Letters stained with suspected blood sent from NC prisoner to judge overseeing his case

A convicted murder in a North Carolina prison has repeatedly mailed letters stained with suspected blood to the judge overseeing his case, including one scrawled with the threatening message, “What will happen to you and your body?”

Earlier this year, inmate Joshua Allen Bolen, 40, mailed nine letters to Stokes County Superior Court, according to federal court documents.

Bolen, now serving a 21-year sentence for second-degree murder, mailed one letter in January marked as an official court document, in which he sought a path to his release through a writ of habeas corpus.

Because he marked it as a court filing, a Superior Court judge had to review it, along with these remarks on a later page:

“You should be afraid not to report this. What will happen to you and your body when I’m located & you didn’t report me: you overlook’d me continuously?”

The judge “thought he might be trying to escape, based on the way he was writing,” court records said. “She was also concerned as to how Bolen would be able to make himself bleed but discovered he was in a minimum-security part of the prison, which would give him access to items he could use to cut himself.”

Bolen was convicted of second-degree murder and second-degree arson in 2016, prison records show. He was charged in 2009 with killing his girlfriend, whose body was recovered from a pond, revealing she had died from a head wound, The Winston-Salem Journal reported.

The judge told investigators Bolen sent another seemingly blood-stained letter in February, which she did not review.

Investigators looked at the nine letters, all of them mailed from the Tyrrell Prison Work Farm in Columbia. Three of them had what looked like blood stains or fingerprints, according to court documents, and one was marked with the words “a fingerprint & a blood offering to attone (sic) for damages in the cases named above.”

C ourt personnel told investigators Bolen had been mailing letters to Stokes County since 2016, including one from April addressed to “Judges.”

In it, he described the first time he had tasted blood, and noted that he is “alwayz thinkin blood to drink.”

“I do not want to be within the system, the matrix, or what-ever this iz called that I am restrain’d within,” he wrote, according to court records.

Outgoing prison mail usually not screened

NC Department of Adult Corrections spokesman Brad Deen said in an email Tuesday that outgoing offender mail is generally not screened for content — only suspected contraband.

“If we have reason to suspect something,” he said, “we will monitor the content, incoming or outgoing.”

A Winston-Salem police officer working with an FBI task force is asking for a cheek swab from Bolen to see whether it matches blood samples in the letters.

In 2021, Bolen sent a hand-written letter to the U.S. District Court petitioning for a writ of habeas corpus, arguing that he was a “slave prisoner” confined in zoo-like conditions for killing a “hateful waste of energy and space,” according to court records.

On that petition, which was denied, he drew what appears to be a sketch for an electric-powered jet propeller and wrote “Now consider me a wack-job.”