Alleged Killer Is Still Scholar’s Prison Pen Pal

The letters from a New York jail arrive with surprising regularity at the Pennsylvania home of college professor Peter G. Jones. But what surprises Jones even more is that he continues to answer the letters from inmate Keith Eugene Goodman.

“After six years of writing, you just don’t quit,” Jones said in a recent telephone interview from Pittsburgh. “I felt a kind of responsibility, it’s a responsibility you get after writing to someone for so long.”

The relationship between academician and prison inmate began in 1984 when Jones, 58, responded to an ad Goodman had placed in a publication while an inmate at an Indiana prison. It was interrupted, at least temporarily, when police SWAT teams poured into Jones’ rented South Laguna home while he was on a yearlong sabbatical last Jan. 15 and arrested Goodman, 30, who had been paroled from the Indiana prison. Goodman and two companions were accused of stalking Goodman’s prison pen pals, then robbing and killing them.

“In my defense, I’m not a stupid person,” Jones said.

But the scholar, who teaches English at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie-Mellon University, acknowledges that for better or for worse, he has responded to all three of the letters sent by Goodman since the arrests.

Murdered men in Mississippi and New York, some of whom were homosexual, were among an estimated 20 to 25 pen pals with whom Goodman had corresponded while in prison in Indiana, authorities said. In fact, at the time of the arrests, police believed that Jones was going to be the next victim.

Goodman and Jon Christopher Mead, 22, have been charged in Broome County, N.Y., with the murder of Harold Williams, 60, who was shot and stabbed to death about Dec. 17, 1989, in his Windsor, N.Y., home. Authorities in New York said Williams had paid a $500 phone bill that he had accumulated by taking collect calls from Goodman, and sent the inmate as much as $300 over the course of their correspondence.

Mead’s first trial for murder ended in a mistrial, said Broome County Dist. Atty. Gerald Mollen. Goodman’s trial is scheduled for Oct. 27.

Mead’s girlfriend, Tracy Lynn Holland, 21, who was also arrested in Orange County, remains in custody on charges of possessing a stolen car and being a fugitive from justice in Mississippi.

Despite the charges, and amid growing doubts about Goodman, Jones said he still feels compelled, in part out of loyalty and understanding, to answer the inmate’s letters. Jones said he paid “substantial” sums to lawyers who helped Goodman win an early release from prison. But any further contributions to Goodman are out of the question, Jones said.

And Goodman hasn’t stopped asking, Jones said. In fact, Goodman’s letters, though still filled with some of the hate and sense of deprivation that had piqued Jones’ initial interest, also state in grim terms that despite the charges, Goodman was willing to spare Jones.

“You had nothing to worry about and nothing was going to happen to you,” says one letter. While another reads: “If I wanted to kill you, I could have.”

Authorities said the other victims in addition to Williams were R.C. Vaughn, 49, and his roommate, Richard Ray Thomas, 29, shot in their Fulton, Miss., home on Jan. 7, and Tommy Lee Mayhall, who lived 10 miles away from Vaughn and Thomas and was also killed on Jan. 7.

When Goodman was arrested in Orange County, police found several credit cards belonging to 41-year-old Robert S. Sibert, who was fatally shot Oct. 21 in Tennessee. One of six weapons in Goodman’s possession, investigators said, matches the description of a .380-caliber, semiautomatic pistol used in Sibert’s murder.

Mollen said that Mississippi prosecutors intend to prosecute Goodman and Mead for the murders in that state, which could mean the death penalty.

If found guilty in New York, where there is no death penalty, Goodman and Mead, who have been charged with burglary, robbery and murder, could receive a maximum of 25 years to life imprisonment, Mollen said.

Finding an impartial jury for Mead’s retrial may be difficult, said Mead’s court-appointed attorney, Vincent P. Accardi. It was Accardi’s objection to the prosecution’s introduction of testimony about the Mississippi murders while being tried for the New York killing that prompted the trial judge to declare a mistrial.

For Jones, whose world “crumbled,” when police walked in and arrested Goodman, the correspondence between him and Goodman will continue.

“I didn’t get killed. I guess if I got killed you can make all sorts of suppositions, and that has been the hardest thing for me to consider,” Jones said.