As she sits in the living room of her neat terraced home, Rachael Ford knows what people will think of her.
"I know because I've thought the same things myself about Death Row wives. What possesses a woman to marry a man waiting to be executed?" And she says: "I'm no Death Row groupie. The last thing I imagined would happen when I started writing to Tony was that I would actually marry him.
"But as soon as I started reading about him, I knew we were so alike. I researched his case extensively before asking if there was anything I could do."
An articulate mother of one, Rachael doesn't fit in to the mad, sad or desperate category. And her petite frame belies a steely resolve which helps in the face of vilification from pro-death penalty campaigners in America.
Rachael's husband, Tony Egbuna Ford, a convicted murderer, is on Death Row in Texas, the state that executes more prisoners than any other in America.
For the past 13 years he has protested his innocence from a tiny cell furnished with a metal bunk and toilet. He is locked up for 23 hours a day.
Doreen Lioy also falls into the same category.
Her wish was also granted when she became the wife of Richard Ramirez, the night stalker who murdered 13 people in the late 1980's by raiding their homes at night.
After an 11-year courtship in which she wrote him 75 letters in prison, he accepted her proposal. He was attracted to her, one of her friends said on her wedding day, because she said she was a virgin.
"Satanists don't wear gold," he reportedly told her when they discussed wedding bands.
In fact, she isn't alone. 'Serial Killer Groupies' write letters of adoration daily to Death Row inmates from all over the world, some of them 20 handwritten pages long.
Richard Allen Davis, the man who kidnapped 12-year-old Polly Klaas from her Petaluma home in 1993 and killed her probably gets more mail than most.
Richard Ramirez has women virtually throwing themselves at him despite the fact he is already married.
Scott Peterson, the man who was convicted of murdering his wife and unborn child, had been on Death Row barely an hour when the first marriage proposal arrived from a woman who wants to be the new Mrs. Scott Peterson.
Three dozen phone calls came in to the warden's office on Peterson's first day at his new home in San Quentin State Prison -- women were pleading for his mailing address, and another smitten 18-year-old gave him his 2nd marriage prospoal.
