The women who marry killers

A murder conviction would stop romantic pursuits for many – yet for some women, the greater the crime, the greater the attraction

There are many things that are extraordinary about the decision by the Government earlier this year to refuse Levi Bellfield – the serial killer, rapist and kidnapper – permission to hold a civil ceremony with his girlfriend, not the least of which is that anybody would choose to take Bellfield as their husband.
He is presently serving two whole-life sentences for the murders of 13-year-old Milly Dowler, 19-year-old Marsha McDonnell and 22-year-old Amélie Delagrange, as well as the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy.
In August, the former nightclub bouncer and wheel clamper, who has fathered 11 children with five different women, was blocked from entering a civil partnership while in prison by a new law, part of the Victims and Prisoners Act, which, according to the Ministry of Justice, aims to “deny the most heinous criminals from enjoying the important life events they callously took from their victims”.
Bellfield’s prospective partner, who is in her 40s, has not been named. But he reportedly first made contact with her after seeing her photograph in the cell of the serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, who was on the same wing as Bellfield at HMP Frankland. Bellfield’s proposal, during a prison visit, was first reported in May 2022. They had originally planned to marry – Bellfield allegedly wanted a Harry Styles song to be played at the ceremony – but earlier this year the marriage was called off when both realised that they would not enjoy a full, proper relationship, although, the woman told one newspaper, her visits to Bellfield would continue.
It’s an odd story. But it appears that the more heinous the crime, the more notorious the killer, the greater the attraction – to some women at least. When, in 1986, Jeremy Bamber stood trial for the murders of his adoptive parents, Nevill and June Bamber, his adopted sister Sheila Caffell and her twin sons, women queued for the public seats in court. In prison he was inundated with mail and received a steady trickle of female visitors, with one telling a newspaper that Bamber had made her pregnant during “steamy four-times-a-week sex sessions” after she had been given accreditation to visit in private as a member of his defence team.
Then there is the case of Charles Manson, who having been convicted in 1971 of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder of seven people, was at one point reported to be receiving a staggering 60,000 letters a year, many from women pledging their eternal love.
Among them was Afton “Star” Burton, who was just 16 when she first became obsessed with Manson, later moved to the California city of Corcoran, where he was incarcerated in the state prison, and ended up running pro-Manson websites. In 2014 it was reported that they had applied for a marriage licence, but it expired before any wedding took place. Manson, not known for his romantic side, had described the stories of marriage as “a bunch of garbage… We’re just playing that for public consumption.” He died in 2017.
These are exceptional cases. Less well known are the number of women who marry convicted murderers they have usually met through prisoner pen-pal schemes, entering a union with someone they can seldom, if ever, see or touch, and that is of necessity conducted mostly through letters and telephone calls.
Is it sympathy, altruism, the romance of the unattainable, the promise of a marriage untainted by arguments, boredom or infidelity? It can’t be lust. Maybe it’s truly love. Let’s, for the time being at least, not rule that out.
There is no shortage of theories about why women marry incarcerated offenders. The New Zealand-born American psychologist and sexologist Dr John Money, who died in 2006, coined the term “hybristophilia” to explain the phenomenon, as he called it, of an individual being sexually aroused by a criminal offender.
But Money, Sheila Isenberg says, was wrong. She is the author of a book called Women Who Love Men Who Kill (1991), based on 35 interviews with women, from lawyers to house cleaners, who had developed relationships with imprisoned murderers in the US. The majority were in their late 30s and early 40s, considered themselves “moral, upright, caring, right-thinking Americans”, and were frequently religious. Quite a contrast to the men – who were generally from deprived backgrounds, lacking in education, and often substance abusers.
Isenberg divided her subjects into two groups. The first were those attracted to serial killers like Bellfield. “These are the women who want notoriety and fame themselves,” Isenberg tells me from her home in New York. The second group were involved with what she describes as “regular, garden-variety killers”.
The one thing all the women she spoke to had in common was that they had been damaged in some way. “I thought, probably like everybody else, that they were all crazy. But I found out they weren’t crazy; they were women who had suffered terrible hurt and pain. They’d been victims of domestic violence or abuse of some kind.
“These are women who are victims in a society that abuses women generally. And they find their equality by having a relationship with a man who is imprisoned by a system that controls them. The man is behind bars and can’t hurt them; they’re safe, and they’re in control. They see the lawyers, they control the money; they’re on top. They’re the boss.
“None of these women were sexually attracted to the men, and sex really played no role in the relationships,” Isenberg says. On the contrary, many of the relationships seemed more akin to “courtly love”.
“The men worshipped them; they wrote poetry, love songs, letters; they put the women up on a pedestal, and the women felt honoured and appreciated, for the first time,” Isenberg continues.
“There’s a theory that some women fall in love with the men to save them. I disagree. My theory is that the women are trying to save themselves. But the relationships are not real life. In real life you fall in love, you have this mad passion in the beginning, and then it becomes a more companionate love. But there is nothing ordinary, usual or companionable about a prison relationship.”
Most prison relationships begin as pen pals. WriteAPrisoner.com is a Florida-based website founded in 2000 by a former ocean lifeguard and medical technician named Adam Lovell, which aims to reduce recidivism through a variety of methods including pen-pal correspondence and educational and employment opportunities. The site numbers one million registered users, most in the US, and 20,000 inmates. Its landing page shows photographs of inmates; users can click through to find a note of introduction and a link to the department of corrections website where details can be found of the inmate’s criminal record.
According to WriteAPrisoner, research has shown that the act of maintaining a pen-pal relationship can benefit an inmate’s well-being, reform, and in some cases has led to having a wrongful conviction overturned.
WriteAPrisoner does not keep a record of how many of the correspondences begun on its site result in marriage, but when I contacted the organisation I was sent a document outlining more than 100 testimonials from women, many of whom, according to the website, “have found success in relationships”.
What is particularly striking is the large number that had, in the hothouse atmosphere of prison correspondence and visits, flowered swiftly from the first exchange of letters to ardent declarations of love – more swiftly, it seems, than most relationships would in the outside world.
“My husband and I met a year ago just as pen pals,” writes one woman. “A year later we are married; he’s adopted my kids and we couldn’t be happier!!! Well unless he was home lol.”
Not all have a happy ending. “Mr Grubbs and I are no longer engaged,” another woman writes. “He finally confessed to being one of those people that has many pen pals and scams them. He said he was coming clean to me so that we could have a future. But really how can you have a future when the relationship you’ve had has been built on a lie?”
Isenberg says that of all the women she spoke to there were only a couple who had gone on to have successful relationships beyond prison, among them the marriage between a journalist who had been imprisoned, and another who had come to interview him. “The last time I spoke to them they were living happily ever after, and they were both in their 80s.”
She mentions another female journalist who had succeeded in getting a prisoner released. “Within two weeks he was doing drugs, and running after other women. He was arrested and died in prison – and ruined her life in the process. She had put his name on the deed to her house; she had invested her whole life in saving him.”
Social media has opened a whole new world of opportunities for prisoners’ wives, affording the chance to turn the relationship into a drama for public consumption on TikTok and Instagram.
A leader in this field is Naomi Oquendo, 30, from Essex, a social-media influencer who is married to Victor Oquendo, 33, presently serving a 24-year sentence in a Michigan prison for double homicide, home invasion and three counts of armed robbery. She has 344,000 followers on TikTok, the platform on which she describes her relationship with the man she calls “noodle head” (he calls her “my beautiful butterfly”): how he proposed within a month of them connecting through a prison pen-pal scheme (“I feel like I’ve known you for ever”); their wedding in prison; their break-up and reunion; her trip to Istanbul for rhinoplasty; her beauty tips (“Having my nails looking good is a huge priority to him”).
One video – “Things my husband in prison has spoilt me with” – showing her surrounded by jewellery, cards, flowers and, mysteriously, a puppy, had more than a million likes.
“Do you think that if he was on the outside it would be the same?” reads one comment. “I only say that because he prob has a lot of free time.”
TikTok pays its users for high-performing videos. Naomi Oquendo also promotes her own jewellery brand featuring bracelets, each with “its own healing qualities”, as well as other outlets selling make-up bags and shoes – and, more surprisingly perhaps, her Goodreads.
Curious to learn more, I attempted to contact her through House of Marketers – “The Success-Driven TikTok Marketing Agency”. I received a reply from her “talent manager” thanking me for my interest in “collaborating” with Naomi. My email explaining that The Telegraph does not pay money for interviews received no reply.
Heike Phelan does not have TikTok or Instagram. Now 55 and living in Ireland, for the past 34 years she has worked as a coach driver, shepherding tourists around every country in Europe. Since 2012 she has been married to William Matthew Schiffert, who is presently serving a 75-year sentence in a Texas prison for his part in a fatal stabbing.
I arranged to meet Phelan in Cork. She requested a restaurant with a vegan menu. Within five minutes of sitting down at the table I decided that I liked her. She struck me as a practical, no-nonsense woman, plain-speaking with a wry sense of humour – not, perhaps, the sort of person one might expect to have married a convicted murderer.
She grew up in Huddersfield, the middle of three daughters of an electrician who later became a university lecturer, and a part-time librarian; a happy family, she said. At 16 she left school, became pregnant with a daughter and married the father, a much older man. Another daughter soon followed, but after three years she “kicked him into touch”. “He was a drinker and a smoker – and far too much drinking.”
She got a coach-driving licence and took a job, while her mother looked after the children, and at the age of 29 earned a degree in transport and logistics management in tourism, which qualified her to take groups all over Europe.
Between tours and rushing back to Huddersfield on her days off, there was little time for personal relationships. Boyfriends lasted a matter of weeks. “I thought, when my girls are grown up I can concentrate on myself.”
In 2008, at the suggestion of a friend, she enlisted in a scheme run by another American website that provides support and information to the wives and friends of inmates, to send Christmas cards to a dozen prisoners, whose names were supplied by the site.
“I have to point out,” she told me, “that people from all over the world write to inmates, or are even married to them – some quite sensible, and some completely deranged.” She paused. “That’s me being a bit judgmental there.”
The Christmas cards, she said, were a gesture of support. Support for them, or for her?
“I’ve never thought of that one.” She paused. “No, it was definitely about the other person. Maybe because I’d had times when I felt a bit lonely myself, I could empathise. I didn’t think anything of it, it’s not particularly profound to send Christmas cards out to prisoners.”
It was a requirement to put a return address on any correspondence going into a state prison. She had not expected a reply, but a month later she received a letter, not from a prisoner she’d sent a card to, but from one of their friends, William Schiffert, the man she calls Matthew.
It was six pages long, telling her everything about his life, his career in crime and why he was in prison. Schiffert’s parents were drug dealers. His mother gave him heroin when he was 13, to keep him quiet. His father disowned him after finding out he was the product of his wife’s affair with another man. At 16 he was imprisoned for murder, one episode in a life of crime culminating in his last conviction for being an accessory to murder.
Much of his time in prison had been spent in lock-down after assaulting officers. His nickname was Mad Dog. “They call him that,” Phelan said drily. “Because he was.”
His letter gave her pause for thought. “It was so open – he told me everything. I was thinking, ‘Oh my God… Do I want to reply?’ At the end of the letter there was this random, throwaway comment – ‘Do you get high?’ I sat on this for about three months and it kept on bugging me.
“Reading between the lines, I could sense this level of vulnerability there beneath all this machismo in the words. So I wrote back saying, ‘to answer your question about getting high, I find that an extraordinary thing to ask in the first letter to a stranger. I have no tolerance for drugs and if that’s what you’re into don’t bother writing again. If you’re going to be civilised and treat me with respect then you can write back to me. You’ve only got one chance.’
“I got a 23-page letter back telling me how amazing my letter was and how I’d laid down the law and said these were my standards. He tells everybody about that letter. He says it’s the best letter he ever got in his life.”
So now she was committed. His first letters, she told me, were “quite raw. I thought, ‘What have I got myself into here?’ He was telling me about the idiotic things he and his friends did in prison – stupid things that would get him into trouble, time after time after time.
“I said, ‘I’m not going to clap you on the back and say well done for being an idiot. But if you’re trying to do better I will admire you for that.’ And he’s always appreciated that. Everybody in his life was always there for what they could get out of him. And I was just writing to him as a friend.”
And perhaps thinking you could save him? She rolled her eyes. She had no interest in that, she said. The reason she kept writing to him was because he had a long sentence. “I didn’t want the hassle of him getting out and me having to get involved in some way. That’s not what I bargained for. Now obviously that’s changed.”
They exchanged photos, and the letters increased to three a week. “A short one was under 10 pages, a medium was between 10 and 20, and long was over 20” – though they were “never soppy”. “He sent me a couple of poems once and I said, ‘Don’t send me these – it’s so clichéd. I’m not into poetry anyway, it makes me cringe’.”
The thing about letters, she said, is that you get to know somebody very well. “He was so brutally honest that I’d be thinking, ‘you didn’t need to tell me that’. So there becomes a responsibility in the relationship, even though it’s only friendship.”
It’s a funny thing, she said, but she found more happiness in writing to this man she’d never met, a career criminal, than she’d found with any other man in her life. “With anyone. Because he became my safe space as well, which sounds very odd for someone being where he is. But it all came about so gradually and organically.”
It was after 18 months – around his 234th letter – that he told her he was in love with her. “He’d always signed off his letters with ‘respect always’ or ‘thinking of you always’. Then this one letter came: ‘love you always’. It just jumped out. I wrote back and said, ‘You signed your letter differently this time’. And he said, ‘Yeah, I couldn’t help it’.”
She thought about that for weeks, she said. “How he was as a person – not the idiot in prison, but how he was with me, his regrets and aspirations.” (It struck me that the more she used the word “idiot”, the more affectionate her tone became.)
“And I realised he’d become an integral part of my life, I couldn’t imagine life without him. And even now I can’t – even though he annoys me every day. But we’re all a work in progress, aren’t we? Me included.”
In October 2010 she flew to Texas to meet Schiffert for the first time. He was in high security at the time, so they spoke on handsets through a Perspex screen.
“I said to him, ‘Oh my God, you’ve got teeth.’
“He said, ‘Why would I not have teeth?’”
It was her “overriding concern”, she told me, “because you’ve seen programmes about hillbillies with one tooth, and I’d never thought to ask him.” She laughed. After that, they didn’t stop talking for four hours.
The truth is, she said, that before all this if she’d seen him on the street she’d have crossed over to avoid him. “I’ve said this to him a million times. Because he was full of tattoos – really very inappropriate. Some of them were far-Right, that sort of nonsense. I said, ‘You need to get rid of those. If you think I’m walking down the street with you like that, it’s not happening.’ And I’ll give the man his due, from day one if I’ve said something and given him an alternative viewpoint, he’s gone away and thought about it.”
Six months after their first meeting, Schiffert proposed. “I said yes. It just came out. I didn’t have to think about it.” They married in November 2012. At the time, Texas did not allow marriage ceremonies in prison, so they married by proxy. She sent him the forms, which he had notarised by the prison law library and sent back to her. Then she flew to America and had them notarised by a judge.
“Then I visited him and said, we were married at two o’clock yesterday.” He was still in high security. It would be another year before he was allowed contact visits and they were able to touch each other.
After that she saw him as much she could, but she has been unable to visit since 2017, after she was hospitalised in a car crash in Texas, and overstayed her visa by a few days. She spent six weeks in a detention centre and is now prohibited from entering the US. But they talk on the telephone daily. During Covid, inmates were allowed electronic tablets, which made communication much easier. It’s the question everyone asks: how could you marry a murderer?
“I’ve told him repeatedly, ‘Don’t think I’m ever going to condone anything you did or think it’s justified, because it’s not.’ However, all that stuff was long before I knew him, so I don’t think it’s my place to judge him on those actions. I can only judge the person I have got to know.”
The more she learned about his life in prison, she said, the more appalled she became, at the conditions, the violence, the way guards pitted prison gangs against each other, the better to control them. When Schiffert developed a medical condition that was ignored, she was so outraged that (with his encouragement) she set out to write a book based on his life. “I felt that even if nobody read it, I needed it to be out there.” She has now written three, part of her Convict series, based on his stories – a catalogue of brutality, shankings, gang rapes and suicides – every word of it true, she said. You would not want to be in prison in Texas.
“He tells everyone about the books and carries one with him wherever he goes.” In the past two or three years, it seems that Schiffert has changed. During his time in prison he’d committed about 280 assaults on officers. “He always said being against the system was his reason for living.”
Now he is what is called a peer educator, giving talks to other prisoners on how to improve their thinking, and acting as counsellor for those at risk of self-harm. He wrote to tell Phelan that the classes had come about after he’d been talking to a duty warden about how, because of their marriage, “he’d stopped being an idiot”.
So she has changed him after all. “I take no credit whatsoever. I keep telling him, I may have encouraged you to do things differently, but it’s not me that’s changed you; it’s you yourself.” A pause. “And I said, people don’t want to hear about me all the time, change the record for goodness’ sake.”
In five years’ time Schiffert comes up for parole. “We talk about that a lot…” Phelan has told him she won’t live in America – she has a low opinion of the country. Perhaps he can come to Ireland. The thought hangs in the air.
All the things that come with a normal marriage, the shared intimacies, bickering about loading the dishwasher, picking up dirty laundry from the floor… they’ve never had that. “It sometimes worries me when he gets out, how am I going to live with someone in that close proximity? But he’s got no qualms. He’s always going on about how we’ll be together 24/7. I said, you’re deranged if you think that; we’d be divorced in a week.”
The last diners had long since left the restaurant and we were talking over coffee, the staff hovering. “There’ve been times when I’ve thought, it’s not an easy marriage to be in. But I’ve never been daunted by it. He says he loves me more now than he ever did. And I don’t have any regrets, and I love him just as much. I do hanker to see him, but I don’t dwell on it.” She shrugged. “It’s just something you get on with.”
When people used to ask, she wouldn’t tell them she was married to a prisoner. “I’d just say ‘Unfortunately he’s a Texan’.” She laughed. “I didn’t want to have to justify myself. Now, I don’t feel the need to.”
So what would she say to people reading this who might think, this is all so strange? She didn’t think twice. “Absolutely nothing, because I don’t owe anyone an explanation.”