‘I was sure she was going to be dead at 25’: A figure skater’s redemptive journey (2024)

Keri Blakinger once opened a small manila envelope addressed to her and carefully emptied the contents. Twelve dead co*ckroaches tumbled out. The brittle bugs were mailed to her by a man in a Brazoria County prison south of Houston.

She’s gotten letters with mold samples affixed with tape and pleas from family members desperate to learn more about their loved one’s medical condition. A few prisoners doing long bids have penned her murder confessions. Other inmates have sent her hand-drawn Christmas cards, like the one with a cheerfully colored, smiling snowman.

One death-row prisoner, per his last wishes, had his ashes sent to Blakinger. They arrived in a glass vial with a cork stopper.

Blakinger regularly receives mail from the grimmest federal penitentiaries, overcrowded state prisons and the sleepy low-security facilities that house Wall Street cheaters.

These items end up on the vast expanse of her desk or elsewhere in her Houston apartment. Some land in the backseat of her four-door sedan, where files are wedged against a red bucket overflowing with loose-leaf papers. Some she stashes in an oversized black backpack that she is rarely seen without, slung over her shoulder, stuffed to the brim.

Blakinger, 36, is one of the preeminent criminal justice reporters in the country. Within the last few months, she has exposed dangerous COVID protocols, faulty locks and riots within prisons. She has written about the racist history behind prison names, the witnesses to the first federal execution under President Donald Trump and raw sewage.

Her reporting for The Marshall Project, which she joined last year, and other outlets has forced prisons to improve health and safety standards, practices and procedures and overall care. Her 2018 investigation into poor dental care prompted the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to launch a dental clinic where incarcerated people could obtain dentures via 3-D printing. Not long after her May story about substandard food, inmates used contraband cell phones to send her pictures of leafy greens.

Blakinger is petite, no taller than 5-feet-2. She has a ring in her lip, a tattoo on the back of her neck and a half-shaved head. She took a pair of electric clippers to her hair last month, growing restless after running out of things to pierce.

She often employs black heart emojis on Twitter and she collects weapons, like a wooden mace from East Africa and a Mississippi prison shank. Last Halloween, she dressed as a heavily redacted Freedom of Information Act request.

Decades ago, she was a competitive figure skater with Olympic aspirations. Pristine and polished. Velvet leotards and sequined costumes. She smiled on cue.

Between then and now, she spent time homeless and addicted to heroin. For a spell, she turned to sex work to pay her bills and subsidize her habit. She dealt drugs while attending an Ivy League school. She was depressed and suicidal. For almost two years, she was known primarily by a number – 11G0845 – while doing time in county jail and state prison in New York.

Her time inside has become a defining characteristic.It’s one reason people seek her out, because she understands the trauma of incarceration and how it stays with you, because she has a kinship with those who have seen the darker sides of humanity. She sometimes receives mail addressed to:

The reporter who was in prison.

“Again and again, what you see in her reporting is an understanding that … whatever the worst thing that a person has done in their life is not what defines them,” says Pamela Colloff, a senior reporter at ProPublica and staff writer at The New York Times Magazine. “Because that’s true of Keri, too.”

Blakinger grew up in Amish country in Pennsylvania, where her father, Dan, was a partner at a prominent law firm and her mother, Cindy, worked as a public school teacher.

Blakinger’s mother wanted her daughter to experience the trappings of suburbia she missed, so Blakinger and her boundless energy were thrown into horseback riding, piano lessons, gymnastics and more. She latched onto figure skating in second or third grade, and no other activity could again hold her interest in the same way.

A relic of the town’s blue-collar beginnings, the local rink was housed in the old Posey Iron Works factory. The rink had no heat, rust dripped onto the ice, and skaters relieved themselves outside in porta-potties. There was, for no apparent reason, a stained-glass image of Benjamin Franklin on the exterior.

By most standards, she entered the sport late, competing for the first time at the Hershey Open in third grade in 1993. She outgrew her local coaches by sixth grade, then began regularly commuting 45 minutes each day to Harrisburg or Hershey for better instruction.

By sixth grade, Blakinger was leaving school early multiple times per week to train. She worked tirelessly on the elusive double axel, the hardest double jump to execute. All skating jumps — axels, salchows, lutzes and loops — finish with the skater landing backward, but the axel is the only one in which a skater takes off from a front-facing position. Properly landing a double axel requires 2 1/2 revolutions; the others require two. It is often a gateway move; once a skater lands the double axel, triple jumps follow.

Blakinger would wipe out endlessly when her skate would catch on the ice just a quarter-turn short of completing the revolution. Sometimes, she inserted a patch of gardening pad inside her leggings to soften the blow.

“I spent my entire middle school years falling hundreds of times on the same jump,” she says.

Precocious but self-aware, Blakinger knew she didn’t have the chops to make it as a singles skater. She possessed the obsessiveness skating required, but could not foresee ever having six triple jumps in her repertoire. Pairs skating offered a more plausible path, but she would need to find a partner, not easy in Amish country.

The summer before ninth grade, Blakinger began commuting 40 miles each way to the University of Delaware to train with prominent coach Tracey Cahill Poletis. She left school each morning and was driven to the rink, usually by a parent or a grandparent. In the car, she’d change into skating gear and nap until one particularly sharp turn usually jolted her awake. The commute was tedious, but it provided her access to the best coaching in the area. After her skating sessions, she’d complete any additional off-ice training before heading home, sometimes doing her schoolwork with a small flashlight wrapped around the seat in front of her.

“It already had been my whole life,” Blakinger says of her skating. “But really it became my whole identity.”

Cahill Poletis found Blakinger a promising pairs partner in 19-year-old Mark Ladwig, from North Dakota, who had transitioned into figure skating after getting cut as a third-string goaltender at the peewee level.

Matching pairs is no simple task — skating style, size, appearance and other factors must be considered. Almost a foot taller and four years older, Ladwig looked as if he could be Blakinger’s older brother. Meanwhile, Blakinger possessed stronger jumping technique and superior artistry, the latter honed by years of ballet training. Despite Ladwig working through what he now describes as his “hammer throwing technique,” the two fit well together. They enjoyed a friendly, professional relationship and a shared goal of making the nationals. Both were stubborn and determined; at one competition, Ladwig tried to power through a bout with mononucleosis, refusing to pull out until a coach intervened.

The pair kept their lifts simple but displayed strong jumping ability and speed. They moved across the ice well, Blakinger’s ponytail bouncing as they glided the length of the rink, Ladwig hoisting her into the air with ease. The commitment to ascending the pairs skating ranks left little time for Blakinger to make friends outside of the sport.

“I did not have any social life,” Blakinger says. “I don’t think anyone training that intensely is going to. I was leaving school so early. I wasn’t making friends there; I was not maintaining friends there; I wasn’t going to a party to sneak a beer. I was getting up at 4 a.m. on Saturdays to go to the rink.”

Skating both widened the gulf with her peers and provided her a sanctuary from the pressure of fitting in with her classmates.

“It’s you and the ice and the cold air, and it didn’t matter that I wasn’t cool or that I just wasn’t good at social interactions.”

In her freshman humanities class at her Lancaster private school, students were prompted to explore the idea of human identity through the works of Dante and Patricia Barker’s World War I novel “Regeneration.” Sitting in the back of the class, a hoodie pulled over her head, Blakinger intuited themes and context with exceptional ease, and her quick-wittedness made her both respected and feared.

“I’m not sure anyone knew what to make of her,” says Luke Jacob, Blakinger’s favorite teacher.

Blakinger and Ladwig did not hang out together much beyond the rink. Their training offered scant time for that. But synchronizing rhythms and movements in such exhaustive detail also meant they knew each other’s tendencies and habits. So when Blakinger arrived looking more gaunt by the day, Ladwig noticed.

Blakinger first learned about purging, vomiting food to lose weight, during middle school. She dabbled in it then, but during her freshman year in high school she started to feel the pressure to climb the ranks of the skating circuit. That’s when her efforts to lose weight intensified.

She heard that eating carrots burned calories. Some days she subsisted solely on carrots and caffeine. The backs of her hands, her knuckles, even the dimples in her cheeks became tinged with orange. Blakinger stayed up late to get her schoolwork done and then spent long hours into the night obsessively working on crossword puzzles. She threw up frequently, too, and looked emaciated.

The lighter she became, Blakinger reasoned, the better she could jump. The results that followed only contributed to that distorted sense of positive reinforcement. Blakinger and Ladwig won the novice pairs division at the South Atlantic Regional Championships in 2000 and 2001, and placed fifth at the national pairs competition both years. She was named to the USFSA Scholastic Honors team in 2001, a prestigious achievement. But soon the mood swings and telltale signs of her eating disorder became apparent, prompting Cahill Poletis to raise concerns with Blakinger and her parents.

“She was never a big girl to begin with, and she always ate well and took care of herself, but then she just seemed to be getting thinner and thinner,” Cahill Poletis says.

Blakinger sought professional help for her disordered eating during her sophom*ore year of high school in 1999, but she lied to her therapist about the scope of the problem for years. She went to outpatient treatment for a few weeks following the 2001 nationals, but she actually lost weight while in treatment. Blakinger couldn’t always control landing a particular jump or placing at nationals, but she could control what she ate.

“I knew what I was doing was f*cked up, but I was also quite aware that if I gained some weight I was not going to be seen as a marketable pairs skater,” Blakinger says.

Ladwig shared his concerns about Blakinger’s declining health with their coach. After what he described as a month of deliberation, he told Cahill Poletis and Blakinger their partnership had to end.

“I was devastated,” says Blakinger.

In the world of pairs skating, there are many more female skaters looking for a male partner than the opposite. At age 17 and heading into her senior year of high school, Blakinger was uncertain she could find someone in time for the upcoming season, especially someone who would relocate to Delaware. She’d have to take a season off with no promise that she’d ever resume her skating career.

For weeks, Blakinger spent nights shuttered in her room, crying for hours.

“It was, as I saw it, the end of my world,” she says. “I was losing my skating career … my identity, my future and all my plans for life.”

It was known as “The Pit.” The amphitheater near Harvard Square was where a group of goth-punk kids used to congregate. Some sported gauges in their ears and many harbored hard drug addictions. They would become, at least for a spell, the first social group Blakinger chose for herself without influence from others.

Blakinger moved to Cambridge, Mass., the summer of 2001 at the urging of her parents. Following the split with Ladwig, their high-achieving daughter was morose, aimless and, at times, catatonic with grief. They hoped summer school at Harvard University would channel her energy into academics.

Blakinger had the academic pedigree to handle the two classes and a college-focused environment. But after years of intense scheduling and strict training regimens, she was now rudderless and vulnerable, in a new place without friends or adult supervision. Blakinger gravitated toward the kids at The Pit, recognizing in them a desire to challenge authority and social norms.

She began to experiment – piercing her tongue, her belly button, smoking pot and trying ecstasy. She did her first line of heroin off the book cover of D.H. Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers,” part of the summer reading list for one of her courses.

“I just wanted to self-destruct,” Blakinger says. “I was in a dark place and I felt like a lot of them clearly were, too. I more or less wanted to die, but wasn’t actually ready to kill myself.”

When Blakinger returned home at the end of the summer, she readied herself for her senior year. She tried skating again, only to find that her time on the ice did not feel the same. She was constantly fighting with her parents. Confronted that fall with a surprise intervention, she panicked, jumping out of a moving car and landing on the side of the road without her shoes and her shirt torn off after breaking free of her parents’ clutches.

She lasted just three days at school in Pennsylvania before she was on the street, toggling between Lancaster and Boston. In Boston, she joined a community of homeless people who slept in tents underneath a parking garage. She stuffed a pile of black clothing into her backpack and lugged around a physics textbook for light reading.

Blakinger ate most meals at soup kitchens, but she needed money to support her drug habit and turned to sex work. She was sexually assaulted at knifepoint once and raped multiple times, she says.

Jacob, Blakinger’s former teacher, received intermittent calls from her during this time. “She would talk about things with a distance,” Jacob says. “It was as if she was looking at her story from the outside.

“I was sure she was going to be dead at 25.”

On paper, Blakinger looked like a strong student from an established private school with a litany of academic accomplishments. She wrote for the school’s literary magazine and won honors for poetry and short-story writing. She was a member of the debate club and the Spanish National Honor Society.

A cursory glance of her application materials by admissions officers at Rutgers University wouldn’t have revealed that she had spent portions of her final year of high school homeless and addicted to heroin. (The only blemish on an otherwise perfect transcript was a B-plus in pre-calculus during one semester in 10th grade.) The transcripts didn’t show that Blakinger took her final AP exams — English literature and composition, and history — while living in a halfway house in Scranton, or the convincing it took to get her to go to rehab. At the behest of Blakinger’s parents, Jacob intercepted Blakinger, working the graveyard shift at a diner and high from drinking cough syrup, and persuaded her to seek help. She did 90 days at a Pennsylvania treatment facility.

In her first year at Rutgers, Blakinger stayed off drugs while living in a sober dormitory. By her second semester, she began working at a strip club and an escort agency in New Jersey to ostensibly pay for her schooling. By the summer of 2003, she was making enough money to pay for her own apartment and small luxuries like a cell phone. Blakinger felt empowered.

“Older men, powerful men, were paying me for things and I was setting the price,” Blakinger. “That felt liberating. I was taking charge.”

Living in her own apartment, she began dealing drugs on the side. She refrained from using at the start, then was enticed by the offer to try meth. She figured meth would enable her to stay up for days at a time, allowing her to work, study and maintain her thriving side business. Heroin was her hard line in the sand, but a fight with her boyfriend or one particularly bad day — she no longer remembers — caused her to relapse. By 2005, Blakinger and her boyfriend were struggling to pay the bills and stay high. Sex work was no longer optional but rather a means of survival. The elements of the job that had grated on her before — men not abiding by ground rules she had set, being rough and aggressive, sometimes incontinent — now became unbearable. When a man asked her to play out a rape fantasy one night, she couldn’t do it anymore. Even with the numbing effects of drugs, it was too much.

“They were paying to fund my self-destruction,” Blakinger says, “And that’s not liberating.”

Though she took a limited course load at points and even spent chunks of time away from school altogether, Blakinger says she maintained a perfect grade-point average while at Rutgers. For years, those grades allowed her to avoid fully confronting the reality of her addiction. Blakinger convinced herself it was just a phase, something she would move beyond. But she began to recognize that life in New Brunswick was untenable.

She applied to Cornell University, her mom’s alma mater, and was accepted as a transfer student in January 2007. But Ithaca was no salve. The 22-year-old Blakinger didn’t feel like she fit in with other kids at school. She constantly quarreled with her parents, over school, and her then-boyfriend. When her grandmother died, her parents didn’t want her to bring her boyfriend to the funeral, so she didn’t attend.

Blakinger started smoking crack and using mushrooms. She abstained from heroin, but her relationship with her boyfriend turned toxic and abusive. She failed that semester and was facing academic probation.

One morning in July 2007, she called an acquaintance and asked to be driven to a bridge overlooking one of the gorges that border Cornell’s campus – an ecological feature that offers scenic views and trails for students, but has been well-documented as an area for suicide attempts (the university erected steel mesh netting below the gorges in 2013).

Blakinger approached the edge of the bridge and contemplated the 98-foot drop to the valley below. When she heard the sound of approaching sirens, she worried she’d be arrested and taken to a psych ward.

She jumped.

Hurtling downward, she felt as if she were viewing everything around her in a freeze-frame. Leaves on the trees came into sharper focus. Time slowed.

She landed on a flat rock covered in moss. She broke several vertebrae but was alive, furious and demoralized.

When the police officer arrived, he shouted to her from the bridge, asking her not to move.

She stood up and gave him the finger.

Not long after her failed suicide attempt, Blakinger adopted a dog. Charlotte, a black Labrador-greyhound mix that was so skinny her ribs were showing. She was afraid of her own bark. Charlotte went everywhere with Blakinger — to class, to office hours, to drug deals at crackhouses, where the dog would sometimes take off with a bag of marijuana in her mouth because she liked the smell.

“She didn’t need me to be sober or doing well in life,” Blakinger says. “I just needed to be there.”

Blakinger took a year off from Cornell while recovering from her injuries — she was forced to wear a clamshell back brace and was prescribed an astonishing array of drugs: morphine, muscle relaxers, Adderall, Ambien, Xanax. The idle time piled up and the prescription drugs couldn’t curb her physical pain and mental anguish. Blakinger turned again to heroin, though her use didn’t completely derail her. The suicidal thoughts abated. She was in an abusive relationship but didn’t use as prolifically or sell drugs as frequently.

“I know that’s a really low bar,” Blakinger says, “but things were slightly less bad.”

Lynda Bogel, a professor at Cornell who taught Blakinger in a film studies seminar and multiple independent studies, recalls Blakinger bringing Charlotte to office hours and plopping down on the floor with the dog. She sensed her student was using drugs and ensnared in a toxic relationship, but Blakinger’s intellectual prowess masked the depths of her problems.

Bogel recalls a discussion Blakinger hosted on the Alfred Hitchco*ck film “Notorious” in which she performed an eagle-eyed dissection of one scene of star Ingrid Bergman physically juxtaposed between two visual elements at the exact time she toggled between poles of a consequential decision.

Her classmates sat rapt by the heavy-lidded punk-rock girl’s ability to distill complicated concepts of film analysis. “People were just in awe,” Bogel says.

Around this time, in 2008, Blakinger also began working at the student newspaper; she started as a copy editor and then wrote daily news stories and some features. She felt more useful than she had in a long time.

By late 2010, Blakinger, then 26, was on the precipice of graduating, working through extensions in classes to complete the work required for her degree. Her drug use worsened.

Ten months after Ladwig, her former skating partner, competed in the Vancouver Olympics, placing as the top American pairs team with his new partner, Blakinger was doing “speedballs” with a new boyfriend, shooting up both heroin and cocaine. And while Blakinger managed to stay afloat academically through heroin use or Adderall or meth or whatever cornucopia of pills du jour she took, adding co*ke to the mix changed that.

On a chilly Sunday morning that December, while transporting a large amount of uncut heroin from a stash house to her apartment in a plastic container, Blakinger pawed through the pockets of her coat to locate a stray cigarette. She didn’t notice a police officer until he practically hovered over her. She panicked and threw the container underneath the nearest car. A watchful bystander retrieved the container and handed it to the officer.

As she was being arrested, the officer found an eight-ball of cocaine in Blakinger’s pocket. Fearing the specter of being dope sick in a holding cell, she pulled a handful of oxycodone pills out of her pocket and slammed them in her mouth. The officer threatened to pepper-spray her if she swallowed them. She did anyway.

There are no step-by-step guides preparing you for the process of being herded naked into a cold shower to be deloused, or being held in a cell alone while being screened for tuberculosis and awaiting classification. You can miss a meal if you don’t know what time to be at the door of your cell.

Blakinger, who was charged with a second-degree felony for possession of a controlled substance, initially served time in county jail. Traditionally smaller than prisons and more provincial, it’s not uncommon for people in county jails to know one another, guards and incarcerated people alike. She struck up a friendly relationship with a guard around her age; they connected over a love of crosswords and a shared taste in music.

He’d show her pictures of his dog and secretly google words to help her on her crosswords. The two did not begin their relationship until she was transferred to prison, where he visited her regularly. (He was later disciplined for fraternizing with an inmate and docked vacation days.)

For Blakinger, prison was largely defined by substantial chunks of boredom and banality interrupted by fights, abrupt transfers to different facilities and arbitrary discipline like being sent to SHU, or secure housing unit, a.k.a. solitary confinement.

Blakinger spent time in solitary confinement twice during her incarceration; neither experience has left her. Her first time in SHU, where she was sent for a medical classification before her transfer to another facility, Blakinger figured she’d be able to handle it. When the door shut and she faced a blindingly white room with no sense of how long she’d be there, she panicked and began sobbing.

The cell had no clock, only a slit of light for the window. She had to stand on the bunk to peer out. But if she was caught standing on the bunk, she’d receive more time in SHU. A small metal toilet with a sink attached and a small metal desk fixed to the wall offered the only respite from the otherwise barren enclosure. Blakinger did not spend time in quiet reflection and repose. Deeply disoriented from the initial panic, she drifted in and out of sleep. Her brain fogged and before long she began to calculate whether she could kill herself by jumping from her bed onto the metal desk.

“It feels like you’re being buried alive,” Blakinger says.

Blakinger wrote about her experiences in journals she furtively kept. Writing was one of the few healthy outlets she could enjoy to pass the time. She also took up a regimen of running to keep her mind sharp and her sanity intact.

Her fastidiousness to the treadmill is how she met Kris, a woman who worked in the prison gym. Blakinger, who dated women and men before her incarceration, initially objected to the idea of having a “prison family.” She never embraced that sort of infrastructure, but she grew closer to Kris, close enough that she considered Kris a “prison girlfriend.” The term means different things to different people; for Blakinger, it meant finding women who could provide her some tenderness and intimacy, who had a stake in her well-being.

When they first met, Kris sat on the stationary bike pedaling as she read a copy of Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” not the kind of book Blakinger expected many people to be reading within the facility. Blakinger asked Kris if she had ever seen a certain version of the movie, and the conversation sparked more intimate ones.

Kris helped her navigate some of the intricacies of prison life one has to learn on the fly — how to request a new bunk-mate if she experienced issues, which guards had a reputation for cruel behavior, how to whittle a fragmented tooth of a comb to the exact right length to keep a body piercing from closing. Her subsequent girlfriend, Sobey, fashioned her a zombie doll made of sanitary napkins and rudimentary decorations, a small token of cheer.

“If you don’t find friends and people to be in your corner, prison can be really lonely,” Blakinger says.

At Albion’s prison gym, Blakinger also forged a relationship with the woman who became one of her best friends on the inside, Stacy Lyn Burnett, a recruitment support coordinator with the College & Community Fellowship who advocates for women with criminal justice involvement and helps them overcome barriers to achieving higher education.

Blakinger met Burnett while seeking guidance on obtaining care for hepatitis C, which she believes she contracted through intravenous drug use. Serving as the grievance rep for the women within the compound, Burnett found Blakinger could toggle seamlessly between the vernacular of her Ivy League education and that of the prison system. Blakinger’s short pixieish haircut, glasses and bookishness earned her the nickname “Harry Potter,” but she could fend for herself.

“To be facing a life-threatening illness in a place like that, it does change you,” Burnett says. “Either you lay down and take it and hopefully you live or you have to start really advocating for yourself and fighting.”

Unlike some of the other women within their facility, Blakinger made it seem as if she was just passing through.

“This wasn’t her final destination,” Burnett says. “She had something else in her that separated her.”

Fueled by non-instant coffee and a toasted everything bagel with cream cheese, Blakinger made an important first stop following her release from prison on Sept. 28, 2012. She asked her then-boyfriend, the former guard at the county jail, to take her to the home of the couple who cared for Charlotte, Blakinger’s dog, during her incarceration. The couple didn’t intend to keep Charlotte longer than a few days but grew enamored of her.

When Blakinger arrived, Charlotte didn’t remember her. Blakinger returned to her boyfriend’s home and cried herself to sleep.

While inside, she was surrounded by people either resigned to long bids or desperate to simply pass time. Everyone’s situation was dire, though Blakinger had it better than most. A plea deal meant she served less than two years in total, markedly less than if she had been arrested in another county or had some of the New York Rockefeller drug lawsnot been repealedbefore her arrest. Once released, she logged on to Facebook and scrolled through pictures of friends who were getting married, buying homes, having children. Meanwhile, she was living in a home with someone she only knew within the context of her incarceration. The relationship, which began with a stark power imbalance, was ill-suited to endure. She hadn’t finished school, didn’t have a degree or even a driver’s license. She was on parole. Her own dog didn’t even remember her.

“It is hard not to look around and feel at least some pang of loss,” Blakinger says. “Not even jealousy, just loss — that I had so much and had squandered it.”

Blakinger kept visiting Charlotte at her adopted home, learning her new favorite walking paths, watching her with her new best dog pal, Bailey, the couple’s other dog and a fellow black Lab mix. But even after weeks of walks, the dog treated her like a stranger.

Finally, Blakinger took Charlotte for a walk back in Ithaca, carefully skirting the boundaries of Cornell’s campus, from which she was banned. After ambling around once familiar haunts — the local laundromat, a convenience store that was dog-friendly, the landlord’s office where they’d often stop in to say hello — the pair walked past their old house. Instantly, Charlotte’s demeanor changed and she followed Blakinger when called. Suddenly, Charlotte remembered her former owner.

After caring for Charlotte for almost two years, incorporating the dog into their own family, the couple that had adopted the dog realized that Blakinger needed her more than they did. Believing Blakinger was headed in a good direction — they had aided her in her transition by inviting her into their social circle — they returned Charlotte to her.

In October 2013, a mutual friend introduced Blakinger to Glynis Hart, the managing editor for a collection of community weeklies in the Finger Lakes region of New York. Working on a story about the access to resources for women in prison, Hart heard through their mutual friend that Blakinger had spent time in prison.

Hart interviewed her and discovered that Blakinger had worked on a memoir while in prison. Hart read part of the manuscript and recognized Blakinger’s talent.

Blakinger became a freelancer for the publication and eagerly agreed to the assignments many reporters yawned at, like sitting through lengthy town meetings.

The communities she covered during her first six months of freelancing were overwhelmingly old, White and extremely conservative. She’d show up to meetings dressed in all black, with an eyeball pendant on a chain hanging from her neck, large onerous piercings, combat boots and an obscenely foul mouth.

“They loved her,” Hart says. “Some of these town council members are still friends with Keri.”

Blakinger quickly gained a sense of what really mattered to residents. That meant sitting in diners, trolling laundromats, showing up for school plays.

In 2015, she landed a job with the New York Daily News and was assigned to a team of young reporters who worked out of Union City. Blakinger, then 31, quickly showed she possessed the talent and drive to thrive in cutthroat markets.

Criminal justice reporter Reuven Blau turned to her for some help with a story, following up on a tip that an incarcerated woman had been sexually assaulted by a guard at Rikers, New York City’s vast jail complex. Blau, who is now a senior reporter at The City, asked Blakinger if she’d be willing to go to Rikers to meet with the woman, who was so fearful that her case would be bungled that she smuggled out DNA evidence by mailing her underwear to a friend on the outside.

“Keri had this really great way about her. This woman — she understood where she was coming from. She had a unique experience of understanding her situation,” Blau says of the woman’s willingness to open up to Blakinger. “I don’t know if it would’ve been the case if it was anyone else.”

The guard was criminally charged, a rarity in the prison system. He admitted committing sexual assault and pleaded guilty. He avoided jail time as a result of a plea deal but was fired, forced to register as a sex offender and put on probation for 10 years. Even after the case, Blakinger and the woman stayed in touch.

Blakinger saw tangible change as a result of her work. Justice. Accountability. And the knowledge that her reporting could illuminate some of the most insidious problems roiling the prison system. Not since she was skating had she felt so energized, driven toward a goal.

In 2016, Blakinger took a job with the Houston Chronicle. Over the next 3 1/2 years, she homed in on the Texas prison system. In addition to her reporting, she wrote personal essays about prison families, prison nicknamesand prison time. She humanized the experience, and in the process earned a reputation for her rugged, intrepid reporting. Fellow reporters marveled not just at her prolific output — Blakinger routinely delivered upwards of five substantive stories a week — but also the depths of the topics she explored.

“She’s one of the best-sourced reporters I’ve personally known,” says Colloff, the ProPublica writer who is also based in Texas.

Chris Tomlinson, a business columnist at the Chronicle who previously spent 19 years at the Associated Press, noticed elements of Blakinger’s behavior in the newsroom, hallmarks of a familiar type of hypervigilance he dealt with for years, a byproduct of his post-traumatic stress disorder from years of covering conflict overseas.

Tomlinson spent seven years as a soldier before embedding with the U.S. Army. He made sergeant. He spoke the language. As a result, the military personnel he covered didn’t hide what they knew he would eventually ferret out.

“I think that’s what made me a good war correspondent and what makes Keri such a good criminal justice reporter,” he says. “You can’t bullsh*t her.”

Blakinger’s incarceration provides her a more nuanced framework to cover the system she experienced firsthand. She recognized the ways in which the carceral system often abandoned those with mental health issues and disproportionately punished those from communities of color. (In 2017, the imprisonment rate of Black women was twice that of White women; the imprisonment rate of Hispanic women was 1.3 that of White women, according to The Sentencing Project.) Blakinger knows that her privilege (which she has addressed in detail here)allowed her to emerge not unscathed, but at least with the chance to start anew.

“Keri has never said this to me, but my impression is that she feels she was handed a second chance and because of that, there’s this huge responsibility that rests on her shoulders, not just to make good on her second chance but to give a voice to all the people who haven’t been given second chances,” Colloff says.

“I think that can be mistaken for advocacy journalism, but she’s doing accountability journalism and there’s a difference. … I think because she’s walked in the shoes of so many of the people she’s writing about, she’s able to show the full context of their lives, the humanity that’s there even if they’ve done terrible things.”

Figure skaters typically sport an array of aches, pains and bruises. Few linger worse than when a skater breaks in a new pair of skates, generally an annual practice. Once a skater reaches a certain tier of competition, the attention to detail to the fit of the boot and the placement of the blade becomes more precise. An impression is created by setting a skater’s foot within a foam molding, with the blade fitted separately. Boots begin incredibly stiff, so as to maintain support. Skaters try to hasten the process of getting comfortable in a new pair of skates in various ways: putting the boots in the oven, walking around the house with them while wearing warm wet socks, manually punching out some of the tough spots from the inside.

Blakinger still has visible scars from one particular pair, where the tongue of the shaft met the boot at the ankle. The scars look similar to the track marks she has on her arms, her hips and the backs of her calves.

Successes in skating can be burdensome and arbitrary. Landing a jump requires repeated failures. Each spill and wipeout tests a skater’s will and resolve.

The day Blakinger first landed her double axel on one of the ice rinks at the University of Delaware, she felt a surge of triumph. Instinctively, her head snapped down. There on the ice, tangible evidence: a distinct line in the ice to prove she had done it.

Nothing topped that moment. Then.

Since joining The Marshall Project in 2019, Blakinger has exposed poor pandemic response, systemic inequity and inhumane conditions within the prison system.

“I think there are journalists who go their entire careers without having the impact Keri’s had already … she’s dramatically improved hundreds of people’s lives,” Tomlinson says.

“She never writes about convicts. She writes about people.”

Blakinger works at a frenetic pace. Most nights, she bangs at her computer until she falls asleep. She is constantly moving, either spitting out the details about her latest piece with nary a breath, or reaching out to sources, keeping in touch with her sprawling tree of contacts. Her recent two-week “vacation” was spent working on her memoir, which will be published by St. Martin’s Press in winter 2022.

“I was obsessive about figure skating growing up, and that was my whole life. That ended, and I filled that with heroin. That ended and I filled it with obsessively working,” Blakinger says.

“I’m not gonna act like I have some great boundaries or sense of balance.”

Her idea of leisure is running 12 miles outside in the Houston heat, sometimes in complete silence. She has a fierce loyalty to her friends and a habit of radical honesty. She started a regular email to her mother with links to her latest work that has since grown into an informal newsletter with 80 recipients, including a judge, several attorneys, her former drug counselor, a guy she used to sell pot to at Cornell, her middle school piano teacher and the Ithaca cop who found her after her failed suicide attempt.

Blakinger sometimes tears up when reading a letter from someone on the inside. Recently, she received a drawing — an outline of a man’s hand, meant to symbolize the way people in prison try to connect with those on the outside, reaching their hand to a partition that separates them from their visitors on the other side of the glass.

She files these small tokens away, keeping them at home, or in that filing system in the backseat of her car, or in that large black backpack, thrown over her shoulder.

Blakinger has had a bag like that for as long as people can remember. Friends easily conjure the visual: Keri and her bag. An overstuffed duffel she carried off to skating practice in high school. The backpack she used to lug textbooks to college classes, the one that housed all her belongings when she lived on the streets, the bag she used to ferry drugs.

Now, it is the bag of a woman at work.

(Illustration:Klawe Rzeczy / for The Athletic)