Prison Stories: “Sherri” Masbruch
Prison Stories: “Sherri” Masbruch
This is part 2 of an ongoing series about the consequences of men being placed in women’s prisons. You can find part 1 here
The following article contains some distressing details of violence against women.
California
It was April 1991, and a terrible crime was about to be committed in Fresno, California1 . Marietta Koop was unwell that day, and in bed because of it. She was an elderly woman and she lived with her daughter Mary. There were twenty-four apartments in the building they lived in, and Mary was the manager of the whole complex.
When the doorbell rang, at around 5pm, Mary stopped her cooking and went to answer it. The man outside said he was looking for an apartment, and so Mary invited him in to discuss the details. Instead of any such discussion, the man produced a gun with a pearl handle, and waved it in her face. He demanded she raise her hands and give him her purse.
Mary raised her hands but told him she didn’t have a purse. He demanded her chequebook but quickly discarded it. He made her lay down on the kitchen floor where he tied her hands with telephone cord. He demanded cash. She told him where she’d hidden fifty dollars. He fetched the money and then tied her hands, again, and her feet with cloth.
It was at this point that Marietta got out of bed and came downstairs. When she got to the kitchen, her daughter told her to do whatever the man told her to, because he had a gun. The man tied Marietta up, as well. She explained to him that she needed to take her medication and he gave it to her, along with a glass of water.
Both women asked him what he wanted. He wanted jewellery and cash, he said, and for the next hour he went all over their home and to every location they told him he might find either.
Then he blindfolded Mary. He “spliced together an extension cord, an electric razor cord, vacuum cleaner cord, and an electric clock cord. After stripping the insulation off the end of the makeshift cord, appellant then applied it to Mary's leg and Marietta's right arm, shocking them with the electrical current and causing them to scream. He then announced that this was only a warning of what he could do to them.”
He took the change out of Mary’s pockets and then he raped her. He also sodomised her. Afterwards, he stood by the sink and casually smoked a cigarette.
He rifled in the kitchen for more money and insisted he was about to leave.
Mary was, of course, afraid that he would kill her and her mother. So, with desperate ingenuity and in the hope of protecting them, she promised she wouldn’t report him to the police if he left them alive.
He set about making gags to use on both women but Mary was concerned that Marietta wouldn’t be able to breathe and so she tried to convince him that he could leave her mother without a gag. That she would be quiet enough without one. He stopped his plan to gag her, but he still put a gag over Mary’s mouth before he finally left their home.
As soon as he was gone, Mary moved over to where her mother was tied up and Marietta managed to cut her daughter’s hands free with a pair of kitchen scissors that the man had used and discarded on the floor. As soon as her hands were free, Mary undid the ties around her feet and ran to lock the front door.
This whole harrowing ordeal had lasted for approximately two and a half hours.
The man who hurt them was called Richard Masbruch. He calls himself Sherri now.
After he left the Koop family home he fled to Texas, where he was arrested less than a week later for an entirely unrelated crime. A crime, however, that sounds horribly reminiscent: theft and burglary with the intent to commit a sexual assault2 . He also had a prior conviction for arson.
It would be over a year before he was successfully linked to the torture of Marietta and Mary Koop, and the rape of Mary. It took that long for authorities to match a fingerprint found at their home to Masbruch. Both women also identified him.
As well as the items stolen from them, and the horror of Mary’s rape, there were other injuries that they sustained as a result of his rough treatment. He had tied Mary’s hands so tightly that she required an operation for carpal tunnel syndrome and had only the partial use of her left hand by the time of the trial. Her finger required a surgery, too. More debilitating still, she became unable to work or to live a normal life because of the events of that day.
Meanwhile, Marietta, forced to endure what Richard Masbruch did to her daughter, was also physically harmed. She had pre-existing osteoporosis and that, combined with the electric shock, had led to a compressed vetebra. This was so painful she had to have regular pain medication to cope with it. Her injuries never healed and she died five years later, of brain cancer.
There is no public record of how Mary Koop coped with this loss on top of everything else but it seems especially cruel that she lost her mother so soon afterwards.
Masbruch Imprisoned
It was during the early years of his imprisonment that Masbruch began attempting to castrate himself. Eventually, he succeeded. In 2005 he started “feminising” hormones and by now he wanted to be transferred to the female estate.
Prison Authorities “considered him a woman” because of his self-castration and because he had “long hair and shaped eyebrows…” 3
His brother, meanwhile has said on the record that “He’s not actually 100% female…I guess you could say he’s 90%.”
Adding “I don’t know what’s going through his head. The only thing I can think of is if you’re incarcerated so many years and went through all that . . . maybe he was so downgraded as a man that he felt better as a woman.”4
To say a woman is an adult human female is often treated as hateful. Yet, we are supposed to believe there is virtue in a gender ideology that insists “woman” is the correct name for a castrated male rapist with sufficiently groomed eyebrows. We are expected to give the time of day to all manner of suggestions like the one offered by Masbruch’s brother; that a woman is a downgraded man. As if this isn’t profoundly sexist gibberish.
When Masbruch became “reclassified as a woman by the state”, it was reported that he was the first man in an American prison officially rewritten in such a way. Authorities began, as they meant to go on, with an arsonist, burglar, rapist and torturer of women.
Even some experts were caught off guard. When Chris Hensley, for example, a Tennessee Criminal Justice professor, heard about Masbruch being reclassified as a woman and transferred into the female estate, he said “I have never heard of that happening before” 5
Given what many of us know about the total disregard for women shown by prison authorities, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that he wasn’t actually the first to get a transfer. Even more frighteningly, though, he wasn’t the last.
By December 2008 Masbruch had been in Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF) in Chowchilla for about nine months.
Petitions, Panic Attacks & Women’s Pain
By 2011 Masbruch had also spent time at the California Institute for Women, according to the L.A times. 6
It was in 2012, with news of his imminent transfer back to Chowchilla that two concerned people set up public petitions on change.org.
The first petition was made by a woman called Anna Silver whose mother was in unit 514, the very one he was being transferred to. Writing on the 14th of July 2012, Anna begins “Today as I answered my mothers phone call” and then she goes onto detail that not only had Masbruch “brutally injured” imprisoned women but he had raped female prisoners, too. Without his penis, he had used objects in order to do so.
Among those who signed her petition was Marlene Riordan who had been in prison with him and knew about women he attacked
Other signers had relatives at the facility. Over and over they spoke of their concern for those they loved. Frank Florio talked of his daughter who was “one of 3,000 inmates who are terrified”. He explained that Masbruch had already made sexual advances to female inmates.
While Elayne Clift reported that sexual assault victims on the unit were traumatised.
A mother of an imprisoned woman wrote about how Masbruch’s violence meant the prison had had to initiate a lockdown, illustrating how disruptive to every aspect of prison life it is when a man is placed amongst the women.
A woman who was in the California Institute For Women with Masbruch added that he looked like a regular man, in prison, and that he “beats his girlfriends just like a dude”
Touchingly, one woman whose mother was also at CCWF had found and signed the petition simply because her upset mother had asked her to. This seems to suggest that female prisoners are very aware of how little, or how much, we are fighting for them on this issue.
It was days later that the second petition was posted by Michael Crim. Longer than Anna’s its opening demand was to put Masbruch back into a men’s prison. The petition then detailed what a disruptive, violent presence he was for the women.
Michael’s last paragraph brought up a particularly disturbing concern and, of course, Richard had already used electricity to torture his victims. It is deeply worrying that the man who spliced together electrical cords to torture women wanted to join an electrical class in prison. Moreover, a prison in which he was surrounded by women he could victimise.
In a further comment on his own petition Michael said sadly “I have a loved one who is suffering because of this Individual”.
All of this was happening four years after Masbruch’s first transfer to be amongst women and authorities had long known what a disaster it was to have him in the female estate. They couldn’t have escaped this knowledge.
Right at the beginning, one incarcerated woman had even filed an official grievance about it. The then fifty-seven year old Patricia Wright told them that she was “experiencing constant panic attacks at the mere thought of this male inmate” and that his presence violates her “right to be housed with only women.”
The worst thing about that is she was entirely right to be afraid. I don’t know if she was one of the women he went on to actively hurt, but the terror of being trapped and subjected to the presence of a known predator is surely an unbearable experience.
Anyone with any foresight or compassion could have seen the harms to women coming.
Mary Koop, for example, the woman he viciously raped in her own home, was very clear when she was approached about his incarceration with other women. She said
“That’s unbelievable, just unbelievable. Women should be worried. I would be worried.”
Ultimately, they did transfer Masbruch away from CCWF as a result of public outcry and a formal complaint. None of which unhurts a single woman.
His current location is being kept a secret but we do know that he remains inside.
I want to end this piece with the words of an elderly woman called Aurora.
She is not, to my knowledge, a prisoner. She does not seem to know Mary Koop. She didn’t claim to have known Marietta before her death. She may have a loved one inside or she may simply mean all other women when she talks about her “kin”. She has almost certainly never met Masbruch, either, but this is the comment she wrote when she heard about this story.
When she heard about what is being done to women in prison for the sake of such a man
“Living at the age of 85 in modern society has proven far more of a challenge than coping with my own debilitating diseases. I was struck with grief when I learned that my kin have been exposed to such insanity! As a women’s rights activist I can not begin to explain my indignation! Women of my era strove and died for a positive outcome in which women were seen as equals and had rights, the people who decided to place this monster in the midst of these defenceless and scared women should be ashamed of themselves. The lack of better judgement must make their ancestors weep”
And it seems they are destined to weep:
Multiple men in multiple countries, regardless of the seriousness of their crimes, have been incarcerated in female prisons in the eleven years since she posted that. Women in those prisons have consequently been imposed on, violated, abused and harmed.
Our better judgement, as a culture, has still not kicked in.
https://theangels.co.uk/2008/12/transgender-inmate-faces-complaint/
https://www.womenarehuman.com/california-senate-votes-to-house-inmates-by-gender-id-despite-male-trans-inmate-raping-women-in-state-prison/
https://cls.soceco.uci.edu/sites/cls.soceco.uci.edu/files/users/marycu/jenness_pressidential_address_sociological_perspectives-2014.pdf
https://theangels.co.uk/2008/12/transgender-inmate-faces-complaint/
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2011-apr-20-la-me-prisons-transgender-20110420-story.html