Empty Promises

black widow spider. Women kill for different reasons than men, and they employ dissimilar methods. There are really only two reasons why the vast majority of women kill: for love—very broadly defined to include passion, revenge on a faithless lover, jealousy, or a desire to clear away obstacles to an affair—or for money. The promise of riches tends to bring out wickedness in some women. Whether it be for love or money, women plan murder with far more care than do men. They seem to be able to delay gratification longer than their male counterparts. One might say that, even in homicide, women enjoy more foreplay than men.
    Perhaps all marital insurance policies should read, “And to my beloved wife, the proceeds of my life insurance … with the express exemption that this policy is null and void if she kills me.”

The Conjugal Visit
    The social science of penology has come a long, long way since prisons were hellholes unfit for any living thing. No rational person today would wish that another human being should serve out a sentence with torturous punishment, in cells that are filthy and dark, and yet questions remain as to just how comfortable and civilized is too comfortable and civilized for those who deserve to be locked up. There are three main reasons to lock someone behind bars: (1) to punish him or her for a crime; (2) to protect society from the criminal; (3) to rehabilitate her or him. In our enlightened era, there are prisons where convicts enjoy a lifestyle some free men might envy. Prisons now have gyms and libraries. Cells have bars, but they also have television sets and radios, and prisoners may hang whatever posters and “art” they like on the walls. A number of penal institutions provide quarters—often mobile homes—where married and engaged prisoners may enjoy conjugal relations with their wives and lovers.
    Keeping a prisoner in touch with his family isn’t necessarily bad, and it keeps a lot of paroled felons from returning to a life of crime when they are released. But there are cases where too much compassion for convicts ends in tragedy. A handsome prisoner named Carl Cletus Bowles played such a progressive system as if it were a fine old fiddle and he a fresh bow. Bowles serves as a sobering example of what can happen when concern for a prisoner’s sensitivities blinds authorities to potential danger. This consummate con man hood-winked some of the most experienced prison administrators in the country. A little luck, a disregarded warning, and a beautiful woman willing to throw away her life for him, and Bowles walked free of the bars meant to hold him for life. In retrospect, anyone who believed Bowles’s promises needed a refresher course in abnormal psychology.

C arl Cletus Bowles was born in Amarillo, Texas, in 1941. He was a wild boy and teenager who always walked just at the edge of the law, sometimes slipping over it. He wasn’t very tall, but he was handsome, with a full head of wavy blond hair and perfectly aligned features. Girls and women were always drawn to Carl, and he was a lusty young man. He began his serious criminal career at a young age. He was just past twenty when he served time in Colorado for larceny. Barely free from jail in Colorado, he was convicted for a larceny and breaking-and-entering rap in Oregon in the early 1960s. At the Oregon State Penitentiary, he formed an unlikely liaison with Norbert Tilford Waitts, a man six years his senior. Waitts was a native of Brunswick, Georgia, but his criminal activities had afforded him a tour of the inside of America’s jails. He had done time in New York State and was sentenced to prison for assault with a deadly weapon during a robbery of a motel in Tigard, Oregon.
    Neither Carl Cletus nor Norbert took well to the rehabilitation aspects of imprisonment; they merely bided their time until they could get out and make up for the lost years. Waitts got out first, on June 1, 1965. He waited impatiently for Bowles’s release four weeks later. It was Monday night, July 5, and wisps of leftover smoke from Sunday’s fireworks still floated in the air. The woman working the desk at the same Tigard motel Norbert Waitts had robbed before—which had landed him in prison—was startled to see a customer walk in so late. She thought to herself that he was one of the homeliest men she had ever seen in her life—bald with a long, dour horse face. His arms were covered with garish tattoos. He didn’t want a room, he