Prisoner to marry inmate pen pal

They have never kissed, never touched hands, never even met. But Diane Zamora and Steven Mora are to be married soon — even though they are maximum-security inmates in separate Texas state prisons, 230 miles apart.

The jailbirds-turned-lovebirds struck up an acquaintance as pen pals more than a year ago. She is 25, a former Naval Academy honor student serving a life sentence for killing a teenage romantic rival in 1995; he is 27, a small-time repeat offender doing four years for threatening a witness.

The couple applied for a marriage license in January, but had to wait while state and county officials determined whether such a union was legal.

Waiting was no problem for Zamora and Mora; both are in solitary confinement in their cells 23 hours a day. Applications for a marriage license were mailed to them last month.

Barring an 11th-hour snag, the wedding will go ahead at a county courthouse, but without such conventional niceties as a bride and groom.

Proxies would stand in for both.

Zamora won't be eligible for parole until 2036; Mora is scheduled for release in March.

Can this marriage be saved? Conjugal prison visits are forbidden in Texas. But if Zamora's warden allows it, Mora eventually might be permitted a "contact visit."

"That would consists of an embrace and kiss on arrival and an embrace and kiss on departure," said Larry Fitzgerald, spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

Then again, Mora might not wait 32 years until Zamora is up for parole.

"Once he gets out," Mora's mother, Saundra Gonzales, told the Houston Chronicle, "it will probably fizzle."