Chicago woman finds love with Nebraska killer

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Through hours of phone calls and pages of letters, Justine Mirth fell for Tom Nissen. Their long-distance love story is different, though: Nissen was convicted in a murder case that inspired the motion picture "Boys Don't Cry." The county has granted Mirth and Nissen a marriage license.

BY JOE DUGGAN | Lincoln Journal Star

The letter, written in his own hand, arrived in late August.

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Nissen

Nissen

“Justine Mirth, will you marry me?”

The 32-year-old Chicago woman quickly wrote her response and mailed it to one of Nebraska’s most notorious killers.

Tom Nissen participated in the 1993 murders of three people in a farmhouse near Humboldt.

The Falls City man admitted to stabbing one of the victims, 21-year-old Teena Brandon of Lincoln. But he testified that his co-defendant, John Lotter, shot Brandon, Lisa Lambert, 24, and Phillip DeVine, 22, all in the head, all at close range.

Nissen’s testimony earned him a sentence of life in prison instead of death in the electric chair. Lotter, who maintained his innocence, got the death penalty.

A dozen years after that night in Richardson County, Tom Nissen held Justine Mirth’s response in his hands.

“Yes, baby, I absolutely would love to marry you.”

This week, Lancaster County granted the couple a marriage license.

They’ve written each other hundreds of pages and spoken to each other for hours on the phone — in 15-minute increments allowed by the prison.

But they’ve never met.

“I’m dying to go see him. I want to hold him. He’s the man I love. I want to spend the rest of my life with him,” she said.

It’s all because of the movie “Boys Don’t Cry,” the 1999 fictional account of the Humboldt murders.

She says she “grew up in a small, stupid town in Indiana” where she didn’t like school, didn’t fit in at home and escaped by running with hard-partying outsiders. When she saw the film, she immediately identified with the characters who represented Lotter and Nissen.

“These were people I would hang out with in real life, people I would have went out with, and that’s why I was attracted to them.”

So she bought a copy of the episode of “American Justice,” a cable TV show, that featured the Humboldt killings. And she made a recording of “The Brandon Teena Story,” the 1998 documentary that included filmed interviews with Lotter and Nissen.

Then she got John Lotter’s inmate number and wrote him a letter. He wrote back. A relationship developed. In March 2004, she flew to Lincoln and got a ride to the state prison in Tecumseh, where he lives on death row. They met, but the relationship stalled.

So she looked elsewhere.

She wrote to Gary Ridgway, the Green River killer, who killed 48 women. No response.  Another letter, this time to Dennis Rader, the BTK killer, responsible for 10 homicides. Nothing.

She admits she’s fascinated with killers. She always has been. A tattoo on her back reads “redrum.”

“Murder spelled backwards,” she says.

So in November 2004, she wrote her first letter to the man who put Lotter on death row. Nissen wrote back, and she knew he was different.

They’ve hidden nothing from each other. He knows about her 12-year engagement to the man who fathered her four children. She knows his life sentence means life — a commutation by the state Board of Pardons is his only hope for freedom.

Still, they fell in love.

“She’s very open minded,” says Nissen, who’s 34 now. “She’s very forgiving, very understanding and she’s beautiful, not just in looks, but in thought and deed.”

Since he went to prison, Nissen has made friends with people on the outside. He’s even had romantic relationships via the U.S. Postal Service, but not for several years, and not like this one.

He had convinced himself that he might never feel that kind of love again. Now, he’s not sure how to feel.

“There are definitely benefits in feeling wanted, needed and loved,” he said. “But there’s conflicting feelings I have because of the crimes I’ve committed and maybe this is something I should not be allowed to have. Maybe these are feelings I should not be allowed to experience again.”

They haven’t set a date. She wants to move to Lincoln first. Then they can plan their wedding in the visiting room of the prison, with two witnesses of their choosing.

She realizes some would think her crazy for wanting a husband who can never help support her and her children, who can’t help with the daily chores of living, who will never wake up next to her.

She says she doesn’t care what others think. They’re with each other mentally all the time. In Lincoln, she’ll be able to visit him at the prison twice a week.

But he has withheld one thing from her: details of what happened in that rural Humboldt house. He told her he deeply regrets his actions and that he’s a far different man than he was at the time of the killings, but he won’t say exactly what happened.

So she doesn’t ask. She says she doesn’t care what he did. She wouldn’t even care if he weren’t sorry.

She’s planning another tattoo. This one will say “Tom” or “Tommy.” She’ll have it put on her chest.

“It was his idea to have his name close to my heart.”

Reach Joe Duggan at 473-7239 or jduggan@journalstar.com.

Prison weddings

* Each year, the Lincoln Correctional Center allows about 10 inmate weddings. The rules allow an outside cleric or magistrate to preside, and the inmate and spouse may each invite one witness. Up to five photos are permitted. Otherwise, the ceremony must be private and without media coverage.

* The couple is not allowed to consummate the marriage in prison, nor are subsequent conjugal visits permitted.

* During visits, inmates and their spouses may embrace for a period not to exceed 10 seconds and may briefly kiss at the beginning and end of the visit.