Arthur Longworth: Prison Writer Freed After 37 Years

Arthur Longworth is a Washington state writer and policy advocate who served 37 years of a life-without-parole sentence for the 1985 murder of 25-year-old Cynthia Nelson, won six PEN Prison Writing Awards while incarcerated, and was released in April 2022 after the Washington Supreme Court struck down mandatory life sentences for people who committed their crimes before age 21. He now works on juvenile justice and foster care reform at the Seattle nonprofit TeamChild.

The 1985 Murder and Life Sentence

On February 15, 1985, Longworth, then 20, lured Cynthia Nelson to a meeting outside an IHOP in Seattle’s University District under the pretense of an Amway job opportunity. He climbed into her Datsun, demanded money, and stabbed her in the back. He dumped her body in Little Pilchuck Creek near Lake Stevens in Snohomish County.¹

A Snohomish County jury convicted him of aggravated first-degree murder in March 1986. The conviction carried a mandatory sentence of life without the possibility of parole under Washington law at the time.² He also had a 1983 armed robbery conviction on his record, a detail that would surface again decades later.³

A Childhood Spent in Foster Care

Longworth entered Washington’s foster care system at age 13 and moved through 14 placements, including group homes and boys’ ranches such as the O.K. Boys Ranch and a facility in Centralia.⁴ He later testified that he experienced severe violence in at least one group home that was eventually the subject of a class-action lawsuit and a state settlement.³ At 16 the state recorded that he had “refused further services,” and he effectively emancipated himself. Four years later he killed Nelson.

“I was raised to be an animal, and that’s what happened,” Longworth told the court at his 2022 resentencing.⁴ That childhood became the backbone of his later advocacy and his legal argument for release.

Decades Inside, and a Writing Career

Longworth arrived in prison with a seventh-grade education. Officials initially refused to let him into general education classes, telling him it would be a “waste of their time and resources” because he had a life sentence.⁵ He was held at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla and the Monroe Correctional Complex. His early years were volatile. His prison file logged 92 serious infractions and 13 trips to solitary confinement.² He has said guards firehosed him at Walla Walla and kept him in leg shackles for months.⁶

He taught himself to write, eventually earned a college education inside, and married. His most recent serious infraction was recorded in 2009.²

Between 2008 and 2017, Longworth won six PEN Prison Writing Awards, including first place in memoir for “Walla Walla IMU” in 2010 and “How to Kill Someone” in 2017; PEN nominated the latter for a Pushcart Prize.⁷ He wrote essays for The Marshall Project on the foster-care-to-incarceration cycle, inter-prison transfers, and pandemic lockdown conditions.⁸

Zek and the Prison Ban

His novel Zek: An American Prison Story, modeled on Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, follows a single day in the life of a Washington prisoner. Gabalfa Press published it in 2016, and it was nominated for the Washington State Book Award.⁹ The Marshall Project called it “packed densely with detail” with “finely-sketched characters.”¹⁰ Longworth had finished the manuscript around 2005; when Walla Walla officials found it, he was placed in solitary confinement.⁵

Shortly after publication, the Washington Department of Corrections banned Zek from every state prison, saying it posed a “security risk” because it described methods for hiding contraband. Inmates caught with it faced sanctions including a postponed release date. Longworth was suspended from his prison job, pulled from college courses, and repeatedly threatened with solitary. The volunteer teacher who had smuggled the manuscript out, Marc Barrington, was banned from the facility for “undue familiarity,” though a state ethics complaint against him was later dropped.¹¹ There is no public record of the ban being lifted before his release.

The Monschke Ruling and Longworth’s Resentencing

On March 11, 2021, the Washington Supreme Court decided In re Personal Restraint of Monschke. In a 5-4 opinion by Justice Gordon McCloud, the court held that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for defendants who were 18 to 20 at the time of their offense violated article I, section 14 of the Washington Constitution.¹² The decision extended protections previously recognized for juvenile offenders to “emerging adults,” requiring sentencing courts to consider the mitigating qualities of youth before imposing the harshest sentences.¹³ Longworth, 20 at the time of the murder, qualified.

On February 15, 2022, exactly 37 years after Nelson’s death, Snohomish County Superior Court Judge Anna Alexander resentenced him to 360 months of confinement, which he had already served, plus 60 months of community custody.¹ His attorney, Casey Trupin, had been working on the case since 2018 and also invoked a Washington statute allowing prosecutors to request a sentencing change when an existing punishment “no longer serves the interests of justice.”¹⁴

Nelson’s family opposed the resentencing. Her sister, Sandra Rodgers, told the court that Nelson “did not have an opportunity to marry, create a family of her own or continue to take part in the lives of the rest of her family,” and asked the judge: “Please don’t dishonor Cindy’s life by elevating the value of his.”³ Nelson’s niece told the court she feared the Monschke ruling would “be opening the wounds for so many families who have already suffered greatly.”¹

Release did not follow immediately. The Department of Corrections refused to let him out, pointing to his 1983 armed robbery conviction, which the agency’s electronic system had logged as consecutive to the murder sentence. King County Judge Hillary Madsen eventually signed an order making that robbery sentence concurrent rather than consecutive, satisfying its terms.³ Longworth walked out of the Washington State Penitentiary on April 11, 2022, at age 57.

Advocacy and Life After Prison

While still at Monroe in 2013, Longworth had convened the “State-Raised Working Group,” a circle of incarcerated men who had grown up in foster care. It grew out of the Concerned Lifers Organization and eventually drew around 100 members, with about half a dozen meeting weekly to study the link between state-supervised childhoods and incarceration.¹⁵ Ross Hunter, then secretary of the Washington Department of Children, Youth and Families, began meeting with the group and later said its testimony “haunted him for years.” Hunter testified in support of Longworth’s release at the 2022 hearing so he could “continue working to reform foster care.”³

After release, the Seattle nonprofit Treehouse hired Longworth to work on policy aimed at dismantling what he and others call the foster-care-to-prison pipeline.¹⁶ He later became Policy and Advocacy Manager at TeamChild, a Washington nonprofit focused on system-impacted young people,¹⁷ where he has argued that judges are “basically handcuffed” by Washington’s rigid juvenile sentencing matrices.¹⁸

In 2024, he was named to the inaugural cohort of the Writing Freedom Fellowship, a joint project of the Mellon Foundation, the Art for Justice Fund, and Haymarket Books that supports writers affected by the criminal legal system.¹⁹ As of 2025 he continues to hold both that fellowship and his role at TeamChild.²⁰

1
Everett Herald. From a Life Sentence for a 1985 Murder to Imminent Freedom
2
Seattle Times. Writer’s World: Life Behind Bars
3
Cascade PBS. Abused in Foster Care, Convicted of Murder, and a Complex Story of Second Chances
4
KUOW. Arthur Longworth’s Long, Troubling Path Toward Redemption
5
Rkvry Quarterly Literary Journal. The Prison Diaries of Arthur Longworth
6
The Marshall Project. Raised, and Imprisoned, by the State
7
Arthur Longworth. Awards
8
The Marshall Project. Arthur Longworth Staff Page
9
Arthur Longworth. Published Works
10
The Marshall Project. Zek: An American Prison Story
11
The Marshall Project. Silencing Arthur Longworth
12
Washington State Courts. In re Personal Restraint of Monschke, No. 96772-5
13
Columbia Law School JLSP. Washington State Supreme Court Finds Mandatory LWOP Sentences Unconstitutional for Offenders Younger Than 21
14
The Columbian. Abused in Foster Care, Convicted of Murder, and a Complex Story of Second Chances
15
The Imprint. New Washington Laws Aim to Interrupt Foster Care to Prison Pipeline
16
Treehouse. End the Foster Care to Prison Pipeline
17
TeamChild. Our Team
18
Public News Service. Act Would Give Incarcerated WA Youth a Second Chance
19
Mellon Foundation. Haymarket Books Mellon Foundation Writing Freedom Fellowship
20
Beyond LWOP. Arthur Longworth