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| Death Row inmates magnets for women |
| By San Francisco Chronicle |
| Published: 04/04/2005 |
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Scott Peterson, 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 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 know Peterson. 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. 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 and Conflict at Northeastern University in Boston. "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. Prison weddings in California are a regular occurrence. 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. 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 Sgt. 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 to Death Row inmates from all over the world, some of them 20 handwritten pages long. 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 California'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 the Netherlands. The interest from Europe, according to Messick, probably is rooted in opposition to the death penalty and sympathy for those sentenced to it. |
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