A Brief History of the Prison Bae
What is it about handsome criminals?
Samantha Spiegel was 19 years old when she started writing letters to some of America’s most notorious murderers. A pretty art student with corkscrew curls and porcelain skin, she wasn’t hard up for a date, yet Spiegel wrote to locked-up criminals like Charles Manson, the Unabomber, and “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez — a man who raped and murdered more than a dozen women.
“It’s not like I was in love with every murderer. I had standards,” she says today. “Scott Peterson is a douche. But when I saw Richard Ramirez dressed in all black, with his aviator shades—yeah, he was my type.”
Spiegel struck up a regular correspondence with Richard Allen Davis, who abducted and murdered 12-year-old Polly Klaas in 1993. Spiegel wrote Davis for four years and occasionally visited him at San Quentin, where he is sentenced to death. At one point in their relationship, she changed her name to Samantha Davis on Facebook. She tattooed words from love letters in his handwriting on her back. In 2010, Spiegel was the subject of an SF Weekly article detailing her fascination. The piece earned her infamy — she received hate mail and “lost a lot of friends” when the story came out. People were baffled: Why would a smart, beautiful young woman seek the companionship of a man who murdered a girl not…
