Once a week, Pad's parents came to visit him, but the few precious hours of visiting time were more for his parents' benefit than his own. He reassured them that he was OK, and when they looked him in the face and saw it was true, they stopped worrying quite so much. They brought him news from home, including the fact that his computer equipment had been returned by one of the police who had been in the original raid. The officer asked Pad's mother how the hacker was doing in prison. `Very well indeed,' she told him. `Prison's not nearly so bad as he thought.' The officer's face crumpled into a disappointed frown. He seemed to be looking for news that Pad was suffering nothing but misery. At the end of almost three months, with faces well tanned from walking in the meadows, Pad and Gandalf walked free. To the casual witness sitting nearby in the courtroom, the tension between Phoenix's mother and father was almost palpable. They were not sitting near each other but that didn't mitigate the silent hostility which rose through the air like steam. Phoenix's divorced parents provided a stark contrast to Nom's adopted parents, an older, suburban couple who were very much married. On Wednesday, 25 August 1993 Phoenix and Nom pleaded guilty to fifteen and two charges respectively. The combined weight of the prosecution's evidence, the risk and cost of running a full trial and the need to get on with their lives had pushed them over the edge. Electron didn't need to come to court to give evidence. At the plea hearing, which ran over to the next day, Phoenix's lawyer, Dyson Hore-Lacy, spent considerable time sketching the messy divorce of his client's parents for the benefit of the judge. Suggesting Phoenix retreated into his computer during the bitter separation and divorce was the best chance of getting him off a prison term. Most of all, the defence presented Phoenix as a young man who had strayed off the correct path in life but was now back on track--holding down a job and having a life. The DPP had gone in hard against Phoenix. They seemed to want a jail term badly and they doggedly presented Phoenix as an arrogant braggart. The court heard a tape-recording of Phoenix ringing up security guru Edward DeHart of the Computer Emergency Response Team at Carnegie Mellon University to brag about a security exploit. Phoenix told DeHart to get onto his computer and then proceeded to walk him step by step through the `passwd -f' security bug. Ironically, it was Electron who had discovered that security hole and taught it to Phoenix--a fact Phoenix didn't seem to want to mention to DeHart.