Why do women marry imprisoned serial killers?

Every once in a while, we read about serial murderers who are serving life sentences, marrying young women while they are serving their sentences. Here are some examples.

Charles Sobhraj is a French serial killer of Indian and Vietnamese origin, who preyed on Western tourists throughout Southeast Asia during the 1970s. Nicknamed "the Serpent" and "the Bikini killer" for his skills at deception and evasion, he allegedly committed at least 12 murders and was jailed in India from 1976 to 1997, but managed to live a life of leisure in prison. He was eventually released and retired as a celebrity in Paris, then unexpectedly and returned to Nepal, where he was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment on August 12, 2004 for the murder of a Canadian tourist in 1975.

Now he is engaged and plans to marry a woman 44 years his junior. Both Sobhraj, now 64, and his 20-year-old Nepalese fiancee Nihita Biswas, have said they are planning to get married if he is freed by Nepal's Supreme Court.

His fiancé says, "We are planning a future after his release. We know he is going to be released soon." She said their large age gap did not matter. "I am mature enough to decide for myself. Age does not make a difference." The two met two and a half months ago when she applied for a job as interpreter for his French lawyer.

I don’t take issue with a woman marrying a man who is 44 years her senior if the two of them are really in love. However, I really question the sanity of a woman who wants to marry a serial murderer who is going to spend the rest of his life in prison, especially when she is only 20 years old.

It is conceivable that she may not marry this man if the court rules against his release. If she doesn’t, it is because she is smart but it also means that her love for him is conditional that he doesn’t have to spend the rest of his life in prison. That isn’t really true love by any stretch of the imagination.

Susan Atkins — Manson family member, and participant in the killings of Sharon Tate, and her unborn baby, Steven Parent, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, and Jay Sebring,— is not only the murdering kind, but the marrying kind. She’s tried it twice now, first in 1980 and again in 1987. As far as I know, she’s still married and her husband maintains a site dedicated to her legal representation.

Ted Bundy (executed in 1989), killed at least 35 women. While in Florida, Bundy received a great deal of media attention, and with it, plenty of fan mail from adoring women. He married a woman in the middle of his trial for his last murder. And the marriage stuck, thanks to some rather interesting Florida marriage law at the time. Not only did Bundy marry, but he apparently fathered a child — a daughter — with his wife while he was in custody before she eventually divorced him, changed her last name and that of her daughters and disappeared into anonymity. Yet despite their marriage, many other women still wrote to him or came to see him during the years between his conviction and 1989 execution. One of them, apparently, later married another serial killer in prison. (as an interesting aside, in 1980, while inspecting the state prison in Starke, Florida, I sat in the same electric chair that Bundy was later to be executed in)

Philip Carl Jablonski was convicted of killing at least three people, including his mother-in-law and his second wife, whom he met and married while serving time for the murder of his first wife. No word on what Jablonski has been up to since then, but he’s apparently looking for another woman he can marry while he is still on death row.

Richard Ramirez is an infamous serial killer and his murder of 16 victims women was so horrible I will not recount them here. But his snarling visage, with high cheekbones and full lips among its appealing qualities, set countless hearts a flutter. Those lining up for a shot at his affections, though, can stand down because he married supporter Darlene Lioy back in 1996 after he was sentenced to life in prison without parole

Tex Watson — famous for the murders of Sharon Tate, her unborn baby, Steven Parent, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, Jay Sebring, and Rosemary and Leo LaBianca — hardly needs an introduction. We know him as a member of the “Manson family,” but he’s also knows has a husband and a father. Having married in 1979, he went on to father four children with his wife before they divorced in 2003. So, Tex is back on the market looking for another wife.

As an aside, I once communicated with Watson in the early part of this century via his wife by email before she divorced him. At that time, Watson had stated that he wanted to apply for parole. I suggested to him that he give up that prospect as society would not tolerate the concept of him ever being released back into society. His wife told me that he agreed with me and would no longer apply for parole. Why she divorced him, I have no idea.

The Hillside Stranglers, a pair of cousins, began their murder spree in the fall of 1977 with a 19-year-old girl. Ted Schwartz, author of ‘The Hillside Strangler’, said that the killers' strategy was to pretend to be police officers making an "arrest." Their first three victims were prostitutes, and they would pick them up, have sex with them, kill them, and dump them by the roadside. Later they killed other women. On Halloween 1983, the jury convicted Buono of nine of the 10 murders and gave him nine life sentences. Bianchi, who had pleaded to five, was given five life sentences on top of the two he was serving in Washington.

Nevertheless, both men eventually found love in prison. In 1986, Buono married Christina Kizuka, a mother of three, who met him via another inmate. Bianchi married Shirlee Book in 1989 after a three-year correspondence. He was just one of many prisoners to whom she had written, and Bundy, too, had been on her list. She believed that Bianchi would eventually regain his freedom to be with her. Isenberg states that Book had bought her wedding gown and invitations before she had even met Bianchi. Their wedding was quite formal, if not in a church.

To give you some idea of how nutty some of these women are, consider what Veronica Compton dreamed up with Bianchi during Buono's trial. She admitted on the stand that she and serial killer Douglas Clark were planning to purchase a mortuary together so they could have sex with the dead. Doug Clark and Carol Bundy (not related to Ted Bundy) were responsible for "the Sunset Strip Slayings" in Hollywood in the early 1980s. Bundy would entice women into the car so that Clark could force them into sexual acts, during which he would shoot them in the head. He would then have sex with the corpses...or just with a severed head.

Wayne Adam Ford, a one-time long-haul trucker, was convicted in June 2006 on four counts of murder. In 1997 and 1998, he had bound, strangled and stabbed four women, three of them prostitutes and the other a hitchhiker. He dismembered two, keeping parts in his freezer. His stabbed his first victim, still unidentified, 27 times, removing her head, arms, legs, and breasts to "make her smaller." Ford tossed her torso into a waterway, as he would do with the next three as well.

An actress named Victoria Redstall, 34, who's landed commercial voice-overs and bit parts in several films, apparently befriended Ford while on a tour of the West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga. She went there specifically to see him, and persuaded a guard to take her to his cell. During the spring, she visited Ford regularly, often spending as much as three hours with him at a time. "I trust Wayne with my life," Redstall said in a press interview, stating that the two of them had grown completely ‘tuned in’ to each other. "He's got such a kindness to him, and such a conscience."

That from a woman who knows that he killed human beings. This woman is no doubt only interested in Ford because of the publicity it will give her.

A New York State law that prohibited inmates from entering into marriages while serving life sentences has been struck down as ”arbitrary and irrational” by a Federal judge. The judge, Neal P. McCurn of District Court in Syracuse, accepted the argument of a convicted murderer that the law unfairly discriminated against single inmates, because married inmates serving life sentences could remain married under the law.

Now back to my question; why do these women marry such murderers, especially when they are serving life in prison?

Some women become serial killer groupies even before the media attention begins, simply from the addictive eroticism they experience in the presence of a dangerous man.

Jack Levin and James Allen Fox in their book, ‘Mass Murder’ have given the following reasons;

Serial killers prove to be magnets for some people, mostly (but not always) females, and experts have offered a variety of reasons why. Among them are:

• Rescue fantasies: the SKG wants to believe that she has the ability to change someone as cruel and powerful as a serial killer.
• Need to nurture: many women have said that they see the little boy in these killers and feel an overwhelming desire to nurture and protect that part of him.
• The perfect boyfriend: she knows where he is at all times, and while she can now claim that someone loves her, she does not have to endure the day-to-day issues of most relationships; she can keep the fantasy charged up for a long time.
• Need for drama: during the trial, the daily events in the lives of serial killers may attract women who want to get close to the adversarial atmosphere and the possibility that something surprising may occur.
• Hybristophilia: some people are sexually excited by others who commit violence
• Exclusivity: there's a real sense of ownership of the facts about the killers—which confers its own special status—among those who feel intimately associated with them
• Regaining the lost male: some who have been abused, neglected or without a father figure look to the killer to fill that need
• Vicarious fantasies: some wish to live out their own visions of violence through a person who can actually act them out
• Low self-esteem: some women believe they cannot find a man and since men in prison are desperately lonely, it's an easy way to get involved
• Attention: when they do something like get involved with a killer, people talk about them and often the media puts a spotlight on them
• Eminence: they evolve from Nobodies into Somebodies
• The chance to show their mettle: they align themselves against the world in a heated defense of their beloved
• Beauty and the Beast syndrome: they like the idea of getting close to danger that will probably not hurt them, but there's always the slight chance

Interestingly, many such groupies are educated and attractive. Some have money, and some are already married. Quite a few are mothers, and it's often the case that they work in some related field, such as psychology or law enforcement.

The murderer doesn't always have to be attractive. Henry Lee Lucas, a one-eyed serial killer who confessed to more than 300 murders, recanted, and confessed again, has had his share of female admirers. Despite his apparent sexual relationship with Ottis Toole, he's nevertheless compelling to some women as a potential mate according to those who proposed to him. Overweight, narcissistic and whiney, John Wayne Gacy, killer of 33 young men and boys during homosexual encounters, married in prison as well before he was finally executed.

Although male serial killers have ‘an almost hypnotic effect on women,’ in fact not all fans of male serial killers are female. Many Web sites devoted to the subject are maintained and authored by males, and the tone apparent in the chat lists and guest books suggests an obsession nearly equal to that of women who become infatuated with such criminals.

I strongly suspect the motives of women who claimed that they are charmed by the serial killers who are destined to remain in prison for the rest of their lives and say that these killers are the men they want to marry. They are either publicity seekers, or are not normal thinking women who cannot recognize the silliness of it all.