As a prison wife, she's escaped to a new life

MELONE
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By MARY JO MELONE

Tracy Demps met her second husband through the Internet four years ago. She came across a Web site where men placed personal ads. Pen Pals, the site was called. Pen had as much to do with penitentiary as it did with letter-writing.

Tracy picked an inmate at the opposite end of her part of the world, Vancouver, Canada. She picked Bennie Demps at Florida State Prison.

They began to write. As sometimes happens when people with otherwise unexpressed feelings begin to talk earnestly and often, Tracy Demps fell in love with her correspondent.

It must have helped that she didn't see him for some time. Her imagination could thrive undisturbed. The cliche about love being blind would never be more true.

For she also became convinced Bennie Demps was innocent of the murders for which he had been convicted, a double homicide in 1971 and another killing in 1976.

Tracy and Bennie were married by a prison chaplain in a barren visiting room on Nov. 24, exactly five months before the death warrant Demps now faces was signed. It was one of the few times they could kiss, hold hands.

The world is full of women who are on the surface like Tracy Demps. Prison groupies. And the world is full of jokes about them. At least she knows where he is. He sure can't run off with somebody else.

Laugh track, please.

But Tracy Demps, 42 years old and spending her nights now in a $23-a-day motel room in Starke, is not one of them. She even became a Muslim for her man.

And Bennie Demps is not the first felon to change her life.

In 1983, when she was a college student in Vancouver, a stranger grabbed her as she passed some woods near campus, raped her, stabbed her and left her for dead.

Only some wounds healed. Tracy was married then and could no longer bear to have sex with her husband. She could hardly hold up her head, work, study, let alone love. She gained weight. Lots of it. Her husband left.

"I couldn't get past it," she said of the rape. "I was damaged goods."

Not any more. Not to her. Not since Bennie.

"You don't know him. He feeds me more than the man I sat across from every day for 18 years."

Here was Bennie Demps, she said, in prison "without a thing of beauty to look upon."

Here was Bennie Demps, she said, fighting every day just to survive "in a cell the size of my bathroom."

Yet he educated himself. He became a jail house lawyer. He turned into a leader of black inmates.

"To be able to grow and blossom in spite of that, that is extraordinary," she said, her pale eyes glistening with wonder. "And that is what he gives me."

Courage, would you call it? A lesson in how to rise from your part of hell and find salvation on your own terms?

The man who raped and nearly killed Tracy Demps was sentenced to 16 years in prison and served 12. After he got out, he spotted her once, tapped her on the shoulder and said, "Remember me?"

Tracy Demps tells this with a suddenly fixed look that makes me think the air is crackling with anger. But she insists that man is irrelevant to her life.

"There was a time when I thought I had dragged myself out from behind that bush," she said, thinking back again to the rape. "My husband taught me that God saved me."

"I had to find this man to learn of my inner beauty."

This man, as she calls him, was to be executed this Wednesday. His wife had been praying to Allah for another chance for him, and she got this -- a stay issued late Saturday so Demps' lawyer could make one last appeal.

This will infuriate many people, as will Tracy Demps' story. But a woman so shattered by violence who repairs herself through the love of a convicted killer is nothing short of a miracle. A crazy miracle, but still a miracle