Mr. Apology

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Join us at patreon.com/criminal. Now, here it is. One of our very favorites from 2024. Mr. Apology. This is Apology. Apology is not associated with the police or any other organization,

but rather is a way for you to tell people what you've done wrong and how you feel about it. All statements received by Apology will be played back to the public, so please do not identify yourself. Talk for as long as you want. Thank you. My first impression was that he was good-looking and tall.

I'm very tall. And in my mind, I always had my mother's ammunition to find a tall husband.

And so I liked the fact that he was tall. And he asked me questions about myself. And that was something that a lot of men didn't do. I mean, it was more like the time of quick hookups. And he really wasn't like that.

In 1980, Marissa Bridge met her future husband Alan Bridge at a bar in New York. Marissa says they were both artists and got along right away. And they ended up talking for hours about everything, including their work. He mentioned something about an answering machine, and I didn't know anybody that had an answering machine.

It was new technology back then. But so I really, and I didn't really care that much. I was into him. And I actually went home with him that night. And we drove on these bumpy streets in Lower Manhattan. He took me to this loft on 28th street.

And I'd never been in a space like that.

And I really didn't see too much of anything. It was late. It was probably two or three in the morning. Everything was dark. But I remember a red light that was blinking on this little object, which was the answering machine I found out later. Did he check the messages?

He did. He did. Yes, but he didn't really explain himself too much. And it wasn't till probably a week or two later that he played the tapes for me. And then I really got what he was doing and I was really blown away. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal.

“So what happened that the week later when you finally heard the messages?”

Well, I was over at his apartment for dinner and he said I want to play you some calls that came in. And I said, OK, great. And all the lights he turned all the lights off. It was after dinner and he put the answering machine on.

And the first one that I heard was a teenage runaway.

And how she ran away from home and she was living on the streets of New York. And she felt that she maybe had made a mistake. She felt very lonely. Hi. Oh.

I love her now. I want to say something kind of sorry that I left. She was 15 enough.

“So I remember in this paper when I said I had a call because it's like,”

I mean, you walk around with the streets all the more. Just look at some of the things that I say. Hey. What a place to go. You don't want me. I can be fooled then.

That's all I want.

Yes, I take up to the time of the day.

But I started to walk. And that struck me so deeply because. Um. Back then, this was 1980. Uh, there was no way to hear anything like that.

Unless you are priest in a confessional. I mean, there was no. Computers. There were no cell phones. Uh. Answering machines which could record a voice were very new.

So it was extraordinary to hear someone's inner thoughts. And it, it just blew me away that he had somehow set up a system where this young woman felt free enough to speak that personally about her life and her situation. Alan had printed 1500 posters with the phone number. Alan put the phone number out on telephone poles in subway stations.

However, he could in New York City and invited people to call and apologize. The poster said, um, attention criminals, blue collar white collar.

“It is the people you must apologize to, not to the state, not to God.”

Get your misdeeds off your chest, call apology. The poster Alan printed also warned callers that their calls would be recorded, and that they shouldn't identify themselves. Then should call from a payphone so they couldn't be traced. And there was taxed in italics that read,

"A apology is a private experiment. It is not associated in any way with any police, governmental, religious, or other organization." "Just above a row of tear-off numbers," it said. "When you call, you will be alone with a tape recorder."

And that poster struck people.

And right away, the first night that he put posters up, he got calls.

And it was a service that he gave to people because he himself had been a petty criminal. He started shoplifting. I believe when he was in art school.

“And he started shoplifting art books and art supplies.”

And he kept it up through college and through his 20s and into his early 30s. When he decided to stop, he made a mechanical sculpture that he called crime time. The sculpture was a box that you could stick your hand into to try to steal a marble.

To do it, you had to spin a wheel of chance. Depending on the results of the spin, you'd either get away with the crime and get to remove a marble from the box, or you would get caught,

and your hand would get stuck. "Hi, Emily, to apologize when I used to be a bailman. I had a job with between Smash Bros. and college. And it was sort of a bail.

But nobody really bothered, but we did or anything. A lot of times I was just throw it away. Just toss out the people's mail. Not really caring whether or not they got their letter.

'Cause I just hated the job so much. I don't know if any people ever played or whatever happened. 'Cause I didn't even, it was just a summer job to be, but I just liked to apologize to people. They didn't get now.

Like if they had a bullet in letters or bills, or it's just, you know, I feel bad about having done it. But when I did it, I didn't realize, you know, how to do better affect on somebody, so it's not like what they're about.

So I'm just to apologize for that.

And I'm sorry for when I went over to visit my grandmother.

I was, I went over to a friend's house. And he had a cute little dog. And we were playing with it.

“And all of a sudden, he started to attack me.”

And so I tried to keep hitting it with a stick. And I'm sorry I did that. Bye. When you would go over there in the early days, could you even, could you get away from the phone ringing or what,

what did it look like? Uh, well, the, the loft was a big open space. And Alan's bedroom was separated from the living room, only by like a six foot bookcase.

So it didn't even go to the ceiling. So, uh, it was, it was open.

And the apology line sat on that bookcase.

And Alan had cut out a hole on the back of the bookcase where his bed was. And he, uh, made a Louvre door. So he could open the Louvre door any time day or night when he was in bed. And attend to the apology line answering machine.

So the machine was, was there. It was in the living room. It was in the bedroom. And it was on all the time. It was on 24/7.

So there was no getting away from it. And we would be sleeping in his bed. And if a call came in in the middle of the night, he'd have the volume up. And we would hear it come in.

And sometimes it was really annoying. And sometimes it was like, wait a minute.

This person is like incredible.

Like, what are they talking about? We'd wake up and listen. Oh, I just want to apologize. To those people I was up there with in the green correctional facility.

Cooksack in New York. Uh, but the can't skills. Uh, everybody wanted me to help them. Uh, we're kind of in the case. One of the inmates in the state prison wall library.

But I was too busy working on my own. And I got my ass out. And they're still in there. Hello. I'd like to apologize to the bank manager.

And to the janitor or cleaning man. At the manufacturer's handover trust branch. At Rockefeller Center. Uh, I paid. You're inated.

In the trash can. At the rural room where they have the automatic teller. 24 hour machine. Because I had to go bad. And it's very hard to find.

You know, a public restroom in New York City. That's clean or at least halfway safe. So I used my little bank card and got into the room. And I paid in the trash can. You know, I'm, I'm really sorry.

I did that. But I had to. I really did. Thank you. Did you ever call the line?

Um, no. I, well, I, I called once or twice kind of in the early days of our relationship. I would call for my apartment in Upper Manhattan. And I would leave kind of like a flirty sexy message for him.

“Was it kind of like your way to reach out to him to say?”

This is all very hard and heavy stuff. A lot of the times you're hearing on this line. Here I am, you know. Um, yes, but I also think it was, hey, don't forget about me. You know, I'm up here.

Um, I. For whatever reason, I was a very. Determined young woman. And I decided that Allen was it for me. I was hooked.

So I, I wanted to make sure I was in the running. But other than that, I didn't call the line. There were all kinds of calls. Some were scary. Once someone called in to say they were going to find and kill Allen.

Allen had been careful about keeping his own identity a secret. Only calling himself Mr. Apology. But Marissa says he went out and bought a shotgun to keep beside his bed after that. Some of the calls were really minor. Like the person who called into Apologize for stealing toilet paper at work.

Some were shocking. One man called and said, quote, "I don't know how to say this, but I should apologize for killing someone. I haven't been able to live with myself since."

“Well, um, I, for once, I think this is really a original idea.”

When he was married, I didn't see my last name.

I really feel guilty. And then he could get stopped. I'm like, "We're close, we're close." I don't know what to do. But like, I can't tell my mother.

I've been close for two, and I've been close for many times. I've been close to anything. I can't stop. I wonder how I would clean up. Well, talk to these people.

It makes me feel a little bit better. I am bezel for $1,000. From a bank, over a period of six years. I feel very guilty about it. But I never get caught.

I didn't send, um, IRS, some money. And I felt very guilty to cover certain tax expenses. If I ever chance to do it again, I probably would repeat it. So I had been able to live like the king. A one man called and said that he accidentally killed his baby brother.

When he was a child, that he was fooling around with a plastic bag, a garment bag, and put it over the baby's head, and the baby turned blue and died.

And his parents always thought it was crib death.

But it wasn't something that he was looking to confess to the authorities. It's more of something that was just so morally wrong. It was a heavy burden that he was carrying for decades. I think a lot of crimes that are committed are by, by all of us. We don't think of it as a crime necessarily.

It's, it is maybe illegal, but it's something that more bothers us in our souls that we have to get off our chest and confess to. We'll be right back to listen without ads. Join criminal plus. Thanks to Squarespace for their support.

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These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose treat cure or prevent any disease. A reporter named Stephen Sabin heard about the apology line, and called to get in touch with Alan Bridge. He wanted to write a story about it.

And Alan agreed. While Stephen Sabin was working on the story, someone called into the line and claimed he'd picked up gay men and brought them to his apartment to rob them. And in his message, he said, he had killed someone.

So Alan, of course, told Stephen Sabin about it,

“and Stephen said, "Well, you have to tell the police."”

And Alan said, "Well, you know, I just started this line, and I told the callers that I'm not going to go to the police." So this is a safe space where they can talk about things.

and a detective called Alan, and Alan didn't want to give him the information, but Alan had planned on doing an interview on NPR. So he decided that he would play that call on the show, so that he wouldn't be guilty of giving the tape to the police,

but the police could hear it.

Alan never found out whether any arrests were made,

but he did continue to cooperate with the police, when certain kinds of calls came in.

“I think he had a healthy understanding of what was,”

what needed to be kept inside the apology line community, and what actually needed to go to the police. Did he struggle with that? He did. He did. He did because Alan got an extraordinary response from people.

He got people to talk about things that still to this day. I don't think I've ever heard this sincerity with which he got people to talk about themselves, and any other kind of system. And I think he did that because he provided them a safe space, and a sympathetic ear,

someone who had been through things and who had done things,

and wasn't going to judge them.

It was very non-judgmental space. And I think he struggled any time he had to kind of break that trust with people. He once told a reporter, "My job is just to face up to the fact that criminals are, in fact, human beings." Part of Alan's idea for the apology line

“was that he would find a way to not just keep the messages on his machine.”

But to make them public. He wrote to different museums around New York, asking if he could come play the tapes, and the new museum took him up on it. So he asked the telephone company to donate four phone booths,

which they did, and they were delivered to the new museum lobby, and he took out the metal box that contained the guts of the phone, and he replaced that with an answering machine with tapes that were just on a loop.

So the tapes were constantly running, and you could pick up the receiver inside those phone booths, and hear the tapes going. People just couldn't believe it. There were lines to get into the phone booths.

The New York Times published an article about the show, and identified Alan only as Mr. Apology. Alan had more to disguise to the opening. And they printed a photograph of the phone booths. Alan's show had been a hit.

This was a 1981. But he was a little disappointed that it was more of a she-she-art crowd, and he was upset that probably not a lot of the actual callers were able to hear the tapes.

So he kept looking for another way to bring the tapes to the callers themselves. And then he founded. By 1983, a few years after Alan started the Apology line, the technology for answering machines

had improved enough that the outgoing message could be longer than just a short greeting. Alan had been using this outgoing message to explain what the line was to callers. But now it could be almost 10 minutes long.

So Alan decided that he would pick a selection of the most interesting messages, put them together into a 10-minute program, and play that on the outgoing message, so that anyone who called the Apology line number

could hear other people's apologies. And that's really when the community started to develop.

That was the first virtual community

because that's when someone could believe a message and two weeks later, they could hear it on the line, other people could hear it, and respond to it. And two weeks later, you would hear that person's response, and then you could respond.

So there was a time lag of two weeks, but that's really when the line became self-sufficient. And Alan decided, "Okay, I'm doing this. I'm doing this. I'm going to create this world for myself and for the community,

and whoever wants it, anyone in the world can call

“and participate, and that's what he did."”

Marissa moved in. She remembers that a lot of times when she came home, they listened to a call that came in that day together, and then I've dinner and talk about it. Did you think that it was affecting him

hearing all of these secrets? Yes, definitely. There's a point sometime in 1983,

I've made notes through my whole time with Alan,

but I had put Alan's voice has changed.

“He sounds so much more serious and somber.”

So it did start to weigh on him, and he did start to take it a lot more seriously. Marissa and Alan got married the next year, and she says that not long after, she asked Alan to move the answering machine,

an apology line equipment out of the main part of the loft. Alan made a little office for himself, or as Marissa put it, a control room. And it was around this time, they started noticing calls coming in from someone who went by Richie.

And Richie was just like the bane of my existence, because he became the focus of Alan's life. Richie called and confessed to be a serial killer, that he would pick up men, mostly people that he met at Times Square.

He, you know, people that he felt were homeless, or that no one would miss, and that he would take them home, and torture them for days or weeks, and then he would kill them,

“and then he would dispose of their bodies.”

And he called for a couple of years, and would go into great detail about what he did.

And over those couple of first couple of years,

Alan decided that he wanted to either stop Richie from doing what he was doing, or catch him. And Alan became obsessed with Richie, and they had long conversations over the apology line, and then at some point,

Alan spoke to a detective in the New York City Police Department, and they devised a plan on how to deal with Richie together. And the plan was that Alan would ask Richie to have offline conversations, like in other words, not on the apology line,

phone line, but on Alan's personal phone line. And Richie agreed, it took a while, and they had these hours-long conversations, and they got Richie's home address, and they got all his information.

And then the police started surveilling Richie, and watching him.

“And they found out a lot of information about him,”

but to cut a very long six-year story short, they had no proof that he had done any of this. And at one point, this is something I didn't find out until much much later. Ray Pierce, the detective,

had actually called Richie in for an interview. Alan never told me that, and he must have known. And they brought Richie in for questioning, and Ray said that he didn't think that Richie was for real.

He thought he was a serious fantasist, as what he called it. Eventually, Richie stopped calling and talking about murder, which was a relief to Marissa. And to relief to a lot of the callers

who had heard some of Richie's messages. Some callers were very interritchy, but other callers decided, hey, no, this guy's an asshole. He says he's killing people.

I don't care whether it's true or not. I don't want to hear about him. So it caused a lot of problems in our life, and in the life of the apology line. And then, the line changed again.

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“I first called the Apology Line because I had a temp job”

in Manhattan working for an office product's whole sailor. And I didn't really have anything to do. I literally had about maybe an hour to's worth of work. And then I just sat at my desk for the rest of the day. And I would obsessively listen to the Apology Line.

So I would sometimes listen on this beaker phone and if anyone came by I would shut it off and then pick the handset up and listen that way. I didn't want them to see that I was reading at my desk or doing something else beside work

because I was afraid that they would actually give me work to do if they knew I wasn't doing anything. And I didn't really want to do any work. This is one of the Apology Line callers who prefers to remain anonymous even now.

She's sort of listening in the early '90s. And when she finally decided to call in and leave a message she identified herself as Gladys Gadiva. Gladys is actually my middle name.

I've always been kind of embarrassed about it

because it was so old fashion and nerdy. And Gadiva was a name I chose for myself because of Lady Gadiva and she had been known to ride on a horse in the nude. And I felt like I was revealing myself.

I'm a little bit of an introvert. I'm not really comfortable talking to people which is one of the reasons I was calling the Apology Line and not really talking to friends or making art that I would perform in front of people or anything like that.

But before the Apology Line graffiti is something I used to do all the time in the ladies room or places like that. I would scratch things or sometimes write things with a Sharpie. And this was kind of an evolution of that for me personally.

Hi, I'd like to apologize to myself for studying what's tied and effort. What are you about, Bad? The relationship should... just waste myself.

I'll be 30 years old. I don't know what I... I don't have a... I don't know what I want to do when I grow up. I don't know what I expect these many do, but...

I just have to stop wasting my life like this. Hi, I'd like to respond to the 30-year-old or almost 30-year-old who doesn't want to know what she wants to do with her life. I hear you too, I was there. I turned 30 in September and I went through a lot of the same things that she did.

This can be something that's going to take a while and just to be patient with yourself. Just try to find a couple of friends that you trust and spend time with them. Probably other women for a while. You know, we get so involved, we're getting involved with these men that we forget all about ourselves.

“And that's why we end up not knowing who we are.”

And I just wanted to wish you luck and lots of love. And I know that there's something out there that's going to make you very happy.

It was hard to reveal myself in that way.

But it was gratified to see that I wasn't the only person who was going through this kind of thing. Because I did feel very alone at the time. Here's part of a message she left with a list of things she wanted to say to her ex-boyfriends. But never did. When you went on vacation, I made a pass at your friend.

I don't trust you around for the women.

Although I didn't exactly lie when I told you I loved you.

I knew immediately after I said it that it wasn't true. I asked you questions about your relationship to sex growth. Because I can determine how much you love them and then write myself accordingly. After I would leave a message, I would feel some release. I felt like I was leaving a part of myself behind, a part of myself that I didn't want anymore.

I think everyone had their own reasons for calling into the line. And they could be as honest as they wanted to be. They could reveal dark things about themselves without having to deal with the judgment of other people. Do you think it's still an apology if you don't have to worry about that aspect of it? I think it's a better apology if you don't have to deal with the judgment of other people because you can be more honest with yourself.

You can really examine why you committed those acts without making excuses like you would maybe if you apologize to a person. And you're trying to you're trying to seem maybe better than you actually are.

“I think people can be overwhelmed by their own guilt and apologies are important because they allow you to move on in your life.”

Around the time she started listening, Alan got the idea to start an apology line magazine with transcriptions of the most interesting messages. The apology line had been around for almost 15 years and the idea was that maybe could sell some ads in the magazine to support the line. Alan was also interested in exploring what it might mean to bring a version of the apology line online. This was the mid-90s. We're talking about an era where the internet wasn't really even a thing yet.

This is another caller who also prefers to remain anonymous. He was the one who told Alan to look into internet bulletin boards. He said he would help as much as he could when he wasn't at school. He was about 15 years old when he started calling. There was one phone in the house and so to do this because of where the phone was situated,

it also meant that it wasn't necessarily easy to have the privacy to sit there and listen to these messages for long periods of time. For example, I was babysitting in those days when we would put the kids to bed that we were babysitting. I would be calling at that point.

“Would you stretch the phone line and kind of take it into your room?”

Yeah, so because the phone was in that house was in the kitchen, right? Rather than sitting in the kitchen, I would stretch it, but it couldn't actually reach my bedroom. So I usually usually do it in my parents' bedroom. You're sitting there with a phone pressed against your ear and there's a sense that these people are talking directly to you.

But then you're dealing with the reality of these people that you will never meet.

You'll never talk to. But I think that I just hit a point where I felt like I needed to say something to let them know that this kid from Brooklyn was hearing them and was wanting them to be okay. I recognize that as I got older, the opportunity for that kind of thing is they're few and far between as you get older. I mean, you have significant others and close friends.

“There are times when there's subject matter that you have a difficult time even talking about with those people, right?”

And I think that for the colors of the apology line that Alan created this forum that enabled them to have a safe space to speak about topics that elsewhere would not provide that level of safety.

He started calling in the early '90s.

“I'm very one-year-old now who's having a major problem dealing with the sexuality.”

He is, I forward it. I don't want to be this way.

I've never done anything really.

I've been woman. I've made love to woman. But the last couple of years I feel deep desire to go towards men. I'm very happy. I'm hoping somebody that calls and can maybe give me some impact on what I should do.

And speaking of the hush tone from that work now, I really feel like I'm very alone. I can't talk to nobody about this. And I've talked a lot about this. I hope you understand. Hi, this is probably the 30-year-old gentleman who is just coming to terms with his gain-ist. And his ambivalent and sure what to do.

All I can say to you from somebody who has been through similar situations, I'm slightly older than you on 38 raised intensely cast, like with intense guilt feelings. A lot of it simply works out over time.

“I think for you sir at this point, the best thing for you to do is just take it a day at a time.”

I say you've made the first step.

I just think that you're going to just learn to accept these feelings. There is no shame to it. You're not doing something harmful. You're not wishing harm on anybody, including yourself. It's love.

It's wonderful. Another man called in to say that he'd also gone through what Ricky was going through. And he wanted him to know that there were so many people like him. Ricky heard both messages on the outgoing program that Alan put together, and he called back. He both made me feel my health a lot better about myself. You really did.

After that message, other callers started leaving messages with advice about places he might go to meet people. Groups he could join. And if you listen to the messages over time, you can tell that he's really doing it. He's going to meetings and clubs.

“In one of the later messages, he shares that he finally worked up the courage to go on a date.”

And I have a lot of you to thank. And I don't feel guilty about it. I thought I would move. It's just so bright. Now I'm upset.

Bye. By 1995, the apology line was getting around a hundred calls a day. Alan had expanded it to include three lines. But then, one day it stopped. We had a boat that we lived on for short periods of time in Hampton Bay, New York.

That's in Long Island. And we would go out there for weekends and stay on the boat. And Alan would go scuba diving in the Chinacock inlet, which was a short drive away. And that particular day, he went scuba diving. And I was on the boat.

I didn't go to watch him. Sometimes I did, but I just didn't feel like it that day. So I was on the boat. And he typically was gone for about two hours.

And when three hours went by and four hours went by, he never came home.

I started to get worried. But I didn't have a car because we only had one car and he had driven there. And the man who ran the boat yard wasn't home. So I had no way to get over there. So I called a taxi and that took about 45 minutes to come.

And by the time I got over there, it was probably like six o'clock or something. But it was August, so it was still light out. And I saw our car parked in the parking lot of this restaurant. And I said, oh shit. So he's still here.

And I was walking over to the car and this man came up to me. And he said, um, who are you? And I said, who are you? And he said, who are you? And I didn't answer him.

And he said, I'm Detective Bookimer from the South Hampton Police Department. Who are you? And I said, well, this is my car. And I'm here looking from my husband.

Or if I all of a sudden heard the sound of helicopters over my head.

“But he told me that this couple had seen someone get hit by a jet ski and they were looking for him.”

And I knew Alan was dead at that point. The strange thing is that none of us can understand the group of people that were close with Alan at that time. We'll understand, but Alan turned the phone line off that weekend when we left. And I didn't know about that until I got back.

He'd never turned the line off in 15 years, but it was off when I got back to the apartment.

And, um, I didn't know what to do. I wanted to let the callers know that he had died. I mean, this was a guy who was available to them 24/7. And they must have been all, they were off freaking out. But I didn't know how to run the line or anything.

I knew nothing. Morris asked the high schooler who had been helping Alan try to bring the apology line to the internet. If he could come over and try to help her turn on the line. So she could put out a message letting all the callers know what had happened.

“So he, I think he had a week off before he had to start back at school and he came to the loft and spent a week trying to figure out how to turn the line on.”

He told us he had no idea what he was doing. Alan hadn't actually showed me anything about how the apology line worked. Um, I just remembered the day that I went to their house. And, um, and saying, well, I have to do something here to sort of help out. But I didn't want to let his, his wife down.

Miraculously, this young kid was able to get the line running. And then we were able to put a message out, telling people that Alan had died and that we would keep them informed of services to come and. And then people started leaving messages of condolence on the line. There was a funeral for family and friends. And Marissa also arranged a special service for all of the apology line callers who wanted to come.

It was at strawberry fields in Central Park. Very few people knew who Alan really was. They just knew him as Mr. A or Mr. Apology.

But at the service, Marissa brought his photograph so they could see what he looked like for the first time.

I didn't know what I would encounter, but, um, so this makes me cry. Um, there were so much love. Um, there were people, so many people there. And some of them were, um, in the shadows, um, because strawberry fields is like a, it's not a huge area. There's a mosaic that says imagine and then there's trees around it. And some people were in the trees and some people came up to me and a known.

And I saw the community. I saw the people. It was, I felt bad that Alan couldn't see it. It couldn't meet them because this was something he created that he'd done with his life. And these people were there for him and it was, was unbelievable. After Alan died, Marissa had the chance to meet Ricky. The man who had called in and said he was afraid to come out.

He was really just so, so kind to me, so kind to me and Alan really changed his life. They'd called you a line. And not just Alan, the apology line and the callers changed his life because he came out and he started his new life as a gay man. And, um, it was, you know, I mean, how many times do you get to meet someone that, that's life has changed for the better because of your husband's artwork.

You know, it's, it's really cool. It was amazing.

The apology line was very much of its time. I don't think anything like that could exist now. Gladys could have. When you called and listened to the line because it was on the phone, it was almost very confessional. People were sometimes whispering or crying and it was very intimate.

But I don't think that anything like that could exist now. Why don't you think Alan got sick of it? You've just think to himself, I got it. It's over.

“I think when you have a door open to all of humanity, you can't close it.”

I mean, he talked, um, in one NPR interview that he did, he spoke about listening to the line like looking at a sunset.

It's always different. It's always amazing.

“And he felt like every call was like that.”

That, um, he never got tired of it because it was something new every day and a new person or something new that a long time caller was talking about. He just thought it was, that it was everything.

This is apology. Apologies not associated with the police or any other organization, but rather as a way for you to tell people what you've done wrong and how you feel about it.

All statements received by apology will be played back to the public, so please do not identify yourself.

“Talk for as long as you want. Thank you.”

If you'd like to hear more stories about people deciding to pick up the phone, we've just released an episode on our other show.

This is love, all about hotlines. You can find it at this is lovepodcast.com or anywhere you listen to podcasts.

Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and me, Nadia Wilson is our senior producer, Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sedgico, Lily Clark, and Lena Sillison.

“Our show is mixed in engineered by Veronica Seminetti.”

Julina Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at this is criminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at this iscriminal.com/newsletter. We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus. You can listen to Criminal. This is love in February to Mystery without any ads, plus you'll get bonus episodes. These are special episodes with me and Criminal Co-creator Lauren Spore talking about everything from how we make our episodes

to the crime stories that caught our attention that week to things we've been enjoying lately. To learn more, and see a preview of some of the apology-lying voicemail recordings we couldn't fit into this episode, go to patreon.com/criminal. We're on Facebook at this iscriminal and Instagram and TikTok at criminal_podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com/criminalpodcast.

Criminal is part of the voicemail media podcast network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. [BLANK_AUDIO]