Prisoners of Love

Oh, what they do for love.

The girlfriend of the “Hillside Strangler” tries to strangle a woman herself to throw police off her sweetheart’s trail. Her murder attempt fails and she goes to jail for life.

A promising young lawyer assigned to defend a murder suspect finds her client so appealing, she helps him escape. She is disbarred and goes to prison.

A courtroom artist can’t get James Earl Ray out of her mind. Long after Ray’s conviction for killing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., she proposes. He accepts, though reluctantly, and she is branded a racist. She loses her career, her friends and, ultimately, her man.

What is there about a murderer that can make him so irresistible?

What is it about some women that makes them find killers so lovable?

Although there is little formal research on the psychology of prison romance, those who observe the dynamics of such couplings say the relationships aren’t as bizarre as they seem.

Long Beach tax consultant Sarah James was just another single mom trying to make ends meet when she fell in love with Jack Kirschke in 1968. “I went to visit him in prison with an outreach group, and I was smitten immediately. It was the most exciting, most passionate and most dangerous relationship I have ever had,” James says. They married in 1976.

For James, a gentle churchwoman with two young children, Kirschke was like no other man she had ever met. A former deputy district attorney, he was sentenced to life in prison for the 1967 slayings of his first wife and her lover.

Kirschke’s trial was that decade’s trial of the century. “I had met Jack briefly when I was doing the books for the Long Beach Yacht Club, where he belonged,” James recalls, “so I followed the trial rather closely and felt there might have been some question about his guilt. When we met again in prison, I believed him at once when he told me he didn’t do it.”

They began a courtship of monitored visits and censored love letters.

“Sarah, Sa-rah, Sa-rah! The very name of my beloved clangs in my poor brain like the clapper of a sonorous bell. . . ,” wrote Kirschke early in the relationship.

“He was intense and intellectual and his letters were pure poetry,” James says.

The women are social workers, reporters, filmmakers, lawyers, counselors, activists and nurses. They may have been waiting all their lives for “the right man,” as journalist Doreen Lioy says she was when she married “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez in October.

Or they may fall in love unexpectedly--”fatefully,” as some say when recalling their early attractions.

According to Sheila Isenberg, who interviewed dozens of women for her 1990 book “Women Who Love Men Who Kill” (Dell), those who fall for men convicted of serious crimes are themselves often surprisingly accomplished.

“They are very likely to be attractive and intelligent, often successful in their profession, and almost always unacquainted with the world of crime and criminals,” Isenberg says. “In the eyes of these women, these men are a magnetic mix of evil and vulnerability, extreme danger and reassuring safety.”

And for women who have been beaten or crushed emotionally by the previous men in their lives, there is some logic in “connecting yourself to a dangerous man who can’t get at you,” Isenberg says.

“These women lead a difficult life, never knowing whether or when they will actually be with their men.” But that, Isenberg discovered during her two years of research, is a major part of the attraction. “These women, damaged in many ways, have a deep need to love someone with whom they can’t enjoy an easy, comfortable relationship.”

In retrospect, James says, Kirschke’s letters of love were also controlling and demanding. “He’d give me a list at the bottom of each letter with the chores and services he needed me to complete before our next visit. Of course, I always did what he wanted,” James says. “I’d do anything, anything to make him happy, [and] to get him out of there so we could live happily ever after.”

Thanks largely to his new wife’s efforts, Kirschke’s life sentence was commuted after 10 years. But the happy ending James expected never came. Instead, she says, “He turned into this tyrannical, coldhearted stranger. . . . And when I stood up to him, he left me for one of my best friends.”

Two decades later, James is frightened by what she sees as a dangerous trend of “sweet, good-hearted women” falling for men behind bars. “I want to warn those women what they’re in for.”

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While no one keeps statistics on love and marriage behind prison walls, many corrections officials believe such unions are happening with increasing frequency.

Even men convicted of the most gruesome crimes have women waiting outside to love and, where state laws permit, to marry them.

Ted Bundy, Florida’s serial rapist and murderer, went to the gas chamber a married man. John Wayne Gacy, who tortured and murdered dozens of young men, was engaged when his execution date arrived. New York’s “Son of Sam,” David Berkowitz, has many would-be lovers on the outside, as does Oklahoma City bombing suspect Timothy McVeigh, who receives marriage proposals from women.

Indeed, say some prison officials, the higher a murderer’s profile, the more likely he is to have a coterie of admirers waiting, even pleading, to be his wife.

In New York, Florida, California and Texas--the four states housing the greatest share of the nation’s prison population--weddings between male inmates and women on the outside occur often. Prison romances are even more frequent.

They meet through the mail--most women who enter relationships with prisoners begin them with letters--through their work, or by introductions arranged by other prisoners or their relatives.

Ray’s bride, courtroom artist Anna Sandhu, was assigned by a television station to draw pictures of Ray and other principals in his trial. When the trial ended, Sandhu used the money she made from the assignment to buy books for Ray, including a volume of Carl Sandburg poems.

“When I brought him the gifts,” she told the Washington Post at the time, “I found him to be surprisingly friendly. I came to realize he wasn’t the big monster everybody made him seem to be.”

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Although such women refuse to be categorized as naive, needy or lonely, Isenberg and others who have interviewed prisoners’ wives find that most such women do at the very least share one important trait: They have come from fatherless homes or suffered unhealthy, even abusive, marriages in the past.

“Here’s the scenario: You’re madly in love with someone who you’re forbidden to love. You are separated by forces greater than yourselves, so you see each other very infrequently. You dream of a happy life together but know in your hearts that this may never happen. . . . It’s Romeo and Juliet. It’s the definition of the perfect prison marriage.”

That’s the theory of John Hill, a former prisoner and now host of “The Prison Show,” a weekly talk show for and about Texas prisons and their occupants.

Hill and his partner, Marta Glass, take calls from prisoners’ wives and girlfriends, many of them with intimate messages for their men on death row. “This is classic stuff when you hear it,” Hill says. “This is the greatest way to share the greatest love--when fate keeps you apart.”

Glass is a nurse who fell in love with Jimmy Glass, a young murderer who was executed in 1990. When she fell in love again in 1994, it was with “a lifer” whose sentence was reduced in large part because of his relationship with Glass.

“Clearly, the prisoners have much to gain from these relationships with the outside,” says Dr. Joe Tubin, a forensic psychiatrist and professor emeritus at UC Davis. “The most obvious benefit may be the effect of having someone love them. This gives them the feeling that maybe they’re not as bad as others think. Or it may be something more tangible, like a higher place in the prison social system. Maybe getting a girlfriend and getting married pays off inside the prison peerage.”

It almost certainly will bring physical benefits to the prisoner. Many prisons allow spouses to send more money to prisoners than other correspondents can.

Being married also shows ties to the community, ties that can be exploited for the prisoner’s benefit when he takes his appeals to court or his case to a parole board. “It just looks better if the prisoner can show he has a family waiting and an established residence to go to.” Tubin says.

But most of those who study prisons and prisoners agree with Hill that women who fall in love with killers often share an idealized version of romantic love. They believe that love is based upon “constant passion, unsatisfied yearnings and ungratified desires,” as author Isenberg puts it.

Because passion is never reduced to the daily tedium and predictability of many marriages outside prison, it burns all the hotter, Hill says. Isenberg goes so far as to describe as “ecstasy” one wife’s suffering as her prisoner-husband is led off to execution.

That wife said: “His family was clutching at him and crying, and he turned around to me and looked straight into my eyes and said, ‘You, I love.’ And they shackled him and took him away.” That moment, Isenberg says, will sustain the widow for the rest of her life.

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Not loving in the real world has its sacrifices--no normal sexual relations, for example. (In California, the rules allowing prisoners private “family reunion” visits with spouses were changed Nov. 1. The new regulations now bar any prisoner convicted of murder, rape or child molestation from conjugal visits.)

Removing sex from a relationship can actually improve it, some women say. Intimacy is more pure, less distracting without the physical part, they say.

According to women who have been in such relationships, falling in love with a murderer has to include the belief that, as one Texas woman put it, “[The conviction] was all a big misunderstanding.”

“I felt sorry for him. He had nobody,” explains “Hilary,” a cardiac care nurse in upstate New York who did not want her real name used.

“When I met Lucas, I just couldn’t find anything that he was lacking,” marvels Hilary. “The only drawback, of course, was that he was in prison for murder.”

This Florence Nightingale attitude is not atypical of women who fall in love with killers. They want to change him, make him more acceptable to society, say psychiatrists, but at the same time some of these women relish the role of caregiver, deriving deep satisfaction from nurturing someone so truly needy.

“Of course,” Isenberg says, “many women use love as a substitute for other types of excitement. They can get satisfaction only from the larger-than-life man, the remote man, the crazy man, 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 such a socially unacceptable man.”

Or as one prison wife said after her husband was executed in Missouri two years ago: “You can’t help who you love.”