Is Love Blind Or, Some Women Are Just Crazy?

[Machiavelli2]

One of the Australian drug mules executed several hours ago has recently married a wealthy Javanese princess who wanted to rescue him. What is the attraction with some women who marry condemned death-row inmates? From serial killers like Ted Bundy to child killers, some women are infatuated with these types of criminals and are more than willing to marry them.


The Javanese princess who gave up her palace for a prison: ‘Feby’ Herewila went to Bali to save criminals' souls and fell in love with condemned man Andrew Chan… who she married on the eve of his execution

The woman who won the heart of doomed Bali Nine member Andrew Chan is a Javanese princess and has been a pastor for about ten years.

Febyanti Herewila, from Jogykarta in central Java, was born to a mother who was part of the royal family.

On Monday she married Australian drug smuggler Chan in a prison ceremony while he is on death row on Nusakambangan island.

Known as Feby, the woman spent five years in Singapore as a pastor before moving back to Indonesia to continue her work in her hometown.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -days.html


Why are women drawn to men behind bars?

Ian Huntley, the man charged with the Soham murders, gets bundles of fan mail every day. Meanwhile, more than 100 British women are engaged or married to men on death row in the US. Denise Mina investigates the appeal.

" 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 years ago a German waitress called Dagmar Polzin fell in love with a murderer while waiting at a Hamburg bus stop. She saw his photo on a Benetton anti-death-penalty poster. Bobby Lee Harris, a North Carolina man with an IQ of 75, was on death row for stabbing his boss to death during a robbery on a shrimp boat. Polzin was overwhelmed by the picture,
"It was something in his eyes," she later said. "There was this remorse, sadness. I was attracted. I knew he was the one."

Within the year Polzin and Harris were engaged and she had moved to America to live with his family. This story seems a little surprising, but if you see the picture that Dagmar fell in love with it is, frankly, astonishing. He may have many charming accomplishments to recommend him as a husband, but Harris is not a bonny boy.

Polzin's romance is not an isolated incident: no matter how extreme or appalling the crime with which they are associated, it seems there is always a woman keen to stand by the man. It was recently reported that Ian Huntley, the Soham man charged with the murders of schoolgirls Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells, receives bundles of fan mail from women every week - many containing photographs of themselves.

Prison romances seem in no danger of dying out. But the cliche of the prison bride as wig-wearing trailer-trash is misguided: the women come from all sectors of society. Carlos the Jackal become engaged to his lawyer last year. The famous Glasgow hard man Jimmy Boyle married a psychiatrist he met in prison. The most common form of contact, certainly for many of the 100 or so British women currently engaged or married to American men on death row, is through anti-death-penalty campaign internet sites.

In her book, Women Who Love Men Who Kill, Sheila Isenberg examines the phenomenon of prison lovers and finds genuine and universal bewilderment among the women at their situation. Even if they have had a series of romances with prisoners or, like one British woman, been engaged to several death-row inmates - all of whom were executed - they still claim not to have chosen that course for themselves. Karen Richey's partner, for instance, is on death row in Ohio. Karen says that she wasn't looking for a love affair when she made contact with Kenny, a 38-year-old Scot: "My war cry is that I only wanted to be a pen pal. Kenny insists this is going to be on my grave stone."

Read http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jan/13/gender.uk

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.

Read http://www.au-troisieme-oeil.com/index. ... news=13728