Scott Peterson, the man who was convicted of murdering his wife and unborn child, had been on Death Row barely an hour when the first proposal arrived from a woman who wants to be the new Mrs. Scott Peterson. Three dozen phone calls came in to the warden's office on Peterson's first day at his new home in San Quentin State Prison -- women were pleading for his mailing address, and one smitten 18-year-old said she wanted to marry him.
As far as anyone knows, these women don't really know Peterson -- and unlike Laci Peterson, they certainly haven't spent any time with him, usually a requisite for getting married -- but, according to several experts on the world of the condemned, it doesn't really matter.
What matters is the allure of marrying a notorious man, regardless of the fact that he may well end his days with a state-approved needle sticking out of his arm. There's the danger of it all, and, ultimately, the safety of it: If things go wrong, the wife can walk away.
"They love the celebrity status," said Jack Levin, a criminologist who is director of the Brudnick Center on Violence at Northeastern University in Boston. Levin is co-author of the book "Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder," which explores, among other things, what Levin called "killer groupies."
"These are the same women who might correspond with a rock star or a rap artist," Levin said. When such a woman writes to a rock star, he said, "the best she can hope for is a computerized signature on a photograph." When she writes to a serial killer on Death Row, "she might get a marriage proposal."
Others give the potential prison brides more benefit of the doubt.
"A lot of women are really taken with the man's criminal case, and they overwhelmingly believe these men are innocent," said Rick Halperin, a history professor at Southern Methodist University and president of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. "Many think the man shouldn't be alone and that even if he doesn't get out, there should be somebody there supporting him."
Prison weddings in California are a regular occurrence. In general, about 20 inmates get married in ceremonies held on the first Friday of even-numbered months at San Quentin, and usually at least one condemned inmate is among them.
And Death Row inmates have no shortage of suitors. In fact, the more notorious the murderer, the less he has to work for female companionship, San Quentin spokesman Eric Messick said.
"You take our five highest-profile killers here, and you've got your answer about who the most popular inmates are," Messick said. "I think it's just the publicity that attracts people."
Letters of adoration flow in daily to Death Row inmates from all over the world, some of them 20 handwritten pages long.
Richard Allen Davis, the man who kidnapped 12-year-old Polly Klaas from her Petaluma home in 1993 and killed her, "probably gets more mail than most," Messick said. Richard Ramirez, the "Night Stalker" who killed 13 people and has more than a passing interest in Satanism, has women virtually throwing themselves at him despite the fact he is already married.
Messick said "99 percent" of correspondence to the condemned is from women. (There doesn't seem to be a similar clamoring among men for women awaiting death. None of the 15 women on the state's female Death Row in Chowchilla has gotten married in prison.)
A large proportion of those who contact San Quentin's Death Row inmates are from Britain and Holland. The interest from Europe, according to Messick, is probably rooted in opposition to the death penalty and sympathy for those who are being subjected to it.
Ramirez married Doreen Lioy, a freelance magazine editor, in 1996 after an 11-year courtship in which she wrote him 75 letters in prison. He was attracted to her, one of her friends said on her wedding day, because she said she was a virgin.
"Satanists don't wear gold," he reportedly told her when they discussed wedding bands.
At the time, Lioy declared herself "ecstatically happy." She could not be reached for comment for this story, and Messick said he hadn't seen her around the prison in a long time.
Other women's interest in Ramirez continues even today, although "from what I gather he's not real responsive to the mail," Messick said. "He's not a big letter writer."
Some Death Row inmates meet their life partners in more mundane ways.
In the 1970s, a woman working for a drug treatment center in San Rafael visited San Quentin and was mesmerized by a convicted murderer speaking about a prison program that tries to keep youngsters from getting into trouble.
The woman, who did not want to be identified for privacy and job reasons, married the inmate in 1977. He had been sentenced to death for abducting and killing a gas station attendant with some friends on his 21st birthday, but by the time she fell in love, his sentence had been commuted to life.
Their marriage prompted numerous newspaper stories and appearances on national television talk shows, raising the perennial question of why someone would want to marry a killer behind bars.
"Why?" she said. "Love. He was like the mayor of San Quentin. He was involved in everything. And I started to become involved in everything relating to the prison."
She and her husband were allowed conjugal visits because he was no longer on Death Row. She visited two or three times a week for nine years until 1985, when he was released. Throughout that time, she said, other women were contacting him, at least one of whom tried to become more intimate.
She said they "grew apart" after his release and eventually divorced. He remarried and now lives in another state.
"You just don't know how things will work out until you live with them," she said. "It just didn't work out."
She still considers him to be "an unusual, interesting man who is charismatic. I wasn't desperate by any means. I just really liked him and became attracted to him and wanted to be with him any way I could.
"It's too hard for me to try to figure out why other women would do this, " she said. But she added that she had met several other wives of condemned inmates, and that some had clearly "lost their marbles."
"They were attracted to men who did serious, ugly types of crimes, child molesting and such," she said.
One woman whose husband is currently on Death Row said she became attracted to the convicted murderer she eventually married through one of the many prison pen-pal organizations.
The woman would not be identified out of fear that her husband's legal prospects as well as her job could be jeopardized.
She said that from the outset she "didn't want to become some prison girlfriend. He wasn't looking for a wife. I wasn't looking for a husband." She was already married, but that marriage wasn't working.
Her husband said in a telephone interview from Death Row, "When she first came up here and we met, we certainly were attracted to one another. But I told her, 'No, go home and make your marriage work.' " Eventually, the woman got divorced.
"My wife and I would not have stayed married for (all these) years had we not been in love," the inmate said. But he conceded that when one spouse is on Death Row and the other is free, "it's a very, very difficult circumstance under which to conduct a marriage."
None of these marriages will ever be consummated unless the man somehow gets off Death Row. Yet it wasn't always this way.
According to Kay Bandell, a registered nurse who has been tutoring and corresponding with prisoners for some 30 years, at one time, San Quentin's Death Row "used to have an open visiting area. To handle questions of intimacy, (couples) would sneak in and out of the ladies room, or some people would form a protective circle around a couple that wanted to have sex.
"Now they have contact (but non-conjugal) visits in cages, with guards around them. People have sex on the phone, verbal sex. And letters provide a certain amount (of intimacy). But all these are vicarious forms of intimacy. It's not the same as having a consummated physical experience."
San Quentin officials said they tightened up the visiting rules about four years ago, after a stabbing incident in the common visiting area.
For some women, the Death Row husband is someone she has been seeking all her life, and it is frequently a life that has had some horrific knocks.
For her 1991 book "Women Who Love Men Who Kill," Sheila Isenberg interviewed 30 women who were married to Death Row inmates.
"Most of these women had been abused in their earlier lives, by parents, fathers, first husbands or first boyfriends," she said. "So a relationship with a man behind bars is a safe relationship. The guy can't hurt them.
"Another thing," she added, is that in the pressure to get married, women tend to look for "the most macho man around. He's the guy who pulled the trigger. We tend to venerate the most violent men in our society. Sometimes, it's the good guys, the cops on TV shows, sometimes the bad guys."
By marrying a man on Death Row, Isenberg said, a woman finds a new life that is "always dangerous and exciting. Can he make the phone call? Will he be executed? Will he spend 30 years in prison? All these exciting elements. It's never mundane.
"It's a very strange world behind prison walls," she said. "It's courtly love, like the Knights of the Round Table. The man in prison has a lot of time on his hands and can romance a woman the way most men can't because they don't have the time. A man in prison can put a woman up on a pedestal and pay attention to her."
"It's all gentlemanly and formal. The women I interviewed said they didn't have sex (with their imprisoned husbands.) It was part of the appeal --
it was more exciting to sit at a table, under the watchful eyes of a guard, and just stare."
Poster Comment:
As the twig is bent, so the tree grows.