Personal Essay

My Uncle Served 30 Years for Murder in Detroit

Part 1: The Convict’s Version

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It was about 1977, so I was just a kid, maybe 8 years old, when my mom told me about my uncle Jimmy. Apparently, we met once when I was a baby, but I was too young to remember. He was my mom’s older brother — half-brother, in truth, because he had a different father — and had led a very troubled life.

“You have an uncle Jimmy who’s in jail,” my mom told me one day. I didn’t have the intellectual capacity to understand the implications of what she was telling me at that time, and I didn’t ask many questions, but I was raised with the knowledge that I had an uncle who was incarcerated.

In truth, he wasn’t just in jail, he was in prison in the state of Michigan, serving a life sentence for murder. As I got older, I became intrigued by the existence of an uncle I had never known, and by the time I was a teenager, I had started exchanging letters with him. I always addressed my letters “Dear Jimmy” because that was the name I knew him by — my grandma and my mom always referred to him as “Jimmy,” the name he had used when he was a kid — but his letters to me were always signed “Jim.”

Jim and I corresponded off and on over the years, and by the early 90s I began to get more curious about my uncle…