For 15 days in late 2005, state worker Rachael Rivas sat in a Sacramento Superior Court jury box, listening to testimony about a bloody brawl between inmates and guards at a state prison – and apparently fell in love with a killer.

Last month, Rivas, 33 – an alternate on the 2005 jury that acquitted her future husband, Edward Dumbrique – returned to the courthouse thanks to her own troubles with the law. And love had nothing, or possibly everything, to do with it.

The former Department of Consumer Affairs payroll specialist pleaded no contest Oct. 21 to a felony count of illegally downloading a confidential state personnel roster.

That roster contained 5,000 names and Social Security numbers of current and retired employees, and she sent it to her private e-mail account, which included the name "dumbriqueluv," triggering a major probe and a $100,000 effort by her department to counter possible identity theft.

Rivas Dumbrique, a heavyset woman with waist-length brown hair, is scheduled to be sentenced Nov. 18. She faces a minimum six-month sentence, but her former employer is pushing for the maximum, a year.

Since The Bee reported the incident this summer, Rivas Dumbrique's case has perplexed colleagues in the four departments where she has worked since 2005: Consumer Affairs, Mental Health, Corrections and Rehabilitation, and the State Controller's Office.

Why did this public servant download the confidential roster? No evidence has been disclosed linking her actions to any personal financial gain.

Were her actions influenced by her recent marriage to Edward Dumbrique, a Mexican Mafia member several years her junior who is serving a 29-years-to-life sentence for a 1997 drive-by gang killing in Los Angeles County?

Why did this mother of three marry a murderer?

At court, Rivas Dumbrique has offered few hints, saying almost nothing and dressing conservatively in loose-fitting black slacks and tops, but carrying a key chain bearing the Victoria's Secret brand name and a matching bright pink Razr cell phone. She and a relative who accompanied her to court both declined requests for comments.

The only clues, therefore, lie in search warrants, court documents, online postings and a series of statements that her former employers made to investigators and The Bee.

Common pattern, with twists

Rachael Rivas Dumbrique's story is a troubled, but not unique one, family court records show.

Domestic violence. Divorce. Troubled liaisons with men. Low-paying jobs that left her, as a single mother, unable to pay off student loans as she repeatedly went to court to secure child support payments. Then, a second marriage, to Dumbrique, on Nov. 17, 2007, at Corcoran State Prison.

It's the kind of life story New York-based author Sheila Isenberg has come across dozens of times in research for her nonfiction work about women attracted to jailed killers. But Isenberg said Rivas Dumbrique's case offers several twists, including a serious crime unrelated to helping an inmate escape.

Isenberg, a journalism instructor at Marist College, published the groundbreaking 1991 book, "Women Who Love Men Who Kill." To write the book, she interviewed the women, the killers, and prison psychiatrists and psychologists involved to understand what she calls "a really strange alternate world."

"These loves are very passionate and impassioned," Isenberg said. "The women in them will often do daring things, risky things, they would not normally do."

Isenberg said the women share a capacity for denial, coupled with a craving for a safe, idealized fantasy, which overwhelms their better judgment.

"These relationships are not really about love," she added. "They're more delusional."

Meeting a killer

Rachael Rivas seems to have first crossed paths with Edward Dumbrique in late 2005.

She was picked as an alternate juror for his felony assault trial and took time off work from her job at the State Controller's Office for jury duty between Nov. 7 and Dec. 16, 2005, state records show.

Call The Bee's Andrew McIntosh, (916) 321-1215.