If Rochelle can crusade for Duane so forcefully and convincingly that she saves him from prison, she can validate herself.
SACRIFICE
“I gave up almost everything.” First, her fiancé. Then, her daughter and son, sending them to live with her ex-husband, then with her mother in Tennessee. “My son wouldn’t speak to me; he was nine. My daughter had just graduated from high school. It was a hard time for her even without this. She went to stay with my mother.” Crusaders set out on missions knowing they will inevitably make major sacrifices. Rochelle is no different.
“I knew this was what I wanted, and I knew I had to cut a lot of ties … and I did. I wanted to give him myself,” said Rochelle on a segment of a syndicated television show “The Reporters.” On the same show, her children related the effect on them of their mother’s relationship with Duane. Her daughter said, “I cried … I got emotional… I thought she was giving everything up. I didn’t think she was treating my brother and I the right way.” Rochelle’s son said the whole experience “was really awful.”
Eventually, Rochelle gave up her home, moving to be near Duane’s prison. She has also sacrificed countless hours of her time, waiting on line to get into the prison for visits. The first year Duane was in prison, Rochelle visited 300 out of 360 days. Why the sacrifice? an interviewer on “The Reporters” asked. “Because he enjoys it. Because he’s so appreciative of every effort I make.”
She gave up her privacy, allowing her story to be told on television. She almost lost her mother, who initially disapproved of Duane. “I was bitterly opposed. I thought he might get out and even kill her,” Rochelle’s mother said on “The Reporters.”
Rochelle is “very delusional. She went into the trial deluded—that much badness just couldn’t exist. For her to recognize the truth would destroy her concept of the world. She has to recreate [Duane] as a good person, so she has to put the blame on the system,” said psychiatrist Dr. Neil Kaye.
Because she never rebelled against her mother, a natural part of the maturation process, she is unable to “grow up as a woman and differentiate herself from her mother,” added the psychiatrist. So she fantasizes about returning to Tennessee, with Duane, to live on the land as her mother does. She wants to go back to the womb, the mother earth. Rochelle has to confirm the picture her mother painted of the world. If she finds out the world is grays—not black-and-white—her belief system will crack.
FANTASY: AFTER PRISON
Rochelle and Duane are sitting on the front porch of their house. It’s made of wood planks that Duane cut from trees growing on their own land. They eat fresh vegetables from their garden and fruit from their own trees. The house is furnished simply with furniture Duane built and curtains and cushions made by Rochelle.
“Should he get out, we would go back and live on a piece of ground and work in the garden and live a simple life. We would do the simplest of things, go to church, be close to our families. He is a welder and a carpenter. If we didn’t live in the city and didn’t pay rent, we wouldn’t need that much money. There’s trees and lumber and we could always build a house.”
Her fantasy of a pioneer/farmer existence for the two of them is delusional considering Duane has a prison record that began when he was in his teens; his crimes progressed from burglaries to use of a weapon to murder. His probation officer wrote: “He seems unwilling or unable to do anything to alter his pattern of criminality… Cannot live in a civilized society… Criminality seems to increase … remorseless … also intelligent and articulate.” Also, it’s unlikely Duane will be freed since he’s serving life without parole.
In Rochelle’s mind, Duane’s good values were distorted by his family’s bad influence, so she’s trying to remake his terrible past. “I’ve tried to be an example of goodness and cleanliness to his family. I don’t want to be a saint or anything, but they’ve done all the wrong things.”
SAINT ROCHELLE
Truth is, she does want to be a saint, and according to one prison official, she acts like one. “I don’t think this guy knows what he has—a treasure. She truly believes that with her love and support, he can change. [Rochelle] is an archangel,” said Lt. Cammy Voss, public information officer at Folsom Prison. “We think there are fifty states, but women have more than fifty. We have fifty-one … a State of Hope.” Rochelle is living there, believing that her love will change Duane and will even clean the slate of his past transgressions. “He has not been a good boy, but he is not a criminal, not a killer,” said Rochelle.
By making Duane her cause, Saint Rochelle takes two empty, unfulfilled lives—his and hers—and gives them purpose and meaning. “The guy is almost irrelevant at this point. He’s a dream lover, a phantom limb,” said clinical psychologist Stuart Fischoff, Ph.D. Although her relationship with Duane is the most exquisite love affair of her life, she’ll never share real intimacy with him. And that’s fine because up until now, as she has said, men have disappointed her—just as her father did. There’s been something “wrong” with all of her previous relationships. But Duane can’t disappoint her. He’s whoever she wants him to be. Saint Rochelle and her fantasy prince will live happily ever after.
9
Little Girl Lost
“Once I said, ‘Daddy, don’t yell.’ He
hit me with the buckle end of the
belt”
Like Rochelle, women who love killers are only acting the role of women in love. The men they love are not real; they are fantasies created by the women’s psychological and emotional needs. But on the surface, there are similarities between these women and “women who love too much” in their behavior in relationships and in their family histories. Like “women who love too much,” women who fall for murderers generally came from dysfunctional families. As a child each woman was a little girl lost. “Their internal script for how you have a relationship is one of pathology,” said Dr. Janet Warren, a forensic social worker who studies murderers and their relationships.
The majority of the women interviewed for this book were abused during their childhoods—physically, emotionally, and/or sexually. They lived in families where little love was shared. The suffering these women endured as children eradicated parts of their psyches. For some, their souls were killed—“soul murder,” according to psychiatrist Leonard Shengold, M.D., author of Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation.
“The horror and violence of murder are immediately apparent. But not all violence, not all murder, indeed, is physical. Violence done to the emotions can destroy us as thoroughly as a blow; faith, love and trust can be murdered as well as people,” wrote Alison Hennegan in her introduction to Reader, I Murdered Him: Original Crime Stories by Women.
Children, so sensitive to hurt, can easily be destroyed. “The effect on them of torture, hatred, seduction, and rape—or even of indifference and withholding love and care—is usually the devastating one of developmental arrest, for their souls, their psychological structure and functioning, are still forming,” writes Shengold.
Chronic, repeated abuse has the effect of suppressing the mechanism that allows us to feel happy, to trust, to love, and to care about others. This is why so many abused girls grow up to be women who can’t really love but must form illusory relationships with inappropriate men—such as murderers. These women often go directly from abusive childhood homes to marriage at very young ages, to men who are abusive physically, emotionally, and/or sexually.
Women who love killers generally had terrible relationships with all men, in addition to the poor relationships with their husbands and fathers. They were raped, sexually assaulted, and attacked by men; they were used by men and often saw themselves as victims.
Many of these women experienced loss during their childhoods: the death of either a parent or a close relative. Loving a murderer allows a woman to experience endless repetition of loss; her beloved will never be with her and she feels this loss on a daily basis. This is acceptable because it
is familiar.
Every woman interviewed for this book described, in varying degrees, some pathology in her childhood. These ranged from the woman who was raped at age five by her father … to the woman who was daddy’s girl until she needed his protection from the husband who was so abusive he broke her bones … to the woman whose “perfect childhood” was spent with a mother who was mentally ill … to the woman whose mother committed suicide.
The most commonly seen structure of the childhood families of these women—a domineering, often alcoholic father and a submissive mother—lends itself to abuse and dysfunction. After a while, it seemed to me as if everyone I interviewed had been abused; every woman had a “horror” story to tell. “As soon as you start working with criminals and their women, you begin to think everyone has been abused,” said forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz.
With a few exceptions, the women interviewed for this book were raised in families where the father was dominant. For other women, raised without fathers, mothers took on the role of authoritarian and ruled the roost as firmly, and repressively, as any man. But for the most part, the father was the focus of the family.
FATHER
He was the boss; his opinions were not questioned either by his wife or his children. He worked and brought his paycheck home to support his family while his wife stayed at home and ran the house. The family was centered around his desires, needs, and availability. Dinner was eaten when he arrived home from work, no matter the hour. If he was in a bad mood, mother was quieter than usual and the children had to keep out of sight. If father was feeling okay, good times were in order.
“The entire family revolved around him, our little nuclear family, my mother and the girls… I remember the last time that he beat me. I remember feeling that I had a power, that if I didn’t cry out… I didn’t, and that upset him terribly. He told my mother, ‘I can’t reach her anymore.’ I felt cold rage. I stood there like a piece of stone. That was the last time he ever beat me.” (Francine, married to Charlie)
In the families of most of the women interviewed, fathers were more than family heads. They were domineering, controlling little czars, brooking no autonomy or independence in anyone else, including their wives. They were frequently cruel; they beat their daughters. Some had sex with them.
“I was sexually abused by my father [when I was] five years old. My mother knew… She hated me and I hated her. She wouldn’t let me sleep at night. She would throw water on me. I’d have to get up, change my pajamas, change everything. Then she’d throw water on me again. She would take a top off a pot and put it over my head and bang it. She would make me lie on the hard floor. Now when I look back at it, now that I understand it, I see that’s why she hated me. He was her man.” (Lori, in love with Kevin)
Many fathers of the women interviewed were alcoholics. Francine was beaten on a regular basis throughout her childhood by her alcoholic father, who was also harshly critical of her and psychologically cruel. As a child, Francine fantasized that eventually her father would stop drinking and stop beating her, and that her passive, withdrawn mother would become a loving, nurturing parent. This is wrong, she thought. It all should be perfect, the way it is on TV. Now, as an adult, Francine is trying to “make it perfect” by living an illusion, by having a “love” relationship with a “perfect” man, a man of her own creation.
Children raised in families where abuse is the norm, often end up retreating into fantasy because reality is too painful. The child has nowhere to go, no place to hide, so she opts out of real life. “How much more oppressed can you be than to not be able to walk on the earth as your own person? It’s literally that, psychologically, she has never gotten the chance to be born,” said psychotherapist Charlotte Kasl, Ph.D., author of Women, Sex and Addiction.
“I can remember going for a week without really eating,” said Lori. There was no help; she thought about calling the police but never did. “I was so afraid of my father, of what he would do. He could kill me. He probably would have.”
If a woman can come out of a tortured childhood without cracking up, without going off the deep end, it means she has successfully developed sophisticated defense mechanisms. Falling in love with a killer is one of those defenses; it’s a way of having a relationship without ever having to get too close. Women who fall in love with murderers are trying to do over their troubled childhoods. They say to themselves: “I will make it perfect. I will fall in love with a man who can’t drink and can’t beat me. He’ll always be there for me because he really needs me.” The love affair takes place behind prison walls and the man she loves has committed murder, but he’s under her control. Her compulsive need to be loved by a man she can control, who can’t hurt her, leads her to love a man who will never get out of prison, who will never have any real power in their relationship. No, daddy won’t ever get a chance to hurt her again.
MISSING FATHERS
Instead of abusive fathers, women who love convicted killers may have had missing or absent fathers—unavailable to them for a variety of reasons. Some were workaholics. Others died. Often a divorce would mean the father dropped out of sight and the child lost her relationship with him.
Dolores, whose boyfriend, Louis, is serving life without parole for murder, was her father’s pet. “He spoiled me quite a bit. I was always his little girl. I was the only one that he let drive his cars, that he let help in the store. Even today, he relies on me more than he does the other ones. I used to go out of my way a lot for him. I would bake cakes for him and make special things for him… I always wanted him to be proud of me.”
He was basically an absent father. A workaholic who put in fifteen to eighteen hours every day, he was home only for dinner, and then went back to his business. Dolores achieved excellent grades to please her father. “It seemed that he was so busy all the time working that I had to get good grades in school and be on the honor roll. When he was home, it was nice to be able to have good things to show him, to talk about.” Dolores became an object to her father and to herself; she lost touch with her self, lost self-esteem, lost ego, unless she was performing and achieving to please her father.
Despite the fact that her mother—with whom Dolores got along well—ran the family since her father was never there, he was still the head of the house. “He was the boss. Anything major, he would handle. He would look at you in a certain way and you would know what was happening.” Dolores’s mother, true to her Catholicism, didn’t inform Dolores about sex as a physical act. “I knew only how babies were made and how you got your period.”
Despite her academic achievement, Dolores skipped college and married at eighteen. Her choice was unfortunate: an alcoholic and a womanizer, eight years older than Dolores. She was a virgin, ignorant about sex. He raped her repeatedly for the first few years of their marriage. The marriage fell apart when her husband began beating their son. “When he was drunk, he was very mean. When [our son] was three or four years old, he would beat him up, abuse him very badly.” He threatened Dolores, also. Finally, he told her he had developed an obsession for young girls and that he had molested several girls—including Dolores’s niece.
What does daddy’s girl do when she’s in trouble? It didn’t work in this case. “My father’s attitude was, ‘You make your bed, you sleep in it.’ He actually said that when I got married. Mother didn’t have very much to say about it. She was very much under my father’s thumb.” Dolores divorced her husband when their son was eleven, then moved out of state. Neither her father nor her mother had ever come to her aid.
A PERFECT CHILDHOOD
Like many people whose families were dysfunctional, women who love killers often hide the truth about their childhoods because their pain is too enormous to confront. These women, masters at denial, learn at mother’s knee how to deny that which is painful. When Hilary’s husband beat her brutally, her parents refused to acknowledge what was happening. She pretended she’d walked into a door and they pretended to believe her.
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Women who love murderers use their childhood ability to deny in their adult relationships. Even for the women who claim to have had happy childhoods, something seems amiss. Annette, married to a career criminal convicted of murder, said she had “a happy childhood. I’m so fortunate.” But something went wrong in her development. The oldest of four children, she was brought up in a “close-knit” Catholic family that emphasized “careers, getting a job, doing a good job.” The children’s education, apparently, left out sex. At age forty-eight, Annette is still a virgin and she’s very proud of it. The boys, and later the men, she dated during her life were interested in sex; she never was.
What mattered to her were work and career. And when she finally fell in love, at age thirty-eight, it was with Jack, who was serving two consecutive prison sentences: first, twenty-five to forty years for wounding a police officer; and second, a life sentence for murder. Annette’s virginity is safe: Jack won’t be making sexual advances during this lifetime.
MOTHERS
Even if fathers wielded most of the power, mothers, too, could be highly destructive presences. One woman who claims a “perfect childhood,” Carla, is married to a Florida death-row inmate. After Carla’s parents divorced when she was three, she visited her father but spent most of her time with her mother. When her father remarried a short time later, Carla didn’t like her stepmother “because my mother was resentful” and tried to make Carla dislike the new woman in her father’s life. Today, Carla says her stepmother is a “nice, good person, but I didn’t like her then.”
Women Who Love Men Who Kill Page 16