Women Who Love Men Who Kill

by Sheila Isenberg

  Anything Lucas asks of her, he gets. “If he would call right now and say, ‘I need your right arm,’ I’d say, ‘You got it.’” Lucas “fulfills my needs. I know that sounds strange. I’m here and he’s in a correctional institute. We’ve been married for seven years and he fulfills my needs! [But] sex is not everything. I could be at my lowest point and he’s always there to pick me up.” (Hilary and Lucas actually had sexual relations once when a guard at the hospital, after finding out they had never consummated their marriage, left them alone for an hour. Hilary said that “it was wonderful and his attorney is afraid that when he gets him out of there, I’m gonna kill him the first night.”)

  DADDY’S GIRL

  While Hilary can recreate her mother’s role in the family by providing Lucas with care, stability, security, nurturing, he can be the father she imagined, the man whose memory she embellished out of her deepest needs. When Lucas is released—Hilary is certain it will be soon because he has served seventeen years and has serious health problems—he will “round out the family circle.”

  “I know he has a lot of my father’s qualities. The strange part of it is, he even looks like my father.”

  Lucas is Hilary’s fantasy come to life; if that’s love, then she loves him. “There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for him and he feels the same way. He’s told me many times he would lay down his life for me. There is no other man on the face of this earth that could come up to my Lucas. I have never cared about anybody as much as I care for him.”

  For more than a decade, Hilary has lived without an abusive, alcoholic man in her house. Perhaps it’s time to take up residence with such a man again. Once, when Hilary teased Lucas and told him she had to leave early from a prison visit because she had a date, he said, “Oh, yeah, you want me to knock you out right here?”

  No. Hilary will wait until he can knock her out right in her own living room.

  6

  Why Women Love Killers

  “We’re not who you think we are”

  We’ve met several women in love with murderers and found out how they meet their men. In order to understand them, it’s necessary to examine their love, to put romance under a microscope and try to comprehend what makes a woman fall in love with a killer.

  Through the vagaries of social change, from the Me Generation of the seventies to the New Agers of the eighties, the yearning for romantic love remains central. Love makes the world go round but comes in many shapes—from the perverse to the practical. Romantic love consumes us as we see from television, books, movies, and popular music. With today’s somewhat waning traditional values—because of physical relocation, a 50-percent divorce rate, and other, positive factors such as a decrease in sexual stereotypes—we have seen an increased importance placed on romance, especially for women.

  “Passions are the great moving forces in people’s lives,” said Ethel Spector Person, Ph.D., author of Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion. A fundamental need for romantic love motivates people to act, to seek, to relate. “When you fall in love and you really bridge that chasm and you almost merge with somebody else, there is ultimately a strength, an enlargement, and an enrichment that comes out of it.”

  Romance is used to sell women on almost every single product, from cars to food. Romantic love makes the world turn on soap operas and in romance novels, two hugely popular and profitable forms of entertainment that have almost half of America mesmerized—the female half. In the world of the soaps, shows that attract millions of devoted viewers, romantic relationships are all turmoil, turbulence, conflict. Best-selling romance novels reach an estimated 20 million people, most of them women.

  In recent years, academics have taken up a serious study of the psychology of love. “Romantic love … has supplanted religion as the arena in which men and women seek meaning, transcendence, wholeness and ecstasy,” writes psychologist Robert A. Johnson, a Jungian analyst, in We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love.

  Many women use love relationships as an arena for excitement and drama. Although this has slowly been changing due to the influence of the feminist movement, it is still evident, from talking to women in love with murderers, that many women use love as a substitute for other types of excitement. Instead of being aggressive in business or sports, for instance, some women find excitement by falling in love with the wrong men. Many women think they can get satisfaction only from a man: the larger-than-life man … the remote man … the crazy man … the risk-taker … the rich and powerful man … the macho man. Women who fall in love with murderers display an extreme need to find excitement, satisfaction, fulfillment, from a socially unacceptable man.

  These women also have an idealized and romanticized perception that love between men and women is based on constant passion, unsatisfied yearnings, and ungratified desires. These women search for and find this type of romantic love with eagerness and intensity. Unlike other seekers after romantic love, women who love killers always find their Holy Grail. They find it in unlikely places, with unlikely partners. But they find men to love who will provide them with constant, renewable, unending passion, with undying love—with romance that resembles a soap opera or a romance novel more than it resembles real life.

  By choosing as their lovers men behind bars for committing murder, they have found a way to keep romance, passion, and love alive forever.

  How? First, let’s look closely at romantic love; then we’ll see how women who love killers, how women who marry murderers, are really very successful at what we call “love.” They are able to fly around the flame without getting burned to death—maybe only a little singed.

  COURTLY LOVE

  What is romantic love? Is it something we should search for? Is it good for us? Or is it, as Robert Johnson believes, merely the mask that spirituality wears today?

  For women in love with murderers, romantic love is spiritual transcendence. They experience an exalted emotion, an ecstatic, transformational love. They soar above the earth and its mundanity, escaping from the trivia and pain—and the reality—of daily life.

  Their idea of romantic love is based, although they don’t know it, on the medieval concept of courtly love, which downplayed marriage and sexual encounters between knights and their ladies in favor of endless courtship. Women who love killers are also not allowed to experience (normal) marriages or (normal) sexual encounters with the men they love. Johnson explains three characteristics of courtly love that could also be used to describe the relationships between convicted killers and the women who love them.

  NO SEX

  Courtly love, “an idealized, spiritualized relationship, designed to lift the [participants] above the level of physical grossness,” forbade sex, writes Johnson. Women in love with murderers don’t have sex either. All the women who spoke to me expressed revulsion at sex in public visiting rooms.

  Although some had a stolen sexual encounter or two at one time or another, all of them downplayed sex. To these women, sex is simply not as important as romance.

  Many of the women talked about the intimacy they share with the men even though there is no sex; some said their relationships are successful because there is no sex involved.

  “I am as important to him as he is to me,” said Dolores. That she and her boyfriend, Louis, who killed a businessman during a robbery twenty-one years ago, have never had sex is an integral part of their relationship. “He has never been able to establish such a long-term relationship with anybody without having sex confuse the whole thing.”

  After a long friendship, they fell in love, and using the language of courtly love, Dolores describes how Louis changed as he opened up to her. He is “like a flower that’s a bud and you can see it opening before your eyes. Maybe that’s what I’ve fallen in love with: this transformation.” Dolores, responsible for the transformation of another human being who loves her enough to flower, is made to feel special.

  Alicia loves Bill, in prison for
life for stabbing a man in 1981 with a butcher knife. Happy to do without sex, she said that romance without sex “is easier for me. I played out my youth as hard as I could till I was sick to death of it.” She will most likely never be able to have sex with the man she loves, but that’s okay. “I’m not interested in transient sexual relationships. And as long as I’m committed to this relationship, I know I won’t be interested in having sex on the side.”

  They will never sneak into the little room outside the visitors’ room that some couples bribe the guards into letting them use. It’s just not worth it. “If there’s no chance of getting caught and it’s very private and the chance comes up, we’ll take it. But if it’s going to endanger his case in any way, no.”

  Elena loved Terry so much she married him despite the many obstacles: her grown children who resented their mother’s having a husband in their age bracket; the state that wanted to execute Terry; the fact they could never be alone in a room together because he was a death-row inmate.

  “We couldn’t live together, but other than that, it was just perfect.” Their “chemistry was perfect” but they couldn’t do anything about it. “We talked about ideas. Sex was something we skirted around because we couldn’t have it. He was not a grabby kind of man.” A few days before Terry’s execution, a sympathetic guard put the very-much-in-love married couple alone in a room together. But nothing happened. “That might have been an opportunity but he was not that kind of man. He would not have grabbed me and done something with the chance a guard would come in. He was very respectful of me as I was of him. Just that act wasn’t that important to us. You can get that on the street.”

  NO MARRIAGE

  Courtly love precludes marriage between the knight and his lady. Although many women in love with murderers who are behind bars marry the men, their relationships are hardly intimate; they can’t relate as normal husbands and wives. Even those women who try to make their marriages as normal as possible fail dismally. Marriage and intimacy do not flourish under prison conditions. Marrying a man sentenced to life in prison is taking on a situation with guaranteed separation and loss. It means choosing to have a relationship that exists in an artificial, repressive, and threatening environment.

  ONLY PASSION

  By not allowing sex, marriage, or intimacy, the focus of courtly love becomes, solely, passion. Writes Johnson: “The courtly lovers keep themselves aflame with passion … they suffer intense desire for each other, yet strive to spiritualize their desire … by never reducing their passion to the ordinariness of sex and marriage.” (Emphasis added.)

  This is the incredible nature of the love between women on the outside and convicted killers. These women have found a way to keep themselves aflame with passion. By choosing as her beloved a man who has committed murder, a man who will never be able to be a regular husband or lover, each woman keeps her passion burning by endless, painful, limitless suffering.

  Women who love murderers “are a real romantic breed. They have to be to put up with what they put up with. Their relationships become very dramatic. The Department of Corrections constantly does these horrible things and [the man and the woman] feel defenseless and they get very romantic,” said Alicia.

  These women don’t choose their relationships; they just “fall” madly in love. They are victims of love with no control over their feelings. “I don’t think you make the choice to pursue it. It ends up unfolding in front of you and you move with it,” said Mary.

  “Bill is just—I don’t know—it was one of those things. I think I was swept off my feet the first time I heard his voice on the phone. I just love his voice, it’s the sexiest voice ever. He’s got this deep, heavy Southern accent,” said Alicia.

  Kay, with a history of unsuccessful relationships, fell desperately and instantly in love with a man serving a life sentence for murder because her first glimpse of him rendered her helpless with swooning passion: “Oh, my God, he is fine. I didn’t even know who I was. What is this man doing in here? He was so handsome. He looked like a black messiah, a black Jesus Christ. He had these big, black, piercing eyes and a wonderful voice.”

  Elena, recalling the love she had for Terry, said, “I loved him. I absolutely adored him. I loved him beyond sanity, probably.” Imagine the ecstasy of her suffering as he was taken away to be executed. Will she ever again feel as deeply? “His family was clutching at him and crying, and he turned around to me and he looked straight into my eyes and he said, ‘You, I love.’ And they shackled him and took him away.” Those words, that moment, will sustain her for the rest of her life.

  There are no bounds to this romantic love, no limits to its depth—or to the pain these women suffer. One notorious woman who loved a murderer—and suffered great losses because of her love—was Tennessee attorney Mary Pentecost Evans. Her lover, William Timothy Kirk, described by another woman married to a murderer as “quite the cavalier and the gentlemen,” was originally Evans’s client. Kirk, charged with being the triggerman during a prison uprising in which seven inmates took four guards hostage and killed two inmates, was to be represented by the court-appointed Evans on the murder charge.

  They met in the attorneys’ room at Brushy Mountain Prison in Tennessee. He was a career criminal who ran with a rough crowd. Already serving a life sentence for armed robbery and other felonies when he was brought up on this new charge, murder, there was little hope that Kirk, thirty-six, would ever get out of prison. Mary Evans was blond, beautiful, bright, from a wealthy family. Both Kirk and Evans, twenty-six, had been married and divorced before. But the day they met, it was as if no one else in the world had ever existed.

  Evans arranged for Kirk to be transported from prison to a psychologist’s office on March 31, 1983, supposedly for a routine consultation. But the couple, by now crazy in love, had planned a daring escape. Evans gave Kirk a gun, and he disarmed the three guards who had accompanied them to the psychologist’s office. The pair ran out to her car and drove off. They were on the road for more than four months before they were captured in a motel in Daytona Beach, Florida.

  There was a lot of talk in Knoxville about what made Mary Evans do it. No one could understand the appeal Kirk had for her. No one, to this day, ever has. But theories abounded. Evans’s boss, Knoxville lawyer James A. H. Bell, was quoted in The Knoxville News-Sentinel as saying that Evans may have become “psychologically hypnotized” by Kirk. He even suggested Evans was suffering from the Stockholm Syndrome, a deep emotional bond that can develop between hostage/abuser and victim, implying that Kirk had kidnapped Evans. (In 1973, a Swedish woman became so emotionally involved with a bank robber who held her hostage that she fell in love with him, broke her engagement to another man, and remained committed to the bank robber during his trial and subsequent incarceration.)

  The psychologist in whose office the daring escape took place speculated that Evans simply loved Kirk. “What I think happened is that she fell in love with him. It is hard for a man in prison to brainwash his lawyer. I think you have to consider the male-female aspect of this thing,” said Dr. Gary Salk, quoted in The Knoxville News-Sentinel.

  “Yeah, she was beautiful. It wasn’t like she was some ugly lawyer who was man hungry. It was unusual that she would suddenly fall in love with a killer,” said Robert Fellman, a staff attorney for the Tennessee State Board of Professional Responsibility.

  Evans’s defense during her trial for aggravated kidnapping, armed robbery, and escape was that she was temporarily insane. If temporary insanity is a euphemism for mad, passionate love, then her defense was valid. While she and Kirk awaited trial, they kept in touch through their lawyers and by telephone. “I think that’s obvious,” answered Kirk’s lawyer, Steve Oberman, when asked if the couple was still in love.

  Evans was tried, convicted, and disbarred; she served two years in jail and moved to Florida, where she has reportedly married. Kirk is in prison; his earliest parole-consideration date is 2013.

  But there is an incr
edible footnote to this story. Only one year after this shocking romance and escape, Kirk manipulated another woman into falling in love with him. Her name also is Mary. They married in 1985 and two years later had a son. Kirk sees his wife twice a week and they communicate daily by telephone, he told Geraldo Rivera on a television show that aired August 26, 1988. “We deal with the same problems and situations on a daily basis that any other husband and wife do, I imagine.”

  Rivera asked Mary if she worried that her husband was exploiting her. “Is he using you so that the parole board might hear his plea for clemency or for lenient treatment? Is he using you and this boy?” Mary said she had wanted to marry Kirk and have his child. “I had the choice. He didn’t make the choice for me. I’m not fascinated by him because he’s done crimes or because he’s in prison. I met him when he was on escape.”

  Is it possible that Kirk had two women in love with him when he escaped—Mary, his then-lawyer, and Mary, his now-wife?

  Another woman on the same program, Deborah Lee, told Rivera that her fiancé is serving a 150-year term. Her passion for him led her to divorce her husband, a Baptist minister. She initially tried to resist loving her murderer, said Lee, but passion overpowered her. “I tried not to. I fought it. But my heart … I knew that I was doing something that morally was wrong, and I tried to back out of it. I just couldn’t do it. I loved him so I kept going.”