Women Who Love Men Who Kill

by Sheila Isenberg

  “I could tell as a juror on his trial that the truth was not coming out. It was obvious it was so one-sided. He had been in county jail for three years, and this was his third set of [appointed] lawyers. The defense attorney was very weak… He hardly brought anyone in to show the district attorney’s theories were incorrect… [Duane] is not innocent, but he’s not guilty in the way that’s charged.”

  After the trial, Rochelle was so upset by what she felt was an unfair verdict, she called Duane’s attorneys and made an appointment to visit him in prison. “There was no way I could drop it. After, I came to see just how much was wrong. If [Duane] had had his proper trial, if he had had a decent trial and I felt it was just, I would never have spoken to him. I would never have pursued any of this. I would never have come to know him.”

  They met: the tall, dark-haired convict and the attractive, redheaded juror. There was instant chemistry. They fell in love, and five months after she helped convict Duane of first-degree murder, Rochelle married him. She was forty-one; he was thirty-four.

  THE WIFE’S TALE

  Rochelle tells the story of Samantha’s death as she heard it from Duane, not as she heard it in the courtroom. She believes the story of Samantha’s murder as testified to in court was tainted, prejudiced against Duane.

  Duane and Samantha were together that night, drinking and using cocaine that Samantha procured because she had the connection. Samantha was living in her car off and on and was already a heavy drug user when she met Duane. “She slept around for drugs with various people.” After spending some time at Duane’s mother’s apartment, there was a dispute about sex, and at some point, she hit her head on the showerhead in the bathroom where they were tussling.

  Samantha asked to be taken back to her drug dealer’s house as she and Duane argued over what was left of the cocaine they had scored earlier. They left the apartment, Duane taking his mother’s gun so he could buy ammunition for it. A few days earlier, he had accidentally shot a bullet into the floor under his mother’s couch, and that night he remembered to take the gun so he could replace the missing bullet. “He thought, ‘I’ve got to replace the bullet ‘cause my mother will see it and get mad.’” Duane and Samantha got into Duane’s truck so he could take her home, but she fell asleep. “He wanted to wait until she sobered up some. He wanted to wait until her mind was straight.” They drove around for a while, then stopped at a park, got out of the truck, and began walking. Abruptly, Samantha decided to leave Duane and hitch a ride. He told her not to since it was five-thirty in the morning and he offered to take her home. She refused to get into his truck, and in order to convince her, he took out the gun.

  “He was going to fire a shot over her head to show her that he meant business. He had a cut on his trigger finger. It had nine stitches on it three days before so it was entirely bandaged up and sticking out straight.” He had to use a different finger to pull the trigger. Also, as a juror, Rochelle had felt how heavy the trigger pull was since the gun was part of the trial evidence. “I could hardly pull the trigger back with both hands, it was that heavy a pull. And I imagine if you’re drunk and doing drugs, that it would be even more cumbersome.” Duane pointed the gun over Samantha’s head and tried to pull the trigger, but “by the time he pulled it down, it was chest level and went off and shot the girl… He tells me that part of it is sort of hazy.”

  In the dim light of near-dawn, the gunblast lit up the sky. Duane bent over Samantha. “He heard a gurgling sound and he could hear body fluids leaving her body. He said he knew she was dead but her muscles were trembling. Now this is the part that hung him. Had he gone for help at that moment…”

  But he didn’t, and Rochelle blames his poor judgment on drugs. “A drug specialist said … when you’re on drugs, especially cocaine … you just do the first thing that pops into your mind.” In the heat of the moment, Duane recalled an event from his childhood, and according to Rochelle, that memory has cost him his freedom. “When he was a small boy, he remembers his dad backing out of the driveway and running over their puppy… All the kids were upset and everything. His dad said, ‘This dog has to be put out of its misery.’… He shot it.”

  Duane performed the same kindness on Samantha. “He went over to her, knowing that she was dead already but she was still moving. I don’t know if he saw blood coming out of her mouth. In his mind, he knew absolutely that she was dying or dead and she was suffering. So he fired two shots to her head. That’s a horrible thing, but he thought he was putting her out of her misery. That’s not done here in the United States. You don’t do that to humans; you do that to animals.”

  Duane’s attorney later said: “If he had only shot her once there wouldn’t be an issue. But euthanasia is not a defense.”

  The police picked up Duane a few days later. Said Rochelle: “He had been drinking and falling down drunk in the park for a week, just waiting for them to pick him up. He knew that sooner or later they’d find him. They picked him up at noon and took a statement from him at one o’clock. He was still drunk. That was the only statement they ever took from him.”

  Duane hanged himself with his confession. As it is quoted in the L.A. Times, he said: “I told her I’d shoot her, and I cocked the gun and when I let go, it went off. I knew I’d hit her, hurt her, so I didn’t want her saying anything, I remember thinking at that time, so I just shot her some more.”

  A ROMANTIC MEETING

  After the trial, Rochelle wanted to tell Duane “that someone believed that he wasn’t guilty in the manner that he was found guilty. Too many things didn’t fit. I wanted to let him know … I felt maybe I could say some words to comfort him, to give him the strength to go on and face prison.”

  She initially visited him in prison to give him some words of comfort and leave some religious tracts with him. She also felt his family and friends were not really supportive during his trial and wanted him to know that someone did care. “I have always been a person who likes to help other people,” said Rochelle, who describes herself as God-fearing but not particularly religious. Duane appealed to her desire to be useful and compassionate.

  But when she walked into the prison visiting room and saw the man she had watched so closely in the courtroom for the past six months, something more than kindness was kindled. “When I met him face-to-face in the holding prison that day … it started to come to me there was far more than I could imagine. I started to see the type of person Duane was. It was overwhelming the injustice [that] was done.” Duane told her that he had been shanghaied, railroaded, framed, and his trial had been a distortion of justice. “It was like [my] worst nightmare. Everything I had suspected and could possibly be, was… He began to tell me things. He told me he was so discouraged.”

  Rochelle believes Duane’s defense attorney did not represent his best interests. “We were supposed to get to the truth. Not what you think happened, but the truth. Justice was not served. Duane was convicted on what the district attorney said. No one said anything on his behalf; no one brought anything up. [The defense] didn’t call in people.”

  Commiserating on the rotten deal Duane had received, he and Rochelle grew close in that prison visiting room. “I saw a very sensitive and gentle man. When you think of prison, you think of hard-hearted [people] and name-calling, and you think of the toughest, roughest person.” But not Duane. “He is sensitive to the tiniest of animals. He’s sensitive to nature. He is a very warm, caring, sensitive person that doesn’t fit this role at all.”

  She fell in love, experiencing the deepest feelings she had ever had for a man. Although Rochelle had been married twice, including one seventeen-year relationship during which time she had two children, she believes she had never loved before. “Very few people ever really love. There are lots of people you can meet and be compatible with. This has happened to me in my life many times before.” But Duane struck her like a bolt of lightning. “It’s entirely different. All the other possessions, all the other things in life, mean
very little. What I want is to be with him.” They married in late 1988.

  “To say that I love him is not enough. Love doesn’t cover it … doesn’t even scratch the surface. I adore him. I love and adore him.”

  “This is stranger than fiction,” said Deputy District Attorney Knight in the L.A. Times. “She apparently fell in love with the guy during the trial. I’ve seen some jurors become enamored of the guy, but I’ve never seen where they’ve actually gone and met the guy and married him.”

  For the first time, Rochelle is passionately in love. But she will neither lie in his arms nor live in a house with him; she will not cook dinner or raise children or enjoy and endure any of the many large and small acts that make up a marriage. Rochelle will live alone and Duane will spend his years inside the walls of a state penitentiary. Although they share the deepest love, they will not be permitted to be together except for two six-hour visits a week.

  The body of Samantha Lynch lies between them. And always will.

  AT HOME IN TENNESSEE

  Mom was from a tiny village in Tennessee and Dad was a big-city barkeep. For a few years they lived over Rochelle’s father’s bar in Detroit, but eventually Mom put her foot down, and the family, minus Dad, moved back to Tennessee.

  Dad lived above the bar because it was convenient for a man with a sixteen-hour workday; it was the only life he had ever known. He had no interest in moving to a rural town with a population of 250 and living off the land. But Mom hated the big city. It was just about the worst place in the world to raise children, she thought. Rochelle was conceived one summer when her mother and brother visited Detroit, but her pregnant mother returned to Tennessee anyway.

  Mom and Dad visited back and forth when Rochelle was very young. “He was always in and out of my life until I was three. Then my mother decided, ‘No. No more.’” Dad was “business minded,” refusing to give up his bar and move to the country, so Mom built her own house on land her parents gave her, using money her absent husband sent. When the house was finished, she moved in and never left. Life was simple, almost spartan. Mom made the children’s clothing and fed them from her garden. When Rochelle’s brother got older, he hunted and supplied the family with meat.

  Mom and Dad never divorced. Rochelle spent summers in Detroit until she was nine, then the visits stopped, but Dad wrote every week. Rochelle did not feel his absence much. Mom was everything. Rochelle adopted all of her mother’s ideas, values, fears, and hopes. “I never felt I was missing out particularly. I never had any fantasies. My father just wasn’t there. We didn’t even want to go to visit him in Detroit because the country life was better than the city life. [In Detroit] we couldn’t go out on the sidewalks because my mother worried that someone would snatch us.”

  Gradually Rochelle and her father drifted apart; he became a fading memory of “a nice man.” She would have enjoyed more visits, but not on his turf. Like Mom, she despised the city. “I would have liked to have had him in the country, but not in that environment. There was always lots of trash on the sidewalk and dirt and spit.” Dad, so reluctant to leave Detroit and move to Tennessee, relocated to Florida “to get out of the cold” when Rochelle was a teenager. She visited him once in Florida. She was fourteen and only noticed, with surprise, that he was short.

  Rochelle’s self-sufficient mother is her role model, the person she most admires. “My mother has very strong beliefs. She’s religious but not a fanatic. She just has a basic good sense about the way life is. She’s a simple person, not cluttered or complicated by worldly possessions. She doesn’t need a new car to make her happy. She believes in God, in raising her family, in doing the right thing by others … in doing right, not doing wrong. She’s a laughing and loving person, but very strict.”

  Mom still lives alone in her house in the middle of forty acres but is so strong spiritually and emotionally that “she doesn’t need to have people around her to feel of value. She doesn’t need other people to satisfy her. She’s satisfied with herself.”

  Mom has one fault, though, a shortcoming one would expect in a self-sufficient, strong countrywoman: She minces no words. “She’s cut-to-the-bone outspoken. She doesn’t cover anything over. She just says the way she feels.” While Mom’s single flaw fits her personality, that did not help Rochelle while she was growing up. She was often embarrassed in front of her friends by her mother’s sharp tongue.

  Despite this one problem, Rochelle recalls her childhood as extremely full and happy. “I never really felt the need for a father ‘cause my mother was everything. She was a strong, together person. Other than the fact of a father’s presence in the house, I never knew, I never thought, that a father could make any difference because my mother did everything.” Childhood was picture perfect: “the American home, out on the farm, good country living, the family sitting down to the dinner table at night all together.”

  FIRST MARRIAGE

  Although her life was “perfect,” at the tender age of seventeen with her senior year of high school still unfinished, Rochelle decided to leave home and see the world, believing the only way to do that was to marry. With Mom’s blessings, she married a man six years older. He took Rochelle away from the small village of her idyllic childhood, but the marriage was such a disaster that six weeks later it was annulled and she returned home to finish high school.

  After graduation, she made a more successful attempt to leave home, making it all the way to California, traveling with relatives and living with them until she got settled. She began working in a restaurant and soon started dating Pierre, a coworker who was seventeen years older. When they married after three years, Rochelle was twenty-one and Pierre was thirty-eight.

  As her second husband, Pierre was the father she never had and the teacher she desperately needed. Being more sophisticated, he had knowledge and experience that his wife soaked up eagerly. They had two children together. They had a tranquil life, never arguing, working together to get ahead.

  When Rochelle was in her thirties, she began to feel that she wanted more than Pierre could offer, more passion, more excitement. “We never fought. It wasn’t a bad situation, but I knew there should be more to life. I had really outgrown him. I just wanted to branch out, to explore the world.” They stayed together for several years more, sleeping in separate bedrooms and finally separating when Rochelle was thirty-eight and Pierre fifty-five.

  When they separated, Rochelle found no shortage of interested men. She dated a lot and had three serious relationships. Finally, she decided to marry again even though her fiancé, like all the other men she knew, just never seemed totally right. “Men have cared more for me than I cared for them. I always ended up seeing something in them that I didn’t care for. I just never really found the person that I really wanted.”

  She compromised as she had with Pierre and was living with her fiancé while she was a juror in Duane’s trial. Her fiancé didn’t believe in God, though, and that was a real problem because in order for her to truly love a man, he must “have a relationship with God.”

  TRUE LOVE

  “When I met Duane, nothing that had ever been before could even compete with my feelings.” To Rochelle, Duane is worthy of her adoration because he is more than a regular man. Men have always been imperfect to Rochelle. She could never quite find the right one, the one who would arouse in her the passionate enchantment of deep, romantic love. But she can love Duane because he is the perfect victim who inspires in her noble and pure feelings. She will be his crusader: saving him, fighting the system, making any sacrifice necessary.

  Duane was raised by a neglectful, alcoholic family. Later, he was victimized by the imperfect and heartless California criminal justice system. He was even a victim of the woman he murdered: She supplied the cocaine; she sold her body for drugs; and finally, she refused to get in his truck, forcing him to shoot her.

  Duane has convinced Rochelle that he is kind, gentle, sensitive; he believes in God. He told her that his morality a
nd ethics are the same as hers; they are two sides of the same coin. “He is the male version of me. He is myself, but he is a man. We have the same feelings. It’s amazing how much alike we are and how sensitive we are in the same areas. We feel the same about … moral issues, life around us, love and family.” But there is something confusing here: Even if Duane did not intend to murder Samantha, his actions still don’t fit in with Rochelle’s proclaimed values. What is she doing with a man who used a gun in order to “scare” someone? With a man who’s used drugs?

  ROCHELLE’S DENIAL

  Despite what she heard and saw as a juror, Rochelle has chosen to ignore evidence and testimony so she can believe what Duane told her. Her denial is necessary for maintenance of her fantasy; she has to believe his version of what happened so she can continue to love him.

  By saving Duane, Rochelle can shore up the rough edges of her own psyche. By battling the California justice system, Rochelle is David fighting Goliath, truth and right battling injustice. If she can win—or even if she can maintain the fight—she will prove that she is “right” and “good,” that her mother was the perfect mother, that she had the perfect childhood. She can prove that life really is wonderful. That bad things don’t happen to good people. That people don’t kill for no good reason. That life is not arbitrary and capricious. That life is orderly, good, clean, healthy, and all the other Girl Scout adjectives by which Rochelle has precariously lived for forty-three years.

  She has tentatively balanced her idealized childhood, her fantasy of her mother, her illusions about the world, her idealistic view of life—with what she saw and heard in a California courtroom. She won’t acknowledge ugliness because it threatens her fragile defense mechanism. She won’t admit what she saw and heard in the courtroom: That people do drugs. They beat each other. They rape, kill, and lie.