Women Who Love Men Who Kill

by Sheila Isenberg

4

  How Women Meet Men Who Kill

  “I am not a thief, robber, burglar, sex

  offender, drug dealer/user, con man,

  or nut case”

  How do free women meet convicted killers? Certainly not in ordinary ways. Women who love men who kill are inventive and determined. With exceptions, such as Teddi, and although they will deny it, they meet killers in prison by actively seeking them out. They look for love in all the wrong places—and they find it.

  Free women—women on the outside—and men who’ve been convicted of murder are separated by the steel and concrete of barbed wire and prison walls. So first, a convicted murderer must want to form a liaison with a woman on the outside.

  ADVERTISEMENTS

  One of the most common methods an inmate uses to meet women is to place a personal ad. No, a convict doesn’t write that he’s committed murder and would like to meet a woman. He omits details about the crime but uses certain buzz words in his ad to attract women.

  Lonely inmate wants to hear from anyone who likes to write, share ideas and feelings. Age, sex, race, are unimportant. Please write…

  The key words here are lonely and share. Also, the inmate’s reference to writing and sharing ideas and feelings gives the impression that he’s sensitive and interested in communicating.

  23-year-old prisoner of drug war seeks correspondence with WF 21 to 40, or anyone… Augusta Correctional Center, Craigsville, Va.

  This man is letting readers of the personals know he is most interested in meeting a white female considerably older than he is. But by adding “or anyone” he’s admitting he’s so lonely, he will correspond with anybody.

  Prisoner, 34, 5’8”, 155 lbs., brown hair, hazel eyes, college grad, seeks woman 18 to 45 for friendship/exchange of political views. Enjoys music, art, sports, and animals. Would also like to work with writer concerning prison reform manuscript…

  In this ad, the prisoner writes that he has a wide range of interests, is bright and involved with issues of the day, including prison reform. Also, this ad, as did the one above it, appeared in The Nation, a weekly political magazine with an educated, politically liberal readership.

  I answered the last ad, hoping to find out how many responses the inmate received and whether he ultimately met any of the women. Here’s his response to my letter: “I believe I could supply you with the information you seek plus more, as I have had pen-pal relationships in the past… However, what troubles me at the outset is your less than good faith means of contacting me… The fact that you chose not to divulge your address… This is somewhat insulting as it implies that you fear me or at the very least, don’t trust me. This much I will tell you: I have been in state prison since 1976. I am not a thief, robber, burglar, sex offender, drug dealer/user, con man, or nut case.”

  This man ended his letter by wishing me good luck whether or not I sent him my home address—his prerequisite for providing me with information. His letter revealed that he was intelligent and could write well. Its tone, however, showed he was quickly trying to gain the upper hand and control any future correspondence between us. And despite his statement about what he was not, the New York State Department of Corrections revealed he had been in jail since 1976 for murder.

  The personality revealed in this letter is a good example of the forceful, manipulative character displayed by many murderers who ultimately become involved with women on the outside.

  Another inmate whose ad I answered accused me of trying to exploit him, but surprisingly, he ended his letter: “If you would like to visit, send me a photo of yourself in your next letter.” In my letter, I had asked if he had had a girlfriend since he’d been in prison. He replied: “Why, [do] you want to be my girlfriend or something?” I had also asked what crime he’d been convicted of. He answered: “No use telling you about it. You are not helping me towards getting out of prison in any way.”

  Then he gave me a list of questions. I had written to him on a professional basis, telling him about this book and asking him specific questions about his ad and the responses to it. His questions to me, on the other hand, were quite personal: “Are you married? Have you ever visited anyone in prison before? Do you have a boyfriend? Do you have children? How much money do you intend to make on this book?”

  I didn’t answer this letter but he wrote again. He told me he had received more than two hundred responses to his ad in The Nation with “still more coming in.” The women who answered his ad “wrote quite a lot of nice things and sent photos.” Not about to give up on any woman writing him for any reason, he ended his second letter by telling me he had placed my name on his approved visitors’ list. He also included detailed directions to the prison and finally, named a date on which I could visit.

  So with no encouragement on my part, this inmate set up an appointment to meet me despite the fact that I had not responded to his first letter. This shows the importance of a relationship with a woman on the outside and the lengths to which some murderers will go to establish one.

  Another inmate in a California prison wrote to me, saying he had no idea why women answered the ad he had put in a magazine: “I can’t think of one sane reason to start a relationship with a prisoner. Pen pals are great for both sides, but why buy into failure?”

  PEN PALS

  Letters, old-fashioned and out-of-style in this age of the telephone, still have an important place in prisons. Since inmates can’t use the phones, except on a restricted basis and then only to make collect calls, letters are their main artillery in their battle to meet women. Personal ads, pen-pal clubs, and letter writing sponsored by various prison advocacy groups are often the way convicted murderers meet women on the outside. The internet age has added a new and very popular component: prisoner web sites have taken the place of personal ads. For a small fee, an inmate subscribes to a prisoner web site and then sends in his personal ad, which is then put online for him. When he receives email responses to the ad, they’re typed up and mailed to his prison address via snail mail. And so it goes; the prisoner web sites (for-profit businesses) act as go-betweens, facilitating meetings between prisoners and the women who want to meet them.

  Although women are often hesitant to admit they are lonely enough to write to an inmate, untold numbers do it all the time. Many inmates who become pen pals are convicted murderers. They have the longest sentences and are the most desperate for a relationship because they know they will either never get out of prison or will be old when they do.

  Alicia met her boyfriend through a writers’ club. “We were both English majors and I was an English teacher at the time.” She is a little embarrassed about this and usually tells people they met through a friend. She thinks it’s humiliating that she wrote to an inmate she didn’t know.

  Alicia was single and hitting thirty when she got her first letter from Bill. She likes to think they would have gotten involved had they known each other on the outside. “We have a lot of common background. We’re both college educated. We’re the same age.” They wrote, then talked on the phone. “I found him a very interesting individual and I wanted to meet him. I don’t think Bill had any idea of looking for a relationship. But he would call periodically and say, come on and meet me.”

  “The more I got to know him, the better I liked him.” But of course, she was not really getting to know Bill, only the image he presented to her—and her own idealized version of Bill. Her family and friends totally disapproved. “When I first corresponded with him, I was semi-involved with a couple of people. One was a cop. I told him [about Bill] and he was absolutely furious. He told me I was making a big mistake. He said those guys just don’t do one wrong thing; they fuck up for a long time and then get caught. I was getting the same thing from everyone.”

  Alicia didn’t listen. She accepted Bill’s out-of-state collect calls for six months, but was hesitant when he urged her to visit.

  Like so many women who love convicted killers, she had never been inside a
prison. Alicia tried to resist her fascination with this convict whose situation had the potential for causing her serious hardship if she got involved. “I tried to control it for a while. At first, I told him I didn’t want to write to him because I was afraid of getting involved. And he understood that and he just let it go, but I wrote back to him and—well, you make little steps and then it becomes more and more.”

  Finally, she made the twelve-hour drive to meet him. “As a person, I liked him. I found him intelligent. Politically, philosophically, we’re very similar. He’s very positive. He’s one of those power-of-positive-thinking people.” She knew what he looked like from his pictures; his voice was familiar, too, so meeting Bill held no great surprises. But on that first visit, she was so uncomfortable in the prison environment, she didn’t want to return. Quite against her will, however, Alicia had fallen in love—and was compelled to return to the prison, again and again. “You get into a relationship because you fall in love. I wouldn’t recommend to anyone to step into this life. It’s a very difficult life. I stepped into it because I became very emotionally involved with him from the beginning.”

  For some women, the initial motivation to meet a murderer is political. When Elena was in her late thirties and a human rights activist, a friend asked her to write to a lonely convicted murderer on Louisiana’s death row. His name was Terry. He was a good-looking man and had received many letters from women, including the infamous porn star Marilyn Chambers. Elena wrote, and later, she went to Louisiana to meet Terry. Although there was a better than twenty-year age difference—Elena was older—the unlikely pair fell in love and married in 1985. Their romantic passion lasted two years; then Terry was executed.

  VOLUNTEERS

  Women also meet murderers by working in a prison. Amanda met Uri in 1986 when he was doing life in a Pennsylvania state prison and she volunteered to help coordinate a prison NAACP chapter. Amanda doesn’t know why she chose to do this since she was afraid of inmates, uncomfortable around prisons.

  Uri was part of a small core group that regularly attended the NAACP meetings, and he helped Amanda get over her initial discomfort with the prison scene. “I had never been inside a prison before. The first time I went [inside], I was scared. The first time I walked by [the inmates], I just stared straight ahead. I was a nervous wreck.” This refrain is heard over and over among women who love convicted killers. And yet all of these women take that step into a prison.

  From the very beginning, Amanda felt Uri was different. The tall, dark-skinned, Middle Eastern Uri “wasn’t just another inmate.” Amanda dismissed Uri’s conviction. He had been found guilty of a contract murder. He and his partner sold illicit drugs and had hired a hit man to kill someone who had attempted to cheat them. “I didn’t go into the prison looking for love. But as we kept seeing each other at the meetings, I kept thinking I wanted to get to know him better.” They started writing so they could communicate privately—the meetings were too open.

  Initially, their letters were friendly, “what I call on the up-and-up, like talking about our lives and our common interests. By December, I had decided that I would like to get to know him, so I had to decide if I was going to be a coordinator or stop.” The NAACP had a rule that volunteers who became emotionally involved with inmates had to drop out. Amanda made the choice: “I stopped being a coordinator, and in January of 1988, I started going to visit him [on my own].”

  Like Amanda, Dolores met Louis when she and her first husband, both very involved in their church, decided they could best help humanity by working in a prison. Dolores worked with inmates who had absolutely no visitors at all. She began to write to one convicted murderer, Louis, who wanted to share letters with someone. That correspondence has lasted for more than thirteen years, through the dissolution of her first marriage, a second marriage, and a second divorce. During the first twelve years, there were no romantic overtones. “It was platonic. We have only become romantically involved in the last year.” But there were always problems with the relationship, even when it was simply a friendship, because Dolores is white and Louis is black. Both their families objected.

  Some time after her first divorce, Dolores remarried and moved to another state, but she kept writing to Louis. Her second husband disapproved of his wife’s friendship with a black inmate, but she risked his anger to continue the correspondence. She felt she was essential to Louis’s well-being since the only friends he had were Dolores and a few people he had met through other inmates. Dolores and Louis cared deeply about each other: “I was as important to him as he was to me.” As his oldest friend, she could not stop writing to him.

  “He had never had a friendship with a woman as long as he’s had one with me. He had never been able to establish such a long-term relationship with anybody without having sex confuse the whole thing. It’s been a very positive part of his life.” She never expected their friendship to change to romance, although it had been “building up.” After her second marriage ended, she moved back to her home state and began to visit Louis again. “I was pretty broken up about yet another failure. I went to see him, and when I saw how the visit was going—it was one of those I-need-you-to-console-me type things—I didn’t want that to interfere with our friendship. I decided until I was able to put my life in perspective again, until I could be a positive visitor, we would just correspond. He agreed but told me he would always be there if I needed him.”

  They kept writing, though, and after a few months, “our letters started having a different tone to them. We were wanting to explore other emotions. It seemed mutual so I started visiting him again. From that first visit, I felt a spark and so did he, and every visit is a little bit better.”

  THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

  Women on the outside also meet murderers through the criminal justice system. Sometimes the women are in a courtroom as spectators during a trial or as jurors, police officers, lawyers, court officials. It is not uncommon for jurors to become fascinated with defendants since a trial creates a strange intimacy between the primary participants. Jurors in murder trials spend weeks, even months, listening to every detail of a defendant’s life. Sometimes, if the right dynamics are in place, if she is susceptible, a juror may develop romantic feelings toward a defendant.

  FRIENDLY INTRODUCTIONS

  Sometimes well-meaning friends introduce women to killers, perhaps because they know a lonely inmate or because they feel their friend would benefit from the meeting. Often in these situations the friends making the introductions have their own ongoing relationships with inmates. Maria (Chapter 1) was introduced to her boyfriend by a woman who was herself married to an inmate.

  Kay, a thirty-year-old woman who lives in the nation’s capital, was introduced to her murderer/boyfriend because a friend thought she needed a new man. At the time, Kay was having serious difficulties with her boyfriend so a friend tried to set her up with Ruben, a convicted murderer serving a life sentence.

  That Ruben was a murderer didn’t place him out of bounds. “I talked to [my friend] and she said that there’s this fine Rasta man down there that [I] must meet. She said he’s nice looking. She knew I was having problems in my relationship.” At first, Kay resisted the idea of replacing her boyfriend with a man imprisoned for murder. Then, increasingly unhappy, she called Diana. “I said, remember what you were telling me the other day? Let’s do it.”

  Kay and Ruben wrote to each other, and when he sent Kay a photo, she was thrilled. “He was gorgeous! I just sat there and looked at the picture. That is going to be my husband one day. I’m going to marry this man.” They arranged to meet. “I was so nervous. My legs were trembling. I was shaking. I waited a long time. This is the moment. I was a nervous wreck.” Thunderstruck by Ruben’s looks and presence, Kay was swept off her feet and committed herself immediately. When she thought about his life sentence, she felt sure it could not be true. “I felt like—oh, God, in my heart I feel he’s not going to serve all that time.”

/>   WORKING WOMEN

  Many professional women, including social workers, nurses, teachers, journalists, and psychologists enter the prisons in the course of their work, and some fall in love with killers. A number of the women interviewed for this book work in these professions.

  Mary met her husband, Al, in 1985 when they both worked in a mental hospital, she as an administrator, he as an inmate/staffer working in a special program. They became romantically involved a year later. She is white and he is black.

  “He was one of many inmates who came to the hospital every day [to work] … and was considered a staff person. I was very impressed with the work he was doing with the patients and had noticed him over a period of time.” Although he was convicted of murder, Al was in a minimum-security prison, received monthly furloughs, or home visits, and left the prison on a regular basis to work in the mental hospital or to umpire Little League games.

  Mary liked Al’s work long before she fell in love with him. One day, an extremely withdrawn patient agreed to go to therapy only after Al sat on the floor with him and convinced him. The patient, unfortunately, escaped and subsequently killed himself. “Al felt responsible. [The patient] had … hung himself. Al was devastated because he was always dealing with his own thoughts of suicide. People inside, their greatest fear is going crazy, killing themselves.”

  When Al talked about the patient’s suicide with Mary, she became even more interested in him. “I realized this was someone I wanted to get to know better: his insight into his own situation, his commitment to helping other people, to taking something horrible and destructive that had happened in his own life and turning it into something constructive.”