From heroin to heroine and hero.

"In real life or on television, the wedding vows exchanged by Donnie Andrews and Fran Boyd on Aug. 11 “would be viewed by many,” Mr. Andrews said, “as a marriage made in hell.” (NYT)
“But we have turned it around,” said Mr. Andrews, 53. “I’m not saying it’s heaven, but we’ve both been trying to do the right thing.”
In 1987, Mr. Andrews was sentenced to life in prison for murdering a man on the troubled streets of West Baltimore, where Ms. Boyd, a former junkie, said she got high on heroin and exchanged sex for other drugs.

Their first conversation took place on Jan. 21, 1993. The connection had been set up by Edward Burns, a former Baltimore homicide detective whom Mr. Andrews had surrendered to in 1986, and David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun reporter who had written about Mr. Andrews’s criminal activities.
Mr. Burns and Mr. Simon had been interviewing Ms. Boyd for a book they were writing that would eventually be turned into the HBO mini-series “The Corner.”

They had a hunch Mr. Andrews, who was turning his life around by earning a general equivalency diploma, taking college-level courses and studying the Bible, could influence the life of Ms. Boyd, who was still nodding out in the old neighborhood. They gave Mr. Andrews her phone number.
“From that very first call, I could hear in her voice that she wanted help,” said Mr. Andrews, who was in the Federal Correctional Institution in Phoenix. “She was looking for a way out.”
Mr. Andrews, also a former heroin user, understood her struggle and her pain. His first wife was murdered three years after he went to prison. He began calling Ms. Boyd frequently. Their conversations were sometimes “four and five hours long,” he said. After a $2,900 phone bill, limits were set on their calls. He used less expensive communication, too, sometimes writing three or four letters a week.
“I was often in bad shape when I answered that phone, but no matter what I did or what I said, Donnie never criticized me,” Ms. Boyd said. “He just kept giving me reasons why I should be doing something else, saying that if he can change, I can change. Through the worst of times, I kept holding on to that.”

Two years after they were introduced, their relationship turned a romantic corner, and the telephone soul mates decided to exchange photographs. When his landed in her mailbox, she pulled the photo from the envelope and peeked at it through her fingers. “I thought, ‘Dear Lord, please make this man be good looking,’ ” she said, laughing. “When I saw how nice looking he was, I just said, ‘Thank you, Jesus.’ ”
By now, Ms. Boyd had fallen hard for Mr. Andrews, but she was afraid to be in love with him.
“I didn’t want to be one of those woman in love with a guy in prison who was never coming home,” she said. “But I knew that Donnie really cared about me and that we were in this thing together, so letting him go was no longer an option.”
In the ensuing years, Ms. Boyd, guided by the steady influence of Mr. Andrews, began standing firmly on her own feet. She became a guardian for two nieces and a nephew, while providing for her own two sons. She began doing outreach work for drug addicts at New Hope Treatment Center in West Baltimore, a methadone clinic associated with Bon Secours Hospital. And she began visiting Mr. Andrews, attending parole hearings, and lobbying along with friends and family for his release.
“I loved Fran so much, that each time the parole board denied me, I just broke down and starting crying, because I felt like she was wasting all this precious time on a lost cause,” Mr. Andrews said. “But every time I broke down, Fran just got tough and said ‘Can we stop the pity party now?’ She had become so strong-willed.”
In April 2005, Ms. Boyd’s unwavering love and loyalty was rewarded with Mr. Andrews’s release after 17 and a half years of time served."