Phil was very interested. He knew that many of the other prisoners had relationships with women on the outside, and he wanted to be one of them. Maria was attractive with long black hair, smooth, clear skin, and a sensuous face and figure. She was warm, a good talker and listener.
It was not until their second visit that Phil told Maria why he was doing time. She accepted his version of the murder and believed that it was an accident. She was able to separate the crime from the man. “I initially wanted to do something nice … [then] I was compelled to go back… I needed to be stimulated intellectually. I guess because every day, all day, it was the same thing—medical, medical, medical—because of my husband.”
She visited Phil once a week, the maximum allowed; they wrote and he called her—collect; inmates can only call the outside world collect. Four months after they met, Phil told Maria he loved her. “Phil said, ‘Since I’ve been in prison, these guys in here have tried to fix me up with everyone. But it’s you I want. I want you in my life.’
“I panicked. It scared me; it wasn’t what I had been looking for. I was looking for a friendship. At that time I still was in a dream world that everything would be okay with Jesse.” But Phil began to become more and more important, his letters and phone calls the high points of her day. Eventually, Maria acknowledged that she was in love with him.
So many romantic, passionate letters went back and forth that Maria now has four shoeboxes full. Some were explicitly sexual—“I did get some smut letters, too.”
Sex, however, was secondary. “There was so much love and so much romance and so much honesty and respect and truth.” At her first meeting, while there was no love at first sight, there was a flicker of feeling—a feeling Maria had not had in a long time, perhaps a feeling she had never had. Someone was willing to listen to her, to talk to her. “I was attracted to him both with my mind and with my body. We had morals and ideals that were the same. I enjoyed his company.”
She denied his crime, separating the Phil she was falling in love with from the Phil who had killed a woman. “I believe what he told me, [that] he did not know the gun was loaded. I believe him because he’s been honest with me all along. I know what he’s done wrong and I know what he’s done right. And I love him regardless.”
According to Maria, marks on Tina’s neck indicating she was strangled before she was shot were made by her brother, not by Phil. “Her brother found out that she was prostituting herself out and that she was involved in drugs, and he smacked her around and choked her that morning.” But Maria knows Phil actually did the killing. “He admits pointing the gun and pulling the trigger. But he says he did not know the gun was loaded and he did not mean to kill the woman… He told me they used to have fistfights. They were arguing, I guess, and he did it more or less to scare her.”
Phil and Tina, about to end their relationship, “had started becoming abusive to each other,” according to Maria, and Phil had a gun in his possession. To Maria—whose husband, Jesse, had been abusive and who had once held a gun to her head—pointing a gun at someone to “scare” them is very much within the parameters of reality. One of her brothers has owned a gun; guns are an accepted part of life: “I think all men go through this gun fascination.”
But Maria believes murder is wrong, and so does Phil, she says. “Phil has a lot of remorse for what he did. He said it’s something he’ll live with every day for the rest of his life—that he can’t begin to explain to me what it feels like to take another person’s life, but it doesn’t feel very good.
“It bothers me that he did something like this. I hope that what he’s told me is the truth, and I do believe him.” Maria said she believes Phil, then said that she hopes he’s telling the truth. She has made the leap of faith; she is willing to believe his story because she is in love with him.
WOMEN WHO LOVE MEN WHO KILL
Maria’s story is not unique. Unbelievable as it may seem, there is a population of women who are deeply drawn to men who have murdered. They meet the men while working in prisons as nurses, teachers, social workers, or volunteers. Others become pen pals with murderers. Some, who are infatuated, write fan/love letters to “celebrity” killers such as Scott Peterson, the Boston Marathon Bomber, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy. A fellow inmate of David “Son of Sam: Berkowitz’s said that even today, decades after his bizarre serial killings in New York City, he still receives letters from women. These women want to meet these killers because they are looking for love; some end up marrying these men.
“The women have reached the point in life where the magic words are ‘one last chance.’… Most are unhappy, frustrated, and dissatisfied. They have low self-image and want to attach themselves to figures they think are powerful,” said psychiatrist David Abrahamsen, M.D., author of many books including Confessions of Son of Sam and the expert whose testimony convinced the court that Berkowitz was competent to stand trial.
In America—where single men and women are lonely and it’s difficult to meet someone to love and relate to—killers seem to have no trouble finding girlfriends and wives. Suspected murderers, indicted murderers, convicted murderers, even serial killers who confess to the most heinous crimes, are all able to find love. Once inside prison, a murderer, although usually serving a life sentence, often becomes a magnet for women.
In Holdrege, Nebraska, Police Chief Ken Jackson said it’s a common phenomenon. He recalled a Lincoln man who shot his wife eight times; she died on the spot. “The first week he was in jail, seven women came to visit him.” These women, who were previously unacquainted with the murderer, appeared to “fall madly in love through the little glass window” in the visiting room.
Robert Chambers was so popular with young women during his trial in the late 1980s that his groupies were dubbed the Bobbettes by the New York Post. “They hung all over him, fawned all over him,” said an observer.
Before the trial began, but after jury selection, Chambers was the centerpiece of a sensational home video made by some of his friends. In the video, he is seen twisting the neck of a doll—who many believe represents his victim, Jennifer Levin—and prancing around, fully dressed, with a number of partially clad, suggestively dancing, young women.
The prisons are full of killers who have women on the outside, waiting, hoping, assaulting the legal system relentlessly, determinedly, so their men will get a parole, a pardon, a commutation, a new trial.
THE WOMEN
These women are of all types. Like Maria, some are housewives married to other men. Others are professionals—teachers, nurses, reporters, social workers. Even women lawyers and judges are not immune to this fascination.
Some women work in factories, offices, and service industries as waitresses, house cleaners, cooks, nurses’ aides, secretaries. Others are professionals: lawyers, professors, journalists. Many of the women have children; others are childless. They are all ages, but the majority seem to be in their thirties and forties.
They may be well educated with bachelor’s degrees, even some Ph.D.’s and law degrees. Some have only high school diplomas while others never got past the sixth grade.
Other than their romantic entanglements with murderers, these women have no involvement with the criminal world. Like Maria, most of these women never visited a prison before they met their men. Nor have they themselves committed any crimes. They consider themselves moral, upright, caring, right-thinking Americans. They are good women—who developed from the good girls they were as children. They generally don’t use illegal drugs; not many drink. They are frequently religious. They believe in family, honor, tradition, and the American flag.
These women are the well-groomed, neatly dressed members of the PTA, the church group, or the garden club. They are the women we see in the supermarket, behind desks, in subways and on buses, taking their children to the park, visiting their elderly parents. They look normal; they look just like ordinary people. They never caused much trouble as teenagers; as adults they have been law
-abiding citizens. They have not indulged in deviant behavior; they have not been arrested.
But they stray from the norm in one enormous way. Their emotions and needs and deepest desires have led them to form passionate, romantic alliances with men who have committed murder—the outcasts of the same society they symbolize.
These women are acting out their deepest fantasies. They find love, romance, passion, and commitment where society says they shouldn’t: with killers, the men who take the lives of others, men who have committed crimes ranging from a brutal single murder to a hideous series of them.
These women find men who kill glamorous, romantic, sexual, and lovable. The murders don’t put the women off; they are not frightened by the idea of killing. While the rest of us might find these men frightening or repulsive, to their women, they are desirable. These women want to meet them, talk to them, love them, be with them.
While the world shuddered at the unspeakable horror of serial killer Ted Bundy, scores of women found him appealing enough to write to him. Dozens visited him in prison, and during his last trial, during the 1970s, the courtroom was crowded with Ted groupies. Carole Ann Boone found him so fascinating and appealing that she married him near the end of his trial and later had his child. (Bundy died in Florida’s electric chair in 1989.)
Serial killers, the acknowledged masters of death, are enormously attractive to women. “Hillside Stranglers” Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono killed more than a dozen women in California after raping, sodomizing, and torturing them. Bianchi pleaded guilty in 1979, and although he had to wait ten years, he is finally a groom. A Louisiana woman fell in love with him after a three-year courtship through the mail, and they married in September 1989, the day after they first met face to face. (Bianchi was denied parole in 2010; he will next be eligible to apply in 2025; Buono died in prison in 2002.)
Preppie Murderer Robert Chambers is still so appealing that he has not been without a girlfriend since his 1986 homicide, and after he was imprisoned in 1988, prison guards reported that a “bevy of beauties” visited him regularly. According to the district attorney who prosecuted Chambers, a manslaughter conviction was the only one possible because of the jury’s confusion over Chambers’s culpability in Jennifer Levin’s death. Their confusion was further complicated by one juror, Elizabeth Bauch, who became “besotted with Chambers” during the trial. “She fell in love with him,” said Linda Fairstein, assistant district attorney in Manhattan. “For nine days [while the jury was sequestered] she refused to discuss the evidence.” (Bauch denies Fairstein’s allegation.) (After Chambers’s release from prison for the Levin murder in 2001, he was rearrested in 2008, charged with selling cocaine. On a plea deal, he was sentenced to 19 years. His girlfriend at the time, Shawn Kovell, was charged with him but not convicted.)
Elizabeth Bauch is not the only woman juror who ever fell in love with a murder defendant. In California in 1987 a man was convicted of kidnapping, rape, and murder but was not sentenced to death because one juror, Rochelle, was convinced “it was an accident.” Sentenced to life without parole, this man received a visitor shortly after his conviction: Rochelle. Today they are husband and wife, and she is working hard to get him a new trial.
There are other cases as shocking:
The former justice of the peace in a Western state who is married to a convicted killer.
The Southern lawyer who, sent to represent a man accused of murder, helped him escape. After they were caught, she was disbarred and sent to prison herself. He has since married another woman with whom he has had a child.
The New York City fashion designer who gave up custody of her own daughter to “mother” the children of the suspected killer with whom she fell in love.
Although these women are diverse in their lifestyles and backgrounds, they are all prisoners of love in almost the same way their men are prisoners of various correctional systems. These women can’t help themselves. They must be in these relationships in order to fulfill their very deepest needs, their most complex emotional dependencies, their ultimate fantasies. They are compelled to dance with the masters of death: These relationships are their lives. They are women obsessed.
THE MEN
They have killed either a family member—wife, girlfriend, relative—or murdered an outsider—a bank guard, a police officer, a random victim.
The men are diverse racially and ethnically but appear to have more similarities than their women on the outside. Few of them received much education before they committed murder, and many had miserable childhoods. The majority were substance abusers. The murders they committed often occurred while they were under the influence—and while they were still relatively young men. (Except for serial killers, who appear to be older than other murderers.)
Many of these men, while in prison, have tried to improve themselves. They attend classes, acquiring high school, college, and even graduate degrees. Many of the lifers have become jailhouse lawyers, spending every waking moment studying law books, convinced they will never get out unless they fight their cases themselves. Some have found new careers behind bars because they were forced to find something with which to occupy themselves in the dead world of prison.
The men are often handsome and well built, like Scott Peterson. (Now on Death Row at San Quentin, Peterson has received many marriage proposals.) They are usually intense and charismatic, such as Jack Henry Abbott, a lifer who was released after pressure from various intellectuals including author Norman Mailer who admired his book In the Belly of the Beast. He killed a man two months later and is serving a life sentence in New York State; he, too, has a woman on the outside. (Abbott committed suicide in his prison cell, in 2002.)
Occasionally, these men appear more ordinary, like Kevin, who was convicted in 1985 of rape and murder. His devoted girlfriend, Lori, visits him once a week for six hours and writes and calls him daily. Kevin, a quiet man with nothing of the charismatic charmer about him, is a rarity among murderers who attract women on the outside.
These killers are strivers, not content to sit behind the walls and do nothing. In addition to seeking education and new careers, they seek love relationships because they learn after they’ve been in prison a short time, that having a woman on the outside is a big plus. She is a liaison with the world, a devoted advocate. Also, for a murderer trying to get paroled, having a stable relationship creates a positive impression on the parole board. A woman on the outside can often help get an inmate out—and when you’re in prison, getting out is all that counts.
BUT IS IT LOVE?
These women are compelled to do what the majority of us would find dangerous and threatening. They go into prisons. They receive collect phone calls from murderers. They write to killers. They long for the day when their murderer/lover will be released so they can be together. Even though their men have been convicted of violent murders, these women are not fearful of sharing a home, a bed, a life, with them. They can’t wait until their men are released so they can all—the woman and her children, if she has any, and the murderer—live together as one big, happy family.
These women have found love in the least likely place, where society tells them it’s forbidden, in the hostile environment of courtrooms and prisons. They have found passion in uncomfortable public prison visiting rooms watched over by unfriendly guards. Some dress in special ways—such as skirts without underpants—so they can have intercourse behind vending machines, in corners, on chairs, on benches; with their children watching; standing up, sitting down; in closets; in private rooms with entree obtained by bribing guards—rarely in a bed. They have found commitment in relationships with men who are con artists, who will promise anything to get an extra pack of cigarettes. They enjoy the security of marriage with men who have broken the most sacred law of humanity by committing murder.
But to these women, the love, passion, and commitment are more real and meaningful than if found in ordinary ways, with average men. Their relationships are the m
ost important things in their lives. For women in love with murderers, the relationships are their reasons for being.
Most average wives and girlfriends don’t give a relationship the time and energy these women do. If they have telephone answering machines, the messages all say, “Yes, operator, I accept collect calls,” so they never miss a message from their lovers in prison. These women are obsessed, addicted; their men are central to their lives. They build their work and family life around the men. They organize their weeks so they can make time-consuming prison visits. They spend a large part of their time talking about their men, fantasizing about the day they’ll get out and they can finally be together.
But is it love or obsession? Is it healthy or unhealthy? Are these “good girls” loving “bad boys” for the wrong reasons? Do they get turned on sexually by the idea their men have killed? Is there prestige and excitement in loving the baddest of the bad guys? What is the particular and peculiar chemistry involved in an attraction to a killer? Are these women strange, deviant? Or are they normal, regular people who happen to fall into bizarre relationships? Are they society’s most passionate women, refusing to brook any obstacle in the way of their love? Why do they fall in love with men who have killed?
MARIA’S STORY
When Maria fell in love with Phil, she was already in a prison of sorts herself, responsible twenty-four hours a day for a totally helpless husband. “The reason I’m not in love with my husband is because it’s changed. He is now my child; I have motherly feelings for him because he does not walk or talk.”
Jesse had abused her emotionally and physically for the duration of their marriage before his accident. But Maria does not focus on his cruelty; she just talks about what is now—his dependent state. She is exacting some kind of revenge for Jesse’s cruel treatment of her. A visit to Maria’s house reveals it is divided into “his,” and “hers.” Maria’s larger part of the house is light, airy, roomy, and comfortable, decorated with beautiful plants, comfortable couches and chairs, and aesthetically pleasing colors. Jesse’s bedroom and sitting room, on the other hand, are small, crowded, and infinitely darker. He is definitely under her control.
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