PART 4: THE LETTERS TO HIS CHILDRENHe keeps three notebooks. One is for legal notes. One is for lyrics. The third, the one with the broken spine, is for them — Joann, Jaah, and Robert Jr.He says he writes to them every week, even though he doesn’t know if they get them.In one letter that was described by a visitor, he wrote to his daughter:”I know I wasn’t the father you deserved when I was out there. The studio was my home more than home was. I was lost in my own fame. I hear you are singing now, and dancing, and becoming your own woman. I am so proud of you from this small cell. I don’t expect you to come see me. I just want you to know I think about you every day at 3 PM, because that was when I used to pick you up from school.”He told his son he keeps a newspaper clipping about his basketball game from two years ago.”I missed everything,” he said in a trembling phone audio. “Their graduations. Their first heartbreaks. Their birthdays. I thought I was giving them a better life by working. But I was just gone. Now I’m gone in a different way, and they still have to live with my name.”The chaplain at Butner said Kelly asked him one question that stuck with him: “If your father made terrible mistakes, would you still want him to be your dad?”He says the silence from his family hurts more than the silence from the industry. Because fame is business, he now understands. But family was supposed to be forever.
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