WOMEN WHO LOVE
MEN WHO KILL
Sheila Isenberg
Women Who Love Men Who Kill
All Rights Reserved © 1991, 2014 by Sheila Isenberg
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the author.
First Edition published 1991 by Simon & Schuster. This digital edition published by P and E Press c/o Authors Guild Digital Services.
For more information, address:
Authors Guild Digital Services
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Excerpt (to be used as an epigraph) from Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard. Copyright © 1977 by Annie Dillard. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.
ISBN: 9781625360953
Acknowledgments
Finding answers to questions about women who love men who kill has been a long but exciting quest, one I could not have undertaken without the help of many people. My mainstay throughout this process has been my husband—always supportive, optimistic, and willing to listen, read, and reread. My thanks to my agent and editor on the original hardcover, Richard Curtis and Susanne Jaffe, to my current agent Will Lippincott for his continued support, to my friend Jed Home, whose reading of the manuscript and suggestions were invaluable, and to the Radical Debutantes for their love and support.
I am deeply grateful to the numerous professionals in psychiatry, psychology, social work, criminology, and journalism who helped and advised: Neil Kaye, M.D.; Park Elliott Dietz, M.D.; Janet Warren, DSW; Emanuel Tanay, M.D.; Jane Caputi, Ph.D.; Carl Rotenberg, M.D.; Streamson Chua, M.D.; Charlotte Kasl, Ph.D.; Michael Baden, M.D.; Abe Halpern, M.D.; Joseph Faulkner, Jr., MSW, whose thesis was the only dissertation I found on the subject; reporters Diane Albright, Angela Aiello, and Pat Plarski; Lt. Cammy Voss at Folsom Prison; and FBI Supervisory Special Agent William Hagmaier. My thanks also to colleague and friend Joan Byalin, to Helene Weinstein for her patience, to computer wizard Sarah Beaver, and to librarian extraordinaire Judy Fischetti. I am also very grateful to the many other individuals too numerous to name who graciously took the time to return phone calls, look up information, and patiently answer my endless questions.
Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to the many women who shared their stories. This book is possible only because of them.
For my father
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1
Maria: A Case of Identification
“He came from a good family”
Chapter 2
Murder and Marriage
“It was hardly romantic”
Chapter 3
Teddi: A Case of Salvation
“He always went one step further”
Chapter 4
How Women Meet Men Who Kill
“I am not a thief, robber, burglar, sex offender, drug dealer/user, con man, or nut case”
Chapter 5
Hilary: A Case of Substitution
“He even looks like my father”
Chapter 6
Why Women Love Killers
“We’re not who you think we are”
Chapter 7
Denial
“He never meant for this to happen”
Chapter 8
Rochelle: A Case of Delusion
“He is sensitive to the tiniest of animals”
Chapter 9
Little Girl Lost
“Once I said, ‘Daddy, don’t yell.’ He beat me with the buckle end of the belt”
Chapter 10
Victims, Repeaters, Rebels
“I went to a bar once, when I was eighteen, and came out when I was twenty-eight”
Chapter 11
Lori: A Case of Desperation
“He called me his princess”
Chapter 12
Devotion
“I work sixty hours a week because I have myself and him to support”
Chapter 13
Women Who Love Serial Killers
“I got me a good one”
Chapter 14
Conclusion: Beyond the Walls
“We might not even like each other in the real world”
Bibliography
Introduction
As a news junkie and former reporter, I follow certain news items with great interest, always seeking the story behind the story. During late 1987 and 1988, Joseph Pikul, a successful Wall Street analyst suspected of having murdered his second wife, Diane, was much in the news. The story heated up when Pikul, to the dismay of many, was awarded temporary custody of his two young children. Headlines sizzled when Pikul remarried and his third wife, Mary Bain—blond, attractive, twenty years his junior—testified during a custody hearing that he’d slashed her dress with a hunting knife.
When I first read that Mary Bain had left her husband and young daughter to live with Pikul and his children, I became intrigued. Why did she marry a man charged with murder? Wasn’t she afraid? Then, after he slashed her dress, why didn’t she leave him? Mary told a Newsday reporter that she couldn’t “walk away” from love, and on television’s “A Current Affair,” she described how much she loved Pikul. But why did she love him? He didn’t appear particularly handsome or charismatic. He was about to stand trial for murder. What did Mary see in Pikul? Was there something within her that made her want to get involved, to take on his cause?
Mary’s romance with Pikul reminded me of another woman in love with a murderer, Naomi Zack. Zack’s husband, the notorious murderer and jailhouse author Jack Henry Abbott, was on parole for a prison murder when he stabbed a man to death in 1981. Abbott was doing time in an upstate New York prison when Naomi became involved with him. She left her hometown and family to live near his prison. A Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University, Naomi was intelligent and talented. What was it about Abbott that attracted her? He had spent his life in institutions, had committed a murder only weeks after he was released, and might, one could easily assume, murder again. I had heard that Naomi was passionately in love with Abbott and viewed him as a hero, not a criminal. I wanted to know why.
As a reporter, I had often seen women in prison visiting rooms, waiting patiently to see their husbands or boyfriends. How many of those inmates were in for murder? Of the women in love with murderers, had they fallen in love after the man’s conviction? If so, how did they meet?
Were these women the most passionate women of all, who would not allow even prison walls to separate them from their lovers? Were they thrill seekers? Did they find it erotic and exciting to be involved with killers? Were they damaged individuals, seeking a continuation of their pain?
I wondered: Is it possible that the men who commit an “arbitrary, sordid, pathetic, and ugly” crime such as murder—in the words of writer P. D. James—can be lovable, attractive, and desirable? Or is their beauty solely in the eyes of the beholder?
Since the murderers we hear the most about are those who end up behind bars, it seemed that these women were also reacting to the prison situation; they wanted a relationship with an inmate. But would any convict do? Did women also fall for burglars, white-collar criminals, drug dealers? Or was it only murderers who drew them? If so, why? Was it something in their pasts that led them to love men who had killed?
When I started looking for answers to these questions, I found there weren’t any. No one had examined the phenomenon of women who love murderers. Everyone knew about these women and questioned their motives, but no one had tried to under
stand those motives. Police, attorneys, and prison officials were all too familiar with prison groupies. Forensic psychiatrists and social workers, who study the behavior of murderers, were well aware that many were attractive to women and formed relationships after they were convicted.
But no one knew what proportion of convicted murderers attracted women. And no one knew anything about those women. Psychiatrists and psychologists have been too busy studying the murderers themselves. It is only now that they are starting to look at murderers’ relationships in hopes they’ll shed some light on their behavior and motives.
Apparently my curiosity is timely. As I finished the manuscript, the movie Miami Blues was released. Its plot pivots on the relationship between a charming con-man murderer and a woman who wants to believe he is really a knight in shining armor. And forensic social worker Janet Warren, DSW, like many other professionals I interviewed, said she believed it was time for specialists to look closely at the relationships between murderers and their women—a “crossover,” she calls it, between criminology and psychology.
Using techniques I learned as a reporter, I managed to find dozens of women all over the country who were in love with murderers. I realized it would be impossible to talk to anyone involved with a murderer who was not yet convicted. Indeed, I was not able to interview Mary Bain Pikul until her husband’s trial was just about over. So I limited my interviews only to those women in love with men already convicted of murder. Surprisingly, they were not hard to find.
While many women were eager to talk about their relationships and their pasts, others were reluctant, saying they didn’t want to hurt their men’s cases. The women who agreed to be interviewed were gracious, helpful, talking intimately about their childhoods, past relationships, values, lifestyles—and about the men they love.
These women live a difficult life, a life on the edge, never knowing whether or when they will actually be with their men. But that, I have discovered, is a large part of the attraction. The women, damaged in many ways, have a deep need to love someone with whom they can’t enjoy an easy, comfortable relationship.
In this book, you will meet these women and the murderers they love. For the purposes of confidentiality, I’ve altered many names, locations, and other identifying elements. In certain cases, this disguising of elements extends to newspapers used as sources.
I also interviewed psychiatrists, psychologists, district attorneys, police, and prison officials. And in some cases, I visited the murderers themselves in prison or exchanged letters with them.
Although I’ve developed a profile of women who love men who murder, this is not a scientific study. The profile described here is not intended to represent all women in this group. But I believe enough women have been interviewed at length to give a fairly accurate picture. It is my hope this book will stimulate further study in this area.
2014 Update: Since I first wrote Women Who Love Men Who Kill more than two decades ago, many aspects of this phenomenon have changed while most have remained the same.
The changes revolve around the internet. When I began researching and writing, there was no internet and prisoners and women on the outside met through traditional pen pal letters, introductions, and chance meetings inside the prison walls.
Today, an internet explosion has led to a prison web site escalation wherein hundreds of thousands of prisoners can post their lonely hearts letters, complete with photos, asking for romance and attention. Twitter, Facebook, and a dozen other internet sites allow women in relationships with prisoners to find others in similar situations, to express their needs and feelings, to find support, to get help for problems, to access resources.
www.writeaprisoner.com, www.prisoninmates.com, www.convictpenpals.com, www.prisonpenpals.net, are just a few of the prisoner pen pal sites that allow first meetings between the men and women. Since prisoners don’t have access to the internet, they pay a small fee to join the web site of their choice, then send in by snail mail hard copies of their photograph and bio. The web site posts their material and turns any emails they receive into hard copy, which is then forwarded to them via snail mail. And so it goes. The correspondence between a single prisoner and the large numbers of women who troll these sites who may respond to him continues until it’s narrowed down to one man, one woman, and becomes more intense.
These web sites also contain fascinating threads, discussions between the women that express their longings, fears, joys, and all the many emotions inspired by these relationships.
Many, many fascinating cases have come along during the years since the first edition of Women Who Love Men Who Kill was published: the dog trainer whose prisoner pal caught her eye as he worked with her on one puppy who was being trained in a prison program for dogs that would ultimately be adopted by families in the area. The trainer and prisoner fell in love, she helped him escape in the van in which she carried dogs in and out of the prison, and the couple had several blissful months in a cabin in the woods until they were found and arrested. Now she’s doing time also. The young girl who wanted to get to know the man who murdered her grandmother in a parking lot, for her purse and cash. You guessed it; they fell in love and now she visits him constantly and fights for his release.
Very recently, the accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev—who is charged with murdering three people and maiming dozens—attracted hordes of young female groupies who twitter and post on Facebook about his innocence, and their love for him. Not dissimilar to the Mrs. Soffel phenomenon more than 100 years ago when a young, attractive murderer headed for the London gallows turned the heads and hearts of British girls and women. The Tsarnaev phenomenon reached its nadir, or zenith, depending on your viewpoint, when Rolling Stone put him on the cover and ran an article about how he became a terrorist, as well as his mass appeal to teenage girls.
What has not changed at all in the phenomenon of Women Who Love Men Who Kill is the phenomenon itself. Enormous numbers of women still pursue these relationships, As one prison officer told me years ago, he had a harder time getting a date than did many of the men he guarded. I’m sure that still holds true today. And our society and culture have not changed very much over the last two decades: women are still undervalued and treated in certain political and sociological and economic arenas as objects, leading of course to violence against women. And as you will read in these pages, it is this abuse of women that leads, in some cases, directly to their pursuit of love in all the wrong places. Women Who Love Men Who Kill are basically victims of society. And while that has not changed in the last 20 years, we have made some progress and we continue to make progress. Remember, we’ve only had the vote for less than a century.
One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held.… A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled and fried in a second.…
And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth’s body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame.…
She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning—only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God.
—Annie Dillard
Holy the Firm
1
Maria: A Case of Identification
“He came from a good family”
THE HALLOWEEN MURDERER
At almost four years of age, Niki was old enough to go trick-or-treating. For weeks, with the help of her mother, Tina, she’d tried to decide whether to go as Miss Piggy or a witch. Tina, twenty-three, was trying to break up with her boyfriend, Phil Sylvester, so she only half-listened to Niki’s chatter.
A week before Halloween, 1977, a week before the night her mother would be murdered, Niki finally decided she would masq
uerade as a witch. Tina cut holes in a sheet for Niki’s blue eyes, her tiny nose and mouth. On the morning of October 31, Tina bought a broom and a pointy witch’s hat in the Philadelphia suburb where she and Niki lived with Phil. It was the last purchase she would ever make.
Waiting for night to fall, the little girl ran around her apartment, her costume over her jeans and T-shirt. Her mother yelled at her to be quiet. Phil finally put Niki bodily into her room and told her to stay there.
It seemed to the little girl that Phil was angry a lot of the time: Phil and Tina had shouting brawls at all hours of the day and night and the neighbors, disturbed by the noise, would bang on the walls until the racket stopped.
Tina, slender and five feet eight inches tall with long brown hair, was described by the building superintendent as beautiful. She had lived in the apartment in Wynnefield Terrace for two years, alone with her daughter after she and her husband separated.
Phil, twenty-two, came from a large family—nine brothers and sisters—but he spent much of his adolescence, from the age of fourteen on, in the streets. A devil-may-care attitude combined with a handsome face and a muscular body made him enormously appealing to girls.
Days after he and Tina met, they began living together. But only two months later, Tina, strung out on drugs and drinking too much, decided she was tired of Phil; she wanted him out. The fighting began in earnest then. Phil was a Don Juan, a manipulator and controller of women whose ego couldn’t accept that he was being kicked out. None of his other girlfriends had broken up with him; he had done the leaving.
Tina was afraid of Phil because he had abused her physically, which was, in part, why she wanted to end the relationship. Tina’s rejection hurt and enraged Phil. For him, apparently, as with other people with certain emotional problems, “the crime of abandonment is so obscene that it must be punished by death,” according to psychiatrist Emanuel Tanay, M.D., in The Murderers.
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