Women Who Love Men Who Kill

by Sheila Isenberg

  Teddi had tried to make her marriage work, in part because of her mother. “I kept wanting to prove to her that I was going to make everything better and I was going to fall into place. I was going to be like every other wife.” And because of her father. “He believed that a wife should know when to shut up.” He told Teddi she had not learned that lesson and was a failure at being a wife.

  Determined to prove her father wrong, Teddi went directly from her first disastrous marriage into a relationship with a different kind of man—who also turned out to be violent. Peter appeared stable, steady, and safe. When Teddi married him at twenty-one, she already felt old and welcomed the chance to have a normal life, a solid marriage. Peter, thirty, was a good provider and loved Teddi. “Peter was the way out … the way of calming everyone down and saying, okay, she’s going to get normal.” A fireman, he saw life as black or white, right or wrong. He expected of Teddi what her family expected: be a good wife, cook, have children, don’t make waves.

  She was pregnant when they got married and thrilled about it. (It was her second pregnancy. A first ended in a miscarriage when Vincent kicked her in the stomach.) The baby would be all hers, someone to love whom no one could take away. Although Teddi had some thoughts of raising the baby alone, she talked herself into marrying Peter. “I thought, you’re doing it again. You’re not falling into place. Give this baby a father and a home.”

  During their eighteen-year marriage, they had four children. While the marriage did not live up to the romantic fantasies of Teddi’s youth, it was relatively calm until Peter’s drinking got out of hand. He had always been a drinker, but Teddi expected men to drink. Actually, Peter was very much like Teddi’s father: “In opinions, whether political or traditional, a Sicilian. Everything from the same foods to the same outlook on life.”

  Peter drank more and more and finally began to beat their children. Teddi, who had started working selling sportswear in a department store, was often not home and didn’t know about the beatings. She was aware, though, that her husband didn’t want her to work. Working outside the home was not acceptable in a good Sicilian wife. “I wasn’t there, so he took it out on the kids.” Teddi called it a career. Peter called it desertion. The children, nine, seven, five, and one when the beatings started, didn’t tell their mother. One day, arriving home early, Teddi found the baby unconscious from being thrown against a wall. “I packed up the kids and moved out.” She began divorce proceedings.

  For some time, Teddi had been aware that her marriage wasn’t working. “The whole thing I was living was a lie. My relationship with him, what I was pretending to be with the kids, was a lie, all of it.” She was not a good wife; she could not fall into place. It was time to start being herself.

  She wanted to raise the children on her own, live her own life. Conveniently, she had just been given a raise and made supervisor of the sportswear department. “I was going to take control totally. I started becoming more successful in the work I did; I became secure.”

  MARTY

  Throughout her life, Teddi had a love that, fed by her fantasies, grew to mythic proportions: Marty. “In the back of my mind was always Marty. When my children were born in the hospital, I resented my husband or his family walking in when I was holding the baby, fantasizing that it was my and Marty’s baby.”

  In 1985, Teddi’s mother, Christina, was dying in a hospital bed. Grab life instead of simply letting it drift by, Christina told her daughter. Get some happiness for yourself, she said. The older woman was aware of Teddi’s unspoken love for Marty. Write to him, she said. Even though Marty is doing life for murder, I’ll be your go-between; I’ll accept his letters for you, said Christina.

  Christina liked Teddi’s husband but knew their marriage was doomed. How could a husband compete with a legend?

  “Marty was the one we all looked up to. He was a leader … in good things as well as bad.” Marty had charisma, charm, grace. He was a leader and everyone in the neighborhood respected him; some revered him. “Even now, you go back to the neighborhood, a lot of the younger kids know that I’m with Marty, and they’ve heard stories of Marty. Guys in their twenties … sit there and ask me questions like they’re talking about some legend.”

  Like other gang members, Marty had a strong code of ethics that he followed, a standard of honor. But there were two sets of rules: one for neighborhood people, friends, family, and a second set for outsiders. “What applied to us didn’t necessarily apply to the girls in the next neighborhood.” It certainly didn’t apply to police.

  “He was from the old school, very old-fashioned. If you were in a bad section of town, he would always get you home.” To Teddi, Marty was Robin Hood; he did “bad” things but he was really “good.” Both Marty and her stepbrother Artie “were bad inside. They robbed. They lied. They did drugs. But … they would defend you to the death. They were protective of people they cared about. But if they didn’t care about you, they could be as cold as they could be.”

  Teddi and Marty had dated before she married Vincent but as friends only. They never developed any kind of romantic relationship because Teddi was young and afraid and wanted to become a good wife while Marty was attracted to a deviant lifestyle. They had never had the time or the opportunity to love each other—or to make love either.

  From her hospital bed, Christina instructed her daughter to sacrifice herself for Marty just as she herself had given up her life for Teddi’s alcoholic, withdrawn father. “Everything was for my father. Her whole life was for him. My mother saw that I had the same thing for Marty that she had for my father, and that was the total acceptance of the man as is, the willingness to sacrifice.”

  Teddi felt ambivalent, though, because she had always been aware that Christina gave in to her husband in order to keep the peace. Christina even told Teddi that Joseph “didn’t do right by her. He didn’t do what he could have done. She felt he could have bent more and given more to her.” But mother and daughter both felt that a wife’s sacrifice was a necessary ingredient in marriage. “I may not have agreed with certain sacrifices that my mother made for my father. But I certainly can see how it cemented their relationship more and more.” In order to make her own life meaningful, Christina wanted her legacy of subjugation to continue into a second generation.

  Teddi and Marty had the possibility of sharing something unique. “My mother said, ‘I see a lot of the same qualities in the relationship, but you have to know who the man is, what he’s capable of, but most important what he’s not capable of—and love him just the same and accept that in him.’”

  In this marriage of convicted killer and sacrificing woman, the woman would have to be the strong one. The strength to hold the relationship together, to fight the odds, would be Teddi’s responsibility, not Marty’s. Teddi accepted her mother’s legacy and wrote to Marty in prison, saying she wanted to visit him. It would mean changing the fantasy that had been playing in her head for almost thirty years. “I always looked at Marty as the protector and the savior. We reversed roles somewhere along the line.”

  Teddi was finally ready to become a good wife. She began visiting Marty in prison, building her life around him, organizing her work and children around prison visits. She could rid herself of her sense of failure if she could marry this man she had always loved, taking on the enormous burden of a relationship with a lifer. Teddi had challenged the rules for being a good girl, but nothing had worked out; her failures made her feel worthless. “I became a disappointment. I got a real hang-up over that. Everything I tried to do, they’re telling me it’s not going to work, it’s not going to work. I said, yes, it is. I’m going to do this. And then it didn’t work. I felt like a total failure.” Now, by marrying Marty, she would succeed.

  LOVE AND MARRIAGE

  There were no flowers at the wedding. No cake. No music. No guests. Teddi’s children, who made the long trip from Brigantine to the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton to witness their mother’s marriage, were fo
rced to wait outside the prison. The wedding was a bit of business—no romance was allowed by prison officials. “The woman sat down; she didn’t even bother standing. We had wanted to exchange our own vows, and things like that… We signed on the dotted line… I left.”

  Teddi cried. “It was more of a sigh of relief. It was like they had to recognize our relationship.” She was also reacting to the momentous occasion; she was legally marrying the man of her dreams, her handsome, dashing Sir Galahad. “I heard Marty saying the words and that was beautiful.”

  After the wedding, Marty was escorted back to his cell and Teddi had dinner with her children. Later, she and the children went to a hotel. “I’m sitting in the hotel, looking at the kids, and I kept saying, ‘We’re actually legally married.’ So the kids ask me, ‘What’s next, Mom? What do we do next?”’ So Teddi went on a honeymoon—with her children. She even took pictures.

  Returning home, married but alone, knowing she would not see him for another week, after another long drive—one of hundreds she had made during the two years she had been visiting Marty in prison—Teddi knew she would sleep alone in bed that night and possibly for many more years.

  Unfortunately for Marty and Teddi, the New Jersey State Prison System does not allow conjugal visits. That’s okay, according to Teddi. “The physical intimacy takes on a different form. With Marty and I, we hold hands or we kiss. Mentally you’re allowing yourself to be physically intimate. That whole part of it for me is more mental. The physical, anybody can control.”

  All around them in the visiting room people are having intercourse or oral sex. (“If they can get away with it, they’ll do it. Men going inside a woman. They just pull up her skirt and put it in. The women don’t wear stockings; I don’t know if they wear underwear. Women would come in and sit on their laps,” said another woman in love with a murderer.) But Teddi and Marty limit their physical contact to hand-holding and touching. “The Department of Corrections would like … to believe that we’re animals, that Marty acts totally basically on instincts, that he has no control over himself, that any woman who would make a commitment to a man like this also must have similar problems. So I won’t give them that.”

  Teddi said it’s actually the guards who are the animals. “They sit up on chairs and watch these people having sex. And I’ve seen men, guards, sitting there playing with themselves, watching.”

  In her years of visiting Marty, Teddi has seen all kinds of visiting-room sex. “Everything from clothes that open, Velcro zippers… If they can get a guard to allow them ten minutes in a closet… A lot of oral sex… I’ve seen people do it with Bibles in their laps. They look like they’re really close together, but actually her legs are over his.”

  She and Marty talk, sharing private thoughts and plans and hopes. No Velcro zippers for them. “I’m not having sex because I would want to be alone with Marty. I won’t give the guards that. The guards do share the same beliefs that we’re trash. But it’s more than the guards, it’s the system.”

  Teddi cherishes her commitment to Marty, and even though she can’t have sex with him, she would never be unfaithful. “I like the old ways. I like being married. I like being faithful to one person.” She now shares some of the beliefs of the women in her family. “Having gone through the whole sixties thing, I prefer the guidelines. I’m more comfortable with them. And maybe I was then, [but] … I wanted to be like everyone else.” The rules about sexuality that she was taught make her feel secure, and she has chosen to live by them.

  THE CROSS

  Teddi is reliving the sacrificial life her mother had with her father. By loving a convicted killer serving a life sentence, she denies herself a companion to live with. She denies herself an ordinary relationship that could include sharing household chores, finances, and child rearing. Trained to sacrifice by her mother, the Catholic Church, and a patriarchal society, she welcomes the cross she bears.

  Teddi is steadfast. “To me, I don’t care if he’s [far away] or he’s next door. I’m going to visit him. I’m going to be there. Every minute of time he is doing, it’s as if I am doing it as well. My life is at a standstill. I live in a cubicle. I live in a cell. My life is on hold like his is.” For her, sacrifice is necessary, as it was with her mother and father. “The sacrifice is strengthening our relationship, cementing the bond. I’ve chosen that; Marty never asked me.”

  SALVATION

  Teddi talks of Marty as “the protector and the savior,” of “willingness to sacrifice,” of cells and cubicles, of her female relatives “preaching.” Only by repenting can she receive salvation. Only by bearing a burden of some kind, her own cross, can she adequately be punished for her past behavior. Her mother said, you must bear a woman’s burden. You must sacrifice for your man.

  Many woman who love convicted killers were raised in the Catholic religion; they need to suffer in order to feel saved. Teddi feels guilty for not being the girl she was supposed to be, for not satisfying the requirements of her family, for not living up to her father’s expectations, for not “falling into place.” She believes she still has to suffer in order to achieve salvation, not realizing how much she has already suffered in her life.

  Raised on a diet of loss and emotional neglect, she married into brutality. At the hands of her father, she was belittled and neglected. At the hands of her first husband, she was beaten and nearly killed. At the hands of her second husband, she saw her children abused.

  Now, Teddi has decided that her rebellious past didn’t work for her so she is following in her mother’s footsteps, throwing herself on the altar of sacrifice and giving up her individuality. But it’s a pleasant sacrifice. She can nurture and give to the shining hero of her childhood. She views Marty as her savior with a Christ-like aura: an all-powerful legend, hero, protector.

  The irony is that her savior is really her burden: Marty is her cross.

  Teddi is a splitter, employing a defense mechanism common to borderline personalities. “A person looks at things as good or bad but can never see them as good and bad. Splitters see the world in black and white tones; they can’t see the gray,” said psychiatrist Neil Kaye, M.D.

  “In splitting, the individual highly values some object or person, then shortly after devalues it. He or she idealizes an object or person, then does the opposite,” explained psychiatrist Park Dietz, M.D.

  Splitting is an attempt to protect the good object by separating its bad, aggressive aspects—by splitting them off. “It indicates a polarization, in which opposites—especially good and bad—can no longer be integrated,” writes psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin in The Bonds of Love. By separating the good and the bad, the good remains pure and does not get contaminated by the bad. It is clear that Teddi, like Maria in Chapter 1, must separate the “good” parts of the man she loves from the “bad”—the killer—parts.

  Teddi also splits her father, seeing him as all bad when she was a child (“He sold me out”), but now, as an adult, viewing him as okay, saying she wishes they were closer. She splits Marty and her stepbrother Artie, describing them as very, very good to those they cared about and very cold to those about whom they didn’t care. She splits her mother: Her mother was good and took care of Teddi, but at the same time, she wasn’t really there for her.

  “Teddi is very well defended from reality,” said Dr. Kaye. “She denies a great deal of what went on in her past and what’s going on in her life now.” For example, she was matter-of-fact about Susan’s attempt to enlist her in prostitution at the age of thirteen.

  Teddi does not see a connection between the three men she has married although all are substance abusers who have committed acts of violence. Two of the three have shown they are capable of murder. (Remember her first husband’s standing over her with the rifle?) Teddi is so used to violence, she may not recognize it when it’s staring her in the face. Even her beloved Artie, when he wasn’t stoned on heroin, showed a rage so powerful, it frightened her when she was a child.

&nbs
p; Marty is a knight in shining armor (“I’m absolutely so proud of him”), which is far from reality. He has spent much of his life in jail, has been a heroin addict, and is convicted of killing a police officer.

  As a child, Teddi was betrayed by everyone. Her alcoholic father. Her passive mother. Her prostitute friend. Her stepbrother Artie, her favorite uncle, and her grandfather betrayed her by dying. Even something that was all hers—her first pregnancy—was taken away when her husband kicked her. Teddi finally had four children, and when she thought they were being endangered, she said: Enough! The bottom line is you can’t take my children. Kill me, hurt me, but don’t touch my children.

  After years of being abused, Teddi decided to take control of her life. She is part owner of a small clothing store now, raises her four children on her own, and has a relationship with a man who can’t abuse her—because he is locked up, under someone else’s control. Marty is the perfect man for Teddi. He romanced her in the old-fashioned way, with love letters and poetry. He can’t place sexual demands on her. Loving Marty allows Teddi to be finally complete. He is her burden, allowing her to be a sacrificing woman. But because she works and he’s in prison, she also plays the role of the good husband who earns a living and is independent. She plays both man and woman.

  “When people see me and Marty as a couple, it’s sort of like a continuing circle. I can’t see where I leave off and Marty begins. It’s like this solid kind of ring; we read each other … he’s the male me and I’m the female him. It’s all a blend.”

  Teddi has finally fallen into place.