CRAZY IN LOVE
Written By: Danielle Sepulveres
Danielle Sepulveres takes Sorbet for a stroll along the fine line between love and omgiloveyousomuchimmakillsomeone!!!!!!
My earliest introduction to a real-life crime of passion was the breaking news in 1992 that a 17-year-old high school student named Amy Fisher had shot a woman named Mary Jo Buttafuoco in the head on the front porch of her home in Massapequa, New York.
Fisher, who would be dubbed ‘The Long Island Lolita’ by the press, had been having a torrid affair with Mary Jo’s husband Joey and had grown jealous enough to attempt murder in a bid to oust her love rival. Immediately the trio’s names and faces were everywhere, taking over the pre-social media news cycle, and like any crime of passion, spawning myriad soapbox preaching depending on whose side you decided to take. Ultimately, the tabloid takeaways were that married men can’t be trusted, young girls are promiscuous and married women are weak, because Mary Jo didn’t leave Joey until 2003.
This is what we call the dark side of love. A force so potent and all-consuming, it fuelled Fisher’s obsession for her duplicitous, manipulative paramour; while Joey had so twisted Mary Jo’s version of love that she said of him: “I believed him when he said he had nothing to do with [Fisher].”
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The recent Netflix documentary Till Murder Do Us Part: Soering vs. Haysom, explores a case from the mid ‘80s in which two college students, Jens Soering and Elizabeth Haysom were tried and convicted for the brutal murder of Haysom’s parents, Derek and Nancy, who were found stabbed to death at their Virginia home. When asked on the stand why her parents were dead, Haysom replied: “Because Jens and I were obsessed with each other.”
Haysom’s admission rings eerily close to the headline- making case of Gypsy-Rose Blanchard and her boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn. A lifelong victim of her mother Dee Dee Blanchard’s Munchausen by proxy, Gypsy-Rose found refuge in an online relationship with Godejohn, revealing to him the depth and years of abuse she had suffered at the hands of her mother.
On June 10, 2015, Godejohn, allegedly aided by Blanchard, stabbed Dee Dee 17 times in the back while she slept. Godejohn’s attorney Dewayne Perry told the court: “Nick was so in love with her and so obsessed with her that he would do anything,” and Godejohn himself would later admit: “I was blindly in love. That was always very much the case.”Blanchard pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, serving eight years of her 10-year sentence, while Godejohn was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
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“What is the craziest thing you’ll do for love?” is a fun dinner party question or a first – no, better make that third – date interrogation. Personally, I’ve been in love three times in my life and I haven’t killed for any of them (and none of them have asked me to). But I know I’ve done things that felt crazy. Driving to his place in the middle of the night simply because he asked me to. Considered a 17-hour flight with three connections to see someone for barely two days even though I’m terrified of flying. And once – jokingly! – declaring that I would lie down in traffic for one guy, to which he replied that he would dive in front of a tractor trailer for me. The truth is that love can make the crazy, the outlandish, the absolutely batsh*t insane feel reasonable, and it’s a line in the sand that can be drawn in different places, and with different sized sticks, depending on who you’re talking to.
Studies have shown that romantic love is simply a hormonal-driven drive to fulfil a basic need. All of which makes it seem possible that relationships in which a violent act is committed could be steeped in a desperation to cling to that basic feeling of needs being met. Society has always been fascinated by couples that kill together, fictional or not; justified or not. And mad, bad, dangerous love is the fine line between whether or not you appreciate that Mickey and Mallory aren’t real.
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