Women Who Love Men Who Kill

by Sheila Isenberg

  Teddi and Marty married in 1989. For Marty, convicted of murdering a sheriff’s officer and serving twenty-five years to life, the marriage means possible conjugal visits and a committed relationship. For Teddi, it means the man she has loved all her life is finally hers.

  Marriage to Marty is the realization of years of fantasizing for Teddi. Through two earlier marriages, the birth of four children, during her entire adult life, Teddi dreamed about Marty since that long-ago day when he touched her hair and promised her it would be okay. Teddi does not allow Marty’s conviction for murdering a policeman to interfere with her love.

  DEATH ON THE PARKWAY

  According to an interview this writer had with a police officer who had been at the scene as well as the official report of the incident, it happened on a quiet, cloudy autumn Tuesday in 1974. No unusual events had been reported over the radio, so Mike Farrow, a Bergen County sheriff’s officer on patrol, parked in a U-turn area near a rural parkway and watched for speeders. Two cars drove by. They followed each other closely on the nearly empty road, almost as if they were driving in tandem.

  Farrow pulled next to the first car and saw a man and a woman in the front seat. Then he dropped back and looked at the second car, a Cadillac. A man in his forties was driving, and a younger man was in the backseat. He signaled the Cadillac to pull over onto the right shoulder. When the driver went for his license, he came up empty-handed. Farrow ordered the driver out of the car, patted him down, and told him to stand at the rear of the Cadillac. Farrow then turned to the dark-haired, nervous-looking man in the backseat: Martin Simmons, thirty-seven—the Marty of Teddi’s dreams, out of jail for only a short time after having served three-years for armed robbery.

  Of the two different versions of what occurred next, the first can be found in court and police records, and the second is Teddi’s story, told to her by the man she loves. The outcome of both versions is the same: Mike Farrow was shot to death by Martin Simmons. In his old neighborhood, people on the street expressed no surprise that Marty Simmons had killed. A heroin addict, Marty had lived on the edge for years. This time, though, Marty had gone too far.

  THE OFFICIAL VERSION

  The police version of Farrow’s death is the story of an unsuspecting cop gunned down by an escaping armed robber. Simmons, two other men, and a woman, had driven to a rural part of New Jersey to rob an electronics store, their take $400 in cash and $250,000 worth of equipment.

  They were driving south toward Jersey City when Officer Farrow noticed them. After he pulled the Cadillac over and dealt with its driver, he went to check Simmons, in the backseat with his bush jacket next to him. Suddenly, Simmons pulled a .25-caliber automatic from a pants pocket and fired once at the policeman, who then pulled out his own gun and started backing up. He kept backing up, firing once at Simmons from the road, and again from the median. Farrow collapsed in the northbound lane, never having hit his target.

  Marty Simmons and his accomplice jumped in the Cadillac and took off. Moments later, two passing off-duty state employees saw the downed officer and called for help. Several miles away, the Cadillac tried to drive around a long line at the tollbooth of the Garden State Parkway. When the toll collector yelled at them to stop, they crashed through a wooden barrier and took off down a side road. In a matter of minutes, the dead sheriff’s officer and the runaway Cadillac were linked and the hunt was on.

  Marty and his accomplice drove on, then stole a two-door 1968 black Ford at gunpoint from a woman. In Pearl River, they dumped the Ford and took a cab. When the cab was stopped at a roadblock set up by the Bergen County Sheriff’s Office, one of the officers saw a gun butt sticking out of a pocket of Marty’s bush jacket.

  The two men were arrested and held without bail. In 1975, Marty Simmons was tried and sentenced to twenty-five years to life for second-degree murder. He also received concurrent sentences for robbery and criminal possession of a weapon.

  TEDDI’S VERSION

  “I could have told you when I was fifteen years old that Marty would have ended up in prison someday—either that or dead… It was the road he was taking, the lifestyle, the drugs.” Marty turned to heroin and crime because they were a way of life for many in the neighborhood. A junkie when he went into prison the first time, Marty came out with a worse addiction. “I remember seeing him two days after he came out, and the only thing that changed was that he was walking the streets. He was the same person, still into drugs. Marty was into drugs from the time he was thirteen.”

  In prison, Marty had no trouble getting high since drugs, like alcohol and other contraband, are easily obtainable for the right price from certain inmates or guards. Released after his robbery term, he went to a walk-in health center in the neighborhood looking for rehab but was turned down; the officials told him there was a conflict in treating him since he was on parole.

  A broke, ex-con junkie, unable to support his habit and unable to get treatment, Marty agreed to a friend’s plan to rob an electronics store. But the robbery was postponed a day, and Marty, needing a fix, was “pretty well strung out” when the heist finally took place. After the robbery, with a quarter of a million dollars worth of stolen goods in their possession, the three men were on their way back to their own turf when fate stepped in: Mike Farrow, looking for speeders.

  Teddi doesn’t believe Farrow’s was a routine check. “The policeman did not log the stop… The lights weren’t on. He just pulled up next to them and waved them over… The indication we have is that he was looking for a payoff.” Farrow behaved in an odd manner. “He took a wallet and put it in his back pocket, which is something that a cop never does. They never touch the wallet at all.” Then Farrow reached for Marty’s jacket. “This is something else that they never do. They never touch the clothing on a routine traffic violation.” Since Marty knew the gun and handcuffs he had used in the robbery were in its pocket, he grabbed for the jacket.

  “I believe there was something else on the cop’s mind. They were not speeding… We have some evidence he had a drinking problem. He had never progressed career-wise.”

  “At this point, the officer started backing up, went for his gun. Marty pulled [his] gun out of his jacket pocket and then everything happened. Marty shot once, thought he grazed him, jumped in the car, and left. Marty didn’t even know he was dead.” Farrow fired twice, shattering a window on the car. Marty was unaware he had killed the officer until he stopped in a bar for a drink and heard the news on television.

  “Marty had never shot a gun before in his life; he couldn’t believe he had even hit him.” His earlier conviction for armed robbery was based on his threatening a convenience-store clerk with a toy gun. “Marty is really not, believe it or not, a violent person. He didn’t use a real gun. As much as he had a reputation for being a tough guy or a fighter, he was a hands kind of guy—a fair fight, one-on-one guy.”

  Marty would not intentionally have killed Farrow, according to Teddi. “That was always the thing with Marty… [When] they stole a car from this woman who had a baby with her, she commented in court that Marty was very gentle with the baby. [His partner] wanted to tie them up, and Marty wouldn’t allow it. There were always the dos and don’ts with Marty.”

  Marty only had the gun with him “for control,” never intending to use it. “Actually, knowing Marty the way I know Marty, he would probably do everything he could not to shoot first. As a matter of fact … Marty first tried to talk to [the deputy] and said to him, ‘Calm down. Why does one of us have to hurt you?’”

  But Marty was a survivor and would do anything to live. Teddi assumes her man’s back was against the wall and so can understand his killing the policeman. “They were both attacking each other… Marty could have died just as easily… I’m grateful that it wasn’t Marty and I’m sorry it was [Farrow].” She doesn’t see the difference between an officer of the law and an armed robber.

  LIFE BEFORE MARTY

  Teddi rebelled against her family starting at about
age twelve. The women in her family, except for her aunt Olivia, saw her as bad, calling her “a devil,” saying, “Oh, she will never fit in.” With the exception of her great-grandfather, the men took little notice of her. After all, in the 1950s, girls were not very important.

  Her father “was here for the boys, but not for [me].” Busy with his work, with homing pigeons on the roof and the social club down the block, he had no time for his daughter. Her mother stabilized the family, always there in the background, cooking, cleaning, ministering to the children.

  Every day, Teddi ran to an alley where she and a friend had a secret place for sheltering stray animals. Teddi would never ask her parents to allow her to keep a pet; there was barely enough money to feed the family of eight.

  Her father, whom she idolized when she was very little, fell from her good graces, and when she entered her teens, Teddi could barely tolerate him. “There was a point in my life where I really turned off to him. He was a real creep.” She was disappointed because he either couldn’t or didn’t want to provide well for his family. “I thought he was just terrible. He didn’t care about nothing. He wasn’t flexible at all… Jobs he could have had, he turned down because he wasn’t going to have a boss. No one was going to tell him what to do.”

  Teddi cared about status. When she was very young, the neighborhood was composed mainly of immigrants, but later, she was envious of the new people moving in who had money to spend. “Before that, all of us were waiting from paycheck to paycheck… I hated the fact that my family were immigrants… I just wanted to be American with money and two cars and that sort of thing.”

  Her father, Joseph, drank. But then all the men drank. It was part of their way of life, like the social club. He “didn’t really talk to you… There was no big relationship one way or the other. If he didn’t come home, I don’t think I would have noticed it for quite a while.” And yet, the house revolved around him. “We ate when Dad came home. Everything was for when he was going to be around.”

  Teddi felt abandoned by her father. “He wasn’t coming to the school project, wasn’t going on the trip, wasn’t doing the things that some of the other kids’ fathers seemed to be doing.” He was not in her life, either emotionally or physically. “He was just not there for me… A little girl goes to her father for protection and he sold me out.

  “I was the middle child. I was expected to tolerate more pain, more disappointment.” She was also the only girl. Alone and unprotected in a chaotic family and a tough neighborhood, Teddi turned to her stepbrother Artie for safety and security because she related more to him than she did to her brothers; they seemed to be more like their father while Artie, maybe because he was a junkie, was different. When Artie died, she felt more alone than ever.

  Two other relatives who supported her when she got into trouble and encouraged her individuality and rambunctious spirit, an aunt and her grandfather, died also. By the time she was in her early teens, Teddi had developed an “abnormal fear of death.”

  She walked around feeling like an outcast in her own family. Told constantly that she was not “falling into place,” she also avoided school as much as possible. Teddi, at thirteen, was confused about her developing sexuality and the mixed messages she got from her mother and other relatives—and from Susan, a prostitute who lived upstairs.

  Although her family strongly disapproved of the sexual permissiveness of the sixties and warned Teddi to remain a virgin until she married, they rented out an upstairs apartment to a prostitute. This woman taught Teddi about sex. Assertive and self-confident, Susan was the only successful businesswoman Teddi knew.

  Teddi began to visit Susan often, and what she was told by this streetwise hooker contradicted the romantic notions she had grown up on. Teddi’s fantasies had been created by the idealistic movies and big-band music of the forties, her parents’ era. But she abandoned romance when she found out what it led to: sex. Surprisingly, the seemingly contradictory views of sex she received from Susan and from her relatives sustained each other. Both were based on the concept that sex is for men only, that women consent solely to gain men’s approval, that women who engage in sex before marriage are tramps. The difference was the family didn’t approve of tramps but to Susan, all women were whores, especially wives, and if you were going to be one, you might as well get paid for it. Everyone told Teddi men would use her.

  To the still-innocent girl, Susan described harsh, violent sexual acts in graphic detail. She told Teddi these acts would be done to her, with or without her consent. She taught Teddi that if she gave in, she should be paid for it, that money would make the sacrifice worthwhile.

  “Any man I met also pretty much confirmed what Susan was saying… They were shallow. It was physical, purely physical.” Teddi gave up the idea of falling in love. Neither the rigid family rules nor the prostitute’s distorted views left any room for a young girl’s dreams.

  One day when Teddi went upstairs to baby-sit for Susan’s toddler, one of Susan’s johns sat waiting, anxious to buy sex with a thirteen-year-old. “He sort of attacked me.” Susan had arranged the whole thing, and although she stopped it eventually, seeing that Teddi was not cooperating, Teddi felt violated. But she never blamed Susan: “That was part of Susan’s lifestyle. If she could have brought in more customers by having a young kid there, that would have been her… She thought that I had the look for it … the body for it.”

  Sex equals profit, Susan told Teddi over and over. No sense giving it away for free. Since Teddi could find no balance between the opposing but reinforcing viewpoints expressed by the prostitute and by her family, she finally gave up on sex altogether. “I decided, well, this must be it. So I’m just not going to bother… And I really didn’t.” She dated during her teenage years but never became sexually involved. She was a virgin at eighteen when she met her first husband, Vincent.

  Teddi decided to get married in order to finally experience sex. “All my friends were doing this already and I felt like a real oddball… I could not get past the point of allowing myself permission to do it unless I was married.” She felt guilty about her sexual feelings because of the strong Catholic anti-sex bias of her family. Teddi also had a somewhat twisted view of sex because of her exposure to Susan. “I hated the idea of it—all the details that were involved… And as time went on, I saw Susan looking … horrible … trashy looking,” as if what she did for a living were reflected in her face.

  Feeling guilty and afraid, Teddi married Vincent. “I finally got enough nerve to step over the line and try it, and this is what I come up with. It was the worst experience of my life. I was ashamed to tell anybody because I started looking at it like I was failing.”

  Vincent had a problem. Anytime he approached Teddi sexually, he became either physically sick or violent. Ironically, the man Teddi had chosen to initiate her into sex was himself incapable of normal sex. “The psychiatrist told me later he was a latent homosexual and extremely violent.” Vincent was not interested in women.

  On their honeymoon, they traveled to Virginia where Vincent’s racehorses were stabled, checking into a hotel near the racetrack. But there was no passionate honeymoon. “A few nights went by and there was nothing. He would either get very drunk and go to sleep or he had to go check the horses.” She just knew something was wrong with her.

  Vincent told her that his inability to consummate their marriage was “very common,” but Teddi didn’t believe him. She also had no one to turn to. “Do I go to the old Italian ladies who have no concept of their sexuality at all? Or do I go to Susan, who’s going to say, fine, go to the racetrack, get the money, buy the clothes. You’re doing better.”

  Teddi finally went along with the hooker’s imagined advice. She wore the clothes, drove the car, spent the money. At eighteen, she was impressed with it all and just shoved aside her doubts and fears. Except that she had to take pills to “numb the whole situation.”

  The fighting started when Vincent demanded Teddi do his
laundry, clean the house, play wife. The first time he hit her, she left him. But she came back; the arguments kept escalating and they split up again.

  One day Teddi, living in a furnished room in Jersey City and working as a waitress, was kidnapped by Vincent and his friends, who took her for a ride. She called Vincent a “pathetic cripple” and he went crazy, using her like a punching bag. When one of the other men pulled out a gun, Teddi wasn’t afraid. “I was very young, but I was very tired of life.”

  At that moment, she realized it couldn’t get any worse. She was facing death and out of that came a newfound strength. “It was almost like a light switch that went on for me.” She fought back until, battered and bruised, they dropped her off in her old neighborhood. She went to her parents’ house where, true to form, her father lashed out at her for failing in her marriage. “He thought that I wasn’t behaving like a wife should behave… He blamed me, more or less, for my husband’s violence because I didn’t fall into place.”

  Two more violent episodes occurred. A friend, “a crooked cop,” tried to rape Teddi, but she resisted very hard. “Once it got into the fight, he got more into the beating, I think, than the actual sex.” Grabbing a statue off a nightstand of Jesus wearing a crown of thorns, Teddi hit her would-be rapist over the head and got away from him.

  Months later, she almost died at Vincent’s hands. She returned to their old apartment to pick up their dog, but Vincent came home before she could leave. “There was no fire escape and no way out. I knew that I was caught… He hit me and I hit my head on the sink. The next thing I knew, he was standing over me with a rifle.” Vincent shot and killed the dog. Neighbors, hearing the shot, called the police.