Mass Killers Often Are Objects of Female Adoration, Experts Say

The killings were gruesome. Men and women murdered in their beds, seemingly picked for death at random. The suspect is a man, the simple mention of whom paralyzes most women with fear.

But 23-year-old Bernadette Brazal says she is in love with “Night Stalker” suspect Richard Ramirez. And that’s not unusual. Mass murder defendants are, experts say, often the objects of female adoration.

Why?

“It’s almost a savior kind of thing,” says Dr. Ronald Markman, a psychiatrist who has testified in several trials involving convicted mass murderers, including Charles Manson’s.

Some women “feel they can save this God-forsaken person. It validates them. It gives these women worth.”

“There may be a sense of competition, of victory,” adds another psychiatrist, “because she is not the victim--for once.”

Manson had a bevy of female fans during his trial and today still receives an average of two love letters a day in prison, prosecutors say. Ted Bundy, convicted in the early 1980s of sexually abusing and murdering three young women and linked to the deaths of 35 more, had several females who attended his trials faithfully.

Lawrence Bittaker, sentenced to the gas chamber in 1981 for torturing and murdering five teen-agers in Los Angeles County, also had female fans, Los Angeles County prosecutor Stephen Kay recalls.

One year after Bittaker’s trial--which featured a tape recording of one of his victims pleading for mercy while being beaten to death with a sledgehammer--he married a “born-again” Christian who said she loved him.

“Why else would I marry him?” the woman, who only identifies herself as Barbara, said at the time of the marriage.

Kay said some of the women he has seen show up at the trials of suspected mass murderers are young and “quite pretty. It’s strange.”

Some, such as Brazal, write love letters. Others simply gaze longingly at the defendant and are determined to win some kind of signal of acknowledgement from him.

Brazal has said she finds Ramirez “cute,” strong, vulnerable and sexy. But Markman suspects that such women may actually find themselves attracted to such men because they have poor self-esteem.

Experts believe such women may have been abused, sexually or physically, as children. They may come from torn families. Their attraction to mass murder defendants may be sadomasochistic or perhaps a desire for control.

Markman points out that such women--like those who marry inmates sentenced to life in prison--can easily control the relationship. Such women can choose when they will see the defendant and can walk away from him without being stopped.

She can also control the possibility of rejection.

“If you call up some guy on Death Row and say ‘I love you,’ ” the chances of him rejecting you are slim,” Markman said.

“They may have a need to find someone worse off than themselves, someone who really needs them,” said one counselor who works extensively with women.

Markman doubts that they are attracted to the potential danger such men pose, although he suggests that these women, sitting in the courtroom day in and day out, “go through a fantasy life.”

He theorizes that it is an ego-boosting experience in which the woman is kidnaped by the defendant but spared her life. He does not believe they are violent themselves. He also says the guilt or innocence of the defendant “is irrelevant” to such women.

“We may look at the people who commit these crimes as sick. But that value system is totally foreign to them (female admirers). There’s a mother attitude that comes to bear. They’re going to make them well.”