Sophie Dahl once received a business proposal from a man on death row - but the former supermodel was too scared to reply over fears he would track her down.
The British beauty, who is married to jazz musician Jamie Cullum, received a letter from a convicted U.S. criminal incarcerated at a jail in Texas, asking her to set up a company with him.
Dahl dismissed the proposition but wanted to send the man some books to help him pass the time - but she finally opted to ignore the letter when she found out the nature of the convict's crimes.
She tells Vogue magazine, "I ended up on the Texas Department of Criminal Justice website because I received a letter out of the blue, via an agent, from a guy in jail - housed in a Texan facility. What he wrote was in equal parts unsettling, contradictory and heartbreaking, a personal account that stayed in my thoughts for a long time. I don't know why he picked me, and it took me a long time to decide not to write back.
"The thing he was proposing (an entrepreneurial business plan on his part) would, I think, have compromised my safety. It would have been a bit mad to comply with it.
"I thought about anonymously sending him some books instead. Then I got neurotic and wondered how many other young women in New York he had written to, and I figured that if it were none, he'd know for certain I was the correspondent. Even in the face of a plain brown package, the New York postage would be the giveaway.
"Besides, the deciding factor in all this was that I looked him up on the correctional-facility website, discovered that the crimes he was in prison for were pretty hard to get past and that he was also on death row."
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