You don’t have to be a woman to be a prison wife.
Take Capt. Tim McDonald, a retired Northwest Airlines pilot and amateur handwriting analyst. He met and married Teresa Deion Harris, aka #233590, a convicted killer sentenced to life without the possibility of parole — after she was already in the joint.
Captain McDonald, one of the many “wives” profiled on Investigation Discovery’s bizarre new show “Prison Wives,” doesn’t find anything odd about meeting your future spouse after he or she has been incarcerated for things like murder, rape, and infanticide.
When Capt. McDonald, social worker Pam Booker, wife of convicted murderer Lance Booker, and Booker’s 16-year old stepdaughter, Anadia, came to talk with us at The Post, they looked like average middle-class folk. They are anything but.
In fact, Pam and Tim devote most of their lives to petitioning, caring, loving and visiting their imprisoned-for-life spouses.
And it’s not always true that people who marry convicts do so because they can’t forget the incredible sex lives they had before they were imprisoned — or the great sex they have during conjugal visits.
McDonald, 64, has never had sex with his wife, 38. She is imprisoned at the Tennessee Prison for Women, which doesn’t allow conjugal visits.
Harris, whose photo and prison ID number are printed on McDonald’s business card, was convicted of felony murder in the death of a teenager who came to the aid of Harris and her friends one night when their truck broke down. After savagely beating him, they shot the boy. And what were they supposed to do with a half-dead teenager except finish him off and chop up his body?
Given those facts, what would make a retired airline captain take up with a convicted murderer?
“It was her handwriting,” he says. “She filled all three zones!”
Turns out, McDonald found his prison penpals online because he loved to analyze their handwriting.
“Most prisoners have no upper zone,” he said, explaining that their letters, like “f” and “t” don’t actually go up., indicating an adolescent mentality. “What’s going on here. I asked myself when I got [Teresa’s] first letter.”
Pam Booker, on the other hand, married her former live-in boyfriend, Lance, after he went to jail — even though he had impregnated another woman while they were involved.
Now Booker, who has a graduate degree in social work, lives for their conjugal visits. Every few months, she spends 46 hours with her man in a tiny apartment on the prison grounds.
P.S: Lance Booker has five children with five different women — although none with Pam. She is close with several of them; in fact, that she works hard to make sure that they maintain a relationship with their father. Anadia, for example, lives in New York City, but with Pam’s help, makes the trip to the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora in upstate New York as often as funds and her school schedule will permit.
Both Booker and McDonald stepped up to the parenting plate. Anything to make the lives of their murderous spouses more comfortable and happy.
Why? Because love is strange, that’s why. And if you watch “Prison Wives,” it’s stranger than you ever imagined.