A WOMAN is to marry one of the most notorious American killers after seeing his crime in the Oscar-winning film Boys Don’t Cry.

Justine Mirth began writing to Tom Nissen in prison after watching Hilary Swank’s best-actress performance as his victim, the cross-dresser Teena Brandon. Nissen raped and murdered her after discovering that she was posing as a man.

Ms Mirth, a 32-year-old unmarried mother of four from Chicago, has been granted a marriage licence to wed Nissen in the jail waiting room, even though the two have never met. “It sounds weird, but we have a real deep love connection,” she told The Times yesterday. “We understand each other. We really do. He is the love of my life. I am the love of his life,” she said. Nissen is serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole.

Brandon, 21, a woman, lived as a man under the name Brandon Teena and was going out with a woman. When Nissen and John Lotter, a friend who is now on death row, found out that Brandon was biologically female, they raped her and, after she went to the local sheriff, tried to cover up by killing her and two others in a farmhouse in Humboldt, Nebraska, on Christmas Eve 2003.

Nissen confessed to stabbing Brandon but saved himself from the electric chair by testifying that Lotter shot Brandon, her lover Lisa Lambert and their friend Phillip DeVine in the head at close range.

Miss Mirth, who was engaged for 12 years to the father of her four children, said that she had been fascinated by killers since she was aged 4. She even has the word “redrum” — murder spelt backwards — tattooed on her back. She said that she grew up in a small town in Indiana and identified with the characters representing Nissen and Lotter in Boys Don’t Cry.

“They are the kind of people I would hang out with — not that I was involved in crime or anything like that,” she said. “Not everyone who murders someone is a bad person.”

Miss Mirth wrote first to Lotter, on death row. He wrote back and, in March 2004, she flew to visit him in the state prison at Tecumseh, Nebraska. They met, but the relationship failed to ignite.

Miss Mirth turned her attentions elsewhere, writing to Gary Ridgway, the Green River serial killer, who murdered 48 women, and Dennis Rader, the sadomasochistic “BTK” serial killer who is responsible for ten deaths. Neither replied.

She started a correspondence with Nissen in November 2004, and the two began to talk by telephone for the prison maximum of 15 minutes a call. He has told her that he regrets his actions and that he is now a changed man, but he refused to reveal what happened on the day of the murders.

After the wedding, Miss Mirth plans to live near the prison so that she can visit her new husband twice a week.

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