Love Letter: One of Eddie's "kites" to Synthia. The cross with a circle was the trademark sign of the San Francisco Zodiac Killer Eddie copied. He signs off with a lock of his and Synthia's hair.   (Photo: Synthia-China Blast)

For those unfamiliar with the inside of a prison, it can be difficult to imagine what life is like behind bars, or how a romance could take shape. The public-information officer at the Department of Corrections in Albany refused to comment on anything that the three inmates had told me about their living conditions in Attica. But Craig Haney, a prison expert and professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, says that maximum-security prisons are both more restricted and more lenient than one might expect. He points out that it’s common for inmates to be allowed to purchase certain items—including TVs, candy, baked beans, bathing products, and art supplies—from the commissary or approved mail-order catalogues for their own use or for gifts. And many prisons, Haney adds, also allow inmates to boil their own water for coffee. “It’s hard to deprive people of everything,” he says. “The prison administration recognizes that there are certain things that are relatively trivial, and if you allow prisoners to have a little bit, it makes the facility a little easier to run.”

The idea of armed guards patrolling each cell 24 hours a day is unrealistic, Haney says: “In most places, it’s very difficult for people to be under around-the-clock surveillance. The manpower alone needed to do that would be prohibitive. And just because the inmates are under restriction doesn’t mean that their humanity, and all that that entails, leaves them. They’re looking for ways to communicate, and they’re looking for ways to touch each other, just as people would do in any other setting.”

For the past five years, Synthia has been taking low doses of female hormones prescribed by a prison doctor for her diagnosed “gender dysphoria.” The dosage is enough to make her breasts grow a bit, but not enough to fit her out with the curves that she’d like. The Department of Corrections, however, has refused to increase the dosage to the much higher levels that some other prisoners are receiving, because she didn’t have an official prescription before she was incarcerated. That’s why she’s suing for medical treatment up to and including a sex-change operation.

Synthia now awaits the day when she can somehow get the full surgery: “The DOC needs to finish what it started. I’m not a guinea pig that you can run scientific experiments on. Pump somebody with hormones for five years and then you deny me a sex change? If that’s not ‘cruel and unusual punishment,’ then I don’t know what is.”

On March 11, 2003, before Synthia married Eddie, she tried to castrate herself. Synthia says she tied a rubber band around her penis and testicles, set a bucket on the floor between her legs “to catch the blood,” and, one by one, popped the stockpile of painkillers she’d bought from other prisoners. Then, she says, she picked up the jagged metal lid from a can of beans she’d hidden and waited for the medicine to start working. “When I was zoomed out and couldn’t feel my body, I lay down for one second and woke up in the hospital,” she recalls. “I put my hand down there, and I was disappointed. I said, ‘It’s still there?’ Someone said to me, ‘What’s still there?’ ”

“Eddie paints her these really weird paint-by-number sets,” says Michael Alig. “I don’t think Synthia appreciates the fabulosity of it.”

She was written up for the incident—the report mentions that Synthia said she’d planned to castrate herself and that the officers had found the lid. As punishment, she says, she was “keep-locked,” which meant she couldn’t go out to the yard, make phone calls, or buy things from the commissary for 30 days.

Still, Synthia continued to take her role as wife very seriously. Every day, she cooked for Eddie using a hot pot he’d given her. And as the husband, Eddie bought her prison-approved supplies with the savings from his $21-a-month porter job. After passing out the meal trays and taking her home cooking back to his cell to eat, Eddie says, he would be let out again to collect the trays. Eddie always completed this task quickly, and then he’d pull up a chair in front of Synthia’s bars. “We’d watch our favorite show, WWE Smackdown, unconditionally every Thursday at 8,” Synthia recalls. “He loves Brock Lesnar, and I love Kurt Angle. We’d argue about the game. We liked to watch 24, CSI, and The Simpsons, too.”

Eddie says he would also make special pieces of art just for her. “Eddie paints her these really weird paint-by-number sets, like a soaring eagle or a horse,” says Michael Alig. “I don’t think Synthia appreciates the fabulosity of it. Other than the fact that he’s this crazy psychopath, it’s kind of cute.” Still, he remains skeptical of Eddie’s infatuation with Synthia. “He talks about her like she’s all soft and feminine, but she’s not soft and feminine,” he says. “She’s hard.”

Synthia was born Luis Alberto Morales on September 11, 1974. “I have always been a girl,” says Synthia, who legally changed her name when she got to Attica. “I was always trying on makeup, and my sister would sneak me cotton panties.”

At the age of 13, Synthia says, she sold crack in her South Bronx neighborhood, and at 16 she was accused of starting a squatter-house fire that killed six people. While awaiting trial, she was sent to Riker’s Island. She had developed slowly, both physically and mentally—one news report about the arson charges described the teenager as having “slight mental retardation,” although during our conversations she struck me as bright if uneducated. She says her small size—she’s five feet five inches tall—left her vulnerable at Riker’s: “I was raped by two other prisoners.” That was also when, according to Synthia, she was introduced to the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation gang. She says that one of its members offered to protect her and then secretly started having sex with her.

Two years after Synthia’s arrest for arson, she was acquitted of all the charges when a witness recanted. Before she was released, however, she says, the Latin Kings instructed her to report to a certain gang member in the Bronx. “He knew I was a gender bender, and he was putting me through it. Then he forced me to be involved with him sexually,” Synthia claims. “Nobody knew. But anytime he wanted me to do something, I’d have to do it. I hated him.”