The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The bride and groom both wore white.
Georgia Dept. of Corrections Rapist Bruce Glass and his bride, Ronnie, had dated for several years before he was convicted and sentenced to 30 years for his crime. 
Georgia Dept. of Corrections After Anthony Kilgore married his bride, Katrina, he returned to a cell, where he very well could spend the rest of his life for murder and attempted murder. Katrina Kilgore had on a two-piece suit and rhinestone-studded heels. Anthony Kilgore’s white pants had a blue stripe on each leg and the back of his shirt was stenciled with the words “state prisoner.”
Their wedding was just before Christmas in the visitation room at Al Burruss Correctional Training Center in Forsyth. They kissed. They had snacks from the vending machine while the small wedding party – her two children, his two aunts and the minister – visited for a short while.
Then Katrina left for a celebratory dinner and Anthony returned to a cell, where he very well could spend the rest of his life for the 1985 murder of a DeKalb County trucking company owner and trying to kill a woman who was at the business.
He’s already been denied parole three times and he won’t be considered again until 2013.
According to information the Georgia Department of Corrections gathers when an inmate comes into the system, 6,497 men and 622 women -- 13.47 percent of the almost 53,000 inmates in state prisons -- are married. DOC declined to respond to questions about how many marry after they are incarcerated, which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled almost 24 years ago was a constitutional right. Corrections also declined to release policies for marriages at prisons.
Married inmates are not allowed conjugal visits with their spouses in Georgia and most other states. Only six states -- California, Connecticut, Mississippi, New Mexico, New York and Washington -- allow conjugal visits. Conjugal visits are also not allowed in federal prison.
While some women knew the men before they were sent to prison, it’s not uncommon for some to marry men they did not know before they went to prison, even those men convicted of murdering women.
Ted Bundy, for example, received a number of proposals; he admitted to murdering 30 women nationwide between 1974 and 1978. The attractive and charming serial killer was electrocuted in Florida in 1989.
Scott Peterson received the first of several marriage proposals just hours after he went to San Quentin State Prison’s Death Row for murdering his wife, Laci, and their unborn son, Conner, on Christmas Eve in 2002.
Murder suspect Joran van der Sloot has told several newspapers he has received multiple marriage proposals and at least one woman offered to bear his child. Van der Sloot is in a Peruivan jail on charges he killed 21-year-old Stephany Flores last year and he is suspected in the disappearance in Aruba of 18-year-old Natalee Holloway from Birmingham, Ala., in May 2005.
Some of the women say they don’t believe the evil details of their husbands' crimes. Some argue their spouses are innocent.
Ronnie and Bruce Glass had dated for several years before he was convicted of rape in 1997 and sentenced to 30 years in prison with no hope for parole. They married in 2007 at the now-closed Men’s State Prison in Baldwin County in a small room that was decorated with flowers and had paper placed on the floor to give the illusion of an aisle.
“I always believed in my heart he didn’t do this,” said Ronnie Glass, who holds a master’s degree and is an Internet technology project manager for a large company in metro Atlanta.
Ronnie Glass, 47, said the marriage has cost her family relationships and friendships because those people don’t understand why she married a convicted rapist.
“I really love him,” she said.. “He needs someone to support him. …. I look forward to the day when he’s not in prison.”
New wives of inmates conceded their husbands may have been guilty but that they are changed men now.
Katrina Kilgore said she has read the transcript from her husband’s trial in 1986.
“It was horrific,” she told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
But she believes he has changed.
“He was open and honest,” she said. “He said ‘I’m not that stupid , crazy young boy anymore. ... To this day he thanks God for taking him out of the flow of life. He was on the path to destruction.”
Katrina, 42, said she knew Anthony, 49, when they were both children. He had been in prison nine years when she ran into one of his relatives and asked for Anthony’s address. They wrote for three years and he proposed even before their first face-to-face meeting in prison.
“I think we always had it in our minds that this is the person I wanted to be with. So our aim was to make sure and get to know each other and not make that mistake,” said Katrina, who operates a machine at a factory near Savannah.
Katrina, married three times before Anthony, accepted the details of his crime but would not marry him if he remained Muslim. “He is a Christian now,” she said.
Early on, Katrina said, she struggled with the question, “has he really changed? After I got reacquainted, that wasn’t an issue. … He’s everything I’ve ever wanted.”
Naomi and Robert Hall knew each other as college students but only briefly. Years later, a mutual friend asked her to write him in prison, where he was serving a 13-year sentence for a 1997 vehicular homicide conviction in Paulding County.
“He was having a hard time and … he was in need of a friend,” Naomi Hall said.
They wrote each other for two years before meeting at Autry State Prison near Pelham in South Georgia.
“I was not being duped. The person I heard in the letters was a real person,” she said.
He eventually wrote a seven- to eight-page letter proposing, and they married at Phillips State Prison in Buford in late 2007.
She wore a knee-length dress with a sheer jacket. It was “very basic and very elegant,” Naomi Hall said. He was in his striped prison uniform for the 10-minute ceremony in a prison lecture hall.
“For me, it was wonderful,” Naomi said of the wedding venue. "To me, this was just another building."
While Naomi Hall, her two daughters and her new husband’s stepson waited outside the prison for a ride, Robert Hall was allowed to stand near the fence so he could talk to them.
“That was our honeymoon,” she said.
Robert Hall was paroled Oct. 23, 2007, and they are now living in New Mexico.
Atlanta Attorney McNeill Stokes sees prison marriages as a “marvelous demonstration of the caregiving of women. They are trying to take care of men that are in trouble in the most impossible situations.”
Maybe not, said Ann Harris, a senior assistant district attorney in Cobb County.
“There are just a lot of impressionable women out there,” Harris said. “What starts out as ‘Gee, I’d like to volunteer for this organization.’ Then it’s ‘I have a pen pal there and he’s telling me he made a terrible mistake and he’s turned his life around.’ Sometimes that’s true and he’s turned his life around. My experience is he has not.
“And there is nothing to disabuse them of their illusions that the defendant has turned their life around and only needs forgiveness and the love of a good woman,” Harris said. “It’s very easy to believe good things about somebody when your contact is limited to letters and jail visits. Anyone can put on a good face in writing and for an hour.”
