Phil, too, is a controllable relationship. He can’t beat Maria, abuse her—or even leave his socks lying on the living-room floor. He can’t place demands on her—for sex, for a good meal, for anything. For Maria, both Jesse and Phil are safe relationships. And while she says she longs for Phil’s release, since Pennsylvania gives no paroles on life sentences, it’s unlikely he will ever get out.
The relationship with Phil is also safe because no sex is involved. Maria, making it clear that she is not one of those women who have sex in the visiting room, treasures the nonsexual aspects of her relationship with Phil. “You don’t have the sexual pressures of the outside world; you have each other. You do a lot of talking. You get involved emotionally.”
After a lifetime of being sexually mauled by men, Maria is not interested in sex. “He [Phil] makes me very happy. I have a husband who can’t function and I have a boyfriend who can’t function, but I’m happy. The love I get from Jesse and the love I get from Phil—I’m frustrated sexually, but I am content.”
For Maria, a relationship without sexual pressures is highly desirable because her sexual past was a nightmare, ranging from a harassing boss to date rape, from a grandmother who said boys shouldn’t be “touchin’ her place” to a father who had a “heart attack” the night she lost her virginity. It’s easier for Maria to live without sex.
It is likely that most women who love killers sentenced to life will never have normal sex with them. Yet, like Maria, the women interviewed for this book said they are willing to live lives of permanent sexual abstinence. Maria, like other women in her situation, “lives in a different reality and is caught up in a different emotional system” where a life of sexual abstinence is possible, according to clinical psychologist Stuart Fischoff, Ph.D. “These women are hooked in a way we can’t comprehend.”
Maria gets quite a bit from her relationship with Phil, in addition to freedom from sexual pressure. First, she feels powerful; she is in charge—she can write if she wants, visit when she feels like it, and accept his collect phone calls if she chooses. She has said her father, mother, and husband always told her what to do. But with Phil, she calls the shots.
During her childhood, Maria protected and mothered her five younger brothers. Once again, she’s a protector: Both Phil and Jesse are dependent on her. She gains value and self-esteem from that role. It also fits in with her tendency to infantilize men. She calls Phil “boyfriend of mine” and “my young boy.” She also has a cat named Boyfriend and usually refers to handsome men as “pretty boys.”
On the other hand, she is aware that a man convicted of murder, an inmate in a tough prison, is not a baby. “They’re not called cons because they’re nice, sweet, innocent little boys. They are manipulators.” Phil is different and Maria appreciates that he’s never used her. But the district attorney who prosecuted Phil more than a decade ago said he was “a manipulator who had gotten [Tina] to stay with him” through control and trickery.
Maria has emotional and psychological needs that are being met for the first time in her life. Phil treats her as if she is important, and he is an excellent listener because, in essence, he is a captive audience. “I need to be stimulated… This is an intellectual relationship… I want to be appreciated for something other than sex.”
Used to men pawing at her—Jesse “drug his finger across my chest” the night they met—Maria is totally dependent on the communicative relationship she has with Phil. Maria needed to be valued as a person, rather than a sex object.
According to psychiatrist Neil S. Kaye, M.D., this is the first time a man has “stuck up for Maria.” Prison is a place where inmates “will go to the mat to defend their women; they will do anything to defend her honor, even hole [solitary confinement] time.” Maria needed a relationship that would supply her with this loyalty and with the attention, interaction, and nonsexual warmth that she craved. Phil is totally there for her, and she feels enriched by this intimacy. As we will see with other women who love murderers, Maria’s father was somewhat cold, removed, and authoritarian. She said she was “scared to death” to go home when her grades weren’t up to par or when she had committed some infraction of the house rules. Her first experience with sex is more memorable for her father’s incredibly cruel behavior than for anything else. (When he had his “heart attack,” he refused to allow Maria to go to the hospital with him. He did, however, allow her boyfriend to accompany him.)
Maria’s parents either never understood the severity of the abuse she suffered at Jesse’s hands, or never cared. Remember, when Jesse was drying out and Maria had left him, her mother revealed her whereabouts, and the result was that Maria went back to Jesse. Now, in Phil, Maria has someone to give her advice. She credits Phil with her decision to remove Jesse from the nursing home. “If it wasn’t for the strength and the courage he gave me, I don’t believe I could have fought for my husband the way I did. Phil said, ‘Maria, Jesse is in prison just like I am.’”
Initially she felt guilty about loving Phil, but she no longer does. “In the beginning I held myself back … but I give Jesse the best life possible. People like him are rotting away in nursing homes; he has a normal life now.” Since Maria lives on the money she receives for Jesse from the Ohio Bureau of Worker’s Compensation, it is unclear how much of her caring for Jesse at home is sacrifice and how much is her desire to have him under her thumb, to punish him for what he did to her.
BUT WHY A MURDERER?
Passionate love can be healthy or unhealthy. The lover may grow and become a better person, or she may become subjugated to her beloved, willing to become a slave to negative forces in exchange for being loved. Being central to another person is a major part of what love is about. Maria is now central to both Jesse—in his weakened, dependent state—and to Phil, in his imprisoned state.
As lovers do, Maria identifies with Phil’s values, persona, and personal history. Some of these things she sees as crucial, while others she disavows and plays down. Maria emphasizes Phil’s morals, which she says are the same as hers, and his “good” values—as when he sends cards and letters to Jesse and uses Jesse’s therapy techniques on an inmate who is similarly handicapped.
But as do the other women in this book who love killers, Maria denies Phil’s responsibility for the murder he committed. When he says he didn’t know the gun was loaded, she believes him. She is not at all afraid of being hurt by Phil. “I know him. He’s a good, caring, loving man, and he has good morals and good ideals.”
“It wasn’t an accident why Maria chose this particular man,” said psychoanalyst Carl Rotenberg, M.D., who believes that to be involved in a loving way with someone who has murdered, one must identify to a certain extent with that act and with the motivation for that act. Phil’s murder “was a killing of a partner, and I think Maria had her own issues about wanting her partner to die,” said Rotenberg. Phil killed someone who was difficult to live with, who rejected him and did not return his love. These are emotions and experiences Maria had during her early relationship with Jesse. It’s likely that during her marriage, Maria had murderous feelings toward Jesse. Phil’s murder of Tina is, symbolically, Maria’s murder of Jesse. (But since Maria herself almost died at Jesse’s hands when he held a loaded gun to her head, she may likely also identify with Phil’s victim.)
That Phil has killed is central to Maria’s love for him. Even while she denies his culpability, it is his ability to murder that attracts her. His murder of Tina means he acted on his rage, however unsuitably. Maria could never act on her rage, cultivating a good-girl image, agreeing to everything imposed on her. Remember: “My father told me what to do. Then my mother told me what to do. Then my husband told me what to do.”
So Phil’s murder is also Maria’s murder. She said they share everything: morals, values, ideals. They also share this killing. It finally brings closure to the unresolved rage she felt during her life toward her family for turning her, too young, into a “second mother,” toward
her father for being unavailable and authoritarian, toward men for seeing her only as a sex object, toward her mother for not adequately protecting her from the men who hurt her, and finally, toward her husband for his drinking and abusive behavior.
Loving Phil has also given Maria a sense of power. In its broadest perspective, murder means exercising control over life and death. This power is incredibly attractive to others; weak individuals feel they can draw from it, become powerful themselves. So Maria identifies with Phil’s power—he had actually done what she had wanted to do herself.
Phil crossed the line between being enraged enough to want to kill—and killing. It was not an accident that Maria fell in love with him. The fact that he listened to her and was concerned about her—any inmate would have served that need. But only someone who took another life could fill her deep need to be enmeshed in that kind of—what she perceives to be—strength. A powerless woman living a life of emptiness and constriction, Maria has drawn energy and vigor from her killer/lover.
Because he’s incarcerated and she is a free agent, Maria has a large amount of control over this relationship. If Phil is powerful because he has taken a life, how powerful then is Maria? “It’s hard to come up with anything more powerful than to be in control of someone powerful enough to take a life,” said Dr. Kaye. “This raises self-esteem and self-image considerably.” Maria is in the driver’s seat and her passenger is a murderer; for the first time in her life, Maria is an important person.
DENIAL
In order to allow oneself to love a killer, a certain amount of denial has to take place. Women who love men who have murdered talk easily about their battles to free their lovers, and they have no problem discussing their romances—how they met, how love flourished in the ugly prison atmosphere. They can explain how the prison system is slowly eroding what’s left of their lovers’ spirits and how the system treats them as if the stigma of loving an inmate makes them into monsters, also.
But when it comes to the murder itself, an element of unreality creeps in. None will say her lover has the capacity to kill. Although the evidence is there, although the facts are known, not a single woman believes that her man really did it—even though he stands convicted. These women engage in denial and compartmentalization. They put the crime aside when thinking about the men they love. They have excuses, like Maria’s, that Phil didn’t know the gun was loaded.
In the following chapters, we will meet other women whose lives are devoted to the murderers they love, each woman spinning dizzily in a dance with a master of death. The fact that her lover has killed is part of his importance and serves to meet her emotional and psychological needs. Because they are so dangerous and difficult, these relationships are extremely intense, burning with all the passion we have come to expect from romantic love as it is depicted in romance novels and soap operas.
Some of these women love men who are notorious. Others love murderers whose names have long since faded from the headlines. But all women who love killers share the same need to sacrifice themselves to a love that is so intense, it is potentially threatening. Like moths around a flame, even if they get singed, these women continue to hover around their lovers as long as they are wanted, until they go up in flames.
2
Murder and Marriage
“It was hardly romantic”
THE PHENOMENON
The phenomenon of women loving murderers challenges everything that is socially, morally, and ethically acceptable. It defies rational understanding and seems to be incomprehensible and unexplainable.
Many criminal-justice experts and mental-health specialists—generally male—tend to dismiss these women as suffering from a personality disorder. But these women are not freaks or fools. They are examples of what can happen in our brutal, patriarchal society in which women strive to keep up at least the appearance of social propriety by getting married—even if it’s marriage to a murderer. These women should not be condemned, relegated to the outskirts of society, or written off. Nor should they be stigmatized and ostracized, as they often are, because of their relationships with killers.
They cross class, religion, and race lines. They work in all sorts of jobs, have varying income levels and educations. They might be categorized as “women who love too much,” but as we’ll see later, they absolutely don’t love too much. They don’t really love at all.
For some, it’s the “good girl” looking for the “bad boy.” She is afraid of being bored so chooses to be a criminal’s “moll.” She always feels special because he loves her, and he is a wild man, an outcast, deadly and dangerous. John Money, Ph.D., the pioneering sexuality researcher, coined a term for being turned on by danger: hybristophilia. It’s a paraphilia, or sexual perversion, in which arousal is dependent on being with a partner known to have committed a violent crime—such as murder. A woman with this perversion is sexually “turned on only by a partner who has a predatory history of outrages perpetrated on others,” wrote Money, in Lovemaps.
No murderer is too despicable; somewhere there is a woman who will love him. Even James Earl Ray, convicted killer of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., managed to find a wife. In early 1978, Anna Sandhu, thirty-two, an artist for a television station doing a documentary on Ray, sat across from the notorious assassin studying the lines and angles and planes of his face. Using charcoals and pastels, she drew him over and over. An attractive blonde with a great figure, a talented artist, Anna began doing little favors for Ray. By the time she began visiting him regularly, the documentary was long finished. Anna was drawn in by Ray’s cries for help and his refusal to admit his guilt. She checked facts, interviewed people, tried to help him prove he was innocent. She fell in love.
James Earl Ray and Anna Sandhu were married in October 1978 at Brushy Mountain Penitentiary in Tennessee where Ray was serving a ninety-nine-year term. She wore an off-white pleated skirt and matching blouse. “I love him. I know we have a lot of adversity ahead of us, but we’re ready to face it,” Sandhu told the New York Times. She had done the proposing; she had even torn her panty hose getting down on her knees. Anna was sure the courts would set a release date for her husband—she believed he had been framed—if he had a wife waiting for him. After the brief ceremony, and a ten-minute honeymoon during which they were alone but under the scrutiny of four guards, Anna went home—alone.
A reporter for a national newspaper, Joe Mullins, couldn’t believe how naive and innocent Anna was when he met with her. In Tennessee to cover the wedding, he was staying at the Holiday Inn. Anna came to his room for a prearranged interview but refused to talk to Mullins unless the door was kept open. He sat on the green-striped bedspread, but she sat primly in a straight-backed chair. Mullins offered her $15,000 for an exclusive but she refused, saying publicity would hurt her husband’s chances for freedom.
During the couple’s twelve-year marriage, they consummated their love at least once. “James had been attacked in jail, and badly hurt, and was moved to a prison hospital. I visited him there and we were able to make love. It was wonderful—we were husband and wife at last,” she told reporter Mullins twelve years later in a 1990 interview. But she described most of her prison visits as “heartrending. We couldn’t even touch or kiss. Two women attendants used to subject me to humiliating searches making nasty comments.”
The marriage was a disaster for Anna. Because people knew who she was, she couldn’t sell her art anywhere, was accused of being a racist, and even received death threats. By the end, she had gained more than sixty pounds and Ray was taunting her about her weight. Eventually Anna stopped visiting. “I think his enthusiasm cooled when he realized he was not going to get out of prison—with or without a wife,” she told Mullins. In March 1990, Ray filed for divorce.
Although it is stated in our moral code that one must not kill, we often settle our differences violently. “Our biggest failure in the socialization of the human animal has been the prevalence of murder… We have never decided to abo
lish homicide; we merely regulate it,” writes Dr. Emanuel Tanay in The Murderers.
Both individual and serial killings are increasing, and in 1992, according to FBI supervisory special agent William Hagmaier III, we can expect the number of murders around the country to equal the population of a small city—at least 22,000. The murderers who are caught, convicted, and imprisoned often attract women to them, with the result that a small but very interesting subculture of couples, composed of murderers and free women, is growing every day.
Women’s romantic relationships with murderers are confusing to police, prosecutors, and prison officials although they are quite aware of the existence of these relationships. Officials are often upset about a convicted murderer’s having a love affair with a free woman. Imagine spending five years tracking down the Hillside Stranglers and another two years testifying at their trials—only to find out that these men are getting married!
Granted, a woman who marries a serial killer is different from a woman who marries a man who has killed once. But how different? Women who love killers have fallen in love with the most spectacularly antisocial portion of our society. They rain their kisses on mouths that have cursed as they pulled the trigger, they hold hands that have strangled, they caress arms that have wielded weapons of death. No matter whether the man has killed once, or ten times, he has taken human life. He has done the unthinkable. He is a pariah forever, doomed to dwell on the fringes of society wherever society knows the truth about him. Once a community finds out a convicted murderer is in its midst—even one who’s paroled or pardoned—residents may chase the man out of the town or city. Their instincts are sometimes correct.
Women Who Love Men Who Kill Page 4