Although Carla identified closely with her mother, she was also angry at her and blamed her for the divorce. “My father was a good man and she kicked him out; she didn’t want to be married.”
Carla’s mother “had a history of mental problems. She wasn’t that rational. She just had her lapses. I didn’t know it, but before I was born, she was in a mental hospital.” While Carla was growing up, her mother had no breakdowns that Carla remembers, except she continually tried to influence Carla to stop loving her father. “She would always say he was a terrible man; she tried to turn us against him.”
When this little girl lost grew up, her social drinking rapidly “got out of control.” She described herself as “a little depressed and an alcoholic” when she met her murderer/husband, Martin. Now, she’s helped him and he’s helped her. “I don’t drink or smoke anymore,” said Carla.
Sometimes, mothers act in a domineering and repressive manner, inspiring love-hate feelings in their bewildered and overpowered daughters. Rochelle had such a mother. Another domineering mother is described by Elena, whose husband was executed a few years ago.
Her mother was an attorney, “intelligent, domineering, very repressive, very controlling. I wasn’t even allowed to go to Sunday school class. She was definitely the head of the household.” Father, twenty-three years older than Mother, “thought she was a gift from heaven. Anything she did was all right.” She didn’t bother to hide her affairs—everyone knew the names of her lovers and Father even baby-sat when she went out. Mother always told Elena she wasn’t good enough. When the child was thirteen, she had enough, went to live with her grandmother, and married a year later when she was fourteen.
Domineering mothers are a minority, however, in the families of women who love killers. Generally, the typical dysfunctional family described by these women consists of a bossy, often abusive father and a passive mother who knuckles under to his demands. Mother passes on to her daughters a legacy of low self-esteem, self-doubt, and nonassertive behavior. She can’t protect her daughter from being beaten because she can’t protect herself. Her behavior, and that of her husband, reinforces sex-role stereotypes to her young daughter. She is woman as victim, and her daughter models from her. These mothers are themselves so intimidated, they can’t protect their daughters from rape, incest, physical batterings, emotional abuse. Sometimes they share in the abuse because, by participating, they create the fantasy that they have some control over their own lives.
The ultimate threat of a domineering, cruel father and a passive mother is that the father will eventually turn to his daughters for sexual gratification.
Says Francine, “My father was very invasive in his questioning of my feelings and development and in telling me the kinds of things that were going to happen to me. He deliberately went around the house with no clothes on. It upset me and my sisters, [but] he said that sexuality was a natural healing experience and he didn’t want his girls excited because they never saw a man before. If you were going to be punished, he was likely to call you in for the lecture as he took a shower and then got out and shaved—all of which he did without his clothes on.”
EMOTIONAL ABUSE
Emotional abuse is a catchall term to describe all the wrong things parents do to children. It’s normal for a parent to lose control once in a while, but a child brought up in a household where parents are constantly berating the child—faulting, criticizing, blaming, putting down, insulting—will suffer great damage. Many women who love convicted killers described damaging relationships with parents, from outright cruelty to the opposite extreme—overpossessive, suffocating “love.”
REPETITION
The great majority of women interviewed for this book were married by seventeen or eighteen, even those who said they had “happy” or “perfect” childhoods. Many of the women married men who displayed the very qualities they so despised in their fathers. This repetition is to be expected when a parent is so authoritarian that the child can’t develop her own will; she takes on the will of her parent. The child, later a woman, with no will or self of her own, internalizes the beliefs of the parent or parents who abused her.
A majority of women who love men who kill have had severely abusive relationships with men before they met their murderer/lovers. Each killer is therefore a safe haven because he is locked up, a respite to the woman who has been so brutalized previously. He is also a repetition of the abusive father because he has, after all, murdered.
Says Dolores, “My first husband was emotionally abusive and threatened me with death. He beat the kids. The second marriage, we argued all the time; it was a turbulent relationship.”
Kay’s live-in boyfriend would become “very violent. He threatened my life.” When she tried to move out of their apartment, he threatened her until she became afraid he would kill her. “We had an oil lamp. He said, ‘I want to tie you up and just let this lamp turn over and burn you to death.”’ Kay did not want to have sex with him because of his abusive behavior, so he would rape her—“but not really because I would give in.”
When she finally left him, he pulled the cruelest trick of all—emotional blackmail, showing friends pictures of the two of them engaging in oral sex from an earlier, happier time. He even threatened to show the pictures to her son. “I had to get my phone number changed, but he found out where I lived. I got an [order of protection] out on him and that helped some. Then his mother … begged me to take him back.”
What a relief it was for Kay to meet Ruben! A convicted murderer, doing life, he was handsome and exciting—and behind bars.
Elena had four children with a man who ran around with other women and neglected his family. “He didn’t want the responsibility. He also discovered he was attractive to other women and began philandering.” That first marriage soured Elena toward men. Between her divorce at age twenty-five and the day thirteen years later when she fell in love with death-row inmate Terry, she had no serious long-term relationships.
LOW SELF-ESTEEM
The more awful the childhood, the less self, or identity, develops in each individual because a child’s identity and self-esteem depend, in large part, on her feeling that she is cared about, that she has a nurturing, all-knowing parent who can right wrongs. How can a woman think anything of herself if her parents don’t? How can she love herself if she is criticized, abused, and belittled? How can she have a positive self-image if she is a member of a family whose female role model, mother, is a weak, impotent creature who does father’s bidding?
Women who love killers take low self-esteem to its furthest reaches: I wasn’t worth anything to my parents. I’m not worth anything to me. So I’ll go after someone that society has branded unacceptable. “I would be amazed if they weren’t among the neediest and most dependent of women. As in the transference cure in psychoanalysis, the women are sucking up a part of the men’s egos and that gives them the illusion of being in control. So by identifying with the popular stereotype of the tough guy, they feel stronger,” said psychiatrist Park Dietz.
In truth, though, murderers are weak, not strong. “Murderers are losers,” added Dietz. The strength of a murderer is an illusion; the idea that he is tough is a fantasy. But these women are so used to living lies, they don’t see the weaknesses in the men they love. As children, they were players in a big charade presented by their families, an illusion they had to maintain in public, in school, with their friends. Don’t tell anyone that daddy beats you. Don’t tell anyone that mommy pours water on your head in the middle of the night. Pretend that everything is fine. Pretend mommy and daddy love you, that you’re secure, that you are safe in their care. Women who love convicted killers are pros at maintaining illusions.
“These women live in a different reality with a different emotional system… Any of the elements—an alcoholic father, an abusive father—could warp her view of men so she would pursue a totally nonrational attraction to men,” said psychologist Stuart Fischoff. Each woman will use
her love as a way to (falsely) boost her self-esteem. “She tells herself, ‘I’m offering myself to a man who is in jail so I will become an extremely special person.’”
One woman, quoted in Ebony magazine, explained how special her murderer/lover made her feel. “I wasn’t looking for a husband, but there was something about him that attracted me, and I liked it,” said Zettye Price, who married convicted murderer Willie Bates in 1980. They met four years earlier when she and her minister went into a state penitentiary in Mississippi to talk to the inmates. “I think everyone needs someone, and he’s the person I needed because he loves and appreciates me.” Willie Bates may have been a murderer, but he made Zettye Price feel loved and cared about. For women with low self-esteem, that is the most important aspect of any love relationship.
10
Victims, Repeaters, Rebels
“I went to a bar once, when I was
eighteen, and came out when I was
twenty-eight”
VICTIMS
Many women who love murderers learned victim behavior during their childhoods and were launched early in victim careers. “Loving an inmate who’s in [prison] for life is … victimization because these marriages cannot deliver a stable intimate relationship with another mature adult,” said Dr. Dietz.
Women who love convicted killers are partly attracted to these men because, subconsciously, they want to remain victims. The women are aware, on some deep level, that they are being used. They are not getting all they could out of a love relationship. They will never enjoy sex, companionship, the joys of a loving marriage. But these women are so convinced they should remain victims because they don’t deserve anything better that they maintain the fiction that they are happy. As children, they learned to live lies; now, as women, they continue lying and pretending—to themselves, as well as to everyone else.
Says Francine, “As I look back on it, I see that was my perception of myself, that first I had been powerless with respect to my father, then I was powerless with respect to my husband. Finally I realized—you are going to have to quit clutching all these hurts to your bosom. Pain is like a shield and it protects you from the outside world. But the only way you can ever get out of this place is to give up the luxury of the pain that you’ve suffered.”
As a child victim, being beaten was preferable to being forgotten. Women who were abused as children develop a victim mentality, often causing them to confuse beatings with feelings of endearment. The beatings can even be gratifying because they can be viewed, in a twisted way, as proof of affection: Better battered than ignored.
Women who love murderers also mix up endearment, love, affection, and attention with violence. Dancing with a master of death has its allure. Not only the potent attractiveness of a violence that is confused with strength, but the violence that each woman remembers from her childhood, violence connected with attention and love.
REPEATERS
Children who are abused must deal with the often remorseful, apologetic parents who hurt them. A child will have mixed feelings after an abusive episode if her parent expresses regrets: She will feel angry and hurt, but she will also feel guilt and love. Over and over, this is repeated, sometimes on a daily basis. Eventually the child begins to feel there is some connection between love and pain. She learns that if she feels hurt first, love and hugs will come later.
As an adult, she may seek a relationship that repeats this pattern of pain/hurt first, followed by love/affection. She may grow to love a man who abuses her because it’s the only kind of love she has known. Repeatedly, women who love killers told me about abusive parents, boyfriends, and husbands. Now, in their relationships with murderers, although they are safe from abuse because the murderers are behind bars, there is still a basic underlying threat, a potent danger lurking just below the surface. These men have killed and could kill again. They represent the greatest potential threat of abuse. The women are repeating the love-pain connection they learned as children in their relationships with murderers.
Many women who love men who kill suffer from repetition compulsion and “are trying to rework their pasts to finally conquer the unapproachable fathers,” said Dr. Fischoff.
Francine’s case is one of the most bizarre. Of all the women interviewed, she was one of the worst victims of physical abuse. Yet the father who brutalized her and her murderer/husband share the same first name, so she is constantly reminded of her father. “She is struggling desperately to replace her father,” said psychiatrist Neil Kaye. “If [Charlie] is her father, she finally has the chance to turn the tables. She finally can control him the way her father controlled her.” When Francine’s father died, she felt sorry for him because he had been very sick. That pity is not unlike the feeling she has for Charlie, according to Dr. Kaye: “He has a little problem called killing, and her father had a little problem called drinking.”
REBELS
Some women who love murderers are rebels, creating drama out of the stuff of their everyday lives because they have no other outlet for feelings of aggression and daring. Because their self-image is so weak, they are attracted by a life on the edge. These women reject what is culturally endorsed and are attracted to what’s deviant. Sheer badness attracts them; they are “good girls” attracted to “bad boys.”
For the rebel, excitement and drama make life worthwhile, and chaos substitutes for warmth and affection. In The Agony of It All, Joy Davidson writes: “In the titillation of rebellion, we are buttressed by the irrational belief that we are special, that we can get away with it.” The sheer outrageousness of loving a man who has murdered causes a woman to transcend her feelings of low self-esteem, of vulnerability. The thrill of her relationship makes her feel alive and important. By controlling the melodramatic events in their lives, women who love men who kill get a false and temporary sense of power.
Alicia, in love with Bill who murdered another man during a knife fight, began rebelling in college by using recreational drugs. “One of the reasons college was so intense for me was that my background was so dull. [College] was like winding up in Disneyland.” During college, she had no focus and was interested mainly in playing. She had fun and worked at easy jobs just to pay the bills. “I went to a bar once, when I was eighteen, and came out when I was twenty-eight.” Finally, “I just got sick of being drunk, of having hangovers. All my friends were partying. My life was at a dead end. I wasn’t going anywhere.”
In the years since, Alicia tried to find a center by taking college courses and working, but she never found what she was seeking. She was a drifter of sorts, living in six different states, working in a dozen fields. When she met and fell in love with Bill, she became focused, chose a career, went back to school, and is now working full-time plus twenty hours overtime to support the two of them.
Alicia is not aware that choosing Bill as a lovemate is a continuation of her lost, lonely drifting and that she is still a rebel. If anything, she has found an even better way to live on the edge; her relationship provides about as much risk as anyone could handle. As it does with other rebels, the drama in Alicia’s love relationship takes the place of real intimacy and closeness. By loving Bill, she is able to experience dramatic conflict, challenge, and excitement.
He is her biker, her Hell’s Angel—the bad boy she was warned against. For middle-class women especially, loving a murderer can be very attractive because it satisfies inner needs for intensity, excitement, and risk taking.
11
Lori: A Case of Desperation
“He called me his princess”
LORI
One night when Lori was five, her father climbed into her bed. He sexually abused her repeatedly until she was eight. By then, Lori’s spirit had died, a victim of “soul murder,” killed by incest, beatings, and emotional abuse. And her mother! Her mother sometimes woke Lori in the middle of the night by pouring water on her. Both parents were alcoholics and both abused their daughter.
When Lori was thirty-e
ight, she considered killing herself. Her life had been an agony of loneliness, suffering, and pain, a long march toward nowhere. She had never had anyone to love; no one had given her any love. Her husband of twenty years didn’t respond to her with affection. She had no children. Waitressing for a living offered no real satisfaction. What was there to live for?
Lori’s husband said he was “not interested in her as a woman.” He humiliated and belittled her. He didn’t allow her to write checks; other than her income as a waitress, she had no access to money. She cooked, cleaned, and administered her husband’s daily asthma medication. The few friends she made in her church advised her to stay with her husband even though she wasn’t happy. Where else can you go? they asked. And because she had little education and few job skills, Lori stayed. Besides, since her spirit had been killed as a child, she was not one to make changes.
Lori plodded on, sadly, hopelessly. But she never broke down. One day, on television, she heard someone talking about taking life “one day at a time,” and that’s how she made it through the endless days and nights. “I’d get up in the morning and I would say, ‘Well, I’ll go to lunch without thinking about my father, thinking about other things.’ And I did it. Then I would go from lunch to dinner. And I kept doing that, day in, day out, day in, day out. And it did ease the pain. I can remember someone saying to me, ‘Time heals all wounds.’ I thought, ‘Are you kidding?’ But it’s true. The weeks turn to months, the months to years. The pain isn’t the same.”
Women Who Love Men Who Kill Page 17