All the attention turned Echols into a celebrity himself. One day, he received 180 letters from supporters. Another time, he was summoned to the warden’s office after women’s underwear was found in a letter sent to him.

Some of the attention made Davis jealous. With her letters, she had created a world for the two of them to live in together. Now it felt compromised.

“My love. . . . I cannot do this anymore,” she wrote. “I must stop before irreparable damage is done. . . . I cannot have these people in here anymore. . . . If I don’t stop I’m going to break, I am going to crack in more places than one.”

“I’ve been pushed, and I’ve pushed myself, as far as I can go,” he wrote her. “I’m on the edge of a cliff, tired, worn out, fed up, running on pain, hatred, anxiety, fury, rage, paranoia and contempt. . . . Sometimes lately I want to start screaming so loud you have no choice but to hear — WAKE UP! WAKE UP! — I see me screaming so loud it looks like the wind is blowing through your hair.”

He shaved his head like a monk and began studying Buddhism. His letters grew distant.

“I just want you back,” she wrote. “I don’t want the Buddha. I just want you to look at me. My name is Lorri and I am your wife, and you fell in love with me a long time ago with such passion.”

“My love. . . . You and I both know that the letter I got from you today was nothing but [expletive],” he wrote. “You keep saying you’re not a part of this world, but you’re far more attached to it than I’ve ever been. . . . I have no use for this world. . . . I have no place in it. I want to crush it, erase it. . . . It amazes me that you love it so much.”

The letter-writing eventually slowed down. She was visiting him in prison on such a regular basis that she would often arrive before her letters would. Grateful as he was for the support, Echols tired of corresponding with so many people. “I swear that I hate having to pick up this pen,” Echols wrote. “I’ve been writing letters seemingly nonstop, and it never, ever ends. I believe it would be worth it to break my hands just so I wouldn’t have to do so much as think about writing for a couple of months.”