Van der Sloot: I'm Getting Marriage Proposals in Jail

(June 23) -- Murder suspect Joran van der Sloot says he has been receiving multiple marriage offers from women while in his Lima, Peru, cell. If true, that would add him to a long list of prison heartthrobs.

"One of them even wants me to get her pregnant," Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf quoted van der Sloot as saying Tuesday.

Van der Sloot's claims of prison courtship have yet to be verified by officials at Miguel Castro Castro Prison, where he is being held on charges of first-degree murder and robbery in the May 30 slaying of 21-year-old Peruvian Stephany Flores. He also is suspected in the disappearance of U.S. teen Natalee Holloway in Aruba.

But forensic consultant Dr. Park Dietz says he would not be surprised if the allegations were true.

"Women who send love letters and proposals of marriage to famous criminals are not uncommon," the founder of Park Dietz & Associates in Newport Beach, Calif., told AOL News. "It is a common topic of conversation among people who specialize in forensic work, and everyone seems to have a theory about what's going on here."

One of those theories, Dietz explains, is the belief that women who are lonely and fear real contact with a man desire an intense pen-pal relationship with someone they won't have to share a bed with because he will never be free.

"They are able to have long-distance romance without the risk of genuine intimacy," Dietz said.

Another theory is that the women are severely mentally ill.

Dietz says he does not agree with either theory.

"Instead, I think if we are ever able to collect systematic data on examples of a hundred or a thousand such women, we would learn that the majority of them have certain familiar patterns of personality disorder that account for this self-defeating behavior," he said.

"The first of those is a personality disorder known as 'borderline personality disorder' in which the principal concern of the afflicted person is the avoidance of abandonment."

Those feelings of abandonment, Dietz explained, are generally developed in the first three years of life.

"The leading theory of how that happens is that the primary caretaker is insufficiently available during that time. So, when the small child cries, there isn't always a predictable response, and when they are hungry, there isn't always a predictable response," Dietz said.

"The lack of a primary caretaker in a child's life can warp the development of personality such that fear of abandonment takes center stage, and what is shown in the adult behavior of people with this personality type is tremendous instability in relationships. ... They go between being your new best friend and being your worst enemy."

Another traumatic behavior is impulsivity, which takes a form of abusing substances, spending sprees, promiscuity and binge eating, Dietz said.

"They are very quick to refer to suicide -- creating crises that involve their threatening to commit suicide if someone doesn't come back to them or if they don't get their way," Dietz said. "Their moods tend to be quite unstable, with quick changes of mood leading to common misdiagnoses of them as being bipolar."

Many other women who seek out men behind bars fit into the histrionic category.

"That is a personality configuration that is all about the attention," Dietz explained. "The primary issue is that they want to be the center of attention, and females who have this personality style tend to be very sexually seductive, sexually provocative, dramatic and theatrical.

"They consider relationships to be more intimate than they really are, and they are easily influenced by others because they are so suggestible," Dietz continued. "So, you can see how that attention-seeking type would flock to infamous killers like moths to a flame because they imagine that an association with him will bring more attention to them."

Van der Sloot has some notable company among desired prisoners, including:

• Richard "The Night Stalker" Ramirez, a convicted California serial killer who married behind bars
• Charles Denton "Tex" Watson, a former member of the Charles Manson Family who married behind bars and fathered four children through conjugal visits
• Henry Louis Wallace, a North Carolina serial killer who married a former prison nurse behind bars

Even John Mark Karr, the man who once claimed to have killed 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey, apparently found love for a brief period: A woman who claims to be his ex-fiancee recently made headlines when she went on national TV saying he is living as a woman and trying to recruit little girls for a kiddie sex cult.

Infamous men behind bars enjoy the slew of women who flock to them, Dietz said, and will often carry on relationships with more than one woman at a time -- sometimes as many as five or six.

"It gets pretty boring [behind bars], so it kills time for them, and they may have a chance to have visitors," Dietz said. "In some prisons, you have contact visits or even conjugal visits. ... Having women who want to come sleep with you is a useful thing when you are locked up for life."

In the event the men can't have physical contact, they will often try to get the women not only to send them items of value, but also "sexy pictures," Dietz said.

"They will engage in the available forms of writing about sexual fantasies or having phone sex if they can get away with that."

Most infamous men are not too picky about their prison pen pals. But Dietz speculates that van der Sloot will probably have a higher standard in determining to whom he writes.

"Given his personality, they would probably have to look good to him," Dietz said. "He'll want photos so he can to screen them for the ones he finds most appealing."