The World Of The Mail-Order Matchmaker -- Blackwells Met Via Bellingham Bride Broker

Ralph Gilmore is a newlywed at 71. Four months ago, after a long courtship by mail, his 27-year-old bride from the Philippines, whom he describes as "a beautiful thing," came to settle down on his farm in upstate New York.

He's a retired grain-mill operator looking at his last years; she's an aspiring schoolteacher looking to a new future. She cooks and cares for him; he gives her a home in America. Both say they are satisfied. Both are only a little embarrassed to admit theirs was a mail-order marriage.

Gilmore found his wife through a catalog published by Bellingham matchmaker Jerry Davis. For nine years, Davis has operated International Connections, linking American men with Filipino women. He claims to have had a hand in more than 200 marriages.

It was through Davis' catalog that Timothy Blackwell found Susana Remerata Blackwell. Blackwell faces murder charges in the March 2 slayings of his wife, her unborn baby and two friends at the King County Courthouse.

Local women's and immigrants' groups have called for an investigation into the mail-order-bride industry, which is almost completely unregulated, even as thousands of mail-order brides from Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe come here each year.

The number entering annually from the Philippines alone is estimated to be 5,000.

Critics say the industry exploits the loneliness of American men and the poverty of Third World women, opening the way for abuses on all sides. They say the women are reduced to objects or slaves, the men to meal tickets.

Blackwell claimed his wife duped him into bringing her to the United States. Susana Blackwell had said he choked and beat her.

The Blackwell case will be added to a list of horror stories that include slavery, torture, forced prostitution and immigration fraud.

The industry's advocates, on the other hand, would have you believe they are benign organizations serving the lonely and the poor, matching men and women of different needs but the same goal: marriage.

"The truth," said Cecilia Julag-ay, a sociology researcher at the University of California at Riverside who has studied the mail-order phenomenon, "is somewhere in between."

"Girls" and "bull moose"

More than 100 agencies nationwide specialize in international mail-order liaisons, with at least three based in Western Washington. A few are large and reputable; many are small fly-by-night operations. Davis' International Connections in some ways is typical.

The 55-year-old twice-divorced entrepreneur runs his business out of a cluttered basement room in his suburban Bellingham home. A college dropout with a blue-collar background, he spent most of his working life running heavy-construction and fish-buying businesses before turning to matchmaking.

He is talkative, blunt, often crude. He refers to women in his catalog as "girls," and to his men clients as "bull moose in heat." He dismisses his critics as do-gooders who "got everything to say about nothing."

Since 1986, he has sorted through thousands of photos of women, selecting up to 500 at a time for his now-defunct catalog, Asian Encounters. He would send the catalog to men seeking to correspond with Asian women. The client would choose which women to write, and then order their addresses from Davis. Ten addresses would cost $60.

For an additional $35, Davis provided a portfolio that included a profile, photos and a video interview. A few times a year, Davis organized three-week tours to the Philippines for men wanting to meet and marry the women they had been writing. Most mail-order agencies don't go this far. Davis charged a flat rate of $800, with the client paying for his own travel and living expenses. Davis also charged fees for assisting in immigration petitions.

The entire process, beginning with ordering the catalog and culminating in flying the bride to the United States, could take years and typically costs the client between $4,000 and $6,000. Blackwell claimed to have spent about $10,000.

Davis said he has stopped publishing the catalog and has concentrated on the tours to the Philippines. "I got a lot of contacts over there" who recruit women to attend introduction parties.

The Philippines in 1989 banned mail-order-bride agencies from operating in that country, but mail-order operators have managed to circumvent law both here and abroad because no U.S. government agency regulates these businesses. Many agencies, such as Davis' International Connections, don't even have business licenses.

Davis said he focuses on the Philippines because he's spent a lot of time there since his Navy days in the late 1950s. His third wife is a Filipina. Through his services, a younger brother and a son have married Filipinas.

Controversy is good for business

Cherry Blossoms, in Hawaii, one of the oldest and largest mail-order agencies in the country, shows photographs of women from Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. The number of women from former Soviet republics has skyrocketed in the past few years, said Bob Burrows, publisher and editor of the agency's bimonthly magazine.

Cherry Blossoms sends the catalog for free but charges $10 per address. A year's subscription that includes 3,000 addresses costs $395. The company grossed $500,000 last year, and takes credit for 10,000 marriages since the business was founded in 1974 by free-wheeling, Harvard-educated John Broussard.

Burrows, like many others in the business, dislikes the term "mail-order bride." "We have a catalog, yeah, but it's different from a Sears catalog," he said. "You can't order women. You can order their addresses. There's a big difference. No one forces anybody to marry or do anything else."

Ultimately, Burrows said, he doesn't mind bad press.

"The more criticism we get, the better we do," he said, citing a recent television show in which a representative of the National Organization for Women excoriated the mail-order-bride industry. "After the show, our sales went through the roof."

"He's a very kind man"

The agencies, large and small, advertise their services in the classified sections of newspapers and magazines across the country. BEAUTIFUL LADIES WORLDWIDE, one ad reads. MEET EXOTIC RUSSIAN BEAUTIES, reads another. LOVELY ASIAN LADIES SEEK LOVE, reads yet another.

It was one such ad placed by Davis in an Alaskan tourist magazine that caught 71-year-old Ralph Gilmore's eye in the spring of 1993. Gilmore's wife of 40 years had died of lung cancer three years earlier, and he wanted a companion. Gilmore sent for a catalog and corresponded for eight months with Elma "Girlie" Termoso of Cebu, Philippines.

In January last year, Gilmore went to the Philippines and married Termoso in a private church ceremony, then returned to his home in Schenevus, N.Y., while her immigration papers were processed. She arrived in November. They have been together four months.

Elma Gilmore at 27 is only one year older than Ralph Gilmore's youngest child. That doesn't bother her, Elma Gilmore said. "He's a very kind man. I like his principles," she said. "I'm lucky. I did not make a mistake in choosing this life."

"A slave for life"

Ninotchka Rosca is the New York director of the Gabriela Network, an international women's organization based in the Philippines that has led the efforts to outlaw the industry. Rosca calls the industry a modern form of slavery, exploiting desires to escape Third World poverty.

"We have a slogan: `A paid-for wife is a slave for life.' "

The women who allow their names to be placed in the catalogs, Rosca said, are forced into it by dire circumstance - hardships most people in America could not fathom. " `Force' doesn't just mean somebody holding a gun to your head. It means being so poor that you see no other alternative."

The Philippines, one of the poorest nations in Asia, annually exports more than 20,000 mail-order brides worldwide, Rosca said. And because the women are sought for their reputed submissiveness and purchased like commodities, they are often dominated, abused or enslaved.

The Gabriela Network has collected a series of horror stories. Mail-order bride Betty Ligones of Philadelphia in 1985 nearly became a victim of her husband, convicted serial killer Gary Heidnik. And Helen Mendoza Krueger of Honolulu in 1986 was murdered by her husband for her life insurance.

Philippine consulates in Germany, Australia, Denmark and Saudi Arabia have received reports of mail-order brides becoming victims of murder or suicides. Women have reported being held in isolation, beaten, forced into slave labor or tricked into prostitution.

In Seattle, Isabela Cuerpo-Clark, a domestic-violence advocate for the Refugee Women's Alliance, said that of the 25 abused women she is currently counseling, half met their husbands through correspondence.

"Safer than meeting at a bar"

On the other side, the male clients who are often ripe to fall in love risk being tricked by women into sending money or being used to gain entry into a First World country. Blackwell contended his wife did just that. Blackwell's attorney, Bart Anderson, said it was a common immigration scam.

But scams and the abuse of women happen regardless of the mail-order-bride industry, said Burrows of Cherry Blossoms. He said there was no evidence showing that abuse and fraud occur more often in mail-order relationships than in others.

"Any relationship is open to abuse, regardless of whether you meet someone through us, or at a bar or in the church choir," he said. "But I would bet that it's safer meeting someone through Cherry Blossoms, spending months corresponding and talking, than meeting someone at a bar."

Burrows and Davis said there was no essential difference between their agencies and other pen-pal clubs and dating services. There are agencies that link singles of all interests: science, classical music, religion and sex.

"So if two people who meet through The Science Connection marry and kill each other, is it Science Connection's fault?" said one advocate.

"Not good at meeting women"

There's little research on the kind of man who looks for foreign wives through mail-order catalogs, but one study at the University of Texas in 1985 found the men tended to be older and divorced, and had gone through a traumatic experience with a previous relationship.

William Suitt, a software engineer at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, fit the profile. He is 53 and divorced. In January, Suitt married a 25-year-old woman in the Philippines he met through Davis. The woman, Jasmine Benito, is still there, waiting for immigration papers.

"I'm just one of those guys who's not good at meeting women," said Suitt, who described himself as having thinning hair and sagging jowls. "I don't hang around bars and don't go to church. I joined a bunch of different singles organizations and wasn't getting anywhere."

He and Benito corresponded for eight months. He flew over and they decided in a short time they wanted to marry. "Before I went over there, we agreed that if we didn't object to one another, we were going to get married. That's what we did."