Couples featured in “Serial Killer Groupies: A Love StoryBarbara suffered psychological trauma after leaving her abusive marriage. Jamie is serving a life sentence after he used a shotgun to kill his stepmother and three brothers when he was 15 years old.
Barbara swore she’d never have another relationship. Jamie had never even had a girlfriend.
Fast-forward several months and several letters later.
Barbara glowed with love again, smiling and leaning over the cold steel table in the Wyoming State Penitentiary visiting room. Jamie stood from his chair and led Barbara to a quiet corner of the room, away from the rattle of vending machines and chatter among other inmates and their families. Jamie knelt in front of her, resting the knee of his orange prison jumpsuit on the floor. He pulled out a ring he’d fashioned from a gum wrapper and professed his love. She gave a tearful reply.
Yes.
The two are engaged, but Barbara and Jamie will never have a church ceremony filled with family and friends. They’ll never sit across from each other at a restaurant or pass popcorn at the movies. They’ll never share a home or a traditional life together. Jamie will never get out of prison. But for them-in the midst of the most unlikely circumstances-there is love.
Joy Krause likes to call herself a “senior senior.” “I was a single mother raising my family all their lives, and I didn’t have an opportunity to go to school. So when an opportunity came up and I was here and the time was right, I went for it,” she says, laughing,
pushing a wisp of unruly red hair behind her ear. “I’m a senior UTC student, and I’m also a senior citizen, so I’m kind of a senior senior.”
As a communications major and a sophomore at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Joy took a documentary film class, introducing her to the world of filmmaking.
“In my film class, I saw a documentary called ‘Paradise Lost’ about three young men convicted of murder. The one man who was on death row began corresponding with a young lady. They eventually met and she became his advocate, and they fell in love and got married,” says Joy. “I didn’t know that people on death row could correspond and have visitors, and I didn’t know they could get married. I thought it was an amazing story and, the more I researched it, the more that I found out that it’s a very big world of women who correspond with men in prison.
“I thought, ‘Certainly not corresponding with men on death row. That has to be a very small niche.’ To my amazement, I found that the men on death row-the most infamous men like Charles Manson and Ted Bundy-they’re the most popular guys in the prison. They get marriage proposals weekly. When I learned that, I just wanted to find out why. Why would a woman do that?”
Meet the Women
Ranch owner Barbara White who found love with quadruple murderer, Jaime Wiley.?Dr. Mary Hamer-the No. 1 fan of Joran van der Sloot, who is the primary suspect in the disappearance of Natalee Holloway and the convicted killer of Stephany Flores.?Businesswoman Wendy Carr, wife of Phoenix’s Baseline Killer, Mark Goudeau.?Hollywood A-list socialite Veronica Compton, whose brief love connection with The Hillside Strangler, Kenneth Bianchi, led to her 20-year prison sentence.- Information from serialkillergroupies.com
Possessed with a need for answers, Joy decided she would make her own film. She would give the women a platform to tell their stories without judgment, whatever the cost.
“Thank goodness at the time, I didn’t know what it meant to make a film. I went into it so completely naive that I thought you could just take a handheld camera and go out and find people and make a movie,” she says, laughing, something she does often.
The end result is “Serial Killer Groupies: A Love Story,” which is getting its finishing touches in the months before she graduates from UTC.
And so far, all the money to make it has come from her pocket.
“Which means … well, have you seen that bumper sticker that says, ‘I’m spending my children’s inheritance?’ I think those cars belong to independent filmmakers.” Not knowing where to start, Joy hired a couple of UTC students to help her write letters to death row prisoners all over the country.
Even more specifically, they wrote to serial killers. Hundreds of letters were sent to the most notorious murderers of all time, asking about their life in prison and, digging even deeper, their love lives.
“We wrote 300 letters to serial killers. We sent a letter to every single serial killer still alive, and we got responses from a lot of them like Son of Sam, ‘Pliers’ Bittaker … and just from those letters, you could see how manipulative they are,” she says. “Most of them would write, but they wouldn’t talk about their love life. A few did, and from those we started to make other contacts.”
Some of these contacts led her to online forums, places where women would correspond with men on death row. From there, Joy met a man who is profiting from these taboo relationships with an online dating service for prisoners.
A Google search for “prison dating” yields 118 million hits and websites like inmatepassions.com, meetaprisoner.com and loveaprisoner.com. That’s just scratching the surface. Suddenly for Joy, the world of love behind bars became more than just an intangible idea.
“I met the owner of the online prison dating service in Florida, and I found out that it’s a huge world,” she says. “It’s much larger than I thought. Thousands and thousands of people a year correspond with inmates.”
Joy KrauseConnections begat more connections, eventually leading Joy to a prison romance nearly as infamous and publicized as the killer’s crime itself.
“I met a lady in Florida, Dr. Mary Hamer, who was fascinated with Joran Van der Sloot, the prime suspect in the disappearance of Natalie Holloway and the killer of Stephany Flores,” says Joy. “I’d seen her on ‘Anderson Cooper,’ and she was treated very, very poorly, and I thought, ‘You know, if I had a chance to speak with her, I would make it a very safe environment for her so she could tell this story. I wonder if she’s ever had the opportunity to tell her story to someone who is unbiased?’ So I called her.”
It was Joy’s big break.
“She was so welcoming. There was something in the phone call that told her that she could trust me. I promised her that this would be the platform. It would just give her the opportunity to tell her story,” she says. “I went to Florida to meet her, and that was the first interview I ever had.”
The interview landed Joy and her son, Mark, who is co-producer of the film, the help of Academy and Emmy Award-nominated director and producer Peter Spira.
“I went to my son and said, ‘I don’t know how to make a movie, do you?’ And he said, ‘Not really.’ We were trying to figure out if we knew anybody who did, and he said, ‘You know, I was on this mountain biking trip last year and there was a guy there who said he made documentaries.’
“So we called him up and told him the idea for the film. He listened and said, ‘It’s interesting, but I get pitched ideas every day.’ He said, ‘If you put something together, I’ll take a look at it,’ and we already had the interview with Mary Hamer. “As soon as he got it, that afternoon, he said, ‘I’m in. This is great. I want to make this movie.'”
That was three years and several interviews ago. “Serial Killer Groupies: A Love Story” has been a labor of love, she says, but a project she couldn’t have stopped if she tried.
“You really have to be passionate about a topic or a subject in order to be an independent filmmaker. Once you start, there’s just something that grips you, and there’s no turning back,” says Joy. “It’s been such a passion that until you experience it, it’s even hard to describe. I wanted to keep meeting women, I wanted to keep hearing stories. I wanted to find out why. I thought, ‘If they have so many other options, why these men?'”
It hasn’t all been easy. A year of making contacts and being denied interview requests came between Joy’s first interview with Hamer and finding her second willing interview subject, Wendy Carr, devoted wife of the “Baseline Killer,” Mark Goudeau. Goudeau earned his nickname after a crime spree in 2005-06 which included nine murders, eight sexual assaults, numerous armed robberies and other violent crimes along Phoenix, Arizona’s Baseline Road.
“There were so many times I thought, ‘No one will ever talk to me.’ These women have been through so much scorn and criticism for who they’ve chosen to have a relationship with. They’ve suffered so much because of their choice that they don’t trust anybody.
“I thought, ‘How am I ever going to convince someone to talk to me? I don’t have a name,'” she says. “And you know, that’s exactly what ended up happening to my benefit. That’s what got them to talk to me eventually. It was the fact that I wasn’t part of the media, and I truly only wanted to give them an opportunity to tell their story, and I wouldn’t judge them in any way. That came across somehow and I was able to get three more interviews from the women who wouldn’t talk to anyone else.
Support Serial Killer Groupies
Watch an exclusive preview of “Serial Killer Groupies: A Love Story” at the film’s Indiegogo campaign page and support the film with money that will be used to secure music rights, to license archival photos and videos, to market, promote, and to distribute the film.Donation perks include co-executive producer and associate producer credits in the film, invitations to film premieres and festivals, and more.
“We have all exclusive interviews, but the last three, each one could have their own movie, that’s how extraordinary they are.”
Filming and conducting interviews with women, psychologists, prison workers, crime reporters, prison workers and convicts across the country has been Joy’s life for the past few years. She’s seen and done it all now, from getting a second phone for inmate calls to witnessing Jamie and Barbara’s prison proposal firsthand.
“I go to school full-time and I do this. I basically don’t have any other life except serial killers and exams,” she says, laughing yet again. “I think the hardest part of the whole project was explaining to people what I was doing. I had people say to me, ‘Well, you’re advocating for serial killers. You’re a fan.’ It wasn’t that at all. It wasn’t about the serial killers; it was about the women. All I wanted to know was why would someone choose a serial killer or a man on death row to have a relationship with, and I was curious.”
Much to her surprise, what Joy found was that these women and their stories have more in common with average relationships than you might expect.
“It’s so extraordinary to me. It’s unexplainable, really, unless you sit across from someone and they tell you their story,” says Joy. “I wanted to know: Is there anything they’re looking for that maybe we’re all looking for in relationships? We wouldn’t choose these particular people, but were there any commonalities? And I found that there are. That was fascinating.”
The women Joy encountered were beautiful, educated, independent and, by most standards, average. They were looking for relationships based on cornerstones that we all value-love, respect and commitment. And for these women, those relationships just came about in a different way than most, says Joy.
“In relationships, we all look for certain core things and I found that these women looked for those core things as well. In Barbara’s case, she’s appreciated by Jamie for who she is. She’s lost friends she’s had for 30 years because of this choice, but there’s one person who loves her unconditionally. He’s a convict, but it works in her life,” says Joy.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to be loved unconditionally? This was something I discovered with these relationships that I could really relate to. How wonderful would it be to be loved unconditionally and be allowed to be who we are and not be judged or hindered to be all we can be? All I can say is in Barbara’s life, and in many of these women’s lives, it works.”