There’s a French term, folie à deux, which literally means “madness of two.” It refers to a psychiatric disorder where two patients share the same delusion, cultivating it together and transmitting it back and forth between each other. A husband and wife might grow to both believe, for example, that the federal government is bugging their home, or a mother and daughter might come down with the same psychosomatic symptoms and blame them on the same nonexistent illness. There is no comparable term for an evilness of two, wherein two people jointly decide to commit crimes. But it happens.
How else to explain Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, for example, who became known as the Ken and Barbie killers because of their clean-cut good looks and preppie clothing? In the early 1990s, they together raped and murdered three girls in the Canadian province of Ontario. The victims included Karla’s fifteen-year-old sister, whose drugged assault the couple filmed and later re-created in a different home movie. Karla, in the re-creation, play-acted the role of the deceased teenager as she and Paul had sex on her sister’s bed.
How else to explain Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two brilliant young friends and occasional lovers who, in the shadow of Chicago’s 1924 jazz obsession and under the thrall of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, decided that they were living examples of Nietzsche’s “supermen,” superior beings unbound by the pedestrian rules that governed the rest of humanity? After conspiring on a few burglaries, they came up with the idea to put their intelligence to the test with an intellectual challenge: committing the perfect murder. They chose their fourteen-year-old victim at random—he was a cousin of Loeb’s but no personal offense was intended, they insisted—stopping him on his way home from school and bludgeoning him to death before they’d driven more than two blocks.
Romantic partners have staged kidnappings, holding prisoners in their basements and garages. They have robbed banks and stolen cars. They have forged $45 million worth of art, in the case of Wolfgang and Helene Beltracchi, who conspired to reproduce the works of more than fifty artists before being captured in 2011.
The public is fascinated by these couples, these incidences of crazy love put prominently on display, these people who had found quite literal ways to answer the quintessential romantic thought experiment, “Do you love me enough to do something mad? To die for me? To kill for me?” Hollywood has made not one but seven movies inspired by Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, teenage lovers—Caril Ann was only fourteen in 1958 at the time of their crimes—who, after killing Caril’s disapproving family, then embarked on a two-monthlong murder spree that left a total of eleven people dead. A Caril Ann-based character was played by Sissy Spacek in 1973 (Badlands), then Juliette Lewis in 1993 (Kalifornia), then Juliette Lewis again in 1994 (Natural Born Killers). Badlands, the most critically successful of the filmed versions, was heralded a masterpiece of its time: “A cool, sometimes brilliant, always ferociously American film,” wrote the chief film critic for the New York Times. “Sheen and Miss Spacek are splendid as the self-absorbed, cruel, possibly psychotic children of our time.”
The psychologists who study criminal couples have discovered that the partnerships are rarely equal ones. The crimes are usually spurred on by one dominant partner: one half of the couple has the fantasy, and he or she works to bring their paramour into that fantasy world. “There’s radar, gaydar, and maybe, mur-dar,” criminal psychologist Gregg McCrary told a reporter in Psychology Today, in a story about how otherwise law-abiding individuals can together become criminals. “It resembles the phenomenon wherein normal people meet and decide that they’re going to get along,” he continued. “But with these couples, it takes a dark turn. They vector in on each other, sensing the excitement of a kindred spirit. It becomes electric.”
Bonnie Parker was reportedly a sweet-tempered waitress before she met Clyde. She’d married another local boy before she even turned sixteen, but the relationship was abusive and ended after a few years. By the time she met Clyde, she was thirsty for love and excitement. “I never did want to love you and I didn’t even try,” she wrote in a letter to him during one of the stints he was in prison during their courtship. “You just made me. Now I don’t know what to do.”
Their love was dysfunctional, and ill-advised, and a hundred other bad things—but it was also passionate and abiding. Long before she and Clyde were ambushed in Louisiana by police who had been tipped off to their location, Bonnie had decided that she would never leave Clyde, she would never turn on him, and that she didn’t even want to live in a world without him. “Someday they’ll go down together,” she wrote in another poem. “And they’ll bury them side by side. / To a few it’ll be grief, to the law a relief—but it’s death for Bonnie and Clyde.” And it was indeed death. The Louisianans who lived near the scene of the shoot-out were allegedly so enamored by the end of the Bonnie and Clyde love story that they sneaked over to the bodies when the police were otherwise occupied and cut off locks of Bonnie’s hair.
Not all criminal romances end so poetically. When Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo were arrested in 1993—forensic evidence linked Paul to the scene of one of the murders—Karla immediately turned on her husband. She told police officers that she had been Paul’s victim as well, battered and abused throughout their marriage, and that she’d only gone along with the rapes and killings because she feared for her own life. Paul, on the other hand, told law enforcement that while the rapes had been his idea (he’d assaulted more than a dozen women before ever meeting Karla, earning the moniker, “The Scarborough Rapist”), he’d never murdered any of the previous women he’d raped, and he wouldn’t have killed the three he and Karla attacked, either. Killing those girls was Karla’s idea; she was afraid the victims would later be able to identify them. Ultimately, prosecutors decided that Karla’s testimony was more important than his and they wouldn’t be able to get a conviction without her serving as a witness. While Paul received a life sentence in prison, Karla received only twelve years and was released in 2005, remarrying and having three children. Her biographer, Stephen Williams, later called this plea agreement “The pact with the devil.”