Pondering her own fascination with bad men of history, author Laura Elizabeth Woollett began to write stories about the women who were attached to them in real life

Entombed in my turquoise and lilac bedroom as a teenager growing up in Australia, I listened over and over to Suffer Little Children by the Smiths, featuring Morrissey’s downbeat crooning about the moors:

Over the moor, take me to the moor

Dig a shallow grave

And I’ll lay me down.

I didn’t know what a moor was, but I liked the song enough to look it up. That lead me to Myra Hindley and Ian Brady – the Moors murderers. From the comfort of my flower-sprigged duvet, I read about Hindley, the 18-year-old secretary who fell for Brady, a tall, sullen 23-year-old stock clerk. How he was rude to her for an entire year before asking her out. How they had sex on their first date, in the front room of the Manchester terraced house where Hindley lived with her grandmother. How Hindley changed her appearance for him, dyed her hair blitzkrieg blond and dressed in go-go boots and miniskirts. How he gave her books to read, including Crime and Punishment, and they spent hours discussing “the perfect murder”, how to succeed where Raskolnikov failed. How she hopped on the back of his motorcycle and went to the wilds beyond town, those moors where they’d later kill and bury four children.

I’d be more embarrassed to admit to being fascinated with relationships like Hindley and Brady’s if I didn’t suspect the reason is quite banal. And the appeal is probably more widespread than we would like to admit – especially those of us who consider ourselves feminists.

From a young age, I was fascinated by men who appeared bad – strange, pale musicians like Ian Curtis, Nick Cave and Morrissey; clever Dr Lecter in the Hannibal novels; bad boy Kane Phillips in Aussie soap Home and Away – who seemed to my 14-year-old self positively Byronic (despite being a rapist). But while I may have been drawn to bad men in my imagination, in reality, they repelled me. So why are so many of us drawn to stories of faceless men who prowl roadsides with murder on their minds? And how do women like me reconcile it with the tenderness and empathy we desire for our own relationships, and those of our friends?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An undated photograph of Hindley taken by fellow killer Brady on the moors. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Most people have heard of “serial-killer groupies”; women who write love letters to convicted criminals, even marry them and bear them children – not to mention women like Hindley, who not only love their men in spite of their crimes, but aid and abet them. Even fewer people would have heard the term for this phenomenon: hybristophilia, which derives from a Greek word meaning “to commit an outrage against somebody”. While not all women in relationships with convicted criminals are attracted to their outrageous acts, for those with hybristophilia, such outrages are a drawing card.

Numerous efforts have been made to explain hybristophilia. Some posit that attraction to violent men has an evolutionary basis, with such men presenting an extreme version of the alpha-male archetype. Others put it down to an evangelical impulse, with criminal men representing the ultimate fixer-upper, to be saved or redeemed by the love of a good woman. Others point to the vicarious thrill of being with a man who acts out the violent impulses many women harbour, yet do not express due to physical limitations or conditioning. Even the theory that hybristophilia is a form of commitment-phobia has been postulated: by choosing a man who is emotionally or – physically unavailable (in prison), there is less pressure to move beyond infatuation.

Long after I had fallen in love with a very good man – who has not asked me to commit any crimes – my fascination with bad men did not end. It was partly this fascination that made me question my relationship, four years in. Was a good man really what I wanted? In the absence of sexy criminals pitching stones at my window, or charismatic leaders asking me to follow them, I had to look for answers.

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This was when the idea for my short-story collection, The Love of a Bad Man, came to me: the stories of real-life bad men – Adolf Hitler, Reverend Jim Jones, Charles Manson and more – as seen from the eyes of the women around them.

While researching, I collected images: glazed-eyed mugshots, grainy crime-scene traces, unsuspecting children who’d grow up to do great evil. I watched footage: Hitler at his residence Berghof, smiling at children and dogs; Brian David Mitchell in FBI custody, belting out hymns; David Birnie, blowing a kiss to reporters outside court. I listened to recordings: Manson singing folk rock; Jones convincing 900 followers to commit “revolutionary suicide” at Jonestown. My desk looked like a combination of a detective’s crazy wall and a teenage girl’s diary. Above it, I tacked pictures of Hindley and Brady frolicking on Saddleworth Moor; Karla Homolka marrying Paul Bernardo, weeks after they murdered and dismembered a schoolgirl together; Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez under the headline “Heart Killers Die Calmly, Martha Last”.

My short stories are fragments of the lives of these men and women, key moments that revealed something about their motivation. These were much easier to identify for women such as Hindley and Hitler’s wife Eva Braun, who’ve been painstakingly researched in countless books. For other, lesser-known figures – such as Veronica Lynn Compton, who attempted to copycat the Hillside Strangler Kenneth Bianchi in a gesture of her obsession for him – the way in was harder to identify.

Why do women love such bad men? Even after writing a whole book about it, I find it hard to pin down an answer. In so many of the cases in my book, it is apparent that the woman was not necessarily attracted to the evil, but rather the small instances of goodness: intense attention, presents, conversation. Most of them likely wouldn’t have committed their crimes if they weren’t involved with these men (on the flipside, many of these men might have done less damage without the women supporting them).

I always looked for similarities between the women, searching for an easy explanation for their choices, but what struck me were their differences. Outgoing and mousy. Worldly and naive. Popular and friendless. Angry and gentle. Godless and pious. They were nurses, secretaries, students, housewives, playwrights. Indeed, the only obvious commonality was that they all wanted love – a trait hard to define, but one that defines all of us. It is hard, after reading these cases, not to wonder: “Could that have been me, if the right bad man came along?”