The suspect has served 19 years of a life sentence for raping and killing a child. He worked in the library in the prison in the western German town of Remscheid and had been due for a parole hearing next month.

The chief executive of the prison Katja Grafner said his girlfriend, 46, had been allowed intimate visits with the prisoner in a secluded apartment inside the jail since 2006.

But after unlocking the apartment on Sunday afternoon, wardens found the prisoner's girlfriend stabbed to death with knives and a device used to bind books. The convict, 50, had attempted suicide and was found with one of his wrists slashed.

The convicted rapist and murderer and the woman, a single mother, had been a couple for five years.

Control and power

Women falling in love with convicts is not a rare phenomenon: It's all about control and power, according to German psychologist and media expert Christian Luedke.

"Women who fall in love with dangerous criminals are more often than not suffering from depression," Luedke told Deutsche Welle. He said that for some women, it was easier to have a relationship with a dangerous criminal than to deal with their own fate.

"It's the fascination with the heinous side of human nature," Luedke said. Often, they are full or anger and aggression themselves. They fall in love with men who symbolize what the women themselves can't act on.

To a certain extent, these women believe they can turn the criminal into a better human being, but in the end "it is the women who need the relationship, they are giving the convict what they themselves have lacked most in life: time, affection, love and devotion," Luedke said.

Doomed to failure

He also noted that such relationships tend only work for as long as the partner is in jail. "As soon as he is out, the relationship faces the same problems the women had before, making a break-up inevitable."

This, of course, is assuming that the relationship makes it that far.

Such conjugal visits in German jails are unsupervised because they are are meant to help prisoners preserve intimate bonds with loved ones on the outside. But prisoners are supposed to be searched before entering the secluded apartment. There are conflicting reports on whether this happened in the Remscheid case.

Author: Dagmar Breitenbach
Editor: Chuck Penfold