Romance Blooms Out Of The Ashes Of A Lufkin Crime Of Passion

​Paraphrasing Larry McMurtry, a woman's love is like the spring dew. It's just as likely to descend on a cowpie as an April wildflower.

In the East Texas romance of Jennifer Doss and Christopher Guffey, we're leaning towards cowpie. You see, Guffey, an alleged member of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang, was just sentenced last month to life in prison for his part in a June 2009 aggravated kidnapping.

In that case, Guffey, 30, was accused of acting on the orders of his Aryan Brotherhood boss, 32-year-old Stephen DeWayne "Caveman" Wallace.

According to testimony at the trials of Wallace and Guffey, Caveman was angry at his estranged girlfriend, so he was accused of sending Guffey and four other (allegedly meth-fueled) Aryan Brothers out to pick her up, grab her by the hair, throw her in the trunk of a car and fetch her to his lair in a lonesome country graveyard. There, he and his new squeeze Rachel Tutt beat her up.

That's right, Caveman was such a playa he was able to persuade his new girlfriend to help him rough up his estranged girlfriend just for thinking about leaving him. That's some serious pimp skills. Maybe the ladies just can't resist his Hannibal Lecter neck tattoo...But now he won't have much chance to deploy those skills on the ladies for quite some time, as he too was sent to prison for life with the possibility of parole in 30 years. (Wallace took it like a man, it has to be said. As he was being led away from the Angelina County Courthouse, he joked to reporters that "My parole officer hasn't even been born yet.")

But just when every ray of hope is gone, just when you think that none of these Piney Woods miscreants have any shot of redemption, along comes Jennifer Doss with stars in her eyes, a song in her heart, and a dream in her soul. This week she plans to marry Gulley. She has a long history of really knowing how to pick 'em...

"Everybody tells me I'm crazy, but I never could have been with another man anyway after the last man I trusted molested my girls. He was not their father," she tells the Lufkin Daily News. "When you love somebody you can't help that you love them and you will do anything in your power for them."

And that she is. Right now she is trying to arrange a conjugal visit in order to consummate their marriage. Failing that, she says she will stay true to Gulley until he becomes parole-eligible, which will be in 2040. And once they are wed, she plans to work on an appeal of his life sentence.

"If the first appeal doesn't turn out good, I'm going to hire an out-of-town lawyer and take it to the Supreme Court if that's what it takes," Doss tells the Lufkin paper. "There's been too many inconsistent stories and too many changed stories for it to all add up. There were too many of them on meth."

On the subject of meth, she knows whereof she speaks. She has said she was an addict from 2000-2008 but has been clean since then, when her brother stepped in and had her "committed to Palestine." Before that, she says she pulled out all her own hair over the course of three days and went looking for her dead mother two years after she had passed away.

Too much information? Just wait until you sort through all the dirty laundry in the comments here.