Among Ted’s first fan letters at ‘Judge’ was a curt note from a condemned murderer on death row in Huntsville, Texas, written on the eve of his electrocution. ‘If your stuff is the kind of thing they’re publishing nowadays,’ the prisoner took the time to write, ‘I don’t so much mind leaving.’ Ted was enraptured with the letter and kept it in his desk throughout his long life, always feigning fear of running into the felon, whose sentence had been commuted at the last minute.