Even psychopaths have a soul mate.

Tracy Bottomley, 41, from West Yorkshire in the UK, is engaged to 52-year-old Ernest Otto Smith — a convicted double murderer.

“Yes, he is a serial killer, he’s committed a few murders, but I understand the risks of what could happen and I still love him,” says Bottomley, who exchanges emails with her hubby-to-be three times a day. “But everybody dies one day. I’m going to die eventually and I don’t mind the fact it could be at the hands of him.”

In one of his letters, Smith wrote, “Girl do you know how happy you make me? Where have you been all my life? I’m falling in love with you girl, I feel like you were meant to find me.”

Smith was sentenced to life without parole at the Ohio State Penitentiary in 2006 for the murders of a man and woman, and also spent 32 years in solitary confinement. The pair began corresponding via a prison pen pal program in 2018 and fell in love. She says their parallel experiences with trauma and abuse have brought them closer.

“[Ernest] also spoke about what he’d been through and how he was a victim of child abuse which led to him using drugs to battle his depression and anxiety,” says Bottomley. “I’ve been in an abusive relationship before and the way he spoke about how his experiences as a child changed him really resonated with me.”

Bottomley, who had been single for three years, and divorced since 2003, knew exactly what she was getting into when she struck up a conversation with Smith based on an advertisement from an unidentified prison Facebook page, Metro UK reports.

“Ernest’s [pen pal] advert did detail his crimes so I knew that he’d been jailed for life for killing two people,” she says. “Ernest doesn’t sound like a murderer, you can’t hear anything crazy in his voice, he regrets what he’s done.”

Over the phone, the murderer described to Bottomley “step by step” how he robbed and fatally shot James Dillingham in Toledo, Ohio, on Jan. 3, 2005. Soon after, he beat to death Cathy Barnett, a witness to the first murder, fearing she would rat him out to police.

Bottomley reports that Smith, a former tattoo shop owner, is writing a book “based on his own experience” about how children of abuse can grow up to become violent and homicidal: “He’s even mentioning me in a few chapters.”

She plans to fly to the Midwest in October to meet and marry her sweetheart at the Ohio Department of Prisons, and says she’s “still in shock” over the proposal, sent in a video. She added that Smith’s son, who manages his dad’s bank accounts, is sending her money to buy wedding bands.

“Ernest didn’t want me to pay for the rings myself — he’s quite old school, very traditional,” she gushes. “I am marrying an old man at the end of the day!”

Of his videotaped proposal, she says, “I’m still in shock that Ernest proposed, I didn’t see it coming at all but I love him so obviously I said, ‘Yes.’ ”

Adds Bottomley, “People always ask me if I’m scared at the thought of what he could do to me. But I’m not scared of Ernest at all — I love him.”