Benjamin ("Tony") Atkins: The jailhouse letters

After his August 1992 arrest in Detroit's Woodward / Cass Corridor, and in the lead-up to his trial that began in January 1994, Benjamin Thomas Atkins, aka Tony, was held in the Wayne County Jail. Besides talks with his attorney, Jeffrey Edison, as they worked on his defense, Atkins was communicating with others. One of those others was the girlfriend of his brother. 

Ben had been with his brother -- just one year older -- all of his life. They shared almost all of the same childhood experiences. They were at the same foster homes together, at the same inner-city home for boys together. They were together throughout Ben's childhood, right up until he began to wander the lonely Woodward Avenue in Detroit and Highland Park as an adult, when he went through periods of homelessness. Sometimes he slept at his brother's place for a stretch, but often he crashed at any of the many abandoned buildings dotting the landscape of this desolate urban area. Buildings like the Monterey Motel, where he left three of the women he killed.

So while Ben was always close to his brother, he also became close to his brother's girlfriend. Sometimes she was referred to as his brother's wife -- it's unclear if they were married, but they were together for quite a while (she has since passed on, in more recent years). Ben considered her his sister, and he referred to her that way. The closeness he felt for her is evident when you read the letters below, which he wrote to her during that year and a half he was at the Wayne County Jail.

(The name of Ben's brother's girlfriend is blurred out of these photos by me.)

"Not the Moma." Those of us who were around in the late 1980s / early 1990s -- what does that remind us of? A television show that was popular at the time, perhaps?

The letter above is the one I call the "Redrum" letter. In it Atkins very interestingly furthered an idea he had been presenting to the various psychologists who were evaluating him in his lead-up to trial. As the months progressed, Atkins began to talk about voices he said he was hearing in his head, distinct people who were living in his head, really. He had been asked about this in his initial interviews with police upon his arrest in August 1992, and he denied hearing any voices. But then, as the four different psychologists / psychiatrists talked with him leading up to his trial, the story began to evolve. First there was one voice, named Tony -- the most malignant and heinous one. Then there were two other voices, females named Mary and Mayolla.

It's the Tony voice, or personality, who is reflected in the above letter, the one that Atkins claimed berated him and egged him on to kill the women. In the letter, Tony steps in and writes to Ben's brother's girlfriend in the two blocks of thick black ink -- and this is in backward text. Is this real? Note the detail below, where you can see the backward text written carefully in pencil first, then traced over in the thick black ink. Would a demonic alternate voice or personality need to do that? What do you think? Weigh in on the comments for this post.

In the above letter (with back side below), Atkins elaborates on the torture he said "Tony" was putting him through. Atkins did actually try to hang himself in the jail but was found in time for it to not be fatal. Below, "Tony" steps in and addresses Ben's brother's girlfriend himself, but not with backward text this time. These letters are not dated, so it's not clear which letter was written first. Interestingly, in the paragraph below, "Tony" references one of the other voices / personalities, Mary.

Atkins did apparently like to draw, as show in the envelope for one of the letters.

So are you convinced? Was "Tony" real? I would love your thoughts in the comments section.

In my research for the book, I would crawl into bed with the files at night, giving them an initial read-through before photographing them for my records and further study the next day. When I came upon these yellow-ruled sheets of paper from a legal pad, knowing this killer had once held them in his own hands, it was quite a surreal experience.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

For a deep-dive of the Atkins case, see "The Crack City Strangler: The Homicides of Serial Killer Benjamin Atkins."

BRBates.com
wbp.bz/CrackCityStrangler
Murders in the Motor City Series