ANTIQUE BRASS TABLE LAMP

No childhood

I started my life in child care, I'm not going to go into details because they're too horrendous what happened to my Mum at fifteen but I was a product of something that happened to her and I was placed in care and I went through the care system from birth.

I was a bit of a dysfunctional child and got into behavioral problems and at ten I spent three years in isolation, in a cell, some of you might know Stanford House closed unit?

It was a proper cell, concrete bed, concrete mattress - the whole thing - so kids can't hurt themselves and burn their cell down.

That very year I started to get an awful lot of hate and anger toward this world.

At ten years of age, I look at my son when he was ten and try to put him in the situation I was in.

And, I don't know, I kind of walked the cell and had panic attacks. I thought I was gonna die, I couldn't breath.

There was no love in there, absolutely no love.

The food was good and you had a colour TV and the ping-pong table but, you know, who wants that? I ten year old boy wants love and I started to get a lot of hate and anger.

When they let me out of that cell and it was a proper cell with two steel doors, not one but two.

Because most kids scream and kick and make and noise so they put a steel door on then they put a wooden door on so that you couldn't be heard.

When they opened that door I came out at thirteen and I wanted to get back at society and I went out and I went on a rampage and I think really now, looking back, I think the devil just grabbed hold of me in that cell and he used me and I went out there and I wanted to destroy everything that was in my path.

I started burgling and stabbing people and I carried a knife and I was doing armed robberies and I was doing all sorts of stuff.

Burglary gave me a fantastic adrenalin buzz. It just kind of fed an addiction that I had and it overtook my life. I've gone though four marriages.

I've lost count of how many children I've got. I've done twenty five years of prison life. Because of my behavioral difficulties, the prison system put me in solitary confinement.

I done twelve years on and off in solitary and I found that rather comfortable after the three years that I done I was more used to solitary than I was in the main wing.


My friend Paul, a heroin addict.

That's my early life and I'll bring you up to where I am today. I have a friend and his name is Paul a very good friend of mine, he was a heroin addict.

Some days he was doing a thousand pound a day on heroin.

If you wonder where he was getting the money, me and him kind of designed a way to open telephone boxes and we were going through this country like wild fire.

We were opening phone boxes and you know not ripping them off and doing the silly things that they do but we used our brain and we took a telephone box home and we opened it and we found how you opened a box and we could actually open a box under ten seconds and we kind of went through the whole country and we was literally on about three or four thousand pound a day.

He was a heroin addict and I lived a compulsive lifestyle - addiction - mine went on women, clothes, holidays, clothes, jewellery, gambling and the occasional drugs as well. That came to an end, by the way, because they reinforced the doors on the phone boxes and you can now no longer get through, so that come to an end.

Rob a Christian camp

Paul phoned me up one night and said that a friend of his had invited him to a Christian camp, which was Faith Camp, in Peterborough.

He was going to go down with a friend, the sun was shining, he had all of his heroin, he'd settled himself in for the week and he was looking forward to going camping.

He was going to send me the information back, you know, whether we could go down there and rob everybody.

I'd kind of said that, you know, that it's gonna be easy because everybody was gonna be over in the main conference place, 'cos he's told me over the phone what it's like and I said, “Well, just go there with a Stanley knife and kind of cut a hole in the tent, get in and get out and we can do hundreds of them.”

I was on bail at the time. I'd just been arrested on possession of heroin with intent to supply - it was a large amount of heroin.

I'm looking at between a five and eight year sentence, definitely going to prison.

I got me wife and I think I had three children then. It didn't bother me in the slightest. I was quite looking forward to going back to prison.

You know, my friends, my family were just as much in prison as they were out of prison. I lived in a criminal world, so I kind of looked forward to going back to prison.

Anyway, no phone call came from my friend Paul. Monday had come, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.

I was starting to really get annoyed, thinking typical heroin addict, he's nicked everything there for himself and he's not got back to me - but that's what heroin addicts do, you know, they’re very selfish

This is a better representation of the of the original slide - a wonderful picture of what looks to be a great Road Trip.

Note the Falstaff Beer box on the table and the 7-up cooler. There is the head of a large duck toy in the passenger window.

Looks like two hot dogs and one hamburger on the grill. Wooden camp box on table looks homemade.

From family slides Joanne found in her garage in Bonner Springs KS.

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