“I think most people who marry lifers don’t believe that he’s going to do life in prison,” said Ruth, whose husband, Alan, forty, has been in prison for sixteen years. The strength of her fantasy is evident when she refers to the men as “lifers” at the same time that she says most women “don’t believe that he’s going to do life.”
Adds Ruth: “He might do a long time, a very long time, but [everyone] will eventually be parole eligible.” This is not true. As of November 1989, eighteen states have sentences of life without parole. And in the cases of particularly heinous mass murders and serial killings, the murderers serve consecutive life sentences (one life sentence after another) for each count of murder, so the likelihood of their being released is nil.
MONEY
“Wives are willing to go out on a limb [for their men]. Mothers tend to be more consistent, but mothers are old and don’t have the financial resources,” said Alicia. Willingness to commit financially to a murderer is one big proof of loyalty and devotion. Frequently, supporting a murderer in prison forces a woman to work two jobs—and she still has a tough time making ends meet.
“What gets the women I know, long-term, is not the loneliness or the lack of sex or anything else. What wears them down, long-term, is the bills: trying to pay the lawyers, trying to pay the phone bill, trying to support the kids, sending him Christmas boxes. I work sixty hours a week because I have myself and him to support,” said Alicia.
These women commit all their money to the men they love. Annette has spent more than $10,000 in legal fees trying to get her husband’s murder conviction overturned. He says he’s innocent and she believes him. The $10,000 is a bargain, “half-price because the lawyers believe my husband did not do it.”
RELOCATION AND CHILDREN
Alicia initially proved her devotion to Bill by leaving her job and her home to relocate to the state where he was imprisoned. She is by no means alone in this; many women who love convicted murderers move to be near the prisons where their men are doing time. In order to be near Jack Henry Abbott, Naomi Zack left her home two hours north of New York City to live near Clinton Maximum Correctional Facility in Dannemora, a few miles from the Canadian border.
Many women also give up their children. When Mary Bain left her husband to be with the man she loved, Joseph Pikul, her daughter remained with her husband. Zack also left her two children with others when she went to live near Abbott.
When Rochelle fell deeply in love with Duane, she sent her teenage daughter and ten-year-old son to live first with their father and later with their grandmother. Rochelle also left her home and job and relocated to live near the prison where Duane was serving his sentence.
Sometimes women with grown children wreck their relationships with their offspring because of their obsession with their murderer/lover.
“I turned my whole life around; I loved him. I absolutely adored him,” said Elena about Terry, the man she married a few years before he was executed for murder in 1987. Elena had four grown children, three sons and a daughter, when she met Terry, who was about fifteen years younger than she. “My children didn’t understand at all and it pretty much broke the bond I had with them. I lived and breathed him, all my waking hours.” Elena’s daughter “understood quite well,” but her sons did not. “They threw a fit and quit speaking to me. They saw themselves cut out by a male person their own age; I would have preferred them to be supportive.”
It’s surprising that a woman would relinquish her children because of her commitment to a man she has just met and begun to love. But the intensity of the obsessive love felt by women who love killers is incredible. These women have such strong psychological needs that when they think they’ve really fallen in love, they are willing to give up everything else in their lives for that love—including their children. Nothing can interfere with their love, nothing, not even children.
THE STORY OF RUTH
Ruth, an educated, mature professional woman married to a convicted killer, is eager to talk about commitment. “I want to tell how we managed to survive all the obstacles and made a relationship that we feel meets our needs. I have learned from it. It’s been one of the more challenging things in my life and continues to be.” Because of her devotion to Alan, she has become director of a local prison-reform advocacy group, an officer of a national prisoners’ rights group, and a leading prison rights activist in her state.
Ruth met Alan while she was on a prison tour. They began writing and then “got serious and fell in love,” according to a woman who knows Ruth. Alan, convicted of the execution-style slayings of two men in a drug deal sixteen years ago, was a minimum-security inmate because of his good behavior in prison. Ruth and Alan believed their patience was going to pay off when, in the fall of 1989, his sentence was commuted by the governor of the state. The commutation meant he would be able to go before a parole board almost immediately.
But by Christmas, 1989, the governor was under heavy political pressure to reverse the commutation order. Although the State Board of Pardons and Paroles had cited Alan as a rehabilitated model prisoner and had recommended commutation, the governor’s actions were viewed as so politically damaging to her and her party that she eventually reversed her decision. Alan is now in a maximum-security prison. Officials believe that he is a good candidate for an escape attempt because of his disappointment over the commutation reversal. He is now not eligible for parole until 1999. Ruth remains by his side, and they have publicly said they will appeal the governor’s reversal.
Of all the women interviewed for this book, Ruth is by far the closest to accepting the fact that her husband has committed murder. She said, “My husband admits his guilt. He pleaded guilty to first-degree murder. He was too embarrassed to go through a trial… He always took responsibility for being there. He didn’t blame his lawyer or anyone else.”
However, there are degrees of denial. At one point, Ruth said, “The murder was an aberration as opposed to being part of his criminal activity.” Of course. Other than serial killers, who murder as a way of life, all murders are aberrations. Also, she said her husband pleaded guilty to avoid the embarrassment of a trial. But according to a spokesman for the State Department of Corrections, that is not the case. He said Alan pleaded guilty in order to receive a life sentence instead of the death penalty.
Finally, Ruth talked about “degrees of reprehensibility,” and one could assume, she meant that the murder of drug dealers is less awful than the murder of innocent people. The families of the murdered men might not agree with her.
STIGMA
Whatever type of murder a man has committed, a woman in love with him often faces the same stigma he does. Society generally believes that a woman who loves a criminal is likely to be a criminal herself. People think a murderer’s wife or girlfriend might herself be capable of killing; she is guilty by association and suffers the consequences. Women who love killers, if they tell the truth about their lives, are often ostracized by acquaintances and even by friends and family. Relatives may disown them, refuse to associate with them, and keep them out of the family circle. This makes the women, alienated to start with for many reasons, feel increasingly estranged; they begin to identify more and more with their murderer/lovers.
The women never expect what they have to deal with in this area. “Nothing they will ever do in their lives, including earning a Ph.D., will prepare them for having a man in prison,” said prison-reform activist Jeanette Erickson. “People don’t understand. It’s never ending: the insults, the injuries, the lies.” Not only does society not understand what it’s like to love someone who has committed murder, but people don’t want to hear about it either. It is expected that a woman with such a “secret” will keep it to herself. Whenever the women interviewed for this book have come out of the closet about their relationships, they have gotten hurt. “You become a target of the neighborhood, a stigma attaches to you as the relative of a murderer,” said one woman.
Terry,
for example, was on the police force in Galveston, Texas, for four years. She had a steady boyfriend, two children, a good life. Until she met Bobby, described by Galveston assistant district attorney George Cooley as “a local drug dealer, burglar, and robber [who] had been in jail three times.” Something about Bobby got to Terry; she couldn’t resist him. One night while they were at her house the phone rang. It was Terry’s ex-boyfriend, Roger. He wanted to come over and talk, and since she had lived with him for so many years, she agreed. When he rang the doorbell, Bobby went into the bedroom. Terry and her ex started to talk, but they quickly became angry and ended up screaming at each other. He punched her in the face. Bobby ran out of the bedroom with a gun—Terry’s service revolver. He shot once and Roger fell over, dead.
When the police pulled up to the house minutes later, Terry, crying, hysterical, said that Bobby had murdered her ex-boyfriend. But her story changed by the time a grand jury was convened. Then, Terry testified that Bobby shot in self-defense, that Roger had attacked him first. Terry’s son testified also, saying that directly after the shooting, his mother had told him, “Your daddy just killed your daddy.”
A grand juror asked Terry what she thought about Bobby, his violence, his quickness to shoot and kill. Terry responded, “I love him and I’m gonna marry him.” And she did. Bobby and Terry were married November 3, 1989. She is, of course, no longer a member of the police department.
Cooley voiced the disbelief and shock common to friends and relatives of free women who love murderers. “It’s unbelievable to me. She ruined her career. I’m very disappointed with her. I always thought she was a sharp individual. I just can’t believe it… He’s using her. He’s gonna drag her down.”
Another woman, a successful professional in a Western state, said, “I may lose my job; my boss is questioning me about my husband.” In another state, a leading prison advocate is also afraid publicity surrounding her marriage to a convicted murderer will negatively affect her career.
In Colorado, Annette was suspended from her high school teaching job because of public reaction to accusations against her by prison officials. These officials barred Annette from visiting her husband, Jack, a convicted murderer, saying she “had been seen fondling [him] during a visit,” according to The Rocky Mountain News. A year later, after a long battle to vindicate herself, officials at the prison apologized and Annette was once again allowed to visit Jack. (She had not seen her husband for a year!) She was also rehired by her school district and given back pay.
There is no limit to the humiliation women who love killers must undergo when they visit their men. One woman, whose husband is in a Massachusetts prison doing time for murder, said that visiting wives and girlfriends have to change their tampons in front of a female prison guard. Prison officials know that contraband is smuggled in, are aware of the methods used, and generally expect wives and girlfriends to do the smuggling.
“Visitors are treated like dogs,” said Hilary. “If you have a metal clip on your bra, you have to remove your bra. If I bring pictures of the grandkids in, they look at them to make sure they’re not pornography.”
Lori said, “It is humiliating. You’re being incarcerated right along with them. The way [the guards] look at you, like you’re a third-class citizen coming through, like you’re the scum of the earth.”
Tricia Hedin, a prison activist from Oregon, has had a baby with her inmate husband through artificial insemination. In Newsweek, she wrote: “One day, in the visiting room, I see a woman’s hand slapped by a prison guard when she places it on her husband’s knee. Another day, another woman is kept waiting for half of her three-hour visit as prison officials try to ‘find’ her husband and bring him to the visiting room.”
Said Alicia, “I have one foot on the inside and one foot on the outside and am straddling the wall. We don’t live in the free world. We sit home nights by ourselves because we can’t get involved with someone else because we’re involved with someone—but that someone you have isn’t there with you. He can’t be with you. The inmates don’t realize how much this dominates your life.”
13
Women Who Love Serial Killers
“I got me a good one”
Ted Bundy murdered thirty-one women and girls in four states. “Hillside Stranglers” Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono killed ten women. John Wayne Gacy strangled thirty-three young men and boys. In California, “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez killed fourteen people. David Berkowitz, “Son of Sam,” shot six people in New York City.
Incredibly, every one of these multiple killers, whose crimes were bizarre, repulsive, and inhuman, has had at least one woman fall in love with him. Three of the six men were married after being convicted as murderers.
Bundy, executed in 1989, married Carole Boone, whom he met during his trial; she bore him a son. Bianchi married a Louisiana woman, Shirlee Book, in 1989. Buono remarried one of his former wives while he was in prison. Gacy’s former girlfriend, Sue Terry, told the world in television and newspaper interviews that she was passionately in love with him. Richard Ramirez’s fans—women who correspond with him and followed him faithfully from courtroom to jail—fantasize they love him. David Berkowitz has had at least one girlfriend and is now supposedly in another relationship.
Who are these women? Do they differ from other women who love murderers? How do women who love serial killers deny the hideous crimes committed by the men they believe they love?
WOMEN WHO LOVE SERIAL KILLERS
“Particularly notorious inmates attract prison groupies… [Serial killers are] more famous, more prominent, more sinister, more recognition enhancing” than ordinary killers, said psychiatrist Park Dietz. Relationships with these men can give women social significance, perhaps for the first time in their lives.
Serial killers provide themselves with a “celebrity career… The public treats them as major celebrities… Virtually all our multiple murderers achieve true and lasting fame. They thus attain an immortality denied the unenterprising common man,” writes Elliot Leyton in Hunting Humans.
Some women’s fascination with serial killers is “the most excessive hero worship and passion that I have ever encountered,” said Leyton. The glamour and celebrity status given these killers creates an escalating excitement. When the bodies are found, there is a kind of a pre-arrest celebrity; once the killer is caught, he becomes a genuine celebrity with a sensational kind of allure.
Women who love serial killers, not unlike women who love men who have killed once or twice, are attracted by notoriety. In our hierarchy of criminal celebrity, the serial killer is at the top, so his status gives his woman a boost, playing on her quite common and universal desire to become known. “If you can’t get your fifteen minutes of fame, you can get close to someone who got it. If he raped and killed, that doesn’t matter so much,” said psychologist Jonathan Segal, Ph.D. When an individual develops a romantic interest in a celebrity to the point of pursuing that celebrity, he or she may be suffering from a psychological condition called erotomania. The pursuers are often “plucked from … obscurity” by contact, real or imagined, with the celebrity, wrote Segal in “Erotomania Revisited.”
MACHISMO
Of course, there is a dark side to women’s romantic feelings for serial killers. Even if she insists on his innocence, somewhere inside her, she knows she loves a brutal killer, and often, a violator of women. And somewhere inside her, she is excited by this knowledge.
“In a twisted kind of way, the male who is the most strong and dominant—and most violent—will appear to be the most male,” said Leyton. The serial killer takes on a maleness that is attractive to women who, because of the limitations of their psyches, can’t see the difference between real strength and brute violence.
Story after story of the appeal of the serial killers for women illustrates this. “Outside the courtroom, some of them [the Ted groupies] would admit to reporters that Ted frightened them, yet they couldn’t stay away. It is
a common syndrome, this fascination that an alleged mass killer has for some women, as if he was the ultimate macho figure,” wrote Ann Rule in The Stranger Beside Me, about Ted Bundy.
TED BUNDY
During his four-year coast-to-coast killing rampage, Ted Bundy kidnapped, tortured, raped, and murdered thirty young women and at least one child. One expert on serial killers believes the total to be much higher. Bundy may have committed more than one hundred murders, according to Robert Keppel, chief investigator for Washington State’s Attorney General’s Office. No one is positive how many states Bundy killed in—four, five, six—or more. After a lengthy investigation, trial, and appeal period, Bundy, convicted of three of the murders, was executed in Florida on January 24, 1989.
Despite being apprehended by the authorities, Bundy’s career was not over. Although the murders would stop, his celebrity career was just starting, and his notoriety would draw countless women to him. For the duration of his trial and imprisonment, Bundy had a huge following. “A lot of believers in him thought that he wasn’t the killer. A lot of people were stuck on his good looks, upper-middle-class attitude, being the aspiring attorney, going to school,” said Keppel.
During Bundy’s trial, “one front row was somehow reserved for the Ted Groupies… The front row—just behind Ted and the defense team—was jammed with pretty young women… Their eyes never left Ted, and they blushed and giggled with delight when he turned to flash a blinding smile at them, as he often did,” wrote Ann Rule in The Stranger Beside Me. “Handsome, arrogant and articulate, he drew scores of rapt groupies to the jammed court each day,” wrote Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth in The Only Living Witness. The women, some young, some older, were all eager to see in person the “Love-Bite Killer,” as the newspapers had dubbed Bundy.
Women Who Love Men Who Kill Page 19