Woman finds mystery letter inside picture frame

The letter was written to Richard Gerritson and taped to the back of a portrait painted by Skip Teegardin.

By Brent Ashcroft
WZZM13.com
Michelle Cantrall found a letter inside a framed photo she bought at Goodwill.

SPRING LAKE, Mich. -- The next time you buy something at a yard sale or at an auction, you may want to examine it more closely than you would had it been purchased brand new, because inside your newly found treasure could be somebody elses forgotten treasure.

A little over a week ago, Michelle Cantrall purchased a framed acrylic painting at the Goodwill store in North Muskegon. As soon as she got into the car in the Goodwill parking lot, she decided to open up the back of the painting and look inside.

That's when she realized that her purchase might have been meant to be.

"I bought the painting only for the frame," said Cantrall, from her Spring Lake home. "But when I opened it, I was in awe at what I found."

Cantrall discovered a white piece of paper folded up and taped to the back of the painting.

She carefully detached the paper, opened it up and began reading a typewritten letter that had been lost inside the picture frame since 1984.

"It's pretty great to kind of almost find a little bit of history," said Cantrall.

Based on additional information inside the frame, the portrait appears to have been painted by a gentleman named Skip Teegardin, while he was in prison. Teegardin wrote the letter to a gentleman by the name of Richard Gerritson.

"It's a pretty meaningful letter," added Cantrall. "This person must have meant a lot to" him.

Cantrall says she would like to locate either Skip Teegardin or Richard Gerritson, or relatives of either gentleman, to see if they'd like the painting and the letter.

"I took pictures and posted them to my Facebook page, hoping someone might have some ideas on how to go about finding either of these gentlemen," added Cantrall. "It would be pretty amazing if this mystery could be solved after 31 years."

If you happen to know how to get in contact with Skip Teegardin or Richard Gerritson, or perhaps know some relatives of either of the two men, please e-mail or call WZZM: news@wzzm13.com or 616-559-1300
https://www.freep.com/story/news/2015/08/11/mystery-letter-inside-frame/31474527/
www.freep.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2022-40
143797
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:QK525D5X7V2RLRPOF7XAGO6IPDPUL6LX
<urn:uuid:210f5fe6-60ad-44bd-b70c-90726d0795cf>
2022-09-27T17:46:13Z
146.75.34.62
text/html
sha1:QNHNQBSFYIWS3K42MKKX5NJ24TNE6O3W
<urn:uuid:562c6623-6e69-4235-9e9a-bb20c65979dc>
https://www.freep.com/story/news/2015/08/11/mystery-letter-inside-frame/31474527/
response
<urn:uuid:551db201-1de3-46e8-be38-ae653bf0e66d>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2022-40
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for September/October 2022
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-251
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.4-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/