Women Who Love Men Who Kill

by Sheila Isenberg

  Hilary idolized her father. “He was a very intelligent, understanding person. I could go to him and say, ‘Daddy, I don’t know what to do.’ We would sit there and have great talks. He would always advise me. We would have long talks about everything, about politics.” He never acted angry. “If my father got mad, he’d go outside and sit on the front porch.”

  Unlike some other neighborhood men, he was not a heavy drinker, but on the rare occasions he did get drunk, he was pleasant. “He would come home and have a beer or two. He might go off to the corner bar … with the guys on his day off. On holidays, when he did get a little bit too much [to drink], he’d be funny as hell.”

  Her parents got along well in a relationship Hilary describes as a fifty-fifty partnership. Bob earned the money and Grace decided how it would be spent. They always saved, even if it was only a dollar a week.

  Hilary views her childhood as solid, although lacking in luxuries. “When I look back, I had a damn good childhood. We never had a whole lot of money and I never had designer clothes, but I had the basics. And I had somebody that I could go and talk to.”

  That was most important. Her father was someone to confide in, to share her troubles with, to advise her. To Hilary’s unending regret, she gave that up to marry when she was only seventeen. She would spend the rest of her life looking for someone to listen to her problems—a man to take her father’s place.

  YOUNG LOVE

  When Hilary turned seventeen, graduated from high school, and decided to get married, conveniently there was a boy three blocks away who wanted her. They had known each other for years. “I had stars in my eyes. I wanted my own little vine-covered cottage with the picket fence and the kids. It just didn’t work out that way.”

  Her nineteen-year-old husband, Sid, drank a bit and his parents were alcoholics, but that didn’t faze Hilary. She knew she could save Sid from becoming an alcoholic like his parents. “I thought maybe if he had someone to come home to and someone to care about him, maybe it would change him.” But that didn’t happen.

  A few years into the marriage, Sid hit Hilary. He apologized. The second time it was easier for him to hit her, then say he was sorry. The third time it was even easier. “It got to the point when I would see him coming home, I’d try to stay out of his way.”

  They had four children, three boys and a girl. To Hilary and her children, Sid was a brute who thought nothing of punching his family around. Every night, he would stop at a bar and get drunk. If Hilary was in bed when he came home, he’d start a fight. If she was asleep, he’d wake her up. If he arrived in time for dinner, he’d say, “I ain’t eating this slop.” If Hilary was out, he’d harass the children. When she came home, she’d tell them to “go up to their room, but sometimes he’d follow them up and beat them. He never touched the girl though.”

  For their daughter, he reserved special treatment. No hitting. Just emotional and psychological abuse. “She would always analyze everything … but he would say to her, ‘You’re nothing but a faker, you’re nothing but a slut.’ He would really pull her down as far as self-esteem. One time she came home from school and complained of pain in her lower abdomen. He said she was faking, but she really did have appendicitis. ‘Oh, Queenie,’ he said, ‘you think you’re the great one but you’re nothing but dog shit. I think he didn’t want a girl.”

  In addition to beating Hilary, he insulted her whenever he could. “He was always putting me down: ‘You’re so ugly. You’re so stupid.”’ Her husband’s outrages upon her body and mind also included what Hilary describes as “not so much rape, as force,” sexual attacks during the last years of the marriage.

  Sid was unreasonably jealous and accused Hilary of being intimate with the paperboy, the mailman, the teenager across the street. “I was not allowed to talk to anybody. An old man kissed me on the cheek and I took a beating for it.” She did not work outside her home for the seventeen years of her hellish marriage. She wanted to go back to school once but Sid would not allow it. “Then I’d get a taste of independence and he wouldn’t like that. He was a very insecure person.”

  It didn’t take long for the reality of Sid’s drinking and violence to kill the fantasies in Hilary’s head about a vine-covered cottage. Nor did she get the calm, cozy family life of which she had dreamed. She had no one to talk to, no one to advise or comfort her, either. Her attempt to emulate her mother and be the nurturing center of a large family had failed. She took care of her children, but the family unit was hardly intact; it suffered from daily doses of Sid’s emotional and physical abuse.

  The marriage ended in a violent confrontation with Hilary wielding a gun. Sid broke her arm, and after she drove herself to the hospital to get the bone set, she came home and put her children to bed. “I didn’t want them to see how badly hurt I was. I didn’t want to scare them.” Then she went downstairs and cradling Sid’s hunting shotgun in her good arm, took up a position on the stairs. She put two shells in the gun and sat waiting for her husband to return home from the bar. When he walked in, she flipped on the light and told him, “You take one step towards me and I’ll kill you.” She pulled the hammer back and he turned white. He backed away, afraid. The marriage was over.

  Later, her thirteen-year-old daughter asked her, “Why didn’t you do this earlier?”

  SINGLE MOTHER

  After the divorce, Hilary worked as a waitress in a fast-food place, then went on to a better restaurant. Years passed. After she put her daughter through nursing school, Hilary decided it was her turn and studied nursing at a community college. She graduated in September 1982 and began work as a nurse. “I always wanted to be a nurse. I like helping people.” Later, Hilary went back to school again, earning an associate’s degree as a paralegal. “I love to go to school. I love education, and now I have two professions I can fall back on.”

  She dated after her marriage broke up but decided that “all men were jerks. They were stupid. Every man that I met was lacking something. Either they weren’t tall enough or they weren’t this or that. I thought all men were idiots so I didn’t even date for two years.”

  MURDER FOR BEER

  It was true that the old man had very little, but on the first Saturday in December 1972, three young Pittsburgh men believed they had even less and decided to rob him.

  Lucas Milton, then twenty-eight, and two friends, planned a break-in to relieve the old man of his social security check. The three younger men followed their target home to his tiny place in Pittsburgh’s Northside after he cashed the $289 check at a neighborhood bar. They listened outside and heard him talking about having a lot of money. Then they bashed in his door.

  Unfortunately for all involved, the old man habitually talked to himself about possessing large sums of money, but in reality he was a pauper. And no match for the youthful burglars. A third accomplice reportedly waited outside with a getaway car while Lucas Milton and a second partner broke into the apartment. When the elderly man refused to reveal where he had hidden his cash, they beat him to death. They ran out with four cans of beer they had taken from the refrigerator, but not before one of the burglars tried to decapitate the old man with a saw.

  Eighteen years later, the Pittsburgh assistant district attorney who prosecuted the murder case, J. Alan Johnson, said the old man had been a plasterer. His killers, after trying unsuccessfully to cut off his head, covered his body with plaster and then walked outside, leaving dusty white footprints that eventually led police right to them.

  In July 1973, Lucas Milton pleaded guilty to attempted robbery and murder in the first degree after first watching his accomplice’s trial result in a first-degree murder conviction, carrying with it a sentence of life without parole. But pleading guilty didn’t help Milton, and he, too, was sentenced to life without parole.

  Then he was twenty-eight, single, and a killer. He is now forty-six, married to Hilary, and according to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, a killer, still serving his term.

  To Hilary
, Lucas does not belong in prison. “He’s a good man, a very good man, religious … not a religious fanatic, but a … good-hearted, unselfish person. He’d do anything for anybody… Now he has a heart problem, but he carried a man across the yard who [was ill].” Hilary told Lucas, “You made a mistake, you never had a prior record, nothing. You don’t deserve to be in here.” Even her family agrees. After her grown children met Lucas, they said, “You gotta get him out of here. He’s a hell of a man.”

  DENIAL

  Although Hilary is bothered by the murder, she believes his drunkenness is what caused Lucas to beat the old man to death. The Lucas she knows and loves does not have that capacity for violence. “That’s not his makeup. If he was in his right mind, if he hadn’t been drinking that night… I’m not making excuses for him. I know it was the alcohol that did it.”

  Lucas had a deprived childhood. He was raised in an orphanage, his mother was unmarried and he never knew his father. “He never had people that said, ‘I love you,’ and meant it… He never had anybody… Lucas was fighting it all himself. He never had somebody say, ‘That’s wrong.’ All he had was somebody who would cuff him back of the head. He told me he never had anybody who cared. I do. I care now. Lucas has been hurt enough. I can’t let him get hurt anymore.” Hilary must protect Lucas to satisfy her own emotional needs. She is his savior; when his attorney files appeals, Hilary goes before the parole board instead of Lucas. “I’m speaking for him. I’m his voice at that time.”

  SUICIDE

  One cold morning in 1986, Lucas tried to end his life by slicing his wrists with a razor he had managed to conceal in his cell. Although he was already married to Hilary and had her strong love in his corner, he wanted to die. Always understanding, Hilary said she can comprehend why Lucas tried to slit his wrists. “My [Lucas] is very, very sensitive. He is so starved for affection, for love. I asked him why. Didn’t you stop to think who you were hurting? He said, ‘All I could think of was—I’ll never get out of here. I’ll never be with you.’ He couldn’t look ahead at that point.”

  She blames prison life for Lucas’s depression. “It’s a tense, stressful situation. There are two thousand men in an institution built for eight hundred ninety-five. You live by bells. Everything is regimented. Lucas has no space to walk, no space, period.”

  In retrospect, however, Lucas’s suicide try was beneficial because he was admitted to a state psychiatric hospital where, for the first time, he began to deal with his alcohol dependency. “That’s where he learned about alcoholism. He said, ‘I would never stand up in front of a bunch of people and say I’m an alcoholic. Now that I know it’s a disease, I can do it.’”

  Hilary became a hovering angel of mercy to Lucas then. She visited him at the psychiatric hospital although it was hundreds of miles away. “I felt … like I was his mother. Get him on the straight and narrow, like a mom does to a kid. He didn’t want to go to the mental hospital, but I told him I’d be there. I went every six weeks. I made it there for his birthday and I made it there for Christmas.”

  LOVE OR THE BOTTLE

  Hilary has told Lucas he has to choose between her and drinking. “Lucas knows how I feel about alcohol. I told him, ‘You’re either going to take me and what I can offer you—or the bottle, and you’re going to die in this place a lonely old man.”’ Unfortunately, Lucas has had a few setbacks in his resolution to quit drinking. “I’m not saying he didn’t slip. But he always got right back on it.” Lucas must stop drinking because of his poor health. Planning for his release from prison, Hilary has already contacted an Alcoholics Anonymous chapter near her house to ask if Lucas could be a speaker.

  Sometimes Hilary wavers. She will admit to being afraid Lucas might drink again. “I have fears what if he goes drinking again. But there’s AA and I have faith in Lucas.”

  In the early years of her marriage to Sid, Hilary was certain she could change his patterns of drinking and violence. “But then I realized a leopard does not change his spots.” So what’s the difference this time, with Lucas? Hilary is convinced Lucas wants to change whereas Sid never recognized his alcoholism. “My first husband would never admit he needed help. Lucas, on the other hand, realizes he does have a problem and that he can’t solve it himself.” Also, for the first time in his life, thanks to Hilary, Lucas “has something he’s never had and something he values—a family.”

  Still, Hilary will have a large burden if Lucas is released. In addition to fears he might start drinking, she will have to support him because his heart condition precludes his working. “I get kind of scared. He won’t be able to work … so it’ll all be on me. Will I be able to handle all that?” But Lucas always has the right words for Hilary when she expresses anxieties. “He told me that we’ll handle it. If we have to eat bread and beans, we’ll handle it.”

  Bread and beans? Right now, while he’s in prison, Hilary is supporting Lucas in a relatively comfortable lifestyle. Although she is in her forties, with little money saved, she does nothing to provide for her own future. All her money—and she works sixty hours a week—goes to pay bills, hers and his. And he has some expensive needs: legal fees for mounting a new appeal; a new color television set because “cell thieves” broke in and took the one he had.

  “I’m the one that buys Lucas his TV, his radio, his clothes, and his goodies from Hickory Farms at Christmas. I’m the one who pays for his phone calls.” Hilary puts money on his commissary book so he can purchase small items at the prison store. She has had to do without herself to keep him comfortable. “I’ve been wanting to get a new washer. But when he calls and says, ‘It’s so cold and all I have is one blanket’—so what’s more important, a blanket for him or a new washing machine?”

  THE MOTHER

  According to psychiatrist Dr. Streamson Chua, Hilary’s great motivator is a need to be like her mother. “She admired her mother, who married young and took care of everyone. She wants people with problems so she can take care of them.” Her need to nurture is one reason why Hilary has chosen nursing. When she was dating Sid, she knew he drank, was aware his parents were alcoholics, but married him anyway and took on the burden of trying to change him. After Hilary had children, she had to be constantly vigilant to protect them from Sid’s violence. Now, in Lucas, she has satisfied her deepest fantasies of being a total nurturer and caregiver. Lucas, with his physical problems, alcoholism, and murder conviction, fills the bill; Hilary can be Earth Mother and Florence Nightingale to this incredibly needy victim. “The more problems that Lucas has, the better it is for her,” said Dr. Chua.

  Hilary does not easily express emotions, but she will share her feelings with Lucas when she’s depressed. For the most part, though, she is his rock and has shouldered his financial, legal, physical, and psychological burdens.

  GOOD ADVICE

  At the same time that Hilary strives to be like her mother, she is trying to find a man who will fill the remembered image of her father—an image that is no doubt seen through a rosy filter. She wanted a kind, understanding father and describes hers as infinitely patient and willing to listen. But anecdotes she tells about him hardly fit the fairy-tale person she describes.

  Early in her marriage, when she and Sid fought, she went home to talk it over with her father. She was only eighteen at the time. Her father had always been willing to advise her, but this was different. “He told my mom to make me a cup of coffee … and he said, ‘You’re welcome here anytime. You can come back here but this is no longer your home. When you have a problem, you have to figure it out and you have to settle it.’”

  Incredibly, Hilary is grateful for that advice. “If my father had been the type to say, ‘Oh, no, no one’s doing that to my baby girl,’ I might have become too dependent. I might have said to my husband, ‘My dad will take care of you.’ I have to thank my parents for me being as independent as I am right now. They’re the ones that built my character.”

  Yes, Dad was right to let Sid keep beating up his bab
y girl; it made her independent. While her parents were building her character, her husband was destroying her body, ripping apart her confidence and self-esteem. “When I was beaten by my ex-husband, I could have asked for help, and I know my parents would have said, ‘Come on home.’ But … it was my bed and I would handle it.”

  Actually, she did not tell her parents directly that she was being beaten because they had not wanted her to marry Sid. “I didn’t tell my parents. Then it would be, ‘I told you so.’ I didn’t want to admit I made a mistake.”

  When she was bruised, she would make up excuses. Her parents never really believed she walked into a door or fell down the stairs. Still, they did not intercede. “I think they were just waiting for me to do something. I have a lot of pride. I didn’t want to admit that I failed.

  “When I pulled a gun on Sid, my father wondered why I didn’t do that years ago. My parents’ attitude was, ‘You knew we were always here, but we didn’t want to step over the line.’”

  SOMEONE, PLEASE LOOK AT ME

  Growing up in such a crowded household, it’s likely that Hilary didn’t receive as much attention as she needed. She is probably fantasizing when she recalls the warmth and love in the family and when she describes her kind, understanding father. “It’s a fantasy that her father sat down and talked to her so gently,” said psychiatrist Chua.

  But Lucas, locked up, a murderer, sick, alcoholic, with no one on the outside caring much about him—Lucas will pay attention to Hilary. Lucas, as do most other convicted murderers, focuses intensely and solely on his woman. He gives her all the attention she could ever want or need—constant phone calls, emotional letters, warm personal visits. As do all the wives and girlfriends of these men, Hilary relishes the attention. As long as Lucas satisfies her need for attention, Hilary is willing to sacrifice.