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Register now at moveinmay.ie and get a free T-shirt. Move every day in May is supported by your local mokolle pharmacy. Welcome to Hidden Brain, I'm Shaka Rivitant. I did a story this past weekend for the public radio show This American Life.
The story was in an episode titled The Heart, Once, What It Wants. We're going to take the whole podcast today to share this unusual story with you. It's a little longer than usual and best heard in a single sitting, so we're going to give it to you without any interruptions. The story is about a con that unfolded very slowly over two decades.
The thing that fascinated me about the story is that when the con was finally exposed, many of the victims were heartbroken. They wanted it to go on. They wanted to keep believing. So here's how the con worked.
Guys around the country signed up for a penpal service. It would put them in touch with women they could befriend and correspond with. And then they'd start to receive letters. They come from Hillsdale, Illinois.
Some of them are white, pink, green. Jesse is a sweet, soft-spoken man with thick plastic aviator glasses. He started receiving the letters in 1985 when he was in his 30s. Back then, he was overweight.
He'd never had a serious girlfriend, always lived with his parents. After his mother died, he spent most of his time taking care of his sick dad and working at his family's restaurant. Jesse's favorite letters came from a woman named Pamela. I usually took it at the end of the day when I got him in the mail, went into my room and laid on my bed and just sat there and read him.
Dear Jesse. Deep down, you know as well as I do that you could be a lot better off than you are if you only had someone on your site. Someone who would help you, encourage you, work with you and stick with you, even when things get bad. What I'm talking about, of course, is a true friend, but that kind of person is hard of fighting today, isn't it?
Jesse had never met or talked to Pamela, but he was curious. He wrote back, telling her a little about himself. And Pamela replied again and again. The letters were typed in a ghoulish font and signed in a blue pen with big, loopy letters.
In another letter, Pamela wrote, Just before I sat down to write this letter to you, I was thinking how lucky I am that in this great, big, crazy world, I found you. I hope I can be part of your life for a long time, darling, and I hope as time goes by, I'll be able to make you happier and happier. This mystery woman seemed to know him. She made Jesse feel understood.
She made him feel loved. You can tell when you meet a person that they're not superficial, this is coming from their heart. Everybody's looking for that perfect love and everything. And this pops up so I thought, well, could this be something different?
LAUGH This was Pamela. He was mid-laged, balding and had a small grey moustache. His real name was Don Lowry. Was anyone difficult to come up with these characters that the characters bore you?
Tell me about it as a writing project. LAUGH No, I was looking for a grandpa in girls, and what kind of girl was this? Where is she from? Where is she?
I like to do it. It was fairly easy after a while. The first 40 were a little bit rough, but the next 80 were not hard at all. And you enjoyed making up these characters?
I love it. LAUGH Yeah, I love it. I admit that. Don died in 2014, but I met him in 2011 in a rundown house in Butler, Pennsylvania.
He was 82. If you have trouble understanding Don's voice, it's because he was a lifelong heavy smoker. The desk in his living room was covered with ash, his sofa, smell of smoke. Don told me he always wanted to be a writer, but his real talent wasn't being a hustler.
He always had a scheme going. In his early 30s, Don visited Mexico and wrote a traveler's guide where he explained how American men could live cheaply there, pick up women, and get by with rudimentary Spanish. It was all Mexico, Bachelors, Bachelors, Bachelors. It didn't sell.
And then he tried something most writers would never consider. He changed the name of the book's author, do a woman's name, sales skyrocketed, he said. Apparently, lonely American men didn't want tips from a guy, they wanted tips from a girl. Don realized there was a market waiting to be exploited.
He rented mailing lists from magazines that cater to single men and started writing letters to them, posing as different women. Men like Jesse were invited to join a club where, in exchange for a small fee, they could receive love letters. In a moment of inspiration, Don decided to call the women who wrote the letters Angels, Angel Linda, Angel Christina, Angel Pamela. He purchased stock photos of models and printed catalogs with photos and bios for each angel.
Angels came in different flavors. Some were compliant, helpless, and pure. Others were raunchy and sent nude photos of themselves. Most were young and all were eager to please.
Dream women for a certain kind of man, dreamed up, of course, by another man. In one brochure, Angel Linda Scott is pictured in a one-piece swimsuit on her hands and knees. Angel Christina looks like an idealistic woman. She's shown hugging a tree and holding a flower.
I prefer a certain type of man, Christina says. He can pick up a handful of dark, rich soil and feel a kind of reverence and joy. But he's awfully hard to find. Don mailed these brochures to men like Jesse.
If a man wrote back, Don began sending letters to him as Angel Christina or Angel Linda. Don told me he didn't want members who were just looking for sex. He wanted men looking for meaningful relationships who would be in it for the long haul. He thought this would be better for business and better for the marks.
The guy, his wife died, you know, and he was living alone. He didn't have any friends, you know, that kind of thing. He knew this. He didn't have anything or anybody else to cheer him up.
No, nobody. We did. These girls would boost their egos. You know, things like, oh, your handwriting is so masculine.
You know, these are like that. The little thing. Gave the guy a boost. And they loved it.
After a few letters to Jesse, Pamela let him know that the only thing she wanted was a little help. When darling, I want you to know that I really love writing you every day. It has filled a great need in my life, and I know I'd be very sad if I had to stop writing you and being your friend. I hope you feel the same way about me and my letters to you.
I think it's fair and reasonable for me to ask you to help with the expenses of paper, envelopes, postage, photos, and the other things I'll be sending you. If you could send me just $10 a week for my letters, I could continue writing every day as I have been. Jesse was fine with that. He figured he sent in $4,000 or $5,000 between 1985 and $8,000.
It wasn't a big deal to him. My business was prospering pretty well. We ran over $100,000 three years in a row, so there was no problem for me to be sending money and stuff, so... Pamela often sent Jesse stories about the two of them for a little extra money.
In one, Pamela and Jesse go on a picnic together. In another, he literally rescues her as a knight in shining armor. This one story that has them both lying on a bare skinned rug in front of a fireplace. And of course, it goes where you think it will go if two people are lying on a bare skinned rug in front of a fireplace.
But it's romantic, not explicit. The language is tame. The letter concludes, I lay beside you and whispered, Goodnight, my sweet darling. Let us drift away to paradise in our dreams and wake up together to a new and wonderful day.
I kiss you gently and fall asleep in your arms. Okay, obviously cheesy. Don Lowry was not a gifted writer, but he was a gifted manipulator. When I first heard about the story, I assumed the men who signed up for the letters from the angels must have been such easy marks.
So naive, who else would buy such absurd fantasies? But then I read the dozens and dozens of letters that Pamela sent Jesse. He saved them in a large binder, each letter in its own plastic sleeve. And as I read the letters, I started to understand the power of the psychological tools Don used to hook men like Jesse.
Most of the letters aren't epic fantasies. Most are about the minutiae of Pamela's life. She goes to the bank, she talks to co-workers, she tells Jesse her thoughts on televentumus. Over and over, Pamela tells Jesse how much he means to her.
She praises him, encourages him. When you read the letters one after the other, like Jesse did day after day after day, it paints a picture that feels real. I felt the Pamela the letter was a real person, and I knew Don was writing them. There were other tricks.
In one letter, Pamela asked Jesse to keep a picture of her nearby, as he read her letters, so he would feel she was in the room with him. Jesse put up two photos of her on the wall. She once sent him a dime. In that letter, she told Jesse she had just had a strange day.
Another driver bashed her car, but didn't leave a note. Just when it looked like the day couldn't get any worse, she lost her purse. Depressed, Pamela spotted this very dime on the street. She picked it up, hoping it was a lucky charm.
Later, a little boy showed up with her purse. A woman called and took responsibility for the car. Pamela told Jesse she was giving him her lucky dime. Here's Jesse reading from the end of that letter.
Keep this dime, darling. Let us always remind you that good people can still come into your life, and good things can still happen to you. And also think of this as a small token of my affection for you. If you hold it in your hand and squeeze it hard, you'll feel the warmth of my love coming out of it.
Did you actually do that, Jesse? Yes, I think I did do that and everything. Like I said, Jesse's mother had recently died and his dad had had trouble. He spent a lot of time looking after him.
He wrote letters to Pamela, confiding in her about his depression. She sent him heartfelt letters about bad relationships she had, and she told him about visiting her grandfather, who was suffering from dementia. That really took its toll on her, so I kind of bonded with that, knowing that she was going through the same thing that I was me and her, kind of more or less bonded more than any other person I've ever talked to. I was kind of like a beacon from outside of it, like if you were a ship out at sea and you were looking for a lighthouse, which they used that in the deal to look for the light and everything and guide yourself towards it where you know that you'll have safe haven.
I'm not sure I'm exactly following you. Is this something from one of the letters where they basically talk about the lighthouse? Yes, and in fact I got a little wooden figure of a lighthouse that she sent to me at one time and everything. And so let this beacon know that somebody's out there looking out for you and everything.
If Jesse had wanted to see it, there were plenty of signs the letters were mass-produced. They looked hyped, but the paper doesn't have the indentations that come from typewriter keys. The signatures look like they've been stamped or printed. All the specifics in the letters are about Pamela's life.
In the letters did Pamela ever ask you how you were handling your mom's death? Not that I remember. No, I don't think so. Did she ask how your dad's health was?
Not that I remember at this time. No. In fact, when I read Pamela's letters to Jesse, she never mentions any of the things he's told her. When Pamela talks about Jesse's life, she switches into generalities.
I know you're sad. I know you're lonely. I know you're having a hard time. The only way the letters are personalized is that Jesse's name is sprinkled throughout.
Autofill, like a mad lib sheet. Jesse, it didn't matter. He saw what he wanted to see. At the time, I wasn't really fully absorbing all of that.
I had a lot more on my plate kind of in turmoil with everything that was going on. So I just read him and kind of took some encouragement out of it. Did you ever have doubts about what was going on as you were receiving the letters? Well, no, not at the time and everything.
Like I said, I was glad to be getting letters from somebody. And even though you're paying money for that, because you have blinders on and not really paying attention to all of that. Like I said, when you're not the best looking person in the world, that somebody out of the blue that writes to you and tells you things and kind of build up your spirits and everything and stuff, because everybody looks at you and stuff. It's kind of like the deal with a hunchback of Notre Dame.
You'll never find anybody that will care for you, but they're at the end. You wound up making a friend with the people that befriended him and everything. At a certain point, Pamela became the thing that kept Jesse afloat when he had to work long hours. When he had to close his restaurant and rush his father to the hospital.
Yes, there was one thing that really kind me, touched me and everything. I was telling him, I'm ready to give up and everything. And she just told me, get back on your feet and everything. So that really was the word of encouragement and everything.
As Don went on, he realized his members were hooked and he could take the fantasy further, much further. He invented an epic world for his angels with a magical backstory and a fantastic future. Here's how it worked. The angels supposedly lived together in a retreat hidden away from the world, most were lost souls, escaping drugs and bad men.
These were men who needed a steady hand and a strong shoulder. As he invented more angels, Don came up with interweaving backstories. Some angels were good, some bad, angels helped one another, backstabbed each other. All the men who signed up to join the Lonely Hearts Club understood they were joining an organization of good-hearted men who were devoted to taking care of the angels.
The organization was known as the call. Don promised members of the call that they would one day move with the angels to a valley paradise into a giant building shaped like a naked woman lying down on the grass. This lady shaped building would house meeting rooms and other Toriums. The paradise was to be called Shondaza.
In exchange for their contributions, the members would have their needs looked after it, Shondaza. All their needs. At the center of the entire fantasy was a matriarch, a saintly woman named Mother Maria. Maria collected and managed the money from the members and she organized and disciplined the angels.
She was set to have mystical powers and could re-vergenize fallen women. There were photos of Mother Maria. She was beautiful. Maria's photos were actually of a woman named Esther.
She was Don's wife. Not all the members of the call believed in Shondaza. Jesse stuffed the letters describing Shondaza in the back pocket of the binder. He figured it was just some wacky idea Pamela had and just ignored it.
But there were other fish who found this hoke attempting. In my mind, I always held this area of, tried not to be convinced 100% about it. Surely it was too good to be true. This is Ken Blanchard.
He's a big gentleman and was another member of the call for many years. He was single when he joined and he was still single when I met him in 2012. What was the draw? What did you tell yourself when you said it was too good to be true?
Well, I think with me it was the prospect of maybe at least having some sort of communication with some women. Maybe my age, maybe a little too young for me, maybe even then. But it sounded like a neat idea to be on the leading edge or something like that. Oh geez, I don't know what else they were saying.
I don't know what else they were saying. I believed them. Don got hundreds of new sign-ups every year. Millions of dollars flowed back to Don's headquarters in Moline, Illinois.
He bought himself expensive cars, a Rolls Royce and Mercedes. He bought his sons and Esther everything they wanted. He got a big office in downtown Moline and operated a print shop. He hired assistants, salespeople and ghostwriters to expand his operation.
By the mid-1980s, Don was writing love letters to more than 30,000 men. We had lawyers, doctors, professors, mechanics, makers, you name it. All kinds of people were members. We even had a priest join the call.
Really? Well, there's not a Catholic priest. Yeah, a Catholic priest. What was he hoping to get out of it?
Who the hell knows? It was probably his board. To exploit this growing market, Don constantly experimented with new schemes and products. He started selling cassette tapes where the angels floated with the men.
He got into merch, monks, puzzles, commemorative coins, all with angels' faces printed on them. And we sent out a pillowcase with angels' face on it. I'm sleeping with angels' face on it. Oh, we know all of these like that.
The members weren't just sending in cash and checks. They were sending gifts. Can't send angels Vanessa a windbreaker? Others sent coats and shoes, even gardening equipment, so the angels could grow vegetables at their secret retreat.
Did you encourage them to send personal items? No, no. I hated that. Here's the guy, his wife died.
And she left all kind of jewelry and dresses and so on. Put him in a big cardboard box and mail it to us. What the hell are we going to do with it? Now, what you wanted, of course, was you wanted them to send a check.
Yeah, of course. Or money order or cash or anything. Did you tell them not to do it? Very subtly.
I didn't want to hurt their feelings. They thought they were doing a great thing for the angels by saying these clothes. I didn't want to hurt them. My dad would blasantly just have sidewalk sales.
Langeray and gifts and jewelry. This is Don Sun, Rico Larry. And my dad would blasantly just be selling the lingeray on racks in front of the print shop. He would actually put up racks on the sidewalk in front of the print shop?
Yep. My dad had a very sarcastic and wicked sense of humor. A local police officer told me men from all over the country started showing up in Malin asking where they could find the angels. If they found their way to the print shop, Don called the cops on them.
The dumbfounded police tried to explain to the man that there was no angel of Vanessa, no retreat, no Shondazza. But occasionally, if Don was in the mood, he'd actually allow them to meet female employees whom he had asked to pose as angels in photos. In time, Don even set up events for his most loyal members to meet the angels. He called them gatherings.
At the gathering in Chicago, an advice columnist offered dating suggestions. The comedian told jokes. Angels and yellow-green dresses leapt around on stage in an interpretive dance. Jessie went to the Malin gathering.
He was excited to finally meet Pamela. She looked just like she did in her pictures. In fact, she was one of Don's employees. And her name really was Pamela.
She greeted Jessie warmly. But Jessie's excitement was tempered by the fact that there were a dozen other men at the gathering. Jessie was shocked to find that every man thought he was in a personal relationship with Pamela too. They crowded around her, vying for her attention.
And then that's when it dawned on me and said, hey, this is not what I thought it would be or anything. That it was a ripoff. Well, that was kind of like getting a kick in the stomach. It was upsetting and everything.
We sent all that money in this net and the other end. It wasn't what it meant to be. Got you down to reality and stuff. Jessie knew that Pamela lacked music boxes, so he bought her an expensive one with a tiny record on it that played when the Saints go marching in.
Pamela loved it. He said she stared at it and let the record play. It went on and on and on. The other men stood around them and looked at Jessie.
They looked at Pamela. Then back to Jessie. He liked that he was making them jealous. Jessie didn't blame Pamela.
He wasn't exactly sure how the scam worked, but he was sure that the woman standing before him was the same woman who wrote to him. That she was the one who had read his letters. The proof? Pamela's dog jumped into his lap.
He jumped on my lap twice and everything. That really surprised Pamela. I guess she smelled my scent on the letters. I was writing to her and everything.
We got in touch with Pamela to see if you remember any of this, but she declined to be interviewed on tape for the story. She did confirm that she hadn't written the letters. Jessie made friends with a couple of other men at the meeting, particularly two guys named Lenny and Al. They were all like strangers who had independently watched the same soap opera for many years.
We got to talking about and say, well, why did you write on to this and everything? Instead of bonding with the girls we ended up talking to each other and meeting new friends and talking about the troubles we had. They were just like me and everything. So we stayed in correspondence like they said.
They wrote me letters and they even called me at my restaurant to ask me how things were going and everything. And flanging out asking about my dad and everything. So that kind of was encouraging to hear somebody calling to want to check on you and everything. In other words, they asked about all the personal stuff Pamela never asked about.
Lenny and Al stayed in touch until they died. What finally brought down Lowery's scam to an end was a woman named Susan Rasso. She was a model that Don had worked with. She'd gotten into a car crash and called Don for help.
He showed up at the hospital with a photographer. They unbounded her wounds and took pictures. They sent these to all the men who were corresponding with Angel Susan and asked them for help in paying her medical bills. But Don didn't give Susan the money.
She went to the cops. And she came to our office. She revealed the promises Mr. Lowery had made to her and broken.
The return that Mr. Lowery received was staggering in terms of dollars and cents. Mr. Lieutenant Kenneth Rexrod of the Moline Police Department.
He'd been aware of Don Lowery for years. He turned away many men who'd come to the police station and searched for the Angels. And he'd been looking for a way to lock Don up. He was very diabolical.
He's a sinister person. I consider Mr. Lowery to be an evil man. But thanks to Susan Rasso, the police finally had evidence to obtain subpoenas.
They raided Don's Prince up. They found out that some men sold everything in order to give their life savings to the Angels. One man lived out of his car and forwarded his Social Security check to his Angel. When the police got in touch with these guys, many of them realized for the first time that their treasured letters were written by a man.
What I was turned out to be angry about and more embarrassed about it more than anything was the fact that he was even involved. The only man involved was even involved. Again, this is Ken Blanchard who spent years receiving letters from Angel Vanessa. When I found out that these letters I'd been getting all these times and I thought it was some girl sharing something with me.
Well, then I found out it was him writing the darn thing. I thought, my god, what the hell am I getting into? But I can laugh about now, but I think at the time I get to have some feelings about that that weren't very charitable. Don's lawyers said that if members believed the Angels were real, that was on them.
As Don told me many years later, people believe what they want to believe. You cannot dissuade them. Most members believed the Angels lived forever and I never, never, never, long called to retreat. We told them they lived forever and they never grew old.
Does that tell you anything? Huh? Well, you're surprised that they believed you? Yeah!
Yeah! It helped me. I mean, I'm happy, so big deal. Don and Pamela were charged with mail fraud, conspiracy and money laundering.
The press mobbed the trial. Don was shamed in the press called a snake oil salesman in People magazine, which brings me back to what got me interested in the story in the first place, the thing that really surprised me. Many members flew from all over the country to show up at the courthouse in defense of the call, some stood outside with picket signs defending the Brotherhood. Jesse and his friend Al were both there.
As they waited outside the courtroom, Jesse saw Pamela come up. He rushed over to her. She was walking up and I noticed she was cold, so I took off my jacket and draped it over her shoulders and we walked all the way up to the courthouse. I was kind of like a security guard and after she went indoors I took my coat off and I backed off and everything.
Did she say anything to you at that point? No, not really. Members testified on the stand and said the call had been a critical, beautiful part of their lives. One man said letters from the angels saved him from alcoholism and thoughts of suicide.
Jesse testified too. This is him reading a court transcript of what he said on the stand. Well, it gave you, like I said, inspiration to continue. No matter what the circumstances that you were going through, that if you preserved, you could make it.
Do you remember saying this at the trial? Yes, I do. Would you say that you still stand by what you said at trial? Yes.
So here's the thing, Jesse. Don Lowry lied to you and sent you letters on behalf of someone else for many years and you formed an emotional connection with this woman who was writing to you. At the same time, you showed up at trial to essentially defend Don Lowry and I'm trying to understand how and why you did that. Well, like I said before, it wasn't actually defending him, but it was actually Pamela that was the one that we were all, we turned our attention to help her and that meant helping Don also in everything.
I understand that Don was really the mastermind of the operation, but when she showed up at these meetings and she presented herself as the same Pamela who was the Pamela in the letters, wasn't she lying to you? Well, I guess you could think about that that way, yes. Did you ever think about it that way? No, not until now and everything.
All of this has been re-brought out in everything. Don and Pamela were both found guilty. Pamela, so two years in prison. Don was in prison for ten years.
When I met Don, I asked him whether he felt he did anything wrong. I think I did something very wrong. I suppose I made it a little bit too real. I did.
I made it too real. Jesse lives alone now with his dog, Chewbacca. He's in his 60s and is still single. He's had some complications from diabetes recently and had parts of his foot amputated.
It hasn't been easy. My producer, Stephanie Fu, visited him at his house in Texas. He was in the hospital after my amputation. He ran around on my knees scooter.
He said, you can still do this. Keep going and everything. Remember those words she told me. Get on your feet.
I do that and everything will keep going. Wow. Even now, even today. Even today and everything and stuff.
But basically that line, you know, get on your feet. It doesn't really matter who wrote it. No. You think back, but it brings back fond memories of way back when.
You could be in your hundreds and everything or older. I hope to have this on my mind, on down the line and everything and stuff. Jesse still has a little wooden lighthouse. Pamela sent him.
It's on his dresser in his bedroom. And he still has two photos of Pamela in his den. One on the wall, one on his desk. In one, she's sitting in an office chair, hands in her lap, not glamorous or sexy or anything.
Jesse says, she's just sitting there, being herself. It's just a little something to say. I made a friend. Thanks this week to the many people in this American life and NPR who helped put the story together, Ira Glass, Brian Reed, Joel Lovell, Mattierny, Neil Drumming and Robin Semyon.
Also Anne Gutenkoff, Karamakalasen, Maggie Penman and the NPR Library. A special shout out to Stephanie Fu, officially she was the producer of the story, unofficially, I think of her as a force of nature. If this is your first time joining us and you like what you heard, you may want to check out Episode 3 of Hidden Brain. It's about a woman competing in a man's world.
I'm Shankar Vedantan and this is NPR. Thanks for listening to Hidden Brain. We have something really special to tell you about. It's a conversation with the author of the Robert Galbraith Mystery Novels, but you probably know her as J.K.
Rowling. Don't miss a rare conversation with J.K. Rowling on Puckulture Happy Hour, NPR's fun and lively roundtable discussion of movies, books, TV shows, music and more. J.K.
Rowling is on Puckulture Happy Hour. Listen now at NPR.org.Podcasts and on the NPR 1A.