Marrying a Monster

He was a 32-year-old inmate who bludgeoned his own mother and sister to death. She was a 60-something mom with a successful life on the outside. How could she have fallen for him?

Illustration by Jess Smart Smiley

On September 3, 1976, Lyal Northey, a well-connected sixty-two-year-old Santa Rosa businesswoman, donned a long white dress and styled her miraculously lush, chestnut hair into a bouffant before entering the gates of San Quentin State Prison in Marin County, California. In her wedding photo, she stands next to her groom, Joe Morse, a man who had been convicted of murdering three people and was serving a life sentence after narrowly evading execution. Morse wears a suit with a crisp, white shirt and has long, dark hair and oversized glasses. Even in the picture, you can tell that he is a Chihuahua of a killer; a small, wiry guy with a springy sort of energy, the type of person who would intimidate others by being unpredictable. His eyes behind the lenses are narrow and suspicious, and when he laughed, it was a strange bark, like he might be laughing at you or he might be laughing at the absurdity of it all.

The 1976 wedding was small, attended only by an…