About Face

The show's producers called him last year asking him to send in an application. Krone decided to play along. Amy Wilkinson, his sister, shot a four-minute video of him talking about his history.

"There was a lot of anxiety; it didn't seem right," he says. But he says he considered the viewership of the show -- an estimated six and a half million people -- and figured it was his best chance ever to get out his message about the need for criminal justice reform.

"That was just too good of a forum to pass up," he says.

Four of his teeth were pulled. He received 17 caps.

The hair implant procedure took 10 hours.

He received a toupee to cover the hair implants until they grew out.

He was fed healthful food, he worked out with world-renowned trainers.

He was presented to his family on January 19 at a ballroom in Hollywood.

His family was impressed. They just hoped he hadn't changed inside.

"You know, we were fine with him the way he was," his mother says.

In the months since appearing on the show, Krone's belly has pooched out from drinking beer with his old hometown buddies and eating dinners at his mom and stepdad's house. He admits he gets stuck in the winter funk of southeastern Pennsylvania.

The point is, though he walked out of prison emaciated, all that's changed in nearly three years back in Dover.

"Now, guys just like to sit around in their garages drinking beer and talking," he says. "I've got to be careful or this gut will get pretty nasty."

So it's off to the Dover YMCA one morning. He pulls off his toupee, throws on some crapped-out gym clothes. It's time to get real.

At the Y, he asks the front-desk clerk about memberships. She tells him she knows his face from television, she knows his story from the local newspaper.

In the weight room, he draws the same stares he draws all over the pre-Revolutionary War township of 20,000 residents where he was raised.

He is comfortable with the weights. Krone is wiry strong. He was a wrestler in high school. And in blue-collar Pennsylvania, wrestling, along with football and anything else that involves rough play, is king.

His body, and his upbringing, helped protect him in prison.

"I guess I could play the part [of con] pretty well," he says.

Now, though, he's a little bit Hollywood, too.

He takes two dumbbells and lifts them up in a military press, then rotates his hands and brings them down out in front of his body.

"My trainer in California taught me that one," he says. "He said he learned it from Arnold Schwarzenegger. [The trainer told him:] 'Do it and you, too, can look like Ahh-nawld.'"

He smiles, and his perfect row of porcelain twinkles in the harsh fluorescent light.

He purses his lips as if a little embarrassed about the perfection.

"I'm still not quite comfortable with it all," he says. "It's still not me exactly."

Krone is staying in a small house his great-grandfather built on land the family still owns. He grew up in a house just a few blocks from where he lives now. His father still lives there.

His mother and father divorced in the early 1990s. His mother, Carolyn, later married Jim Leming.

Together, Carolyn and Jim spent about six years and $200,000 of money they didn't have trying to get Ray freed from prison. They lived in a friend's cabin down by a nearby river as they sold off their property to pay Ray's legal bills.

Once Ray was released, they bought a run-down old house in the country and remodeled it. Now they have a cozy home where Krone often goes for some of his mother's cooking.

He loves people in his hometown. Everybody has been great to him. But, then again, he's getting that itch again to travel. There's more than the obvious reason that he got a tattoo that says "Freebird" after his release from prison.

"I guess I like to keep on the move, see new things," he says. "But it's tough. This really is my home. These are the people I care about the most."

After high school, Krone left Dover to join the Air Force. He ended up at Luke Air Force Base working on computers. When he left the service, he decided to stay in Arizona.

"I loved it there," he says.

After the Air Force, Krone worked for the U.S. Postal Service as a mail carrier. By 1991, he was a tenured employee making about $30,000 a year, a nice salary at the time for a bachelor.

His mom was hoping the 34-year-old might finally settle down.