When Simon Gittany gets his first bag of mail in prison, the convicted murderer might be surprised to find admiring letters from strangers.
For some women, Gittany’s incarceration in a maximum-security prison last week has sent his attraction ratio skyrocketing.
These are the women who fall in love with men behind bars and just like Gittany’s model girlfriend, Rachelle Louise, many of them are attractive – even drop-dead gorgeous.
When Scott Peterson was sent to Death Row in California’s San Quentin prison for murdering his wife and their unborn child, dozens of women phoned asking for his address, with one teenager wasting no time in offering to marry him.
Killers Lyle and Erik Menendez, who are doing life in jail for the shotgun execution of their parents, are married to women they met while in jail, who have never shared any more intimacy with them than communal jail room visits.
Lyle’s first prison wife was a Playboy model; his second is an editor turned attorney.
In Australia, Lucy Dudko, a one-time librarian with a young child, showed her love for jailed armed robber John Killick by committing the most daring prison break in Australian history.
Then she served time herself in prison, and now waits for her lover – a white-haired paunchy man of 71 – to gain parole.
What is it about the women who love men behind bars?
Some psychologists say women attracted to imprisoned men want control over a “helpless” prisoner and a relationship which provides them with the chance to “mother” or at least spoil the man.
They also might be chronically lonely, love-starved or in need of excitement, lured by the bad boy glamour of a real life criminal.
Psychologist and criminal profiler, Dr Tony Clarke, told news.com.au prison relationships were often a testament to the manipulative ability of the incarcerated inmate.
“There are two groups of women who get involved with prisoners,” he said.
“The self-selected group who write to men in jail and then there’s the women who work in jails. They think [the inmate] is a nice person who has changed and who loves them. [The women who work in jails] then become accomplices who help smuggle things into jail or help them escape.”
“Psychopaths in jail are expert at manipulating people and they specialise with people who have low self esteem. Psychopaths test [these people’s] vulnerability extremely quickly and then exploit them to get what they want … for sex, money or boredom. It’s boring in jail. Once they are out and they no longer need [the woman’s] services, they will frequently beat them.”
Here are some of the women who fell in love with men behind bars.
Erik and Lye Menendez
Tammi Ruth Saccoman was nine years older than the groom.
The wedding took place in a prison waiting room and the wedding cake was a chocolate bar from a machine.
But the new Mrs. Erik Menendez said it “was a wonderful ceremony” followed by a “very lonely night”.
With Erik sentenced to life without parole, along with his brother Lyle, for the 1989 shooting of their wealthy parents, Jose and Kitty, things don’t get any more intimate than a cuddle during visiting hour among dozens of other inmates and their partners.
Tammi told ABC News in the US her relationship with Erik was “something that I’ve dreamt about for a long time. And it’s just something very special that I never thought that I would ever have.”
She began writing to him after watching his first trial on television.
They met in prison and Erik proposed to her, on one knee, in the jail visits room.
She released a self-published book which Erik heavily edited during visits she and her daughter – who refers to Menendez as “Earth Dad” – drive 240kms to every weekend.
During a subsequent interview, she told CNN: “Not having sex in my life is difficult, but it’s not a problem for me.
“I have to be physically detached, and I’m emotionally attached to Erik. My family does not understand. When it started to get serious, some of them just threw up their hands.”
Erik has stated, “Tammi is what gets me through. I can’t think about the sentence. When I do, I do it with a great sadness and a primal fear. I break into a cold sweat. It’s so frightening I just haven’t come to terms with it.”
Lyle Menendez, now 45, met his first wife after the Playboy Playmate watched him on television and felt compelled to write to him.
Anna Eriksson moved to Los Angeles so she could visit him and the couple wed in a telephone ceremony on the day he was sentenced to life without parole for murdering his parents.
Eriksson subsequently divorced him when she learnt Lyle was corresponding with another woman.
In 2003, Lyle married a 33-year-old magazine editor, Rebecca Sneed, who has since become an attorney.
They wed in a maximum security visiting area of Mule Creek State Prison in California.
Neither of the Menendez brothers has met their spouses.
John Killick
Russian-born librarian Lucy Dudko was a 41-year-old just breaking up with her husband in Sydney in 1996 when she met convicted armed robber, John Killick, at a party and embarked on a fateful journey which ended up with them both in jail.
Dudko and Killick were both separated from their spouses.
Killick had a girlfriend. Dudko was living alone.
He was a 58-year-old career criminal. She was an innocent, mousy-looking librarian.
Despite his criminal history, and during the wild ride as fugitives from justice which ensued, Dudko said she never doubted him or her feelings.
“I just love him … I never analysed him,” she later told a court.
Back in jail and sentenced to a total 28 years for armed robberies, Killick began convincing his devoted new girlfriend to hatch an escape plan.
“He said he would probably die in jail and he didn’t want to die in jail,” she said.
Dudko followed her lover’s explicit instructions.
On March 24, 1999, Lucy booked a motel room in a false name and gathered clothing for the two of them.
She had done her homework, studying three videos Killick recommended – Hostage, Fled and Breakout, inspired by a real escape from a Mexican prison with the aid of a helicopter.
The following day, Dudko took a Derringer .22 Magnum pistol and a Luger semiautomatic pistol to the Sydney Olympic site in Homebush, where she had booked a helicopter joy ride.
Soon after takeoff, she pointed a firearm at the pilot, Tim Joyce, directing him to land in the exercise yard of Silverwater prison, where Killick was waiting for her.
Prison guards fired on the helicopter as it approached, believing it may have been a terrorist attack.
Killick boarded the craft and allegedly told the pilot, “G’day mate, I’m a lifer. You can make a lot of money out of 60 Minutes, or you could be dead. It’s your choice.”
Mr. Joyce flew to an oval in Sydney’s north, where the couple abandoned the chopper and hijacked a car.
Armed and on the run for six weeks during which they kidnapped a Victorian motel owner and forced him to drive them back to Sydney, the pair was eventually captured in a caravan park.
Killick returned to prison and Lucy Dudko was jailed for seven years for the hijack.
For most of her time inside, she refused to admit she was the woman in the helicopter.
Released in 2006, Dudko is said to be waiting to be reunited with Killick, who was declined parole this year.
She has also befriended his former wife Gloria, who visited both former fugitives in prison.
He’s 73 years old, she’s 33.
Phil Spector
They are Mr and Mrs Phil and Rachelle Spector.
He lives in a tiny jail cell and she lives in his 35-room Los Angeles castle.
In between visiting him in prison, where he is serving 19 years for killing a former girlfriend, she has been doing a tour promoting her new album which was reportedly produced by the retired music mogul before he was put away.
Phil Spector, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame legend who once produced artists such as the Beatles, Ike and Tina Turner, the Ramones and Cher, is appealing against his sentence and hoping for a new trial.
His new wife is deflecting criticism she is playing on his reputation and his vulnerability now he is behind bars.
The aspiring singing star has given interviews about their sex life before Spector was jailed.
The Huffington Post reported she drives more than two hours from his vast Los Angeles home to visit him.
They spend a few hours in his prison each week talking and holding hands, before being allowed one kiss and a hug, after which she returns to the mansion.
Earlier this year, she released a song, “PS I Love you” a love letter to her husband in jail.
She said she passionately believes in his innocence and her main focus is “keeping his spirits up, keeping him positive, keep reiterating that he’s an innocent man, that he took the fall for other people”.
Charles Manson
Deranged mass murderer and psychopath, Charles Manson, has been luring in women as cult followers all his adult life, but his latest adherent is a class above.
Calling herself Star, the 25-year-old runs an online network of Manson believers and has carved an X into her face in devotion to the 79-year-old lifer.
In photographs on the site she is dressed as a nun in white.
The site quotes Manson saying, “air, trees, water and animals . . . the air and the water is our spirit, the trees and the animals are our flesh and blood”.
In her nun’s outfit, Star is pictured worshiping a tree.
Manson has a swastika carved into his forehead, as did his followers in 1969 – mostly young women who lived with him at a sordid Californian commune – who carried out nine killings that, according to Manson’s theory, would spark an “apocalyptic war” between blacks and whites.
“I’ll tell you straight up, Charlie and I are going to get married,” Star says, although Manson himself does not agree, saying instead, she is his latest “project”.
Asked how her parents felt about her man, Star said they were happy.
“My parents like Charlie. We were just talking and they said, ‘If Charlie gets out, you guys can come stay here. You could stay in the basement for a while, and you could maybe build your own little house down by the creek’.”
Manson’s followers have been continually refused bail.
In 2009, Susan Atkins died from brain cancer at the age of 61 in prison.
But before she died, Atkins had jail romances of her own.
Atkins, whose real name was Sadie Mae Glutz, was the “give up” in the Manson family.
Arrested in connection with the murder of Gary Hinman, a Manson acquaintance, she boasted to her cellmates about the other brutal murders in which she had participated.
What ensued was one of the most sensational and highly publicised trials in American history, known as “Helter Skelter” in a book which documented the hearings.
Manson, Atkins and three others were sentenced to death in 1971.
Atkins’ sentence was commuted to life and she converted to Christianity.
She married a Texan “millionaire”, Donald Laisure, but divorced him when she learned he was not as rich as he claimed and had been allegedly married thirty-five times before her.
In 1987, she married Harvard Law graduate James Whitehouse who represented her at subsequent parole hearings.
Back in Australia Simon Gittany will be sentenced in February for the murder of his fiancee Lisa Harnum.
His girlfriend, Rachelle Louise, will be allowed almost daily visits while he stays at Silverwater Remand Centre in Sydney, but may find it more difficult to visit him when he is moved to his sentencing jail in regional NSW.
This article originally appeared on News.com.au.