Crystal is the customary gift. I got dog drool

My husband and I celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary in prison, along with our 12-year-old daughter.

By Susan Musgrave

Oct. 25, 2001 | I slip off my wedding ring, which doesn't fit so snugly anymore, and add it to the plastic tray along with two hand-carved silver bracelets and one of copper, a heavy metal belt, a brass watch with lizards curling around the band and a necklace of flattened nails and vertebrae that a friend brought me back from Africa. I step through the metal detector.

On my wedding day, 15 years ago today, I wore the same body armor, along with French garters, but that time I didn't take it off. I lit up the scanner's alert panel to the highest number: 10.

Stephen and I were married in a maximum security prison. He had written a novel while finishing up a 20-year sentence for bank robbery, and the manuscript had landed on my desk when I was writer-in-residence at a Canadian university. I fell in love -- with his writing on the first page, with him, before first sight. All I had left to do was to meet the man.

I wrote to Stephen, in my official writer capacity. My opinion was that his book should be published. I wrote later the same day offering to work as his editor. I wrote a third letter asking if he needed anything -- books, paper, pens. In the last letter I sent that afternoon I wrote, "P.S. Will you marry me?"

I didn't get an immediate reply so I wrote again the next day apologizing for being so hasty. I got carried away, I wasn't serious. Just because he was a notorious outlaw (the FBI's wanted poster described him as bright, witty, a bon vivant) didn't mean he was going to fall for some woman who threw herself at him lock, stock and Uzi barrel. He might, after all, be old-fashioned.

Stephen replied, finally. All 13 letters had arrived on the same day. No one had asked him to marry her before, he said. He suggested we meet first. (I was right, he was old-school.)

I visited him behind bars for two years, in monitored rooms where we sat at square tables, at right angles according to regulations, working on his book, which grew to more than 400 pages, working on our love affair, which grew into an epic. When his book was published and he still didn't make parole, we set a wedding date.

The ceremony took place in the prison chapel, attended by my mother and sister and four of Stephen's friends from inside. Two guards stood watch over the cake knife as we exchanged vows.

As Stephen was escorted back to his cell to change out of the Armani suit I'd bought for him, into his prison greens, I said goodbye to my mother and sister at the front gate, tossing my bouquet over the 14-foot perimeter fence topped with razor-wire.

Then there was the honeymoon -- a three-day affair in a house inside the prison walls allocated for Private Family Visits. They are conjugal visits, in the vernacular, but that makes it sounds as if it's only about sex. We cooked, read books, played Yahtzee and watched "Late Night With David Letterman." And when the phone rang, four times a day, we got dressed and went outside to be counted.

Not long after that, Stephen came home on full parole. We had a daughter two years later. Living together seemed easy. Unhappily, it was not forever after.

Our married life went into remission on June 9, 1999, the day my husband -- disguised as a transvestite Barbie, and wired on heroin and cocaine -- failed to rob the Royal Bank in peaceful Cook Street Village, in Victoria, British Columbia. Stephen, once the leader of the Stopwatch Gang (famous for making it in and out of a bank in under two minutes), spent four minutes withdrawing $100,000 of other people's money from the bank that day. "I could have taken out a loan in less time," he admitted later.

He remembers little of the car chase through the prim neighborhood park, or the shooting at police officers who pursued him. Both of us remember, only too well, the day six months later, when the judge sentenced him to 18 years.

Stephen had fought a lifelong addiction to heroin, and the habit had won -- this round, anyway. In an essay called "Junkie," just published in "Addicted: Notes From the Belly of the Beast," Stephen wrote: "Prisons are about addictions. Most prisoners are casualties of their own habits. They have all created victims -- some in cruel and callous ways -- but almost to a man they have first practised that cruelty on themselves. Prison provides the loneliness that fuels addiction. It is the slaughterhouse for addicts, and all are eventually delivered to its gates."

My first visit to the medium-security institution where Stephen had been transferred was to coincide with our 15th wedding anniversary. It would be a family affair -- including our daughter, who is 12 -- and take place in the house designated for conjugal visits.

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