Lori sat down one morning during her break and began to look through a copy of The Village Voice, a New York City weekly newspaper, where she saw a personal ad from an inmate at a state prison seeking someone to write him. This intrigued Lori. Although she didn’t know why he was in jail, she knew he was lonely and his need touched her emptiness; and so began a passionate love affair, the first she had ever known.
“It’s been over two years and I feel like a kid. If I don’t see him for two, three days, I get—Then when I know I’m going to see him, I get so excited. I’m in love. We love each other. We’re crazy about each other.”
Lori answered the ad because she was desperately lonely; Kevin placed the ad for the same reason. Although they were worlds apart in ages and backgrounds—she’s about fifteen years older—their common need for an emotional connection drew them together. After two letters, Lori visited Kevin.
Kevin was gracious and thoughtful during that first visit. No one had ever treated her that way before. “He was so cute. He got us a little paper towel and he put it down on the table and he put ketchup on my sandwich for me. He was very attentive, which I thought was nice. He wanted to make sure I was comfortable all the time. He asked, ‘Are you comfortable in that seat? Would you want me to put your jacket on? Did they give you any problems coming in?’… I never saw five hours go so fast in my life.”
Of course not. They were, perhaps, the only happy hours Lori had ever had. She didn’t yet know about Angela Simon.
ANGELA SIMON
Angela Simon had difficulty socializing. The fifteen-year-old couldn’t make small talk about boys, clothes, and music like the other girls could. Angela would walk up to a group of kids and ask for a cigarette as a way of getting into the conversation. She would stand around and smoke, but she didn’t talk. “[Angela] was physically attractive but possibly mentally dull,” said attorney Sidney Dworet.
Most of the kids in the Islip, Long Island, neighborhood where Angela lived as a foster child teased her. Later, when questioned by officials, these teenagers described Angela as “quiet, introverted, slow intellectually … naive and frequently the brunt of ridicule.” She was seen a lot on “the path,” a shortcut teens used to get to a nearby mall. She also spent time at a local luncheonette, a hangout for neighborhood kids. In Suffolk County police reports, the luncheonette proprietor described Angela as “a good kid, very quiet and reserved … who rarely spoke to anyone unless she was spoken to first.”
Kevin, during an interview in a prison visiting room, remembered: “She was shy. I felt a protective thing toward her. But I wasn’t her boyfriend. She regarded me as a person she could talk to. [The others] picked on her. They teased her.”
Angela’s favorite refuge was “the hut,” an abandoned truck body on the dirt path. The hut was furnished with a blue and white box spring, small filthy scatter rugs, and empty cartons; it was strewn with empty beer cans and cigarette butts. It was not a place that many people knew about, but according to police, a small group of youths, including Angela and Kevin, used the hut as a hangout.
Some of the boys who spent time with Angela in the hut may have been sexually intimate with her, depending on who’s telling the story. The boys wrote their nicknames on the walls. They hung out. They wasted time. They sat around drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. On March 18, 1984, one of the boys raped Angela, strangled her, and smashed her head in with a cement block.
THE BIRTHDAY MURDER
According to police in Suffolk County, New York, Kevin celebrated his twenty-first birthday on Sunday, March 18, 1984, by eating a large midday meal with his foster family. Later he went with friends to play video games at the mall. At about five P.M., he met Angela on his way home as he walked along the dirt path. They went into the hut to talk and smoke. Kevin gave her one of his Marlboros. After a while they started to kiss; he felt her breast, then pulled her bra up. When he tried to tug her jeans and underpants down, she resisted and finally, screamed. She tried to get away but he stopped her.
“She continued to resist me and screamed for me to stop,” Kevin told police in a taped confession. “I told her she was not going anyplace, that she was staying with me a little longer. I then started to squeeze her neck harder because she wouldn’t stop screaming. When she stopped moving, I let her go and took her pants and underpants off. I tried to fuck her, but I couldn’t get my dick in her cunt. I checked to see if she was breathing and I knew I killed her.
“To make sure she was dead, I picked up the cement block as high as I could and threw it at Angela’s head. I then turned her around on her stomach and put the cement block on her head. I put the box spring across the benches to cover her up.” Kevin went home and took a shower. At eight P.M., a friend picked him up and they went bowling to celebrate his birthday.
Kevin’s version of his birthday is different from the police version and does not include rape and murder. He said he ate a big dinner in the middle of the day with his Italian foster family as they did every Sunday. After dinner, at about two-thirty P.M., he went to a friend’s house and later played video games at the mall. Then he walked back to his house to enjoy a birthday cake. “That’s when they think I did it,” said Kevin.
That night, he, his friend, and his friend’s girl went bowling, then took the girl home. The two guys went drinking; Kevin got drunk on beer, then his friend dropped him off at the local 7- Eleven store. “I knew it was too late for me to go home, so I went to the trailer,” said Kevin. His family didn’t allow him in if he came home after midnight because he made too much noise, so he decided to sleep in the hut. “I knew there was a mattress there. I thought it was great [that] I wouldn’t have to sleep on the floor.” In the morning, “I woke up frozen cold and the only thing on my mind was to go home and catch some rest before I would have to go to work.” When he later heard Angela Simon’s body was found in the hut, he was very upset. “That freaked me out when I heard the girl was underneath the mattress I slept on.”
Although Kevin signed a confession, he claims smart, veteran cops coerced him, using the good cop-bad cop tactic to force him to admit to something that wasn’t true. “They said, ‘If you sign this, you’re all right. If you don’t sign this, we’ll throw away the key.’”
There are great discrepancies between Kevin’s story and police reports, and Kevin continues to maintain his innocence. A brief filed in 1989 in New York Supreme Court’s Appellate Division asking for a new trial describes Kevin as “a nervous individual” who was “visibly upset and emotionally unstable” when he was questioned by Suffolk County detectives. The brief maintains that Kevin was questioned in a locked police car in an isolated parking lot, thus violating his constitutional rights, and that no direct evidence was found—blood, hair, fingerprints, etc.—linking him to the murder.
Kevin’s defense attorney, Sidney Dworet, interviewed five years after the trial, said: “I didn’t defend him believing I was defending a guilty person.” But Dworet expressed ambivalence about Kevin’s guilt. If he did kill Angela, “he repressed the act into a dream state. He has to deny the act. If he did it, and the evidence seems to indicate that he’s done it, his psychology is such that he believes himself to be the kind of person who couldn’t hurt anyone.”
Added Dworet: “He believes he’s innocent. But I’m not certain… He just wants to please everybody. He’s a real Eagle Scout… It’s hard for me to come to a conclusion there was injustice here. If he didn’t do it, where is the murderer now?”
AN EAGLE SCOUT
“To know Kevin, you would know that he couldn’t do it. He’s too decent of a person. He’s never had a record. He’s never been in trouble with the law. He was an Eagle Scout. He was a good kid,” said Lori. Kevin has lifted her from the tedium of an empty life and she believes in him totally, perhaps more than he believes in himself. He cries when he talks about the murder, but Lori gets angry; she proclaims his innocence, the unfairness of it all, the injustice that this good, kind man is i
n prison.
Kevin is caring, affectionate, has a good sense of humor, and is ideal for her, according to Lori. He makes her feel happy for the first time in her life. He worries about her wellbeing and focuses all his attention and affection on her. No one has ever done that for her before, and in gratitude, she promises to remain with Kevin forever. “Love is unselfishness, giving yourself. To be loyal, to stick with the man and not give up on him.”
Lori knows Kevin may well lose his appeal and have to spend twenty more years in prison. But she will always believe him to be innocent. “He’s just not that sort of person. You have to be a kind of a person to do crimes like that, but he’s not.” Asked how she would react if she found out he was guilty, Lori has no answer. “I don’t know. I would want to know why he did it. I really don’t know how I would be able to justify it.”
Fortunately, she does not have to make that judgment. To her, Kevin is a victim just as she was throughout her life. They are two hapless souls, clinging together in a lifeboat built of love and need, in a world that is often unjust.
EARLY YEARS
During Lori’s empty marriage, her husband “turned aside all the time when I would go to him for affection. He didn’t want to be bothered.” Once, he told her about a homosexual encounter. “He said this fellow came over and he wanted to do things. And he said he did them and he liked doing them.”
Lori was so confused that she used to ask people if what her husband told her was normal. She left him once, but went back because she was emotionally and physically exhausted. Waitressing did not really pay enough to support her.
When Lori was a teenager, she worked after she quit school but turned her paychecks over to her abusive parents. She also took care of the house because her mother was too drunk to bother. “Thinking about it, I must have been like a wife to my father. My mother wasn’t around. She was out picking up men, having affairs. My father was working and coming home and sleeping and beating us up. We just lived from day to day. It was survival.”
There was rarely anything to eat in the house. More than once, she went without food. Life was hell, and when she got an opportunity to marry, she took it. She met her husband through the church she and her father belonged to until the congregants kicked him out. “We would sit in the parking lot and he’d beat me up in the car. And then a couple of people saw him in bars… Christians don’t do that.” Although they asked him to leave the church, no one ever reported him for abusing his daughter.
So Lori, eighteen, married the first man she dated. Although she and her husband had intercourse the first night, weeks went by before they again had sex; thus began a pattern that would repeat itself through the marriage. He would ignore her and she would badger him. “I would say, ‘Come on, now, we can at least have sex once a week.’ Then he made me feel guilty because I had to ask for it. I thought there was something wrong with me because I had been abused.”
The unending nightmare of rejection got worse when Lori’s father died. He died as he had lived, drunk, in a bar. Lori almost had a breakdown then. “I looked up to this man for so many years, and to know that I had been abused by him…” Confused and lost, she turned to her husband for love and affection. She asked him to hold her, to love her, but he refused. “I would just go over and say, ‘Put your arms around me. Just, can you hug me?’ And he’d say, ‘Just get away from me.’”
TRUE LOVE
“I’ve always been made to feel as though I’m nothing. Being with Kevin, everything was new. It was like I never had a life before. I never had a man treat me like a woman. He called me his princess.”
She loves him so much it hurts. At night, she lies in bed, crying, punching the pillow, wishing he were there with his arms around her. When she’s unhappy, she tells him; once she talked about suicide. He said, “Oh, God, don’t ever say that again.” Now, she feels she has something to live for. Even if Kevin’s appeal is unsuccessful, they will always have each other.
“I can’t believe he’s so attentive to me, so considerate. Why me? I’m nobody.” This attitude makes Kevin angry; he wants her to have more self-esteem. “He makes me feel as though I’m somebody.”
Love is consuming Lori. So new to her, after all these years, it is a feeling she can barely contain. She inhales and exhales love; it radiates from her. She finally has someone who will hold her. In a maximum-security prison waiting room with dozens of people around, he puts his arms around her for five minutes and then asks if it’s enough. “No. Just a few minutes longer.”
For Lori, whose mother stood on street corners begging money from strangers, whose father raped and beat her, there can never be enough holding.
Although she has difficulty expressing it, Lori feels great rage toward the people who have hurt her. Like so many women, Lori spent her life turning her rage inward, gaining weight, living in misery, depressed all the time. It was not until she met Kevin that she began, with his encouragement, to voice her anger.
“I’m ready to kill somebody.” Of course, after she says it, she quickly retracts the angry words. But the power of her rage is frightening.
According to clinical psychologist Stuart Fischoff, Lori may be “trying to rework her past, to finally conquer the unapproachable father” by maintaining a safe relationship with a man behind bars.
But Lori, seeking intimacy with Kevin, is being fooled because their intimacy is an illusion. On the other hand, for the first time in her life Lori is being loved, and there is no underestimating the benefit of that. Her relationship with Kevin is good for her; she knows he cares about her and it makes her feel better about herself. Her life is happier and more fulfilled than it’s ever been.
Like other women who love convicted killers, Lori was launched early in her victim career. But victim though she may be, it is clear that, with Kevin’s help, she is trying to build up her self-esteem, not tear it down. She has chosen to fall in love with a man who appears to really care about her wellbeing. When she wrote to him in response to his ad, she chose a person she felt was needy, someone she was certain would answer her letter. Her self-esteem was so low, she assumed no one but a lonely inmate would write back.
Kevin gives her love; her husband is still supporting her financially. “At the moment, it’s taking two relationships to satisfy her basic needs—without sex, of course,” said Dr. Kaye. In a way, Lori is taking care of herself, and this can been seen as a first, positive step. She is actually growing as a result of this relationship and gaining strength from it. Lori believes Kevin to be innocent and is using denial to continue in the relationship.
For Lori, and Kevin, there is a way to forget about being victimized, a way to keep terror away, to prevent real life from intruding into the careful fantasy they are weaving together.
They are like young lovers, sharing an emotion so innocent and pure, it cannot be touched with ugliness or harshness. He is her courtier, all gentleness and sweetness. She is his rescuer, all kind and giving. They remain enclosed in their cocoon of mutual dependence and illusion, separated from real life by more than prison walls.
12
Devotion
“I work sixty hours a week because I
have myself and him to support”
Women who love killers make serious commitments, promising fidelity to men who are locked behind prison walls for the rest of their lives—or at the least, for a very long time. It is a commitment without limit, a devotion that has no bounds. Despite the fact they do not share sexual intimacy, or because of it, their killer/lovers inspire the deepest, most passionate, most committed love in these women. They would never be unfaithful. Francine said her husband Charlie totally trusts her. “My husband one time told me, ‘I’m the only man in prison who doesn’t have to worry about his wife, because I know that you don’t see other men.’ And I don’t. For the same reason that I went more than twenty years faithful to my first husband—it would never occur to me to be otherwise.”
A man from Huntsville, Tex
as, doing life for murdering his wife, wrote to me about his fiancé of six years whom he has never met: “Communication, understanding, patience, and a whole lot of love have been the keys to our relationship and its continual growth. Since Cely came into my life, my days are a lot brighter and every day is a good day. How much longer is Cely willing to wait? How ever long it takes. Remember, Cely is Filipino, not American. Filipino women are extremely devoted. In our hearts we are already married.”
Despite the men’s inaccessibility, women who love men who kill devote their lives obsessively to them. Careers take second place, and the women spend all their savings and extra money on legal fees, sometimes working two jobs to pay for them. Their children are sometimes neglected. They may even give up custody of their children, either temporarily or permanently, in order to be near the men they love.
The women put up with incredible hardship. They are alone most of the time; they are financially responsible not only for themselves but for the convicted murderer. Nothing comes easy. Every phone call, every letter, every meeting, means the system has to be dealt with one way or another.
Often, a woman assumes her man’s life, his identity; she does his time with him. He’s committed the crime but she shares the imprisonment. His legal battle becomes her struggle, his friends and family become her closest allies. In hypothesizing about ending her relationship with a murderer, one woman said it would also mean ending everything else in her life. “I would be giving up a whole lifestyle I have developed. I have become very involved with his family.”
Probably the greatest sign of these women’s commitment is their patience. They wait—for visits, calls, letters. And of course, they wait for their fantasy to come true: that the man they love, who is on death row or serving a life sentence or life without parole, will eventually be freed, and they will be together.
Women Who Love Men Who Kill Page 18