Women Who Love Men Who Kill

by Sheila Isenberg

  Tommy Trantino, in a New Jersey state prison for the 1963 murder of two police officers, is “tall—six feet one inch—muscular, long haired, rugged, the cowboy type,” according to Paramus, New Jersey, police chief Joseph Delaney. More than a decade ago, when he was on death row, Trantino was visited by his attorney and the attorney’s wife, Charlee. “Charlee appeared to be the demure, silent, small, soft-spoken type,” said Delaney. Her lawyer husband “was almost a male likeness of Charlee,” quite different from Tommy Trantino in appearance and demeanor.

  Although he was convicted of murder, Trantino wooed and won Charlee. Delaney said he believed Charlee and her husband must have split up over Trantino, whom he described as “glib, a great con artist, very manipulative, with a striking look about him.” There is no question in Delaney’s mind that Charlee was swept away by Trantino’s charm. “He could be a pied piper, he’s that charming.”

  Yet Trantino’s crime was particularly heinous. As Delaney tells it, one night in 1963, while sitting in the Angel Lounge in Lodi, New Jersey, celebrating a robbery, Trantino encountered two policemen who were responding to a noise complaint. The first man into the bar was a sergeant. When he didn’t return, his partner, an unarmed rookie, went in after him. Both officers were made to strip, then were pistol whipped and shot, said Delaney.

  “The most obvious person that Charlee—strictly by theory and thinking of her as diminutive and easy to intimidate—the most obvious person she’d be attracted to, is someone who is macho, good looking and dangerous—Trantino,” said Delaney. According to the police chief, Charlee believes that her husband is rehabilitated—but also that he never committed the crime of which he was convicted.

  A columnist for the Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Times Leader, Steve Corbett, commented, “She considers Tommy to be sensitive and caring… She is impressed with his painter/poet/author status.” Trantino has had a book of poetry, Lock the Lock, published.

  One of the most attractive qualities of men who have killed is their ability to focus on another person, to really listen to what she is saying. According to psychoanalyst Dr. Carl Rotenberg, men in prison are “the best psychologists in the world” because they spend most of their time watching people and reading them. Out of necessity, out of their need to survive, they learn this skill on the streets and, once in prison, perfect their ability to interpret facial expressions, voices, and body language.

  When a man who has killed focuses this way on a woman, it’s often the first time, for her, that anyone has paid her that much attention. For the murderer, it’s done out of necessity, out of a need to survive. He has to learn all he can about this woman as soon as possible, to find out if she’s friend or foe. But for the woman, it feels like a loving touch; the romance for which she yearns begins with his closeness, his constant eye contact, his hanging on her every word.

  MURDERERS MARRYING

  Until 1989, New York State did not allow lifers—murderers, for the most part—to marry. But on May 26 of that year, U.S. district judge Neal McCurn in Langone v. Coughlin overturned the New York law, calling it arbitrary and irrational. “The right to marry in a prison setting is a fundamental one,” he wrote in his decision.

  A large number of inmates and free women agreed with him. During the latter part of 1989, the New York State prison system was inundated with requests for marriages between convicted killers and their long-term girlfriends. Richard Langone, 33, an inmate serving fifteen-to-life for a drug-related murder when he was eighteen, was one of the first to take advantage of the new law. “Marriage is important for someone in prison. It makes a person feel like he’s got something,” Langone told Associated Press writer Marc Humbert.

  Sure. He has a friend, a supplier of money, food, gifts, and sometimes drugs and other contraband, a lover, a wife, a companion, a helpmate—everything a man serving endless years in prison would want, short of his freedom.

  “The men need an advocate on the outside, otherwise they’re dead,” said Jeanette Erickson, a strong supporter of prison reform in Pennsylvania where her brother is jailed. For a man doing time for murder, having a woman on the outside is like a gift from heaven. She is a positive influence with parole boards, a sure way to secure a furlough or short visit home, even proof that he is “normal.”

  But the convicted murderer is not normal. No matter the specifics of his crime, he can never really be described as just a regular fellow. And a relationship between such a man and his woman on the outside is never regular and ordinary. In fact, it has more in common with the fantasy of romance novels and soap operas than it does with real-life love and marriage—despite protestations to the contrary made by the women interviewed for this book.

  Francine has a real marriage, not a prison marriage. Charlie, her husband, a convicted murderer, feels that way, too. They are special, different, not like the other prison couples. When she drives the two hundred miles to visit him, she puts her bills in an accordion folder beside her on the front seat. Telephone, mortgage, gas and electric, doctor, dentist, even the vet bill for her two cats’ rabies shots. During their visit, they talk about household business, and Charlie helps Francine make financial decisions. He understands her hardships. She expects of him the same consideration and input as if he were free. When it’s time to leave, after five hours together, after shared junk food from the vending machines, after much holding hands and looking into each other’s eyes, Francine gets into her car and puts her accordion file on the passenger seat. She drives the two hundred miles home.

  Francine shows total denial of reality. She and her husband are playing at being married, as children do, because if the electricity is turned off in her house for nonpayment, she suffers, not her husband. The state always makes certain that inmates have heat, hot water, and the other basics.

  THE WEDDINGS

  Couples get married in prison waiting rooms, in chapels if they’re lucky, in tiny offices. Sometimes, they’re separated by glass windows. During some ceremonies, they can hold hands. In Colorado, maximum-security inmates can marry only by proxy unless a woman is pregnant.

  Annette got married in a white stone Episcopal church in a small town in Colorado. She wore a long red-and-white Christmas dress to set off her dark hair and skin and carried two dozen red and white roses. Jack, the man she was marrying, was not allowed to be there, so his son stood in for him. Annette said “I do” to her new stepson. He didn’t kiss her at the end of the ceremony and she didn’t look at him with stars in her eyes.

  During an interview for this book, Annette, whose husband, Jack, is doing life in a Colorado penitentiary for first-degree murder, said about her wedding: “It was really romantic.” But in a 1987 first-person piece in a Colorado newspaper, she wrote: “[His] grown son from his first marriage stood in for his dad and said the vow. It was hardly romantic [emphasis added], but I wanted to have it in the church.”

  On May 27, 1978, Geraldine Harper, dressed in a yellow gown, married Nathaniel Grimes, Jr., imprisoned since 1968 for murder. The bride, “still clutching her yellow bouquet,” went home alone after the ceremony, reported the June 1983 edition of Ebony magazine. After their marriage, Geraldine Harper Grimes worked at a kindergarten in Thomasville, Georgia, while her husband—who had spent more than three years on Florida’s death row—served his sentence 180 miles away in Raiford, Florida.

  October 23, 1989, a bright autumn day in upstate New York, is the wedding day of the most well-known jailhouse lawyer in New York State, and possibly in the country, Jerry “the Jew” Rosenberg. Jerry and Ella are married in the dreary visitors’ room of the prison where he is doing life for felony murder.

  Jerry, in his fifties, his skin the dead gray that speaks of months, maybe years, in solitary confinement, is quiet. Ella, attractive, ebullient, about thirty, has her two little boys with her. She met Jerry in 1983 when she was studying at Syracuse University for a master’s degree. This is her wedding, and no matter where the ceremony is, no matter that it’s the
institutional setting of a prison visiting room, she’s dressed for it: a white silk dress, a veil and headpiece decorated with pearls, and white heels. Jerry wears his prison uniform of green shirt and pants.

  The reception is a table strewn with paper wrappings of Ring-Dings and Twinkies, the junk food dispensed by the vending machines, and ashtrays filled with butts. Her little boys, bored, run around the room, careening into other tables. “Do you want Daddy to get in trouble?” Ella shouts to them repeatedly.

  The prison superintendent comes in to congratulate the couple. Other inmates, sitting with their own visitors, look over at Jerry and Ella from time to time. This is clearly an occasion. Jerry is an unusual inmate. In 1967, he became the first person in New York to earn a bona fide law degree behind bars. In 1974, he was the first prisoner permitted to represent a client in a jury trial. Stephen Bello, author of Doing Life: The Extraordinary Saga of America’s Greatest Jailhouse Lawyer, calls Jerry the “most accomplished and successful jailhouse lawyer in the country.” Bello believes in Jerry’s innocence, that he was wrongly convicted for felony murder in connection with the homicides of two police officers.

  After the low-key celebration in the visiting room, Jerry is returned to his cell. Ella drives home with her boys. Although they are married, it makes no real difference to either Jerry or Ella tonight. Or any other night. The prison has no facilities for conjugal visits.

  CONJUGAL VISITS

  Some of the rush to marry in New York State, and other states, has to do with nothing more complex than a desire on the part of the inmates to have sex with a woman. A Texas woman, married to a man convicted of killing five people, writes: “Of course, some of these relationships don’t have much depth either. I can tell you in two words why there has been a sharp rise in the number of proxy marriages in the TDC [Texas Department of Corrections] within the last two years—contact visits!”

  As of January 1989, the Corrections Yearbook, put out by the Criminal Justice Institute, states that conjugal visits—also called trailer visits—are allowed in nine states. During these visits, a married couple is left alone for a number of hours, or even days. They can enjoy sex in the privacy of a trailer or special housing unit set aside for that purpose. Many babies have been born out of these unions. A pilot program was set up in 1983 at the Mississippi State Penitentiary that allows inmates to have as many as forty-two conjugal visits a year. “If an inmate is in good standing and behaves well, he can spend more time with his wife than the warden can spend with his,” said a prison official quoted in Ebony magazine.

  Sex during a contact visit is incredibly intense, romantic, and passionate. Think about it! A man is imprisoned for murder and hasn’t made love to a woman in five, ten, fifteen years. Then he meets, courts, and marries a loving, more-than-willing woman—and boom! There he is, having sex with a woman finally, again, at long last! What could be more dramatic, more romantic and erotic, for both the man and the woman?

  Conjugal visits, in addition to providing a sexual outlet, also serve to solidify and strengthen the bond between couples. If the woman becomes pregnant, the relationship becomes even more stabilized.

  Judy is married to a man who has killed twice. She has also had a child with him. The State of California says he’s in for life with no chance of parole. Judy married Roberto even though he knifed a man to death during a poolroom/bar fight and even though it was his second murder. They’ve been married seven years now, and their child, born as the result of conjugal visits, is five. Judy believes Roberto’s sentence might be reduced to life with the possibility of parole because he is married and has a family. “He [originally] pleaded guilty to first-degree murder because his attorney told him a jury would give him death.” Judy and her child live on hope, waiting for Roberto to be freed.

  LIFE WITHOUT SEX

  The majority of convicted killers and their wives are not allowed conjugal visits. But even the nine states that provide these visits place limitations on them. If a murder is sex related—like the killings committed by the Hillside Stranglers—the inmate is not allowed contact visits. In still other prisons, there are simply no facilities.

  For one reason or another, the majority of women interviewed for this book have never had sex with their husbands or boyfriends. A very small number of women reported having a stolen sexual encounter or two. Despite this lack of sex—or perhaps because of it—these women remain monogamous.

  “Once we did [have intercourse]… They had a park setting, and they had picnic tables, and you could barbecue and stuff like that. The tables were very far apart, and obviously there were people there to monitor you, but they didn’t constantly patrol… It was very, very unsatisfying, obviously, because it was furtive … frightening … terribly secretive. It was not anything that you could enjoy or be relaxed about.”

  Francine and Charlie never had sex again although they have been married for more than a decade “because of … the potential for being shamed… I don’t want that again. Can you imagine, at my age, having someone come upon you, and being caught in that—and then being shamed and scolded?”

  The women interviewed, who love men with whom they cannot have sexual relations, all said they were having a hard time with it but could handle it. “I think it’s an awful, awful, awful burden,” said one woman. “It’s very difficult to deal with because obviously if you love a man, you have tremendous longing to be with him and that is always frustrating. So it means that the suffering is terribly acute because you’re always unfulfilled.” None of the women interviewed for this book said they would consider having sex in a public waiting room.

  They go through humiliation and pain and suffering—indeed these are central to their love as we’ll see later—but before they begin their relationships, none of these women know what lies ahead. None are aware of how difficult these relationships will be. They meet the men, fall in love—then find out.

  3

  Teddi: A Case of Salvation

  “He always went one step further”

  THE FUNERAL

  Teddi was in turmoil. Sitting in a front pew near her parents, she felt alone even though the church was filled with friends and relatives. Her stepbrother Artie was gone and with him, her sense of safety and security. Although ten years older and worlds apart, Artie had always been willing to take the time to listen. No one else heard Teddi the way he did.

  Birds sang and the sun shone outside the church. But to the ten-year-old girl, the sun had set and would never rise again. Artie, her hero, her prince, was dead of a heroin overdose at the age of twenty. The year was 1957.

  Sitting there, waiting for the mass to begin, Teddi remembered how she didn’t believe it when her mother said Artie was dead—until she saw the blood coming out of his mouth and nose. She felt the pain of abandonment over and over. “I always wanted Artie to take me everywhere. I really resented him leaving.”

  The family mourned Artie, surrounded by relatives, neighbors—and police. Theirs was a tough, inbred, Italian section of Jersey City where gangs held sway, secrets were kept to the death, and crime was a way of life. The police had been in and out of the house, checking Artie’s body, looking for drugs, trying to find out if the overdose was accidental. Three days later, the entire close-knit neighborhood turned out for the funeral.

  Sitting in church, Teddi remembered when Artie came to live with her family after his own mother died. He was the one who listened to her when she could no longer stand the chaos, the noise, the mob scene, at home. She would go to Artie, who would point to her temples and say—“The ticket out is there.”

  But Artie himself used a different route—heroin. Although the family was constantly disrupted because of his addiction, his habit also provided Teddi a refuge of sorts. Their closest times were when he was stoned, nodding out on a fix. “He would be sitting on the couch and I knew the look… He seemed so happy and at peace and I had the most fun… I looked for that … more than the other way [when] he was very troub
led, very angry, very violent.”

  Artie’s death meant the end of comfort for Teddi. No one else would be her friend the same way. She squirmed in the pew. The community was waiting, too. Even the priests had to wait for the young lords of the neighborhood—the gang members—to say their good-byes to Artie, in his open coffin.

  Suddenly, a thrill went through the church: Marty had arrived. “Everything seemed very tense at that moment. No one knew how Marty was going to react.” Artie’s best friend, Marty, a gang leader, was an important person in the neighborhood, a “knight in shining armor, always gallant, very noble, but also a rebel… If someone made a dare—like climb out on the roof— Marty would be the one to climb out on the roof—and then hang off. He always went one step further… He needed to be noticed, to stand out from the crowd.”

  The hushed crowd watched Marty walk up to the coffin and listened as he talked softly to his friend. Then Marty “cried like a baby. I thought what a strong friend he was.” The toughest of the young toughs was not afraid to show his vulnerability.

  Afterward, Teddi stood outside the church with the other children. Marty emerged, a leader flanked by his gang members. He walked over to Teddi, touched her hair, and said, “Everything will be okay, kid.” Suddenly, she believed it would be. Her faith in Marty was total; Teddi knew he wouldn’t say anything that wasn’t true. “I felt, all of a sudden, protected again, and I felt that I had a piece of Artie back.”

  Once again, Teddi had a knight to save her from the sordidness of life. She would hold on to the talisman of Marty’s words and his touch for the rest of her life.

  IN PRISON

  It is three decades later. Teddi and Marty sit in the visiting room of a maximum-security correctional facility, holding hands, looking into each other’s eyes. Her long blond hair streaming down her back, blue eyes lit with love, Teddi comes alive. A sleek, handsome man, Marty strokes Teddi’s hair. “No one has beautiful hair like my girl,” he says. She relishes his touch, almost purring under it. Her eyes make love to him as her hands caress his.