it look like he had lost his mask. 

I later moved away again to Charleston, South Carolina. Surprisingly, I was reunited with one of my childhood friends. We talked and caught up with each other, and it was there where I confessed what I had done, and how it was only because of the voice inside my head. Later that night, he ended up telling the sheriff. At approximately 1:00 a.m., the cops took me to the local county jail. They tried me the next week for murder and I was proven guilty. I was convicted and sentenced to 19 years at the Eastern State Penitentiary. While I was there, it was cold and lonely. I was put in solitary confinement and it was the scariest place to be at night. The voices in my head became a reality, and ghosts wandered the halls at night. There were screams that were so scary, you couldn’t tell if they were real or not. My brain couldn’t control it anymore, and the voice in my head put me to sleep.