Talking with Serial Killers

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  The bemused witnesses noted that the women grabbed a red-and-white beer cooler from the back seat and, still arguing, staggered off along the road. At the approach of other cars, they would dash into the woods and hide; only to reappear after the vehicles had passed. When the coast was clear, they returned to the car.

  When Rhonda rushed over to offer what little assistance she could, the blonde begged her not to call the police, saying that her father lived just up the road. The two women climbed back into the car and, with some difficulty, managed to reverse it on to the road and drive off. Within minutes, a front tyre went flat and, with the car now disabled, Wuornos and Moore had no other option other than to abandon it. They pulled off the rear licence plate and threw it, together with the car keys, into the woods and walked away.

  A motorist, thinking that the women might need help, pulled over and offered assistance. He noticed that the blonde was not only bleeding but also very drunk. When she asked him for a lift, he thought better of it and refused, whereupon Lee became angry and abusive. The man drove away, but contacted the Orange Springs Fire Department, and told them about the injured woman.

  Two emergency vehicles were despatched to the scene, but when they arrived, Lee Wuornos denied that they had been in the car. ‘I don’t know anything about any accident,’ she snarled. ‘I want people to stop telling lies and leave us alone.’

  At 9.44pm Trooper Rickey responded to the emergency call, and found the car. (It was not until almost two months later that detectives learned exactly where the Sunbird had first crashed, or heard the account given by Rhonda and Jim Bailey.) Marion County’s Deputy Lawing was dispatched to investigate the abandoned, smashed-up vehicle. The VIN was checked, identifying the missing Peter Siems as the owner. Latent bloody prints were found in the vehicle and there were bloodstains on the fabric of the seats and on the door handles. Items removed from the car by the police included Busch and Budweiser beer cans, as well as Marlboro cigarettes and two beverage cosies. Underneath the front passenger seat lay a bottle of Windex window spray with an Eckerd Drugs price label attached to it. This ticket was easily traceable to a store on Gordon Street in Atlanta, Georgia.

  By now, the police artist had drawn composites of the two women, based on descriptions given by witnesses of the incident with the Sunbird. Armed with these sketches and the bottle of Windex, the investigators travelled to Atlanta to question the manager of Eckerd Drugs. Viewing the pictures, he recalled the two women entering his store on a Friday night. ‘We are in a bad part of town in a predominantly black area and white people do not venture into this area after dark,’ he said. The manager remembered that the women purchased cosmetics and a black box of Trojan condoms, the same brand found near David Spear’s body and inside the trunk of his car. A beverage cosy was also traceable to a Speedway store near to the entrance/exit ramps of I-75 in Wildwood.

  Peter Siems and his wife were missionaries. They neither drank nor smoked, and relatives stated that the couple had never travelled to Atlanta. John Wisnieski of the Jupiter Police had been working on the case since Siems was reported missing. He sent out a nationwide Teletype containing descriptions of the two women, and he also sent a synopsis of the case, together with descriptions and sketches of the two women, to the Florida Criminal Activity Bulletin. Then he waited. He was not optimistic about finding Siems alive. The man’s body had not been found, his credit cards had not been used, and money had not been withdraw from his bank account.

  * * *

  Ever-smiling Eugene ‘Troy’ Burress celebrated his fiftieth birthday in January 1990. With a natural gift of the gab, he was employed as a part-time salesman for the Gilchrist Sausage Company in Ocala, a resort town in northern Florida, where he also lived. He also ran his own company, Troy’s Pools, in Boca Raton.

  On 30 July 1988, Burress set out on Gilchrist business, travelling the company’s Daytona route, which took him to several customers throughout central Florida. His last planned stop was to have been Salt Springs, in Marion County. This was ‘Wuornos killing country’, and he never arrived.

  When he failed to report at his office after work, Gilchrist manager, Mrs Jonnie Mae Thompson, started calling around and discovered that Burress had failed to show up for his last delivery. She immediately went out in search of him and, at 2.00am, he was reported missing by his wife. The police recorded her description of a slightly-built man around 5ft 6in in height and weighing about 155lb, with blue eyes and blonde hair.

  This time there was a fast response and a quick, though tragic, outcome. At 4.00am, Marion County deputies found the Gilchrist delivery van, distinctive with its black cab, white refrigerator back and company logo, on the shoulder of State Road 19, 20 miles east of Ocala. The vehicle was locked and the keys were missing, as was Troy Burress.

  A family out for a picnic, in the Ocala National Forest, found his body five days later. They chanced upon his body in a clearing, just off Highway 19, and about eight miles from his abandoned delivery van. Florida’s heat and humidity had hastened decomposition, precluding identification at the scene. Identification was confirmed later by his wife by means of the wedding ring he was wearing. He had been killed with two shots from a .22-calibre handgun, one to the chest and one to the back. A clipboard with delivery details and receipts, which had been removed from the van, was found near the body, but the company’s takings were missing.

  * * *

  Dick Humphreys, of Crystal River, Florida, never made it home from his last day of work at the Sumterville office of the Florida’s Department of Health and Rehabilitation Services. An investigator specialising in protecting abused and injured children, he was about transfer to the department’s office at Ocala. Aged 56 he was a man of some experience who had formerly served as a police chief in Alabama.

  On 11 September 1990, he disappeared after picking up a blonde hitch-hiker. The following evening, his body was found off County Road 484 near I-75 in Marion County. He had been shot seven times. Six .22-calibre bullets were recovered from his body but the seventh copper-jacketed round had passed through his wrist and was never found. His money and wallet were missing.

  Humphrey’s Firenza car was found on 19 September, some 70 miles to the north. It had been backed into a space behind an abandoned Banner service station at the intersection of I-10 and State Route 90, near Live Oak, in Suwannee County. The licence plate, keys and a bright yellow Highway Patrol Association bumper sticker had been removed from the car. During an initial examination of the vehicle, it was noted that everything which told the world it had belonged to Dick Humphreys was gone or trashed, just like his life. Missing items incuded his ice-scrapers, his maps, his personal papers, business papers and warranties. His favourite pipe, in the newly-carved wooden tray up on the dashboard, was also gone. In return, Lee Wuornos left one can of Budweiser beer under the passenger seat.

  Back at the police pound, a closer examination of the car’s interior revealed a cash register receipt for beer or wine from EMRO store number 8237, a Speedway truck stop and convenience store located at State Route 44 and I-75 in Wildwood. The receipt was time-stamped 4.19pm on 11 September 1990, the day that Dick had disappeared. The clerk who had been on duty at the time could not identify the man but did recognise the composite police sketches of Wuornos and Moore. From their body language, the clerk formed the impression they were hookers. When they left the store, she believed they drove away and therefore did not call the police, as she was obliged to because prostitutes are banned from truck stops throughout Florida.

  Most of the victim’s personal effects, including his pipe, which was returned to his wife, were found a month later in a wooded field off Boggy Marsh Road in southern Lake County near US 27.

  By now, a number of law enforcement officers, investigating the various murders, were starting to collate their evidence. Marion and Citrus detectives had compared notes on the Burress and Spears killings. Then they spoke to Tom Muck, in Pascoe County, after they read in the Florida D
epartment Law Enforcement (FDLE) bulletin that Muck’s victim might be linked to Spears. That made three, indicating that a serial killer was at large.

  The crimes had a number of features in common, including the fact that the victims were all older men who had been robbed, and two of them had had their pockets turned inside out. All three killings had been carried out using a small calibre weapon. Bullets, recovered from the bodies, were .22-calibre, copper-coated, hollow-nosed, with rifling marks made by a 6-right twist firearm.

  Another link emerged when the police exchanged the composite sketches made by their individual witnesses. They bore significant similarities, suggesting they were looking for the same short, blonde woman. If she was a sole killer, and not working with a man, the officers reasoned, then she might well use a small handgun as an ‘equaliser’.

  Captain Steve Binegar, commander of the Marion County Sheriff’s Criminal Investigation Division, knew about the Citrus and Pascoe murders. Today, he is based at the County Jail in Tallahassee, where he recalled that he could not ignore the similarities between the murders, and had begun to formulate a theory. His first job was to form a multi-agency task force, with representatives from counties where the bodies were found.

  ‘No one stopped to pick up hitch-hikers in those days,’ Captain Binegar explained. ‘So the perpetrator/s of those crimes had to be initially non-threatening to the victims. Specifically, when I learned that two women had walked away from Peter Siems’s car, I looked at the Trojan brand of prophylactics. Then came the composites and the truck stop clerk who said that the two women looked like hookers. Then I said to the other guys, “We gotta be looking for a highway hooker, period.”’

  Binegar decided to turn to the press for help. In late November, Reuters ran a story about the killings, reporting that the police were looking for two women. Newspapers throughout Florida picked up the story and ran it, along with the sketches of the women in question.

  * * *

  Sixty-year-old Walter Antonio, from Cocoa, Florida, was driving to Alabama, in search of a job. Recently engaged, he wore a gold and silver diamond ring, a gift from his fiancée. On 18 November, a police officer, out hunting, found a man’s body, naked except for a pair of tube socks, near the intersection of US 19 and US 27 in Dixie County. Walter Antonio had been shot four times, three times in the torso and once in the head, with a .22-calibre handgun.

  His maroon Pontiac Grand Prix car was found on 24 November in a wooded area near I-95 and US 1, in northern Brevard County. The licence plate and keys were missing and, like Humphrey’s car, a bumper sticker had been removed. A piece of paper had been crudely pasted over the VIN, and the doors were locked. Empty Budweiser cans were found on the ground near the vehicle, which had been wiped clean of fingerprints.

  Detectives learnt that Antonio meticulously recorded every purchase he made of car fuel, retaining the filling station receipts on which he noted his mileage. From this methodical behaviour, they were able to deduce that, in the week since his disappearance, his car had been driven for over 1,000 miles.

  His fiancée gave the police a list of possessions that had been in his car, including handcuffs, a reserve deputy badge, police billy club, flashlight, a Timex wristwatch, a suitcase, a toolbox and a baseball cap. All of these items were missing.

  Walter Antonio’s personal identification and clothing were discovered in a wooded area in Taylor County, approximately 38 miles north of the body’s location. The rest was never found.

  In just over a year, Lee Wuornos had scattered a trail of middle-aged male corpses across the highways of central Florida.

  * * *

  Following Captain Steve Binegar’s appeal for information through the newspapers, calls began to pour in and, by mid-December 1990, detectives had a number of firm leads involving the two women suspects. A man in Homosassa Springs, where Wuornos asked David Spears to drop her off, said that two women, who fitted the composites, had rented an RV mobile home from him about a year earlier. After searching through his records, he came up with the names of ‘Tyria Moore’ and ‘Lee’.

  A witness in Tampa said two women had worked at her motel south of Ocala, close to where Troy Burress was murdered. Their names, she said, were Tyria Moore and Susan Blahovec and they let it be known they had bought an RV in Homosassa Springs. The informant remembered that the blonde, Blahovec, was the dominant of the duo and believed she was a truck stop prostitute. She also told the police that both were lesbians.

  The information from these two callers rang immediate alarm bells with the task force – David Spears; Homosassa Springs; RV trailer; two women … Troy Burress; Ocala; RV trailer; the same two women. The investigation was starting to pay off as previously tenuous links started coming together.

  Meanwhile, the composite sketches, published by the media, of the red-lipped blonde with the stringy hair and her dark-haired, moon-face companion in the baseball cap, began to haunt Moore day and night. This was her excuse to flee Daytona Beach and go home to Ohio for Thanksgiving. Tyria, who had never hurt anyone in her life, had a lot of serious thinking to do because, although she was emotionally attached to Lee, she could not believe that her lover was the serial killer for whom the State had launched a massive search operation.

  The breakthrough for the investigators came from Port Orange near Daytona. Local police had picked up the trail of the two women and were able to provide a detailed account of the couple’s movements from late September to mid-December. They had stayed, primarily, at the Fairview Motel, in Harbor Oaks, where Blahovec registered as Cammie Marsh Greene. They spent a short while living in a small apartment, behind a restaurant near the Fairview, but returned later to the motel. Then Wuornos – aka Blahovec, aka Greene – returned alone and stayed until 10 December.

  A national police computer check gave driver’s licence and criminal record information on Tyria Moore, Susan Blahovec and Cammie Marsh Greene. Moore had no record worth considering, having had breaking and entering charges against her, in 1983, dropped. Blahovec had one trespassing arrest, while Greene had no record at all. Additionally, the photograph on Blahovec’s licence did not match the one for Greene.

  The Greene ID was the one that finally paid off. Volusia officers checked area pawnshops and found that in Daytona, Cammie Marsh Greene had pawned a 35mm Minolta Freedom camera and a Micronta Road Patrol Radar Detector bought at Radio Shack (both of the type owned by Richard Mallory), at the OK Pawn Shop in Daytona Beach. Cammie got $30 for the trade, showed her driver’s licence and duly left the obligatory thumbprint on the collection receipt. Few people even own a Radio Shack radar detector, let alone associated with a Minolta .35mm camera, so this combination sparked the detective’s interest. In Ormond Beach, she had pawned a set of tools that matched the description of those taken from David Spear’s truck, although the police failed to recover these.

  The thumbprint proved to be the key. Jenny Ahearn of the FDLE’s Automated Fingerprint Identification System found nothing on her initial computer search, but she visited Volusia County with colleagues where they began a hand-search of fingerprint records. Within an hour, she struck gold. The print showed up on a weapons charge and outstanding warrant against a Lori K Grody. Her fingerprints matched a bloody palm print found in Peter Siems’s Sunbird. All of this information was sent to the National Crime Information Centre, and responses came from Michigan, Colorado and Florida, confirming that Lori K Grody, Susan Blahovec and Cammie Marsh Greene were all aliases for one Aileen Carol Wuornos.

  Posing as leather-clad bikers, two undercover detectives, Mike Joyner and Dick Martin, finally spotted Lee Wuornos at 9.19pm on Tuesday, 8 January 1991, and kept her under surveillance. She was drinking at the Port Orange Pub, on Ridgewood Avenue, in Harbor Oaks, about half-a-mile north of her favourite bar, ‘The Last Resort’, one of the many bikers’ bars that line Highway One. Suddenly, to the dismay of the undercover officers, two uniformed Port Orange police officers walked into the bar and took Wuornos outside. Joyne
r and Martin frantically telephoned their command post at the ‘Pirate’s Cove Motel’ where authorities from six jurisdictions had gathered to bring the investigation to a head. They concluded that this development was not a leak but simply a case of alert police officers doing their jobs. Bob Kelly of the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office called the Port Orange Police Station and told them not to arrest Wuornos under any circumstances. The word was relayed to the officers in the nick of time, and Lee was allowed to return to the bar.

  The action shifted back to the two undercover detectives, who struck up a conversation with her and bought her a few beers. She left the bar at around 10.00pm, carrying a leather suitcase and declining the offer of a lift. Once again, the cautious arrest was almost ruined when two FDLE officers pulled up behind Wuornos, following her with their lights off as she walked down Ridgewood Avenue. Police at the command post radioed the FDLE officers to back off, allowing Lee to proceed to The Last Resort.

  Joyner and Martin met her at The Last Resort, drinking and chatting until midnight, when she left. But she did not go far. Lee Wuornos spent her last night of freedom sleeping on an old yellow vinyl car seat, under the tin roof overhang of the bar.

  Surveillance was planned to continue throughout the following day, but when the police learned that a large number of bikers was expected for a party at the bar that evening, they decided further surveillance would be impossible. By simply donning a crash helmet, Lee could quite easily disappear among the hundreds of motorcyclists milling around at the party, and vanish for good. The decision was made at that point to go ahead with the arrest. Joyner and Martin asked her if she would like to use their motel room to clean up before the party. At first she was reluctant, but then changed her mind and left the bar with them.

  Outside, on the steps leading to the bar, Larry Horzepa of the Marion County Sheriff’s Office approached Lee and told her that she was being arrested on an outstanding warrant for Lori Grody. This related to the illegal possession of a firearm and no mention was made of the murders. The arrest was kept low key and no announcement was made to the media that a suspected serial killer had been arrested. Their caution was well advised for, as yet, the police had no murder weapon and no Tyria Moore.