In this free-for-all-Friday Trent explores the phenomena of women who fall in love with incarcerated murderers.
Transcript:
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It has been said that women like bad boys, but some women really like really bad boys, like murderers and serial killers. And it’s weird and messed up. And I just, I just want to talk about it. So that’s what we’re going to discuss today here on the Council of Trent. On Mondays and Wednesdays we talk apologetics and theology.
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On Friday we talk about whatever I want to talk about. And I came across a post recently showing excerpts of love letters that were written to Chris. What’s so if you don’t remember, Chris Watts was he was a guy in Colorado. He was married, he had two daughters, and he murdered his wife and then his daughters. He strangled her.
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And then he then he smothered his daughters, and he dumped their bodies in a big oil tanker like, you know, one of those out in the rural areas, a big oil tanker. It can hold like thousands of gallons. He worked for a petroleum firm, and his case became famous because his wife and family, allegedly, like the other family friends, went to check on them and then they weren’t there.
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And then Chris put up an act like, oh, I don’t know where they are, please return my family to me. And it was the least convincing thing ever of a husband and father worried about his missing family. It’s so atrociously bad acting. You can tell something is not right here. And so this was chronicled in a documentary from 2020 called American Murder The Family Next Door.
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And it goes through the watch case. Primarily it goes through with police body cam footage because it’s amazing when the police show up at the house like the family friend. So Shannon, his wife, comes home. What happened was I had an argument during the night. He strangled her, killed the daughters, loaded them in his pickup truck, backed out, dumped their bodies to the petroleum site and came back.
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Then a friend went to the house. Uses to pick up Shannon for like a doctor’s appointment. And she didn’t answer the door. So she called the police and they’re like, well, you know, we don’t know if there’s foul play. Oh, here’s the husband. And he goes in and he’s immediately acting suspicious about things not, you know, upset like any husband would be like, where’s my wife and daughters.
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Like it’s super bizarre, but it’s a really good documentary. I recommend American Murder to the family next door. It was like, at one time, the most popular documentary on Netflix when it when debuted and you see. And he gets caught, by the way, because one of the things is there’s a neighbor across the street who has a ring camera showing the house during the day and sees who leaves and who enters.
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And you see Chris, you see his hands on his head getting so nervous because he knows he’s going to be exposed because the camera doesn’t show his family leaving. It only shows one thing leaving him in the truck in the morning, which is where he loaded the bodies. Then everybody puts two and two together. But it’s amazing to me that there are these letters that people have sent him, multiple letters from women sending him that are basically like in love with him.
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One says, greetings from New York, Chris. This article about it, a Brooklyn based woman wrote to Christopher Watts, I found myself thinking a lot about you. I figure life is too short to hold back. So here I am. And then she includes a picture of herself in a bikini to him, so you can place a face to the words, I know what you look like, so I thought I’d make it fair.
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I hope I’ve put a smile on your face. This is 29 year old Tatiana. Tatiana sending a letter to to him. But there’s. There’s others as well. Candice, a 39 year old mother of two, wrote. What’s the letter ends? Hashtag team Chris. Hashtag I love him. I’ve been watching her interview and I just became attracted to you. Don’t ask me why.
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If you wrote back, I’d be the happiest girl alive. And so. And I’ve seen a lot of other excerpts. What’s crazy is that in the letters, the women even say, I don’t know why I’m writing this. I don’t know why I’m doing this, but I just can’t help myself. I’m attracted to you, and I just wanted to let you know that.
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Is there anything you need? Are you doing okay in prison? Do you want me to send you anything? And it just seems totally bonkers, right? Why? Why would you love someone horrible like this? And it’s not even that. They think, oh, I think you’re innocent. And I love you. Like they know he’s guilty. They’ll say things like, I don’t judge you.
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We all make mistakes. Oh, yeah, we all make mistakes. And in fact, there’s a word for this. It’s called hubristic. Philia. So hubristic. So I’m going to read the article here for you. We’ll break it all down. Hubris is a psychological term used to describe sexual or romantic attraction to individuals who have committed violent crimes or serious offenses.
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The term comes from the Greek hubris, meaning to commit an outrage against someone. In philia lover attraction, Harrison comes from hubris, right? You think, oh, what hubris? The idea, you think. And Chris Watts was someone with hubris. Like, you think you’re going to get away with this, that we’re not going to catch you, that you think you’re so much better than you really are.
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You’re so much smarter. Like it’s your actions are just so outrageous. You think you can do something like this. So he remains relatively rare and poorly understood. But there have been serial killers, people like Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, a Night stalker, Jeffrey Dahmer, who have received this kind of attention. So passive, that’s the more common one is just women who are attracted to someone because of his criminal reputation.
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It’s also called Bonnie and Clyde syndrome. Aggressive is much rarer, even though hubris is rare in and of itself. Aggressive. Aristotelia is where a woman, and usually almost always women. I think there’s some isolated cases of men loving women who are violent. Usually, almost always, it’s women loving men who are violent, aggressive, hubristic. Philia is when the woman is attracted not just to the man for committing crimes, but to the crimes themselves.
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And that would explain cases where there have been cases of serial killers, serial rapist and killers who had female accomplices or guys who would kill, and they had women who loved them, who would lure other women to their doom. They would lure the women in, kind of bring them to like, appease these men. And they were like attracted to be excited by the murders and be partners along with it.
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So what I want to talk today is more common of this rare subset passive Aristotelia, the women that fall in love with these men and then send them these love letters in prison, why would they do that? The article goes on to say researchers have proposed several explanations for why some people develop these attractions. One theory suggests that highly publicized offenders become the focus of idealized fantasies.
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Because incarcerated individuals are physically distant and relationships are limited to letters, phone calls, or supervised visits, admirers may project qualities onto them that have little connection to reality. The relationship can feel emotionally safe because everyday challenges of intimacy are largely absent, so I don’t think that there’s necessarily one explanation, by the way, but I think all of these kind of come together because human beings are complicated, right?
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I think that for some people, when there is a famous person, a lot of people will develop a parasocial relationship with that. I mean, that’s so common now with influencers, YouTubers that it’s like there’s a million celebrities nowadays. It’s like, you know, 50 years ago there was like 100 celebrities that you would see on TV or people magazine you kind of knew about.
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Now there’s just a lot more celebrities, people out there, and you can know so much more about their life. Right? Like back in the day, you would pick up people magazine, or you wanted to go to a movie to see a famous actor in it because, like, you could see the actor that much, like, oh, I want to go see them in this movie.
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But now you can follow them on social media. You can learn everything about them. You don’t even go to their movies. So I think a lot of these cases, you have parasocial relationships where in general people will get attract some because they know a lot about that person and they feel connected to them because they know so much about them, even though the other person doesn’t know anything about them.
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And I think this happens here, where if you get if you’re like a true crime junkie, you can develop a parasocial relationship with someone on death row that, you know, all of this stuff about them, and it creates a false sense of intimacy as a result, where you know a lot about them and think you can have a relationship with them.
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And for some of these women, it’s an idealized relationship because they know that this other person is not going to cheat on them with some other woman because they’re in jail, not going to. And it’s, oh, I read another article saying that women who fantasize about these men and want to have a relationship with them through prison pen pals, that it’s kind of like a safe way of being dangerous.
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Like I said, for women like the like the bad boys. And so it’s a safe way of being, you know, being in one of these relationships with someone who’s really, really bad, knowing they can’t hurt you because they’re locked up. So I think a lot of this comes together where it can be feel like a safe way to indulge in kind of a dangerous sort of fantasy.
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So that is one explanation. Like I said, I think they’re all kind of bound together. The second one also, I think makes a lot of makes a lot of help here. It says another explanation emphasizes personality and attachment. Some individuals may be drawn to relationships in which they feel uniquely capable of saving, rehabilitating, or understanding someone the rest of society has rejected.
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This rescuer dynamic can create a powerful sense of purpose or significance. Others may have insecure attachment styles, low self-esteem, or previous experiences with abusive relationships that influence the kinds of partners they pursue. It’s important to note, however, that these characteristics, and either necessary nor sufficient to explain a Bristol and many people with similar backgrounds never develop such attractions.
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So that’s the other one. I think that women have a fantasy like, you know, women have their fantasies, men have their fantasies, right? And men have a hard time understanding women’s fantasies because men aren’t women takes time to get into another person’s shoes or high heels, if you will. And women’s fantasy, you know, that’s why you think about not to go on a direction.
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But the thing about superhero movies, like female superhero movies, why do they fail now? A lot of them actually do. Well, there’s some that that don’t necessarily fail, but a lot of them really do fail because the superhero is a male power fantasy. That’s a male power fantasy. What is a man’s fantasy? The ability to punch your way out of any problem that if you face something, you can physically destroy it with your strength?
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That is, that’s a man’s fantasy. And so that’s why men like superhero movies, because that’s their power fantasy for when there were seven years old to punch their way out of any problem and beat up any guy who’s a problem to them, that’s not a woman’s fantasy. So if you make a female superhero movie where it’s just a woman in tights punching her way through problems, women don’t respond to that.
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That’s not their fantasy. What’s a woman’s fantasy? A woman’s fantasy is to be desired. A woman’s fantasy is to be desired by the most powerful men that are out there. So think about it. When I’ve talked about this before in episodes, what are books that that appeal to women for their fans? You think about Twilight, right? A vampire and a werewolf fight over just a regular little girl.
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Bella, right? Or a Hunger Games? Gail and Peter fighting over me like women want to be fought over. Men don’t want to be fought over. They want. There’s the girl I’m gonna fight and I’m going to get her. That’s a man’s fantasy. And a woman’s fantasy is. It’s just different in that respect. And so one of women’s fantasy is the idea, like, oh, I’m maternal, so I can take someone.
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It’s like beauty. That’s why beauty and the beast as a story speaks to women. Because this the idea as a woman, her fantasy is like, I can take this beast, I can rehabilitate, I can save him. That’s a good maternal desire to want to take someone who is rough around the edges, who has a lot of good buried under bad, get rid of the bad and the good comes out right.
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That’s a maternal desire, and it’s a good thing. And so when we can indulge in it, but it can be aimed in the absolute wrong direction. Another another explanation for her, though, by the way, is that serial killers and murderers, for some women, it activates a part of their brain. This goes back to the saving thing a little bit, but also fantasy that these men are like the ideal mates.
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So it seems like, well, what do women want, right? They want a strong man, right? They want a man who can protect them. If if a man can’t protect a woman, a woman’s not going to be. Why? Why do women like bad boys, right? Because, I mean, thousands of years of evolutionary predispositions is that women are relatively fragile, right?
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Most women, if a man goes to attack them, you know, they really can’t protect themselves. It’s sad and it’s scary. So for most women, how do you protect yourself? Well, you keep a man nearby you who is strong and can beat up the other guys. And if anyone comes near you. He’s going to make them pay. And so women are hardwired to look for that in men.
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It’s why women are attracted to men who are taller, have defined jaw lines, have muscular development, or have amassed power in other ways by their they have money, they have influence, they have things like this. They have the ability to protect. But that physical element is something that a man who would, if someone tried to kill me, he would just snap them in half.
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So a man who really has murdered people, who has, you know, broken the law, murdered people, is fearless in this way and has killed for a very, very small subset of women. It lights up something in their brain where it’s like, I want a man who who’s not afraid to kill. I want a man like that. And I’m not saying all women are.
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Nearly all women recognize this as nutty pants, by the way, but for a small subset, they’re attracted to that. And so they will then reach out to these men because they see the ideal is if I could get someone who is tough enough to murder, but I could make him better. So he’s a good person. Well, that’s the beauty and the beast fantasy right there.
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And so that’s where I think a lot of this comes together with, with the philia. So the article concludes saying, ultimately, Hebrews highlights the complexity of human attraction. No single theory fully explains why certain individuals become romantically involved with file and vendors. The motivations vary considerably from person to person. And then, oh, I forgot, I skipped past it apart here about the the media coverage.
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I guess that gets into the parasocial relationship that now there’s a lot more to cover related to people and you can develop that parasocial relationship. So that is now. And you learned a new word today, by the way, when you hear about, oh, you hear the person, they wrote those love letters, that guy in jail, you’re like, oh, hey, Ofelia strikes again.
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Now, you know, fascinating stuff into the human condition. I mean, honestly, we could do you could do a whole series. I could do a whole podcast just on paraphilias. So disordered attractions, Phileas and phobias, disordered fears. You go on Wikipedia. The list of Phileas and phobias goes on forever. You wouldn’t believe it. So. All right, well, thank you guys so much for listening.
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I hope you have a very blessed weekend.