My Life with a Criminal: Milly’s Story

John Kiriamiti’s best-selling novel My Life in Crime has become a classic.

When,
as an innocent teenage girl, Miriam met John Kiriamiti, alias Jack
Zollo, she found him gentle, kind and considerate. She fell into a
passionate, romantic love with this man who claimed to be a car
salesman, and who continued to present the image of the perfect
gentleman — for months, running into years, never abusing her trust and
for this long period continuing to respect her virtue and her virginity.

But
finally, with a clean conscience and with the blessing of her own
mother, she moved in with this man she loved. And that is when she began
to notice that her lover led a double life. It started with the
realisation that this man never had an office … he operated from a
noisy bar … Then there were the little, heavy, sharp-pointed,
dull-golden objects hidden in a chalkbox … and, one day when she came
home early from the office, the stumbling on five men in her sitting
room conspiratorially sharing out bank notes.

Her discovery of her
man’s double life did not constrain her to run away from him, for her
love was the love of a lifetime. But her life and love started to exact a
heavy price: she constantly walked the tightrope of stress as she sat
out nights waiting for a man who at such moments was involved in gun
fights and car chases with the police. Could she ever hope of settling
down with this man, of consummating the love that had consumed her
being?

Milly was Jack Zollo’s (alias John Kiriamiti) girlfriend
and her story is told from the criminal’s point of view in an earlier
book, My Life in Crime. This is now Milly’s poignant story about her life with the bank robber.