Why some women are drawn to serial killers like Paul Bernardo

I suppose we should no longer be shocked that even the most repulsive members of our society attract people looking for a romantic connection.

Still, it was hard not to shudder Thursday when the Toronto Sun reported serial killer Paul Bernardo had apparently conned a young London, Ont., woman into making marriage plans.

The 30-year-old university graduate would not confirm the nuptials but admitted to the Sun she had been writing him, has a tattoo reading "Paul's Girl" on her ankle and reportedly told friends she's bought wedding bands. She also thinks Bernardo is innocent of raping, torturing and murdering teenagers Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy in the early 1990s.

Guess no one told her Bernardo and his then-wife and accomplice Karla Homolka recorded their crimes on video.

Killer groupies are nothing new. There's apparently even a name for it: Hybristophilia, the attraction to people who've committed horrible crimes.

The Fox network took it to the extreme with the TV series The Following, about a charming serial killer who builds a secretive cult that breaks him out of prison and kills at his command.

But just what kind of woman believes she can make a deep emotional connection with someone like Bernardo, a cold-blooded sociopath suspected of a string of rapes before sexually assaulting his wife's own sister, Tammy, after he and Karla drugged her? She would die from the animal tranquilizers they slipped her.

“It’s like the bad boy phenomenon on steroids," Scott Bonn, a New York-based criminologist and author, told Yahoo Canada News.

"The serial killer represents the extreme bad boy and I can fix him. I’m the one who has the ability to connect and reform him because at some level he’s redeemable. A variation of that is he may, be he's a bad boy but he’s my bad boy.”

Bernardo's purported "fiancee" told the Sun "he is a kind man, a Christian, a very nice man."

Bonn, whose book Why We Love Serial Killers is due to be published this fall, also said some women, like all murder groupies, are fascinated by the crimes themselves.

"They then become vicariously involved and learn things that no one else knows," he said. "That makes them feel special.”

[ Related: Notorious killer Paul Bernardo reportedly set to marry Ontario woman ]

They bask in the reflected notoriety of their captive mates. In a way they're like celebrity stalkers, only the targets of their affection are quite happy to receive it.

“You never have to worry about where he is because he’s on death row or in solitary confinement," said Bonn. "He may be a bad boy but he’s not going anywhere.”

Rarely are they interested in committing such crimes themselves, he said, but they like the thrill of proximity to danger.

“I think it has more to do with getting close to the flame and not getting burned, the excitement of the dark side of murder and mayhem, but just not getting close enough that you’re getting hurt yourself.”

Many of us, maybe most, are fascinated by crime, the more gruesome, the better. Where we mostly limit our interest to watching Criminal Minds, killer groupies are nearer the far end of the continuum, somewhere past the "murderabilia" collectors.

“I think it has more to do with getting close to the flame and not getting burned, the excitement of the dark side of murder and mayhem, but just not getting close enough that you’re getting hurt yourself," said Bonn.

It's not necessarily a psychological flaw, he said.

"I would call it a compulsion," said Bonn. "If it comes to dominate your life it probably is a problem. Some women do step over.”

On that Neil Boyd disagrees. The thing these women tend to have in common is a troubled psychological history, said Boyd, director of the Simon Fraser University's School of Criminology and the author of two books on murder and male violence.

“Most of the women who have expressed interest in people like Bernardo, these are people who have a lot of emotional difficulty as well," Boyd told Yahoo Canada News. "They’re attracted to the notoriety but they’re almost inevitably pretty dysfunctional people.”

The father of the woman carrying the torch for Bernardo described her to the Sun as brilliant but psychologically and emotionally fragile.

[ Related: Facebook ‘fans’ drawn to accused killer Luka Magnotta ]

These relationships almost never last, both experts agree. Some women lose interest and move on. After a while, perhaps, their fantasy of redeeming their imprisoned love evaporates.

“It’s almost impossible to conceive how a relationship like that would work," said Boyd. "He’s going to be in jail for the rest of his life.”

It's not always the case, though, Bonn noted. Richard Ramirez, the "Night Stalker" who terrorized southern California in the 1980s before being caught and sentenced to death for 13 murders, married one of his romantic correspondents in 1996.

Doreen Ramirez told reporters she would commit suicide when her husband was finally put to death. But he died of liver failure last year.

“So his wife was let off the hook because he wasn’t executed," said Bonn.

"But you know what she does now? She authenticates his murderabilia. So if you by an item of Richard’s, it comes with a letter from her that this was in fact owned by Richard and she gets a percentage of the sales as a result.”