Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Diane, Aileen’s natural mother, arrived shortly after the funeral of her mother and was shocked to find her children as hardened and homeless juveniles living on the street. Diane had given birth to two other children since abandoning Keith and Aileen and was raising them in Texas, again as a single mother on social assistance. She claims that social services authorities in Texas would not allow her to bring home an additional two children. “It sounds so cold…not being able to take your own children…but there’s only so much a person can do,” Diane says. Completely estranged, Lauri, 15-year-old Aileen, and her 16-year-old brother were cast adrift into their separate ways.

  Back then, Aileen did not look anything like she did when she was arrested for murder. She was blond and very attractive in a cute kind of way. But she led a vagrant’s life, hitchhiking and hooking along Michigan’s roads, sleeping over with men she picked up along the way or prostituting herself from dingy motels, ever increasing her travel circle farther out to Ohio, then Pennsylvania, and eventually south to Georgia and Florida. She habitually stole from clients and from people who befriended her for short periods of time before her sudden rages would put them off.

  Keith would pull himself out of drug and alcohol abuse to successfully pass his physical and join the Army in 1974, only to be diagnosed with cancer a month later. While he battled the cancer, the now widowed Lauri committed suicide in 1976 by running his car engine in a closed garage. Neither Aileen nor Keith went to the funeral. Aileen was nowhere to be found and had she been contacted it is unlikely she would have cared much about her hated stepfather/ grandfather’s death. Keith’s condition by this time was critical with the cancer having spread to his throat, brain, lungs, and bones.

  Four months later, Keith died.

  In the middle of all this, Aileen got married. One day while hitchhiking in Florida she was picked up by Lewis Gratz Fell, a wealthy retired 69-year-old blueblood Philadelphian. Fell wanted a beautiful young blonde on his arm and Aileen fit the bill. Aileen wanted a secure “sugar daddy” and Fell was exactly what she thought she needed. Fell gave Aileen a large diamond engagement ring and the marriage made the Daytona newspaper social pages along with a wedding photo of the strangely mismatched couple.

  Aileen returned for a visit to Troy, proudly showing off her ring and new silver-haired husband, claiming she was blissfully happy. But within days the bride began to get drunk and hang out in her familiar lowlife bars, much to the annoyance of Fell. He quickly returned to Florida without her and filed a restraining order claiming that Aileen had beaten him with his cane. Shortly afterward, he filed for divorce.

  Aileen reversed the story and claimed that it was she who was beaten but several witnesses had been told by Aileen that she became fed up with Fell when he doled out money to her “thirty dollars at a time.” She said she took his walking cane away from him and beat him. Altogether, the marriage lasted for a month.

  Missing Years Adrift

  For the next ten years, Aileen drifted across the U.S. living on the fringes of the highway system—hanging out at biker bars, hooking and stealing, occasionally dropping in on people she knew like her mother, Diane, in Texas and Lori, who was now married. The visits never lasted long and were always punctuated with Aileen’s raging outbursts.

  Aileen had an ingratiating charm about her but it could turn dark and ugly on a dime. One can see it in her interviews in the Broomfield documentaries. Broomfield had developed a relationship with her over the duration of two films made in the years while she stood trial and then awaited her execution. As long as the interviews went her way, she was charming, sweet, and friendly with him, but anytime Broomfield strayed from the agenda her eyes would go cold and dark like a shark’s, her nostrils flaring. Hours away from her execution she angrily dismissed Broomfield from her sight forever when he failed to stick to a closely scripted scenario she had wanted to play out before his camera. Aileen was like one of those friendly and cuddly pit bulls that suddenly turns and lunges for your throat for no apparent reason other than something clicks in their brain.

  In the 1970s and 1980s, Aileen Wuornos began to accrue a long list of criminal convictions, albeit under several different pseudonyms: assault and battery, armed robbery, theft, prohibited possession of a firearm, drunk and disorderly, and DUI. At some point she—either accidentally or in a botched suicide attempt—shot herself in the abdomen.

  In Daytona in 1981 she finally settled into a comfortable, casual relationship with Jay Watts, a 52-year-old autoworker. She moved in with him and apparently they lived relatively happily together for two months. This, perhaps, was the first relationship that Aileen managed to sustain. But one night they argued, according to Watts over some matter so trivial that he could not even recall what it was. Watts testified that Aileen was always a boisterous, outgoing, friendly woman who was fun to be with, and he had never witnessed her legendary temper. That night was no exception—she seemed a little upset but she was not at all violent.

  Aileen remembered it differently. She recalled that she had a lot on her mind that evening and had asked Watts if he’d mind giving her some privacy in the bedroom they shared. According to her, Watts took it the wrong way and said, “You can leave my room and the rest of the house for that matter!”

  Waking up the next morning, Aileen was convinced that it was over between the two of them. Taking a six-pack of beer and driving off in a car that Watts had bought and restored for her, she drove down to the beach and got drunk. She then bought more beer and afterward purchased a .22 handgun at a pawnshop. She walked over to a K-Mart and bought some bullets, then to a liquor store where she bought some whisky and mixed it with Librium. She says she was contemplating suicide.

  Then, dressed in her bikini, she stumbled into a convenience store, waving her gun as she attempted to rob it. According to her, she wanted to be arrested so that Watts would have to come to rescue her, pay her bail, and take her home. That would prove he still loved her.

  Aileen was arrested without any trouble a few miles down the road. She was sentenced to three years in prison. Watts found a lawyer for her and visited her and they corresponded. Watts recalled that Aileen railed against lesbians in the prison, saying that she had to fight them off and that they disgusted her. Watts supported Aileen in prison for about a year before they finally drifted apart. Realizing that Watts was drifting away from her, Aileen placed a personal ad in a biker magazine and received several hundred replies.

  Aileen was released in August 1983 and immediately hitched a ride to Washington, D.C., where she showed up at the door of one of her pen pals, Ed, a 47-year-old Maryland engineer. After telling him she was gay and that they would have to keep it platonic, she moved in with him for a tumultuous three months of nonstop drinking, raging, and fantasizing. During the three months she made several trips back and forth to Florida in Ed’s car, where she would stay with Jay Watts, stealing things from him on her departures.

  Ed would later recall that Wuornos spun fantasies of stomping a biker who had attempted to rape her. She described and acted out how she turned the tables on him, getting him to the ground and kicking and stomping on his head. She would lose her temper at the most trivial provocation and sometimes with no provocation at all.

  Aileen initiated sex with Ed once, who was surprised because she had told him she was gay. Aileen replied, “I was just joking! Let’s go find out how gay I am.” Five minutes after having sex, Aileen got up and returned brandishing a kitchen utensil, threatening to kill Ed. He managed to talk her down, but she was clearly wearing out her welcome.

  Both Ed and Jay Watts recall that Aileen also had a fantasy about being like Bonnie and Clyde, admiring the bandits’ violent migratory careers. She was fascinated with outlaws and bikers and the violent subculture that enveloped them.

  Ed eventually managed to get Aileen out of his apartment when she drank so much that she collapsed and had to be hospitalized. It was a relief to be free of his raging houseguest. Aileen drifte
d back toward Florida, sometimes hooking along the highways and sometimes stealing things from the cars of clients and people who might have given her a ride. Somewhere along the way she stole a handgun from a car glove compartment.

  In the ensuing months, under various aliases, Wuornos built up a lengthy criminal record. She was arrested driving a stolen car. In another incident she tried to drive away from a license checkpoint and was pursued and stopped by police. A search of the vehicle uncovered the stolen handgun and a box of ammunition. Several months later she was again arrested with another handgun in her possession. She was arrested again for forging bad checks totaling $5,595 but she did not show up for sentencing. The only thing that kept Aileen out of prison was her uncanny luck in passing herself off under different aliases and fleeing.

  Since her release from prison in 1983, Aileen began claiming to be a lesbian. In a telephone conversation with Lori in 1984, Aileen said, “I’m gay and I know you are not going to like that.” Around this time, Aileen had a brief and tumultuous relationship with a woman named Toni.

  Tyria “Ty” Moore: Aileen Finds True Love

  Sometime in June 1986, Aileen met Tyria “Ty” Moore in a gay bar in Daytona. Their relationship was vividly documented in the movie Monster, with Christina Ricci in the role of Ty (although her name would be changed in the movie). This would become the longest sustained relationship Aileen ever had—four and a half years—during which Aileen would come to commit her string of seven known serial murders. Ty was six years younger than the 31-year-old Aileen, who was now using a truncated version of her name: Lee. Ty and Lee became a couple. Ty was mesmerized by the boisterous, hustling, and motor-mouthed Lee, who dominated the younger woman.

  Over the next four years the couple drifted from cheap motel rooms and small backroom apartments, mainly in the Daytona area but in other parts of Florida as well. Tyria would work as a chambermaid in the low-end motels that dotted the Florida highway system while Lee would remain in her room getting drunk. Whenever there was a shortage of money, Lee would hit the highways and hitchhike from exit to exit, turning tricks in between. Sometimes she made only $20 but other times she would come back with as much as $300.

  Aileen was extremely jealous and possessive of Tyria, preferring that she not work at all and remain in her room while Lee turned tricks to sustain them. Some of the couple’s former landlords record that there were sometimes days when the two women would not come out of their rooms other than to purchase beer, cigarettes, and snacks. Housekeeping would remove mountains of empty beer cans and snack wrappers from their room.

  Ty, who had no previous criminal record other than a breaking-and-entering charge when she attempted to recover her belongings from the apartment of an ex-lover, began to accrue minor charges and incidents: driving without headlights, disobeying a traffic sign. In July 1987, Ty was treated for scalp lacerations after an altercation in a bar. All minor things compared to Aileen’s record.

  Lee and Ty lived a shadowy existence on the dark fringes of the Sunshine State. They plodded on foot in a freeway world of out-of-state cars rushing north and south. Lee and Ty inhabited a world of dingy, dirty little bars and stale, low-rent motel rooms and trailer parks, only needing to be within walking distance of a minimart with its supply of beer and cigarettes. It was a cash world where identities were rarely asked for—only that the rent be paid in advance. They were constantly on the move, either because of trouble with the law or because of eviction for noise as Lee and Ty fought frequently and loudly, or for failure to pay rent or damage to the premises.

  While Lee kept mostly kept to herself and focused all her attention on Ty, with whom she was madly in love, Ty worked and circulated among other people. Sometimes Tyria invited her fellow workers home to the motel room she shared with Lee. Almost everyone had the same impression of Aileen—she was outwardly friendly but there was something darkly menacing and overcontrolling about her at the same time. She was scary.

  In the autumn of 1989 Lee and Ty were living in a room at the Ocean Shores Motel in Ormond Beach, north of Daytona. Ty was working as a housekeeper in the nearby Casa Del Mar Hotel. On November 23, around the Thanksgiving holiday, Ty brought over a fellow employee, Sandy Russell, a pretty 29-year-old blonde, for a Thanksgiving meal of frozen turkey TV dinners. Russell would later recall that although Aileen was outwardly friendly, she did not partake of the meal she served and instead just sat there watching her eat. Later in the evening, Aileen was drunk and waved a handgun around, describing how she had shot herself in the stomach some years ago. Again, Aileen’s incipient menacing behavior overshadowed her overt attempt at maintaining a friendly demeanor toward the guest Ty had brought home.

  The First Murder

  On November 30, Aileen set out to make some money by hooking on the highways. She was no longer the cute blonde she was when she was twenty. Overweight and cranky, her face and teeth showed the years of neglect and drug and alcohol abuse. Aileen was rough trade, dressed in unflattering cutoff jean shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, which did little to disguise her flabby beer belly.

  Numerous authors remark how Aileen’s overweight and rough look must have had a detrimental effect on her earning potential as a prostitute and perhaps that was the motive for her killing—desperate need for cash. Aileen was not a call girl, the kind of refined and pretty prostitute men hire for a “girlfriend experience.” She was a roadside ho and the rougher and more haggard she looked the more she attracted a specific clientele desiring some quick and dirty sex with an underclass female with whom they would never imagine being seen in the light of day. They were not looking for a girlfriend substitute; these men wanted a fix of degrading sex. Aileen was for them the roadside Cigarette Pig of her childhood, and no matter how rough and worn she looked she would have suffered no shortage of clients who wanted this kind of sex.

  Tyria would later testify that Aileen returned early in the morning the next day smelling of alcohol and with a Cadillac she said she had “borrowed.” They had been looking at a small apartment nearby and were planning to move soon, having already packed some of their things in boxes. Lee told Ty that she had made a lot of money the night before and that they could move to the apartment that very day. After having moved their things, Aileen put a bike in the trunk and drove off to “return the car.”

  That evening as Lee and Ty sat in their new apartment guzzling beer and watching TV, Lee suddenly said, “I killed a guy today.” Ty said nothing, glassily watching TV. Aileen continued to pour out details: She shot the man and hid his body in the woods, covering his remains with a carpet. The unfamiliar possessions and clothing that Ty saw Aileen bring to the apartment belonged to the victim. Lee attempted to show Ty a photograph of him, obviously taken from his wallet. Ty looked away. The car, Lee explained, was his and she had gotten rid of it this afternoon.

  Ty did not pose a single question, not even why. She just continued watching the TV show like a docile cow. When asked later if Aileen ever told her why she had killed the man, Ty would reply that motive never came up in the conversation.

  On December 6, using identification she stole from Ty’s former roommate, Lee pawned a camera and radar detector she had taken from the car for thirty dollars. As required by local law, her thumb was inked and a fingerprint pressed into the pawnshop’s receipt book next to her signature. The name was fake; the thumbprint was not. With the press of thumb, Aileen had crushed any possibility of getting away unidentified. The stolen identification would later bring police to the roommate, and from the roommate to Ty, then from Ty to Aileen and her thumbprint. That’s how eventually Aileen Wuornos would go down, but not for at least a year.

  Police on a routine patrol found the abandoned car first, emptied and carefully wiped clean of fingerprints. A check of the VIN number and tags returned the name of 51-year-old Richard Mallory as the owner. In a small depression near the car police found a wallet with several expired credit cards and business cards. Also found half-buried were two p
lastic tumblers and a bag containing a half-empty bottle of vodka.

  The driver’s seat was pulled more forward than a distance compatible with the height description of the owner. Ominously, there appeared to be a bloodstain on the backrest of the driver’s seat.

  Mallory was found later, on December 13, approximately five miles away from the car. His body was discovered by several men scavenging for recyclable debris in a small clearing littered with garbage among palmettos. The body had been almost entirely hidden beneath a large scrap of carpeting. Mallory was lying facedown, fully clothed, his jeans zipped up fastened, and his belt buckled with the buckle slightly off-center. His front pockets were pulled out as if somebody had been searching through them. He was shot four times in the chest with copper-coated hollow-point .22 bullets. One of the bullets appeared to have entered his body while he was still seated in his car. His blood alcohol level was .05, in the lower limits of intoxication.

  Mallory was the owner of an appliance repair shop and was known to frequent prostitutes. After her arrest, Aileen would claim that she had shot him because she “realized” he was going to rape her.

  “The Psychic Abolition of Redemption”—Aileen’s Second Murder

  Aileen killed for the second time six months later. The victim was 43-year-old David Spears, a large, soft-spoken man who was described as “everyone’s idea of a nice guy.” He was predictable, hardworking, honest, sweet, and responsible. In many ways he was the opposite of the first victim, Mallory. Spears had three children and although he was divorced from his wife of twenty years, they had continued in a relationship for the last six years and were considering remarrying. David had already bought a new engagement ring. His wife and children lived about a hundred miles away near Orlando, and it was Spears’s routine to spend every weekend staying at their house. On Saturday morning, May 19, 1990, he was on his way in his pickup truck for one of those weekend stays. This one was special, too, because one of his daughters was celebrating her twenty-third birthday and college graduation. He was carrying a large sum of cash as a graduation present for his daughter and was due to arrive at around 2:00 p.m. He never showed up and did not call—very unlike him.