Women Who Love Men Who Kill

Whatever type of murder a man has committed, a woman in love with him often faces the same stigma he does. Society generally believes that a woman who loves a criminal is likely to be a criminal herself. People think a murderer’s wife or girlfriend might herself be capable of killing; she is guilty by association and suffers the consequences. Women who love killers, if they tell the truth about their lives, are often ostracized by acquaintances and even by friends and family. Relatives may disown them, refuse to associate with them, and keep them out of the family circle. This makes the women, alienated to start with for many reasons, feel increasingly estranged; they begin to identify more and more with their murderer/lovers.

Some women who love murderers are rebels, creating drama out of the stuff of their everyday lives because they have no other outlet for feelings of aggression and daring. Because their self-image is so weak, they are attracted by a life on the edge. These women reject what is culturally endorsed and are attracted to what’s deviant. Sheer badness attracts them; they are “good girls” attracted to “bad boys.”

For the rebel, excitement and drama make life worthwhile, and chaos substitutes for warmth and affection. In The Agony of It All, Joy Davidson writes: “In the titillation of rebellion, we are buttressed by the irrational belief that we are special, that we can get away with it.” The sheer outrageousness of loving a man who has murdered causes a woman to transcend her feelings of low self-esteem, of vulnerability. The thrill of her relationship makes her feel alive and important. By controlling the melodramatic events in their lives, women who love men who kill get a false and temporary sense of power.

Women who love killers take low self-esteem to its furthest reaches: I wasn’t worth anything to my parents. I’m not worth anything to me. So I’ll go after someone that society has branded unacceptable. “I would be amazed if they weren’t among the neediest and most dependent of women. As in the transference cure in psychoanalysis, the women are sucking up a part of the men’s egos and that gives them the illusion of being in control. So by identifying with the popular stereotype of the tough guy, they feel stronger,” said psychiatrist Park Dietz.

In truth, though, murderers are weak, not strong. “Murderers are losers,” added Dietz. The strength of a murderer is an illusion; the idea that he is tough is a fantasy. But these women are so used to living lies, they don’t see the weaknesses in the men they love. As children, they were players in a big charade presented by their families, an illusion they had to maintain in public, in school, with their friends. Don’t tell anyone that daddy beats you. Don’t tell anyone that mommy pours water on your head in the middle of the night. Pretend that everything is fine. Pretend mommy and daddy love you, that you’re secure, that you are safe in their care. Women who love convicted killers are pros at maintaining illusions.

Chronic, repeated abuse has the effect of suppressing the mechanism that allows us to feel happy, to trust, to love, and to care about others. This is why so many abused girls grow up to be women who can’t really love but must form illusory relationships with inappropriate men—such as murderers. These women often go directly from abusive childhood homes to marriage at very young ages, to men who are abusive physically, emotionally, and/or sexually.

Women who love killers generally had terrible relationships with all men, in addition to the poor relationships with their husbands and fathers. They were raped, sexually assaulted, and attacked by men; they were used by men and often saw themselves as victims.

We must keep in mind the difference between “prison wives,” “women who love too much,” women who are addicted to love relationships—and women who love murderers. Murderers are special. Women who love murderers are special, also, although they share some characteristics and qualities with women addicted to love relationships and women who love too much. Murderers have acted with total disregard for societal mores. They have shed someone else’s blood. The women who love them accept this as part—perhaps the most alluring part—of them. Murderers and their women, who can’t live without each other but are forced to remain apart, may be under the spell of “death love“—the German concept of Liebestod. By worshiping death—or the men who have caused death—these women find the union they cannot find in life. Death becomes the orgasm, the high, the kick.

Each woman in love with a killer views her man as her salvation: He will save her from loneliness, from selling herself in the meat market of singles bars where rejection is always a threat, from the potential sexual threat of other men. And by making him into a knight, a hero, the woman dilutes what is perhaps the greatest threat of all: that he murdered once and if he had the chance, might just murder again … and she might be the victim. After all, her subconscious reasons, her Sir Lancelot would never hurt a damsel in distress or force himself on her.

Many of these women are drawn to their murderer/lover because the men represent challenges; relationships with them are obstacle courses. Meeting him, earning his love, making the relationship work despite the tremendous odds against it—women who love killers thrive on these challenges.

Also, these men are “bad,” socially unacceptable, extremely macho, because they have killed. If a man is certified masculine, then a woman can be more certain of her femininity; with a man whose maleness or machismo is exaggerated, a woman feels most womanly. These “bad” boys, these killers, fulfill some part of the woman’s desire for excitement, for challenge, for adventure—and even make her feel more of a woman. “Crime holds a special attraction for middle class women, who don’t turn to it out of economic hardship or peer pressure,” writes Joy Davidson, Ph.D., in The Agony of It All.

Romantic love can be an emotion felt by one person and directed at another—a feeling that considers the happiness and well-being of the beloved as most important. Or romantic love can be an illusion, a reflection of the lover’s own desires and fantasies. “Hence the popular idiom that love is blind, for a lover projects onto a partner, or love-blot, his/her unique love image,” writes John Money, Ph.D., in Love and Lovesickness: The Science of Sex, Gender Differences and Pairbonding.

Women in love with killers refuse to see faults in their men. And they bestow upon their inappropriate partners qualities that most objective observers can see are not real.

These women do not allow themselves to admit their men have weaknesses. They deny the murders their lovers have committed. Their love is fed on illusion and fueled by fantasy so they naturally have false beliefs about the natures of the men they love.

These women love a shadow lover of their own creation. It’s as if each woman has taken a blank canvas and painted her ideal man, then fallen in love with him, making him come to life in the process. He is an ink blot, a blank, a reflection of her inner needs; he, and the love she feels, are not real.

Falling in love is “prompted by an internal psychological state,” said Dr. Ethel Person. H. G. Wells wrote of “the Lover Shadow,” an explanation for love at first sight. If a woman sees someone and instantly loves him, it’s likely he fits her image of her lover shadow. The lover shadow “is made up of many, many different things—memories, sensations, wishful fantasies,” according to Dr. Person. And that’s fine, she added, unless a person “can only fall in love with somebody who is a disaster.” Like a murderer.

Women who love killers are seeking the oblivion of total passion, total commitment and the giving up of the self to another. Does it sound religious or spiritual? It is. When we love, “we believe we have found the ultimate meaning of life, revealed in another human being,” writes Robert Johnson. Searching for the meaning of life in another person is part of romantic love. And passion is the fuel. Not sexual passion, but the passion of transcendence, ecstasy, intensity, extremes of joy and despair.

Women who love murderers experience all this: They suffer deeply. Their love flourishes in an atmosphere that tries to kill it. For women who love killers, every prison visit presents an opportunity for a tearful, joyous reunion, a demonstration of intense feelings and a sharing of devotion. Every parting is an opportunity for tears of despair, cries of eternal love, and feelings of longing. A single prison visit contains as much drama and intensity as a romance novel or soap opera. The women relish these incredible highs and lows; they live for them and on them.

he romantic passion experienced by women who love convicted killers never, ever becomes ordinary, everyday love, what some call companionship or companionate love. This affectionate bonding is a warm, tender sharing based on the exchanges of a mutual daily life together. But the special population of women in this book who have fallen in love with murderers has found a way to stave off this more relaxed kind of love. After these women fall in love, they maintain a high level of intensity with their murderer/lover; the relationship does not change into companionate love. It remains eternally romantic.

But some psychologists and psychiatrists give no credibility to romantic love, saying our culture creates an addictive attitude toward love. If the measure of love is its destructiveness to the two lovers and their families, it’s not healthy. These experts advise against a romantic love that brings suffering, suggesting instead a down-to-earth, painless love that brings comfort and companionship.

Only “consummate love” is real love, writes psychologist Robert Sternberg in an essay “The Psychology of Love” in his book of essays on love, The Psychology of Love. Consummate love has three aspects: intimacy, passion, and decision/commitment. Passionate love is “a continual interplay between elation and despair, thrill and terror, positives and negatives,” agrees psychologist Elaine Hatfield. Hatfield contrasts the radical ups and downs of passionate or romantic love with companionate love. According to her, companionate love is characterized by more positives than by negatives and by an exchange of affection in a loving relationship where partners are capable of both intimacy and independence.

Women who fall in love with convicted killers don’t want the companionate love described by Hatfield or the consummate love described by Sternberg. These women seek a love that causes discomfort and pain because they want to ride the crests of the waves, lingering over the highs and lows, suffering intensely, denying themselves the normalcy of an average, everyday kind of relationship. These women want passion and won’t take anything less. And they accept that passion means suffering. (According to the Oxford English Dictionary, compact edition, 1971, the root of the word passion means “to suffer”—the sufferings of pain, the sufferings of Christ on the cross.)

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.

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.

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.

One of the most attractive qualities of men who have killed is their ability to focus on another person, to really listen to what she is saying. According to psychoanalyst Dr. Carl Rotenberg, men in prison are “the best psychologists in the world” because they spend most of their time watching people and reading them. Out of necessity, out of their need to survive, they learn this skill on the streets and, once in prison, perfect their ability to interpret facial expressions, voices, and body language.

When a man who has killed focuses this way on a woman, it’s often the first time, for her, that anyone has paid her that much attention. For the murderer, it’s done out of necessity, out of a need to survive. He has to learn all he can about this woman as soon as possible, to find out if she’s friend or foe. But for the woman, it feels like a loving touch; the romance for which she yearns begins with his closeness, his constant eye contact, his hanging on her every word.

Murderers find love relationships with women no matter how, why, or whom they have killed. To cover the attraction they feel toward the men’s violence, the women focus on their men’s normalcy. These may be convicted murderers, but they eat, sleep, talk, walk, do all the things everyone else does. Since most people think they can look at a person and tell if he’s a murderer, these women evaluate the men they love and say: “He could have been my next-door neighbor”—therefore he’s not capable of murder.

Many criminal-justice experts and mental-health specialists—generally male—tend to dismiss these women as suffering from a personality disorder. But these women are not freaks or fools. They are examples of what can happen in our brutal, patriarchal society in which women strive to keep up at least the appearance of social propriety by getting married—even if it’s marriage to a murderer. These women should not be condemned, relegated to the outskirts of society, or written off. Nor should they be stigmatized and ostracized, as they often are, because of their relationships with killers.

They cross class, religion, and race lines. They work in all sorts of jobs, have varying income levels and educations. They might be categorized as “women who love too much,” but as we’ll see later, they absolutely don’t love too much. They don’t really love at all.

For some, it’s the “good girl” looking for the “bad boy.” She is afraid of being bored so chooses to be a criminal’s “moll.” She always feels special because he loves her, and he is a wild man, an outcast, deadly and dangerous. John Money, Ph.D., the pioneering sexuality researcher, coined a term for being turned on by danger: hybristophilia. It’s a paraphilia, or sexual perversion, in which arousal is dependent on being with a partner known to have committed a violent crime—such as murder. A woman with this perversion is sexually “turned on only by a partner who has a predatory history of outrages perpetrated on others,” wrote Money, in Lovemaps.