Not every killer is suave or sympathetic in the style of Bundy or Paul John Knowles, the notoriously handsome Casanova Killer ; many of these men plainly exist on the margins of society, exhibiting weird mannerisms, or poor hygiene, and uniformly a total dearth of remorse.
And yet, so-called prison groupies invariably feature in the footage from murder trials, lolling around US court pews wide-eyed and turned on, even as state witnesses describe, say, how the accused dismembered the bodies of the women he brutalised and killed.
These are the women who take our universal fixation with convicted criminals to its limit: the lesser-known deviants who write and send pictures to serial killers, and sometimes go on to marry them. On the record, they avow their beloved s innocence; behind closed doors, their relationship to criminality is decidedly more ambivalent.