Married to Murder: The Bizarre and True Accounts of People Who Married Murderers (7 page)

In addition to sculpture, Boyle was also a very successful author. Disney reportedly bought the film rights for one his novels:
Hero of the Underworld.
Boyle’s second memoir,
Pain of Confinement: Prison Diaries,
was made into the French movie
The Anger and Dreams of the Condemned.
If that wasn’t enough, Boyle co-wrote a play called
The Handman,
which was produced for the stage.

Boyle was so colorful that he even inspired the main character in the 1999 British gangster movie,
The Debt Collector.
The movie chronicles the life of Nick Dryden (played by Billy Connolly), a Glasgow mob enforcer turned celebrity artist, who is being tormented by small time gangsters. Like the real life Boyle, Dryden was married to a celebrity and part of high society. In the movie, Dryden loses everything when he ends up murdering a former mob associate.

Jimmy Boyle’s life wasn’t as tragic as that of his movie alter ego. His marriage to Sarah Trevelyan ended in 2001, 21 years after it began. The two divorced and went their separate ways.

Boyle still had good things to say about Sarah. He told
The Herald
newspaper that she taught him how to love. He also called her a fantastic mother to his children.

Jimmy Boyle now divides his time between Morocco and France. His 10,000 square foot home in Marrakesh, Morocco, was so luxurious that it was featured in
The New York Times
in 2007. Boyle shares the home, which has a swimming pool, with his second wife, actress Kate Fenwick. Boyle reportedly married Fenwick in 2007. The house bears an eerie resemble to the homes where retired mobsters reside in British gangster movies.

Sarah Trevelyan is still living in Glasgow; unlike her ex-husband, her life has been low key since her divorce. She’s stayed out of the media, which is difficult in a tabloid-obsessed country such as Great Britain.

BBC News. "Jimmy Boyle's Life Less Ordinary." 27 August 1999.
news.bbc.co.unk/2.
Online News Article. 29 January 2013.

Sherwood, Seth. "In Marakesh, Homes Among the Palm Groves." 21 October 2007.
nytimes.com.
Newspaper Article. 29 January 2013.

The Herald . ""She taught me how to love, she absolutely taught me how to love' Jimmy Boyle faces life after marriage." 2 June 2001.
heraldsctoland.com.
Newspaper Article. 29 January 2013.

The Herald. "Married with the world looking on EVENT JIMMY BOYLE'S WEDDING." 15 January 2005.
heraldscotland.com.
Newspaper Article. 29 January 2013.

The Scotsman. "Jimmy and Sarah Boyle Split after 20 years." 23 January 2001.
highbeam.com.
Newspaper Article. 29 January 2013.

Wikipedia. "Jimmy Boyle (artist)." n.d.
en.wikipedia.org.
Online Encyclopedia Entry. 29 January 2013.

—. "John Trevelyan (censor)." n.d.
en.wikipedia.org.
Online Encyclopedia Entry. 29 January 2013.

Wikipedia. "The Debt Collector." n.d.
en.wikipedia.org.
Online Encyclopedia Entry. 29 January 2013.

Even a professional woman with a good job and children can feel the allure of a serial killer. Christine Kizuka, a mother of three, who worked as a supervisor in the state of California’s Employment Development office in Los Angeles married Angelo Buono Jr. at the famous Folsom prison in February 1987.

Buono
was one half of one of the most sadistic duos of serial killers ever to terrorize an American city. He and his cousin, Kenneth Bianchi, were the notorious Hillside Stranglers that kidnapped, raped, and murdered ten women between October 1977 and January 1978. They were called the Hillside Stranglers because they dumped the bodies in the Hillside neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Buono
was hardly much of a catch for Kizuka; at the time of his marriage, he was a small time hustler, car thief, rapist, and pimp turned serial killer. He also had a series of failed marriages on his record. Among the crimes on Buono’s rap sheet was failure to pay child support. Of course, by the time of his marriage to Kizuka, he would not have been able to save much support out of his cigarette money.

That didn’t stop
Kizuka from seeking the monster out and marrying him. Nor was he much of a genius; some media accounts indicate that Buono and Bianchi’s reign of terror began as a botched attempt to force women into prostitution. They took women hostage and ended up killing the women when they wouldn’t go along with the scheme.

Anthony
Buono had already attracted a lot of attention by the time he married Kizuka. He had been involved in one of the longest murder trials in American history. The case took so long because prosecutors had actually found it hard to convict Buono because two people were involved in the crimes.

Bianchi didn’t make their job any easier with some bizarre attempts to beat the rap. Among other things, Bianchi talked a serial killer groupie named Veronica Lynn Compton into trying to commit another Hillside Strangler crime in order to misdirect jurors. Instead of committing murder, Compton got herself arrested for attempted murder and went from prison groupie to prisoner.

The trial lasted two full years, from 1981 to 1983, and evidence was so circumstantial that prosecutors were only able to convict Buono with Bianchi’s testimony. Bianchi had committed two other murders in Washington State after breaking up his partnership with Buono.

The jury eventually convicted
Buono of nine of the ten murders he had been charged with. Bianchi pled guilty to the five other Hillside Strangler killings. In an interesting coincidence, the jury found Buono guilty on Halloween (Oct. 31) in 1983.

The most bothersome thing about Angelo
Buono might be that he was simply a dupe who was used by his smarter and more charming cousin. Testimony at the trial indicated that Buono drove the car while Bianchi committed the crimes. The crimes themselves didn’t begin until Bianchi moved to LA and moved in with Buono, who was running an upholstery shop.

There is a strong possibility that Bianchi talked
Buono into going along on his killing spree in much the same way he talked Compton into attempting murder. Bianchi is a charming and handsome individual who was something of a conman. Buono was a small time loser who didn’t commit a major crime until Bianchi came into his life.

So it is hard to see what
Kizuka saw in him. At the time of their marriage, Buono was a fifty–two-year-old former upholsterer and petty criminal. He was also serving nine life sentences in the California State prison system. Pictures of Kizuka revealed her to be an attractive woman with long blonde hair.

Kizuka
apparently met Buono in 1983 when her first husband was serving time for assault with a deadly weapon in the cell next to his. In other words, she met her violent convict new husband through her convict ex-husband.

Little is known about Christine
Kizuka’s personal life, but it is doubtful her marriage was ever consummated. In 1987 prison officials assured
The Los Angeles Times
that Buono would never be allowed a conjugal (sex) visit with his wife. Buono was found dead in his prison cell in 2001. He died of an apparent heart attack; he was 67 years old.

The story of Christine
Kizuka and Angelo Buono Jr. is a bizarre one. It is made even more bizarre by the fact that Kenneth Bianchi was able to consummate his marriage to Shirlee Book in a Washington State prison.

Death row seems like a strange place to find a spouse, but not to Doreen Lioy. She not only found a husband there; she married the most notorious butcher on California’s death row, Richard Ramirez, the notorious Night Stalker. Ramirez was the Satanist who terrorized Los Angeles and San Francisco in 1984 and 1985. During his reign of terror, Ramirez is believed to have killed more than 13 people.

If there is a profile for serial killer groupies – poor and uneducated – Doreen
Lioy certainly doesn’t fit it. Lioy is a professional journalist and freelance magazine editor with a bachelor’s degree in English. She is also five years older than Ramirez; she was 41 at the time of their wedding at San Quentin Prison in 1996.

Richard Ramirez seems to be
Lioy’s polar opposite. He is the uneducated son of a railroad laborer from El Paso, Texas. The motives for Ramirez’s rampage are not known, but some experts think the young man might have been imitating his cousin Mike Ramirez, who claimed to be a Special Forces veteran that had openly boasted of atrocities he had committed during the Vietnam War. Mike even showed his cousin and admirer pictures of severed heads of Vietnamese women he claimed to have killed.

Mike Ramirez’s grisly war stories might or might not be true, but 13-year-old Richard Ramirez was present when Mike shot and killed his wife. Some accounts indicate blood spattered on Richard Ramirez’s shirt during the murder.

The Night Stalker crimes began after Ramirez moved to Los Angeles. Unlike most serial killers, Ramirez used a variety of methods of killing. He sometimes shot his victims, beat them with a hammer, and stabbed to death. Ramirez often raped his female victims, and sometimes forced them to perform oral sex on him. Another difference was that Ramirez was an equal opportunity killer who targeted victims of all ages, races, and colors, although he did seem to signal out Asian victims for his butchery. Ramirez murdered 83-year-old women and 9-year-old girls. Ramirez had one thing in common with most serial killers – he robbed his victims after murdering them.

The most frightening thing about Richard Ramirez was that he killed most of his victims in their own homes. His usual modus operandi was to simply walk into a home and start killing or raping. Ramirez’s original names in the media were the Walk-in Killer and The Valley Intruder. The name Night Stalker came later and its origins are hard to fathom. The most likely source is a popular 1970s TV show called
Kolchak the Night Stalker
. The show had nothing to do with serial killers; instead, it revolved around a badly dressed reporter played by Darren McGavin who chased werewolves, Satanists, space aliens, and other ‘B’ movie monsters.

Richard Ramirez was not caught by clever police work, but by an angry mob of East Los Angeles residents that had seen his picture on TV. The mob chased the Night Stalker down and beat him to a pulp. At the end of his reign of terror, the fearsome Night Stalker had to be rescued from the people he had preyed upon by the police. Cops on scene believe that Ramirez might have been lynched if they hadn’t arrived in time.

Richard Ramirez first caught Doreen Lioy’s eye when he was arrested in 1985 and identified as the Night Stalker. She actively pursued Ramirez for 12 years, visiting him in prison and sending him as many as 75 letters.

The frightening thing is Doreen
Lioy was not the only woman trying to land Richard Ramirez. Press reports indicate that several other women were visiting Ramirez, and one of them threatened Doreen with violence if she didn’t break off her pursuit.

Most reports indicate that Ramirez proposed to
Lioy shortly before his trial began in 1988. The marriage had to be delayed because of prison rules for death row inmates. For various reasons, the delay lasted eight years until 1996.

During the ceremony, Ramirez refused to wear a gold ring – he explained that Satanists refuse to wear gold. Strangely enough, Ramirez made his teenaged niece, who was attending the ceremony, pull down her skirt because other inmates were looking at her.

It isn’t known exactly why Ramirez married Doreen Lioy; most likely, he believed her claims of being a virgin. Ramirez comes from a culture in which men are only supposed to marry virgins. Since no conjugal visits are allowed on death row, it is highly unlikely that Richard Ramirez will ever find out if Lioy is lying or not.

Richard Ramirez is still on California’s death row at the historic San Quentin Penitentiary north of San Francisco. He is still awaiting execution on the 13 counts of murder he was convicted of in 1989. Ramirez has now spent most of his adult life on death row, and he’s been on death row so long that the method of execution has changed to lethal execution from the gas chamber.

For her part, Doreen Lioy claims to believe that her husband is innocent. She also claims to be proud of her man. It’s likely she’ll be there when Ramirez is finally executed by lethal injection.