Mass murderer Charles Manson, 80, has been issued a marriage license to wed a woman more than fifty years his junior. WSJ’s Mark Kelly reports.

THESE women were married to true monsters, some for decades, but did they really have no idea about their lovers’ murderous rampages?

MARY ELIZABETH HARRIMAN

IN 19 years of marriage, not a day passed that Mary Harriman didn’t consider herself blessed to have found a man like Russell Williams.

British-born Williams was a well-respected colonel in the Canadian Armed Forces and she loved him very much.

Williams was also a sadistic cross-dressing, knicker-stealing, home-invading rapist and murderer. It’s possible that Mary knew about and perhaps even admired these evil traits.

The couple owned two houses and both were filled with trophies from his crimes — the most conspicuous being dozens of lingerie pieces he’d stolen from his victims. Police later found 48 pairs of women’s underwear stuffed into plastic bags and boxes along with sex toys, stashed in the attic and basement.

As if this wasn't enough to make a wife suspicious, Williams kept military-style records of his crimes, including newspaper clippings, video clips of news reports and photographs of his victims.

In 2010, Williams pleaded guilty to 88 charges, including multiple rapes, break-ins and the murders of two women, although it’s suspected he killed more.

Considering how much evidence Williams left in plain sight around the couple’s properties, many found it hard to believe Mary didn’t have an inkling that her husband was up to something.

Last year, her possible complicity in his crimes was raised in court for the first time when a woman who was held captive at knifepoint in her own home by Williams just weeks before his first kill won the right to pursue legal action against her.

Laurie Massicotte’s statement of claim alleges Mary was “aware” of her husband’s “illicit conduct” but “did not report that illicit conduct to the police.”

Superior Court Justice Martin James ruled that Ms Massicotte be allowed to explore the possibility that Williams’s wife knew about his sadistic double life yet chose to remain silent. “While the suggestion that Ms Harriman was aware of Williams’s conduct may seem outrageous and far-fetched, the plaintiffs are entitled to endeavour to prove these allegations as a basis for an award of punitive damages,” Justice James wrote.

The case continues.

LINDA YATES

Linda Yates spent 26 years married to Robert Lee Yates jnr, a serial killer from Spokane, Washington, who murdered at least 16 people over two decades.

Yates preyed on prostitutes working on Spokane’s “Skid Row”, killing the majority of his victims between 1996 and 1998.

He later confessed to committing two other murders in Walla Walla in 1975 and another in Skagit County in 1988.

Many of his victims’ relatives found it hard to believe that Linda knew nothing of her husband’s crime, particularly during that intense two-year period in the 1990s when he killed at least 13 women.

But investigators say Yates kept his wife in the dark by exerting dominance over her; refusing to let her wear make up or tight clothing and convincing her she was incapable of making any decisions without him.

As is the case with many abused wives of control freaks, Linda blamed herself when things went wrong, telling a Washington newspaper reporter: “I didn’t love him like a wife should,” during an interview after her husband’s arrest.

However, there were a few notable incidents that took place that would have set alarms bells off for even the most submissive of partners.

Like the time Linda noticed a blood-soaked seat in the back of the family van and accepted without question Yates’ explanation that he’d accidentally hit a dog and then taken it to the vet.

He’d arrive home late from work covered in dirt, sweating heavily and reeking of an odd smell. Conversely, he’s slather himself with aftershave prior to going on hunting trips at weekends. He’d also racked up thousands of dollars in bills at a local motel called Al’s Hot Tubs yet she accepted his explanation that he went there to “relax his muscles” after work. She assumed he was cheating on her. In fact, he was using the motel room as a kill pad.

The penny didn’t drop for Linda until police rang her to inform her they’d found a body buried in the couple’s backyard — right under the window of a bedroom she’d been sleeping in for the past two years.

Yates is currently on death row at Washington State Penitentiary following his conviction of 13 murders in 2002

JUDITH MAWSON

Nobody was more shocked when Gary Ridgway was unmasked as the Green River Killer than his third wife, Judith Mawson.

She simply could not believe that the man “who made me smile every day” was America’s most prolific serial killer.

Ridgway was convicted of 49 murders, although investigators strong suspect he killed more than 70 (Ridgway himself admitted to having lost count), all of them prostitutes and/or runaways in the Seattle and Tacoma, Washington areas during the 1980s and 1990s.

Judith fell in love with Ridgway in 1985, smack bang in the middle of his murderous spree after meeting him in a Seattle bar, later describing him as the perfect suitor: “handsome and polite with a good job”. She said he “treated her like a lady”.

Once married, Judith said they had a completely ordinary life and claimed they were “very affectionate towards each other”.

She was a stay-at-home-wife, he worked regular hours and on weekends they’d go camping or hold garage sales — both being mutual hobbies.

On the rare occasions Ridgeway left the house early or arrived home late, he always had work related excuses. Judith would later recount an incident that seemed innocuous at the time but became chilling in retrospect.

She had visited his house for the first time and commented on the fact that he had no carpet and slept on a mattress and boxsprings laid on the bare floor.

Ridgway explained the carpet had been destroyed by the previous tenants and claimed an ex-girlfriend had taken the bed frame back. Later Judith learned the truth: he’d removed the carpet and bed because they’d been covered in the bloodstains of multiple victims.

After Ridgway finally confessed to 49 murders — two years after his arrest and repeatedly insisting they’d collared the wrong man — Judith spiralled into depression and began drinking heavily.

But she eventually recovered, changed her name and wrote a book called Green River Serial Killer: Biography of an Unsuspecting Wife. It came out in 2007 and was a bestseller.

out in 2007 and though it helped her recover, she said she will never forgive her husband.

“Telling my story, getting all the poison out of me helped me to heal. But how do you forgive someone who is suspected of killing 70 women?” Mawson said when the book was published.

She said she sought comfort in the knowledge that while the pair were married, Ridgway’s “kill rate” dropped and believes her love for him saved lives.

FAYINA CHIKATILO

FAYINA was married to Russian cannibal serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, a man who gave this journalist nightmares as a child thanks to creepy TV coverage of his trial, where he would be pictured sitting not in the dock but inside a cage, Hannibal Lector-style.

During the thirty years they were married, it’s estimated Chikatilo killed, raped, murdered and snacked on as many as 100 people, including many young children. However, authorities were only able to find evidence to link him to 53 deaths. He was sentenced to death in 1992 and executed two years later.

At the time, Chikatilo was considered the worst serial killer in modern history and he’s probably still up there on the scoreboard.

As with other the wives of other killers with enormous body counts, it beggars belief that Fayina didn’t suspect that her husband was a murderous maniac.

In fact, police practically had to smack her in the face with the thick file of evidence they had amassed against her husband before she accepted he might not be the man she thought he was.

Her recollections of his long business trips, the nights away from home, the child molestation rumours which cost him his teaching job, scrubbing his often bloodstained clothes all started to take on a sinister air when coupled with what police were telling her — that he was a serial killer.

Fayina opened up to police, confiding she’d suspected he was having an affair at worst. But she’s believed him when he’d told her that he was impotent and incapable of sex with her — let alone the small children he’d been accused of molesting. She claimed to have been “completely dumbfounded” when investigators told her Chikatilo’s crimes were sexually motivated.

However, many suspect Fayina knew more than she admitted, even providing him with an “iron-clad” alibi when he was accused of killing a nine-year-old girl, despite several witnesses having testified to seeing him in her company. At trial, Chikatilo confessed to the child’s murder, casting even more doubt over her claims of ignorance.

CATHY WILSON

CATHY Wilson married British serial killer Peter Tobin when she was just 16 years old but managed to escape the union after a relatively short period, divorcing him at 19.

However, Tobin, who was 20 years her senior, managed to inflict an enormous amount of damage in those three years, physically and emotionally abusing her pretty much constantly.

He would make Cathy watch as he brought home hookers to beat up and have sex, with but she claimed she never believed he would go as far as killing anyone.

Tobin watched her every move and threatened to kill their toddler son should she ever try to leave him — at one stage dangling the child over a staircase banister to prove he meant business.

Though her husband had banned her from the basement, Cathy couldn’t help but notice terrible smells that seemed to emanate from there and the fact that the drains would regularly become clogged for no apparent reason.

When she finally mustered the courage to leave him, she continued to allow him regular visits with their son, severing contact only after he was convicted of drug and sex charges and jailed for 14 years. He only served 10.

Within days of his release he was linked to a missing girl, prompting an investigation that would eventually connect him with and investigators soon released there was evidence to link him to the disappearance and suspected murders of as many as 20 women.

In 2007, he was sentenced to life for the rape and murder of a young girl in Glasgow, Scotland.