What I never heard from any woman interviewed was a simple statement: Yes, the man I love committed a murder, but I have forgiven him and love him anyway. Each woman excused her lover’s murder; some concocted fabulous rationalizations to explain how the murder took place. These rationalizations range from the fantastically intricate to the simple. Some women create unbelievably involved denials (see the next chapter). Others excuse the murder by blaming it on social forces or drugs and alcohol. These denials are part of each woman’s individual defense mechanism for coping.
If a woman falls in love with a murderer, she must attribute his behavior to something—either to psychological causes or to outside factors—in order to exonerate him. She can’t admit he’s a murderer inside, that he has the heart and soul of a killer. Otherwise, she would be crazy for loving him.
“She denies the true character of the man regardless of whether he will [later] abuse her or murder someone else,” said psychologist Stuart Fischoff, Ph.D. She compartmentalizes the fact that he has murdered, taking it out of the context of his personality. Then she can deny the murder’s importance.
Here are some examples of actual denials in which real women describes the murders committed by the men they love:
He meant to shoot over her head.
He was framed.
He shot in self-defense because the man was coming at him.
He was drunk.
He was stoned.
My husband is serving a ninety-nine-year sentence for murder. He swears to me he is not guilty.
He didn’t mean to kill; it was unintentional.
There are degrees of the reprehensibility of these crimes.
They’ve got the wrong man in prison.
My husband was guilty with mitigating circumstances.
While it’s true that a large number of convicted murderers had terrible childhoods, the women who love them emphasize the detrimental effects of these childhoods. But they always add a disclaimer: “I’m not trying to excuse his behavior.” Carla married Martin, a Florida death-row inmate, in 1989, more than a decade after he bludgeoned an elderly woman to death. He was sixteen at the time. “He was chronically sniffing gasoline for four or five years. He had a history of being sexually abused by his uncle and cousin. His father, an alcoholic, used to punch his mother around. They’d catch him sniffing gasoline and they’d whip him,” said Carla. She describes the murder, using the psychological jargon she’s picked up as the wife of a death-row inmate, as an “isolated explosive disorder.”
Despite Martin’s dysfunctional family—and despite the fact that in four separate trials, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to die—Martin is “a great person. You’d never think he had that childhood. He’s a very nice guy. He cares about what happens to people,” according to his wife. She sounds as if she’s describing a totally different man, not the Martin who has been convicted four times, who struck an elderly woman with a glass vase and wrench, then dragged her into the kitchen where he stabbed her sixty-seven times with a kitchen knife and sexually abused her with his fist. Carla also denies that Martin will die: “You have to kind of pray for the best. If he’s sentenced to die—I just don’t believe that’s going to happen this time,” she said before his fourth conviction.
Ruben “is a beautiful person, inside and out.” He was sentenced to twenty years to life for a murder committed during an armed robbery—felony murder—so he did not actually kill anyone. “The only reason he got caught was he got shot and he couldn’t get away.” Why was he committing a robbery in the first place? “He was with other people,” said Kay, the woman who loves him.
Several years after his execution for a double homicide, Terry’s crime is still not something his widow, Elena, can talk about. On a segment of the Geraldo Rivera television talk show, “The Wives of Death Row,” Elena said the murder Terry committed “was thirty seconds of his life. That’s not all the man was.” She added, “I would really prefer not to go into his crime. No murder is pretty. I don’t justify any murder. I don’t justify what he did as right. Although there were circumstances.”
With women who love men who kill, there is always although. There are always circumstances. There are always excuses. There are, mostly, denials.
In an interview broadcast on the Fox 5 television network, Shawn Kovell discussed her love for Robert Chambers, a love undiminished by knowing he had killed Jennifer Levin—perhaps a love enhanced by that knowledge. “He’s a special person. He’s caring. He’s warm. He’s funny. I know [the death was] an accident. He’s not that type of person. I know him well. I’ve been with him long enough … that he would never intentionally hurt anyone for any reason.”
Only six weeks before he killed Richard Adan, Jack Henry Abbott was paroled from Marion Federal Prison in Illinois. He had spent most of his life in institutions—foster homes, then a reformatory, then prison—a life of torment as he described it in his 1982 book, In the Belly of the Beast. When the book was published, Norman Mailer and other members of the literary establishment hailed Abbott, then thirty-seven, as a brilliant writer. Mailer helped convince a parole board that Abbott could earn his living by his pen. A short time later, Abbott, who had never lived outside the walls of an institution, was sent to a halfway house in New York City.
Weeks later, during a dispute in a restaurant on the Lower East Side, Abbott stabbed to death an out-of-work actor working as a waiter, Richard Adan. Abbott ran and eluded police for a few months. When he was caught, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to a New York State prison where he will likely spend the rest of his life. In In the Belly of the Beast, which is dedicated to Carl Panzram, a notorious serial killer, Abbott demonstrates his romanticizing of criminals and violence. “It is the high esteem we naturally have for violence, force. It is what makes us effective, men whose judgment impinges on others, on the world. Dangerous killers who act alone and without emotion … this is a state-raised convict’s conception of manhood in the highest sense,” writes Abbott. But Colin Wilson, in A Criminal History of Mankind, writes that murdering Richard Adan was an act of cowardice, not heroism, “about as heroic as strangling a baby.”
Abbott has written that he acted violently in a violent world, that he had no choice but to kill when it was necessary to kill. Two years after he murdered Adan, Abbott met Naomi Zack, a resident of a small upstate New York town with a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University. To Zack, according to one friend of hers, Abbott is an existential hero who allows nothing but purity to guide his actions, actions that are truer, more honest, and more valid than most people’s.
Five years after Abbott’s murder conviction, Abbott and Zack, by then deeply in love, collaborated on My Return, Abbott’s apologia for the murder of Adan. And Zack’s cry of denial.
The introduction to the book, written by Zack, is replete with denials: “The incident was something ordinary, but everyone refused to understand it… What happened was simply this: The man [Abbott] was returning from an after-hours club… The man had a disagreement with the night manager [Adan]. The night manager finally drew a knife to intimidate him, and the man stabbed the night manager one time and killed him accidentally… No one admits that the night manager had a shared responsibility.”
In another section of My Return, a defense attorney rather euphemistically asks: “Mr. Abbott, did there come a time when you put a knife in the chest of Richard Adan?”
In the book’s appendix, Abbott and Zack continue their denial by attempting to make the victim look responsible for his own murder: “Those who knew Adan report that he was aggressive and impatient with strangers. Timidity was not a character trait anyone attributed to Adan, nor has anyone described him as having a sunny disposition… Adan was twenty-two years old, a grown man… He had lived in a violent section of the city for about two years. He knew the streets. He was the same age as the ‘Son of Sam’ killer. He outweighed Abbott by almost fifty pounds. It was Abbott who knew nothing about Bowery behav
ior.”
This skinny innocent, this naïf, is the same Jack Henry Abbott who wrote in In the Belly of the Beast: “Have you ever seen a man despair because he cannot bring himself to murder… The only prisoners I have seen who do not despair of being incapable of murder are those who are capable of it.” He also wrote: “You have sunk the knife into the middle of his chest… You can feel his life trembling through the knife in your hand. It almost overcomes you, the gentleness of the feeling at the center of a coarse act of murder. You’ve pumped the knife in several times without even being aware of it. You go to the floor with him to finish him. It is like cutting hot butter. No resistance at all.”
In the next chapter, we meet Rochelle, an expert at denial, whose description of the murder committed by the man she loves is one of the most incredible stories in this book.
8
Rochelle: A Case of Delusion
“He is sensitive to the tiniest of animals”
DEATH ON A SPREE
She had always been a good girl: obedient to her parents, an average student who had earned a bachelor’s degree, a loyal friend, a loving fiancée. But when the man she was to marry broke their engagement, she fell apart. She plunged recklessly into a nether world of drinking and drugs, activities that had been only mildly appealing when she was in college. In an attempt to numb her feelings, drugs became her whole life, and there were rumors she used sex to obtain them, that she consorted with the vilest and lowest of characters. One thing is certain: Samantha Lynch was no longer a good girl.
And so she came to spend a night in the winter of 1984 with a young drifter named Duane. They partied at a club and then he invited her back to his place. At thirty, Duane lived occasionally with his mother, at other times with friends; sometimes in jail. He had been convicted of a string of felonies including attempted kidnapping.
Michael E. Knight, in the late 1980s a judge in California, was the district attorney who would eventually prosecute Duane for murder. He said Duane had been convicted of attempted kidnapping in Las Vegas in 1980: “A woman drove her thirteen- or fourteen-year-old son to school to pick up his books. It was late summer, 1979. While she was sitting in her car in front of the school, [Duane] jumped in, punched her in the face, knocking her against the passenger door, then drove away [with her], saying he would kill her. She was an acrobat or a gymnast and managed to tumble out of the car as he sped away. The next day, after a police pursuit, he crashed the car into a house. He hid under the house but was caught and convicted of attempted kidnapping.”
Four years later, Samantha, not knowing and likely not caring about Duane’s history, went with him to his mother’s apartment. The two snorted cocaine and drank, becoming more and more stoned as the evening went on. When they were about to have sex, Samantha apparently changed her mind, and Duane resorted to force, hitting her with his fists and with a pistol his mother kept in the house. Finally, Samantha’s drugged mind told her it was time to sleep; she wanted to go home. She was exhausted and wanted to lay her head down in her own bed. She told Duane she wanted to leave; when they walked out the door, he had his mother’s gun in his pocket.
Changing environments was a fatal mistake. Somewhere between the time she decided she wanted to go home and the next day, Samantha ended up on the hard, cold ground, asleep forever. Duane had killed her.
MURDER ONE
Arrested three days later for Samantha’s murder, Duane confessed to police and in a letter to a friend. After a hiatus of three years, Duane was tried for murder, and the then-deputy district attorney of San Fernando, Michael Knight, succeeded in proving Duane guilty.
In California, if the state can prove either that a murder was committed with “malice aforethought” or that it was done during the commission of other felonies, called “special circumstances,” a conviction will be first-degree murder for which the sentence can be death. In Duane’s case, the prosecutor proved rape and kidnapping—that Duane forced Samantha to drive around with him and that the sex he had with her was, in part, involuntary. Although Knight convinced the jury it was a premeditated, deliberate killing, Duane was spared the death penalty and was given life without parole. The jury was divided on the penalty, with the major dissenting voice belonging to a forty-year-old supermarket cashier who did not believe Duane to be guilty of premeditation or rape and kidnapping. Her name was Rochelle.
THE PROSECUTOR’S TALE
According to Knight, “He tried to have sex with [Samantha] but she locked herself in the bathroom and was trying to climb out the window when he broke the door down. He yanked out the phone wire, then beat and pistol-whipped her. He admits that he had sex with her twice and he admits that he forced her.”
The pathologist from the L.A. coroner’s office who originally examined Samantha’s body said she was pistol-whipped and that there was evidence of sex, but not necessarily of rape. “I did the autopsy and determined that she had been pistol-whipped and was very concerned that she had been raped. I noticed an abrasion or a roughening of the vaginal lips. There was evidence of sexual activity, but there was no medical proof of rape. There was clear, unequivocal evidence of pistol-whipping. The wound she had to her head had a characteristic pattern—curved lacerations associated with an abrasion on one side [indicating she was] hit with a hard object, usually a gun,” said former coroner Terence Allen, M.D.
During Duane’s trial, Knight said that after they left his mother’s apartment, Duane and Samantha got into his truck, but he refused to take her home. “He drove her around with the gun to her head for two or three hours. He took her to a park in a remote area, then shot her in her ear, then in the back of her head. After she was lying on the ground, he shot her in the chest.” The prosecutor described Samantha as religious and studious. “She was engaged to a man who had unceremoniously dumped her. She became lonely and confused.” Duane and Samantha likely drank and used cocaine that night. “He gave it to her probably in the hopes she would go to bed with him,” said the prosecutor. While he acknowledged that Samantha initially spent time with Duane of her own free will, she ended up trying to get away from him.
In the park, just before dawn, Duane cold-bloodedly “executed” Samantha. As she lay on the ground, he shot her a third time, in the chest. There were contact wounds to Samantha’s head, meaning the gun was against her skin when it was fired; the chest wound was made from a distance of a few feet. “I theorize that after she was lying there, still breathing or gurgling or making noises, he then shot her in the chest,” said Knight, who believed Duane is a vicious killer. “This man has committed a very callous, cold, terrible criminal act against another human being… He planned the murder and he deliberated over whether or not to do it and he decided to do it… He committed all kinds of acts that showed us he premeditated and thought it out. He formed the intent to kill. He found a place to kill. He executed her. He put the gun in her ear and shot her in the brain.”
A SOCIAL TRAGEDY
Duane’s defense attorney, Gerald Chaleff, said his client cried when he confessed to police. He said Duane also described the night Samantha died in a letter to a friend. “On the tape, he was crying, was remorseful. He did kill her. He admitted that,” said Chaleff.
The legal issue was the degree of murder involved. “I always worried he would be convicted of first-degree murder,” said Chaleff. The main problem for the defense attorney and his client was the number of bullets Duane had shot into Samantha’s body. In contrast to Michael Knight, Chaleff said the chest wound was made before the head wounds because ballistics reports indicate that it was a clean, round hole with no powder burns. He is also not convinced Samantha was raped. “[Duane] sort of said he had sex with her. She would stop. He said he sort of forced her but she wanted him to.”
Also in contrast to the prosecutor, Chaleff does not believe Duane is a killer. “I don’t think he is a dangerous human being, an exceptionally violent person. He was under the influence of alcohol and cocaine. If he ever got out, I do
n’t think he’d commit another crime.”
Chaleff said the murder was “situational” with “mitigating circumstances.” He is completely opposed to Duane’s sentence of life without parole, believing it to be a symbol of hopelessness. “I don’t think anyone should be sent to prison without parole.” What hope is there of rehabilitation if an inmate believes he will never be released no matter how he behaves? But the lawyer acknowledged that Duane murdered a young woman who did not deserve to die. “There should be some punishment. But locking someone up forever is not appropriate. Nothing will ever bring her back.”
“AN UNPLANNED SHOOTING THAT RESULTS IN DEATH”
“He shot a girl but he didn’t plan it. It was accidental. When the shooting took place, [Duane] was drugged out of his mind,” said Rochelle, the juror who stayed the jury’s hand, preventing them from sentencing Duane to death.
Even though she went along with her fellow jurors in convicting Duane of first-degree murder, she never really believed him guilty. She caved in, however. “There was too much pressure. I held out for two weeks, then gave in the last day. I wished that I’d been a little stronger… I broke down at the last. All these people believed so strongly but I didn’t see it that way.”
Rochelle’s tale is radically different from the district attorney’s version of the crime, and somewhat different from the defense’s. She feels quite strongly that Duane did not receive a fair trial and that he is guilty of, at most, manslaughter.
“He is responsible for taking a life. But what happened is the gun went off when he was not trying to shoot the person, but trying to fire the gun above the person’s head and scare them.” (Emphasis added.)
“But it had such a heavy trigger pull that by the time he pulled it down, it was chest level and went off and shot the girl. A person convicted of an unplanned shooting that results in death is guilty, not of murder, but of manslaughter.
Women Who Love Men Who Kill Page 14
