Need advice

What a good question--and I think it's best for legals to answer. There are all kinds of things coming into play here.

Were the letters mailed to you via USPS? Hmm. Do you in fact own what letters you receive in the mail--cards--is it your property in perpetual? Federal issues... are they considered gifts?

ETA: A letter is given to you--handed to you. Is it yours? A gift to do as you wish...????

michelle25 said:

is there any way to leave the correspondence in without getting in trouble?

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No. You can't publish someone else's letters without their permission. I happen to know someone who wrote a book about a friend of hers who had been murdered, and could not use her friend's letters to her because the woman's parents refused permission. See also the multi-year legal kerfuffle around Ian Hamilton's book In Search of J. D. Salinger.

The recipient of a letter is not the owner of that intellectual property under US law; the author is. And the last person you want to give a chance to sue you is someone in prison, because they have nothing but time and access to law libraries.

While I agree with the Empress about reproducing the letters in your book (no) I do think you could paraphrase them and get the same effect.

You can paraphrase them with no problem. I also suggest changing names (and indicating you have done so). This is common practice in memoir.

Even if you do everything possible to protect yourself legally though, nothing is foolproof. I myself sold my memoir to a publisher who then killed the book shortly after I was paid the advance. No explanation was offered for the book-kill, but I do know a lot of publishers are getting gun-shy about publishing memoirs because of the legal issues surrounding the genre.

It seems to me true crime would be better since we're in such a 'reality' faze, media-wise. (Does that make sense?) It may mean delaying things a few months to track down the necessary paperwork, but it sounds like it could make your story that much stronger.

Good luck.

michelle25 said:

Tracking down the necessary paperwork - that's where I get thrown. What is the necessary paperwork, how do I get it?

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Public Record. Available to anyone, usually at your corner courthouse. Records room-Clerks Office. You'd have to talk to a Field Agent in a local FBI office or go to jurisdiction where crime was committed about their records and where to get.

Best!
And ETA: Do you mean a person must go to jail-prison before it is considered a true crime noval? Just curious...

I'm not too familiar with the genres of true crime and memoir, but I'm more inclined to say that the genre a book belongs to is one where it naturally fits with as few requested changes as possible. And if it falls into both in a way never seen before, that would be something, right?

Basically, the important thing is that your story is true to you and coming from your own heart.

using letters in our books

The only way we can use letters verbatom is to get permission from the person who wrote them. Even though they sent the letters to us, they remain their intellectual properrty because they wrote them. Just like you could write a book and send it to someone, and then they couldn't just duplicate your writing without your permission.

I've used personal letters in my memoir but since we can't use them verbatim I've read over the actual letters to get the feel of them and then paraphrased them for my book. The same information gets across to the reader, and it actually gives me more control over crafting it the way I want to (cutting out unnecessaries, fixing punctuation, etc.)

Hope this helps.