Women Who Love Men Who Kill

by Sheila Isenberg

  COMPANIONSHIP

  The romantic passion experienced by women who love convicted killers never, ever becomes ordinary, everyday love, what some call companionship or companionate love. This affectionate bonding is a warm, tender sharing based on the exchanges of a mutual daily life together. But the special population of women in this book who have fallen in love with murderers has found a way to stave off this more relaxed kind of love. After these women fall in love, they maintain a high level of intensity with their murderer/lover; the relationship does not change into companionate love. It remains eternally romantic.

  But some psychologists and psychiatrists give no credibility to romantic love, saying our culture creates an addictive attitude toward love. If the measure of love is its destructiveness to the two lovers and their families, it’s not healthy. These experts advise against a romantic love that brings suffering, suggesting instead a down-to-earth, painless love that brings comfort and companionship.

  Only “consummate love” is real love, writes psychologist Robert Sternberg in an essay “The Psychology of Love” in his book of essays on love, The Psychology of Love. Consummate love has three aspects: intimacy, passion, and decision/commitment. Passionate love is “a continual interplay between elation and despair, thrill and terror, positives and negatives,” agrees psychologist Elaine Hatfield. Hatfield contrasts the radical ups and downs of passionate or romantic love with companionate love. According to her, companionate love is characterized by more positives than by negatives and by an exchange of affection in a loving relationship where partners are capable of both intimacy and independence.

  Women who fall in love with convicted killers don’t want the companionate love described by Hatfield or the consummate love described by Sternberg. These women seek a love that causes discomfort and pain because they want to ride the crests of the waves, lingering over the highs and lows, suffering intensely, denying themselves the normalcy of an average, everyday kind of relationship. These women want passion and won’t take anything less. And they accept that passion means suffering. (According to the Oxford English Dictionary, compact edition, 1971, the root of the word passion means “to suffer”—the sufferings of pain, the sufferings of Christ on the cross.)

  An excellent example is the story of Kate Soffel, told by Ron Nyswaner in his original screenplay for the film Mrs. Soffel. In 1900, Kate Soffel was busy as the wife of the warden of Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County Prison and mother of their four children. A year later, she was in prison, having fallen passionately in love with one of her husband’s charges. Her obsessive love for Ed Biddle, a murderer and robber who was sentenced to death, was so overpowering that Kate threw away everything she had to be with him. She helped him and his brother escape from prison and fled with them on New Year’s Day, 1901. At some point during their crazed one-day run for freedom, Kate and Ed realized they would be captured. Kate’s passion for Ed was such that she could not live without him so she asked him to shoot her; she preferred dying to going back to her everyday life. He shot her, but the bullet missed its mark and she lived. Ed was killed when the runaways were captured.

  Kate, in her early thirties, first met Ed when she read the Bible to him. That, as well as supervising food preparation and making sure the inmates had blankets, were her responsibilities as warden’s wife. Ed, twenty-four, and his brother were doomed to die and had become a cause célébre, capturing the imaginations of the women of Pittsburgh. Ed, in particular, handsome, smart, eloquent, and genuinely poetic was the focus of hundreds of women who stood outside the prison daily, praying for the brothers, protesting their imprisonment and their imminent hanging.

  After the brothers were killed during the escape attempt, their funeral turned out to be one of Pittsburgh’s most well-attended events. Countless grief-stricken women sobbed over the brothers. Because of her sorrow over Ed’s death, one teenaged girl committed suicide by ingesting lye. Like Kate Soffel and the women of Pittsburgh, she had fallen under Ed’s spell.

  Kate, who had encountered passion for the first time in her life with Ed, was never to know it again. She would, however, know a different kind of suffering. After her capture, she served two years in prison. Her husband did not allow her to see their children, and she died five years after her release. She had nothing to live for.

  Companionate love is the kind of love that allows lovers to see each other’s faults and flaws, weaknesses and needs. It is love that flourishes on commitment and reason, not on wild upswings of irrational expectations, on mad passion, on ecstatic joinings and despairing partings. It is not the love experienced by women who love convicted killers.

  FALLING IN LOVE

  Women who love murderers, like everyone else looking for love, are seeking transcendence, elevation above the daily routines of life, completion, a feeling of being totally united with another so the self can never again feel the awfulness of existential loneliness. This falling in love, to most of these women, means losing control over their emotions, being totally consumed by an obsession that takes precedence over everything else.

  Carla, whose husband is currently on Florida’s death row after his conviction for the beating and stabbing murder of an elderly woman when he was sixteen, described her passion: “I have never been in love. I had many boyfriends, but now I know I’m in love. I will love him no matter where he is. My feelings will not change.”

  Mary loves Al, a convicted killer; her feelings for him are deep, passionate, and committed. She talked about the sacrifice that is a necessary part of her relationship: “This is a burning question inside every woman—What is the extent of my love? Could I ever love like that? Are they crazy? Would I be crazy to do that?”

  Falling in love is “prompted by an internal psychological state,” said Dr. Ethel Person. H. G. Wells wrote of “the Lover Shadow,” an explanation for love at first sight. If a woman sees someone and instantly loves him, it’s likely he fits her image of her lover shadow. The lover shadow “is made up of many, many different things—memories, sensations, wishful fantasies,” according to Dr. Person. And that’s fine, she added, unless a person “can only fall in love with somebody who is a disaster.” Like a murderer.

  Women who love killers are seeking the oblivion of total passion, total commitment and the giving up of the self to another. Does it sound religious or spiritual? It is. When we love, “we believe we have found the ultimate meaning of life, revealed in another human being,” writes Robert Johnson. Searching for the meaning of life in another person is part of romantic love. And passion is the fuel. Not sexual passion, but the passion of transcendence, ecstasy, intensity, extremes of joy and despair.

  Women who love murderers experience all this: They suffer deeply. Their love flourishes in an atmosphere that tries to kill it. For women who love killers, every prison visit presents an opportunity for a tearful, joyous reunion, a demonstration of intense feelings and a sharing of devotion. Every parting is an opportunity for tears of despair, cries of eternal love, and feelings of longing. A single prison visit contains as much drama and intensity as a romance novel or soap opera. The women relish these incredible highs and lows; they live for them and on them.

  DRAMA

  “One of the great paradoxes in romantic love is that it never produces human relationship as long as it stays romantic. It produces drama, daring adventures, wondrous, intense love scenes, jealousies and betrayals,” writes Johnson. Women who love men who kill are always in a romantic relationship. They experience continuous excitement and tension: Will the prison allow me to visit? How much time will we have together? What’s happening with his appeal? Will he be released? Will he spend the rest of his life behind bars?

  In addition to the adventure of their prison visit together, there is the great drama of his life behind bars, as well as her life on the outside. Each week, they exchange impassioned stories. He was attacked by another inmate. A guard harassed him. He was found with a newspaper in his cell and punished with four day
s in solitary. She was insulted on the telephone by her parents for having this relationship. She could only work a regular forty-hour week so she can’t buy him shoes right now. And so on.

  ILLUSION

  Romantic love can be an emotion felt by one person and directed at another—a feeling that considers the happiness and well-being of the beloved as most important. Or romantic love can be an illusion, a reflection of the lover’s own desires and fantasies. “Hence the popular idiom that love is blind, for a lover projects onto a partner, or love-blot, his/her unique love image,” writes John Money, Ph.D., in Love and Lovesickness: The Science of Sex, Gender Differences and Pairbonding.

  Women in love with killers refuse to see faults in their men. And they bestow upon their inappropriate partners qualities that most objective observers can see are not real.

  These women do not allow themselves to admit their men have weaknesses. They deny the murders their lovers have committed. Their love is fed on illusion and fueled by fantasy so they naturally have false beliefs about the natures of the men they love.

  These women love a shadow lover of their own creation. It’s as if each woman has taken a blank canvas and painted her ideal man, then fallen in love with him, making him come to life in the process. He is an ink blot, a blank, a reflection of her inner needs; he, and the love she feels, are not real.

  THE MEN THEY LOVE: HEROES AND KNIGHTS

  The murderers these women love are similar to the heroes of popular romance novels. Readers devour the heroes in the books because, in real life, no men like these ever cross their doorsteps. These heroes are long, lean, and mean—but also loving, caring, and giving to the women who win their hearts. There is no doubt the men are hot-tempered and capable of violence and passion; they’ve proven that by murdering. But they are also tender. Rochelle’s husband is “sensitive to the tiniest of animals” although he is convicted of rape, kidnapping, and murder. Over and over these women describe the men they love as caring, thoughtful, concerned human beings.

  According to their women, these men are one-of-a-kind guys. They are leaders, bright, articulate, handsome. Bill “is intelligent, politically, philosophically. He’s very liberal. He’s very positive; he’s one of those power-of-positive-thinking people,” said Alicia. Bill is also smarter than she is: “He’s a whiz at computers and math. His areas of knowledge are more than mine.”

  Naomi Zack, a Ph.D. in philosophy, in her introduction to My Return, written together with her murderer/husband, Jack Henry Abbot describes him as “one of the most promising young philosophers” of her generation. (In 1981, Abbott stabbed Richard Adan to death.) Abbott is so brilliant, even Zack can’t understand some of his writing. To her, he is a genius, an existential hero, and finally, a tragic figure. Writes Zack: “He has paid—more than any man today who has been convicted of manslaughter—for the events of that fateful night—both in the time he has so far served and in his dangerous circumstances in prison.”

  But there is a more tragic figure: Richard Adan. In her obsessive and delusional love for Abbott, Naomi Zack has forgotten the real victim.

  MASTERY AND CHALLENGE

  Murderers are also masterful, like romance-novel heroes. Very often, even though they are imprisoned, they are consulted by their girlfriends or wives on life issues. Generally, to his woman, the word of her man is law even though he is a powerless inmate behind bars. Bill has a dominating personality, admits Alicia, and he tries to control her. But her denial mechanism clicks in quickly and she softens this statement. “He has a dominating personality but only in the sense that he’s very cocky and intelligent and he simply likes to be right. He has a tendency to think he knows a little bit more about most subjects. And he’s right. He does know more than most of the people around him.”

  Consulting a prison inmate is a sham, because if a man is in for murder, he has little control over anything. It is the woman’s need to see her man as masterful that makes her ask him what she should do and causes her to seek his advice.

  “One of a woman’s most pervasive fantasies is being Swept Away by the man of her dreams,” writes Carol Cassell in her book, Swept Away. Although no woman interviewed for this book chose to fall for a murderer, they each described sensations of being swept away by the uncontrollable fervor of their love.

  Each woman fantasizes that her man is a hero, a knight in shining armor, so he can save and protect her—not only from the world but from himself and the threat of his own violence. Every man is special and none is a con who uses women. “In [my man’s] case, he’s not much of a con man. I think our relationship is somewhat different,” said Alicia.

  Each woman in love with a killer views her man as her salvation: He will save her from loneliness, from selling herself in the meat market of singles bars where rejection is always a threat, from the potential sexual threat of other men. And by making him into a knight, a hero, the woman dilutes what is perhaps the greatest threat of all: that he murdered once and if he had the chance, might just murder again … and she might be the victim. After all, her subconscious reasons, her Sir Lancelot would never hurt a damsel in distress or force himself on her.

  Many of these women are drawn to their murderer/lover because the men represent challenges; relationships with them are obstacle courses. Meeting him, earning his love, making the relationship work despite the tremendous odds against it—women who love killers thrive on these challenges.

  Also, these men are “bad,” socially unacceptable, extremely macho, because they have killed. If a man is certified masculine, then a woman can be more certain of her femininity; with a man whose maleness or machismo is exaggerated, a woman feels most womanly. These “bad” boys, these killers, fulfill some part of the woman’s desire for excitement, for challenge, for adventure—and even make her feel more of a woman. “Crime holds a special attraction for middle class women, who don’t turn to it out of economic hardship or peer pressure,” writes Joy Davidson, Ph.D., in The Agony of It All.

  Who are the women whose psychological needs impel them to seek this type of intensity in their love relationships? Which women must have romantic love that never ends—an unchanging courtship, filled with agony and ecstasy? Why do they want the illusion of romance rather than real love?

  These women are satisfied with a love relationship that exists under conditions the majority of us would avoid and find awful. In the classic Women Who Love Too Much, Robin Norwood writes: “Prison wives … represent perhaps the ultimate example of women who love too much. Because they are incapable of any degree of intimacy with a man, they choose instead to live with a fantasy, a dream of how much they will love and be loved someday when their partner changes and becomes available to them. But they can be intimate only in fantasy.”

  We must keep in mind the difference between “prison wives,” “women who love too much,” women who are addicted to love relationships—and women who love murderers. Murderers are special. Women who love murderers are special, also, although they share some characteristics and qualities with women addicted to love relationships and women who love too much. Murderers have acted with total disregard for societal mores. They have shed someone else’s blood. The women who love them accept this as part—perhaps the most alluring part—of them. Murderers and their women, who can’t live without each other but are forced to remain apart, may be under the spell of “death love“—the German concept of Liebestod. By worshiping death—or the men who have caused death—these women find the union they cannot find in life. Death becomes the orgasm, the high, the kick.

  7

  Denial

  “He never meant for this to happen”

  Women who love killers don’t really love at all. They need. They fantasize. But what they feel for men who kill can hardly be described as love. These women are totally deluded about the men they think they love—“practically living in a trance state,” said Charlotte Kasl, Ph.D., author of Women, Sex and Addiction. “Each woman totally colludes with
her man’s denial system. She is absorbed into his being. She and he are enmeshed into one person. They bond through this incredible denial,” said Kasl. “There is no human connection.”

  Al committed a murder—but not really. It was during the robbery of a tiny store in a run-down section of Boston. “He was shot in the back and was knocked into the door. His gun discharged and he killed somebody who was standing in the wrong place.” The store owner, who was armed with a shotgun, shot Al first, causing Al’s gun to discharge. Result: one dead store clerk.

  The store wasn’t a respectable shop; it was a front for a bookie joint. Anyway, Al’s junkie friends manipulated him into committing the robbery. “His friends took him along on a stickup. He was given a gun.” Al was just a nice guy standing there in the middle of a robbery holding a gun that someone had shoved in his hand. And passive, he did not shoot his gun; it went off. “The store owner had been standing in the loft surrounded by an arsenal, with a loaded weapon.” This Rambo-type store owner defending his business was guilty of overkill: He had too many weapons and was too quick to shoot the burglars. “[Al] had a semiautomatic in his hand and it discharged, killing a woman clerk. He was standing six feet from her; it hit her in the chest. He never meant for this to happen. If he didn’t intend this, then he can’t really be guilty.”

  This version of the murder committed by Al is told by his wife, Mary, who must deny his guilt to continue loving him. She does not want to accept that he armed himself, went into a store to commit a robbery, and then killed a clerk. Her denial mechanism is stronger than her rational, clearheaded social-worker side.