Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  David Spears’s badly decomposing naked body was found on June 1, in a clearing amidst pine trees and palmettos south of Chassahowitzka off route US 19, about 80 miles beyond his planned destination. The corpse was so badly decomposed and gnawed at by animals that at first it could not be determined if it was a man or a woman. The autopsy found at least nine bullet wounds and recovered six .22 slugs. At least one or two bullets had been fired into Spears’s back, while the rest were fired into his torso and abdomen from the front.

  Spears’s pickup truck had already been found earlier, looted and abandoned. Police found blood on the driver’s side inner running board and an empty condom package.

  According to Aileen’s confession after her arrest, Spears had picked her up hitchhiking near where route 27 intersects with I-4—approximately thirty minutes away from where his wife and children lived and were waiting for him to celebrate. She claimed that without phoning his wife and offering some excuse, the reliable and predictable Spears drove some eighty miles beyond his destination to the Homosassa area where he pulled off the road into a deserted area to have sex with Aileen, at around one or two in the morning—nearly nine hours after he was due to meet his family.

  Wuornos claimed they drank a lot of beer, both got naked, and were “screwing around” when Spears invited her into the back of the pickup truck. There Wuornos says she saw a lead pipe just as Spears got violent with her. Wuornos said she leapt from the back and ran to the passenger door, retrieved her bag, and shot Spears as he stood by the opened tailgate of the truck. Wounded, Spears made a desperate dash back to the driver’s side and attempted to get in to presumably drive away. Wuornos stated that she then shot him across the cab from the passenger side, shouting, “What the hell you think you’re doin’, dude…I’m gonna kill you, ’cause you were trying to do whatever you could with me!”

  Spears staggered back away from the truck, whereby Wuornos slid over to the driver’s side and fired a third shot that brought him down to the ground. She did not recall firing at least another four shots into his chest and two in his back. Before she drove off in his truck, she stole about $500 to $700, which she found in his clothes and hidden in the vehicle. She then drove home, unloaded some of the tools she thought she could sell from the back of the truck, and then dumped the pickup by a remote roadside. Ty, who was working the day shift that day, recalled Aileen coming by with a “borrowed” pickup truck but she did not ride in it.

  The geography of the murder site, the time line, and Spears’s reliably consistent commitment to his family suggests that it is unlikely that thirty minutes before arriving at his appointment with them he would have suddenly changed his mind and spent the next nine hours hanging out with a roadside hooker some eighty miles beyond his original destination. At least not without calling.

  Ian Brady, the Moors Murders serial killer, the accomplice of Myra Hindley whose story is told further on, wrote that it is the second murder that is the most important in the evolution of the serial killer. The first murder leaves the killer in a state of confused shock. According to Brady, the killer is

  …too immersed in the psychological and legal challenges of the initial homicide, not to mention immediate logistics—the physical labour that the killing and disposal involve. He is therefore not in a condition to form a detached appreciation of the traumatic complexities bombarding his sense.

  …The second killing will hold all the same disadvantages, distracting elements of the first, but to a lesser degree. This allows a more objective assimilation of the experience. It also fosters an expanding sense of omnipotence, a wide-angle view of the metaphysical chessboard.

  In many cases, the element of elevated aestheticism in the second murder will exert a more formative impression than the first and probably of any in the future. It not only represents the rite of confirmation, a revelational leap of lack of faith in humanity, but also the onset of addiction to hedonistic nihilism.

  The psychic abolition of redemption.136

  Serial Murder

  There were six months between Aileen’s first and second murders. She did not wait that long to commit her third. She was now transformed into a monstrous killing machine. About two weeks later, somewhere near Tampa, Wuornos encountered 40-year-old Charles Carskaddon, a laborer on his way to Florida to pick up his fiancée and drive back with her to Missouri where he had just landed a job as a punch press operator. Aileen shot him dead in the backseat of his Cadillac. According to her testimony, she then searched the car and discovered a .45 handgun. Obviously he was planning to kill her, Aileen explained. She became so enraged after finding the gun, she says, that she reloaded her nine-shot .22 revolver and pumped several more shots into Carskaddon.

  As before, Wuornos took her trophy car and loot home to Ty. They target practiced together with Carskaddon’s .45. The car was kept for about two days before being abandoned.

  Seven days later in a coffee shop near I-95 not far from Bunnell, Wuornos met Peter Siems, a 65-year-old preacher traveling in a Sunbird full of Bibles on his way to join a Christ Is the Answer Crusade caravan. She ended up in his car. According to Wuornos they stripped naked and were going to have sex on a blanket on the ground but then she realized that he was planning to rape her. She shot him dead, abandoned his body, and again looted his car and drove it home. Siems’s body has never been found.

  Ty remembered a Bible suddenly appearing in their room. This time, Aileen kept the car. She parked it behind the motel they were staying at. When Ty asked about it, Lee told her she had borrowed it but there was a problem returning it.

  A month later, Aileen still had the car, chauffeuring Tyria around in it. On July 4, Lee and Ty took the car out for a holiday joyride. They kept stopping along the way and buying beer. It was not unusual for Ty and Aileen to put away up to three cases of beer in one day. Aileen was so drunk that she could not drive any longer. She asked Ty to drive, even though she was as drunk as Aileen. Ty ended up losing control and they crashed the car in a ditch near some houses.

  As people came out to help, Aileen and Ty ran away, but not before they were seen. When police recovered the vehicle, they found it was registered in the name of Siems, who had been reported missing by his family. Careful descriptions of the two women seen escaping were taken and sketches were produced based on the witness recollections. A handprint belonging to Wuornos was lifted from the abandoned vehicle.

  Interestingly enough, police had already suspected that a female offender might be behind some of these murders, although because of different jurisdictions, the murders were not yet linked together. In the case of Mallory, police suspected that one of the hooker-strippers he had recently hired might be behind his death, while in the case of Spears, the possibility that his ex-wife might somehow be involved crossed their investigative minds. The pattern of the shooting—shots to the torso—was to police indicative of a female shooter. Even when shooting themselves, women rarely aimed at the head, preferring instead a shot to the heart or other parts of the torso, according to police.

  Next, 50-year-old Eugene “Troy” Burress, a route driver for a sausage company failed to come home on July 30 nor did he return his delivery truck to the company. The truck was found the next day along his route. Troy would be found on August 4 lying facedown off a small dirt road, shot twice. According to Aileen, he had picked her up along the road, they had agreed to have sex, but instead Troy had thrown a ten-dollar bill at her and said he was going to rape her. She shot him once in the chest. As he lay dying on the ground, she put another shot into his back. Eugene Burress was a married man with children and grandchildren with no history of erratic behavior or vices. His family was devastated by his murder and put a reward out for any information leading to the arrest of the culprit.

  On September 11, Aileen murdered her sixth victim, Dick Humphreys, a former Alabama police officer and chief and now employed as a child abuse investigator. When he failed to return home one night without calling, his wife began de
sperately calling his work and former police partners. The next day some kids bicycling in deserted terrain behind housing developments found Humphreys in a field by a road, slumped over in almost a sitting position. He was fully dressed but his pockets had been turned inside out. He was still wearing his watch and wedding ring. He had been shot seven times. One of the shots was to the back of his head. On his right side there was a small bruise consistent with a mark made by a barrel of a gun being forced hard against his side. A toxicology report showed no traces of marijuana or alcohol in his system. Again, Humphreys had no known kinky history and left behind an adoring and grieving family.

  On November 17, 1990, around the Thanksgiving holiday, Aileen murdered 60-year-old Walter Jeno Antonio, a trucker, security guard, and member of the reserve police. According to Aileen, she was picked up by him while hitchhiking and he agreed to “help her make some money” by having sex in the backseat of his car. But when she undressed, Aileen claimed that Antonio flashed a police ID and told her he would arrest her unless she had sex with him for free. They got out of the car and began to argue. When Antonio went to her side of the vehicle, Aileen said she drew her .22 handgun. They struggled but Aileen prevailed, and as Antonio ran for his life she shot him in the back. She shot him three more times, once execution-style to the back of the head the same way she had shot Dick Humphreys. She took a gold and diamond ring from Antonio’s finger, a present from his fiancée, whom he was to shortly marry.

  Downfall and Arrest

  Aileen’s mistake was to kill four of her victims in the same county—the pattern of .22-caliber shootings of middle-aged and elderly men dumped by roadsides was too obvious to ignore. Eventually, similar murders in the other counties also hit the radar screen. With the description of two women running from Peter Siems’s car and the palm print left behind, police traced Wuornos to one of the aliases she was using—the one when she was arrested for possession of a .22 by coincidence. The thumbprint she left behind when she pawned Mallory’s camera and radar detector would lead to Aileen and Ty through the identification presented to the pawnshop, which had been stolen from Ty’s roommate. For the longest time, police thought that Aileen and Ty were a team and separate task forces searched for both women.

  In the autumn of 1990, things between Ty and Lee were not going well. When police issued a public announcement about their search for two female serial killer suspects, along with a sketch of their faces, Ty finally broke up with Aileen and flew back home to Ohio. Tyria knew about some of the murders—at least three. She had ridden in the cars that Lee brought back and she had seen the loot.

  Aileen Wuornos was finally spotted on January 8, 1991, and put under surveillance. When Aileen crashed a huge drunken all-night party at The Last Resort, a biker bar in Daytona, police, fearing that they would lose her in the rowdy crowd, decided to arrest her in the early morning hours. Aileen was actually so burnt out that she had fallen asleep in a corner of the bar—her last sleep in freedom. A plaque put up by the owners would later mark the spot.

  A separate team working in Ohio had already tracked down Ty in Scranton, Pennsylvania, staying with some relatives. They picked her up.

  Lovers’ Betrayal

  After her and Lee’s apprehension, Tyria Moore would make a series of incriminating phone calls to Lee in jail while police recorded the conversations. Ty was promised immunity if she could prove that she was not present at the murders and assisted police in convicting Aileen. With police prompting her, Tyria began spinning a web over the phone that would entrap Aileen.

  WUORNOS: Hey, Ty?

  MOORE: Yeah.

  WUORNOS: What are you doin’?

  MOORE: Nothin’. What the hell are you doin’?

  WUORNOS: Nothing. I’m sitting here in jail.

  MOORE: Yeah, that’s what I heard.

  WUORNOS: How…what are you doin’ down here?

  MOORE: I came down to see what the hell’s happenin’.

  WUORNOS: Everything’s copasetic. I’m in here for a…a…vi…uh…con…carryin’ concealed weapon back in ’86…and a traffic ticket.

  MOORE: Really?

  WUORNOS: Uh huh.

  MOORE: ’Cause there’s been officials up at my parents’ house askin’ some questions.

  WUORNOS: Uh oh.

  MOORE: And I’m gettin’ scared.

  WUORNOS: Hmmm. Well, you know, I don’t think there should be anything to worry about.

  MOORE: Well, I’m pretty damn worried.

  WUORNOS: I’m not gonna let you get in trouble.

  MOORE: That’s good.

  WUORNOS: But I tell you what. I would die for you.

  The phone calls continued in this vein for several days, with Tyria weeping over the phone that she was scared she would be charged as an accessory to the murders.

  WUORNOS: I…listen, you didn’t do anything and I’m…I will definitely let them know that, okay?

  MOORE: You evidently don’t love me anymore. You don’t trust me or anything. I mean, you’re gonna let me get in trouble for somethin’ I didn’t do.

  WUORNOS: Tyria, I said, I’m NOT. Listen. Quit cryin’ and listen.

  MOORE: I can’t help it. I’m scared shitless.

  WUORNOS: I love you. I really do. I love you a lot.

  MOORE: I don’t know whether I should keep on livin’ or if I should…

  WUORNOS: I’m not gonna let you go to jail. Listen, if I have to confess, I will.

  MOORE: Lee, why in the hell did you do this?

  WUORNOS: I don’t know. Listen, did you come down here to talk to some detectives?

  MOORE: No. I came down here by myself. Just why in the hell did you do it?

  WUORNOS: Ty, listen to me. I don’t know what to say, but all I can say is self-defense. Don’t worry. They’ll find out it was a solo person, and I’ll just tell them that, okay?

  The hint of Aileen’s defense was cropping up in the conversation—“self-defense.” No doubt that to some extent Aileen was convinced—not in a delusional kind of way but more as a rationalization—that defending herself is what she was doing when she killed those seven victims. But there were lots of other things mixed into it:

  WUORNOS: I probably won’t live long, but I don’t care. Hey, by the way, I’m gonna go down in history.

  MOORE: What a way to go down in history.

  WUORNOS: No, I’m just sayin’…if I ever write a book, I’m gonna have…give you the money. I don’t know. I just…let me tell you why I did it, alright?

  MOORE: Mmm.

  WUORNOS: Because I’m so…so fuckin’ in love with you, that I was so worried about us not havin’ an apartment and shit, I was scared that we were gonna lose our place, believin’ that we wouldn’t be together. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s the truth.

  And there it probably is. Why Aileen Wuornos killed then and not earlier. The sense one gets of Aileen and Tyria is that Aileen was the husband and Tyria the wife who craved security. In fact, Aileen referred to Tyria as her “wife.” But it was Ty who would take on miserable little jobs to guarantee a minimum flow of income while nagging Aileen about her freelancing lifestyle. The constant moves and evictions, the poverty and insecurity tore at Tyria and threatened their relationship—threatened Aileen’s status as the “husband”—threatened the only long-term intimate relationship Aileen had ever managed to form in her entire life, the only loving family she felt she had. It is a Greek tragedy of epic proportions: After taking a life of abuse and rejection, it was only when Aileen finally found a loving partner that she became a killing monster.

  Aileen killed in rage for love and in the end that same love would betray and kill her. Aileen confessed her way into a death sentence to save Tyria.

  “I Killed ’Em All Because They Got Violent with Me and I Decided to Defend Myself.”

  On January 16, about a week after her arrest and after her conversations with Tyria, Aileen made a videotaped confession. Her first murder, the killing of Richard Mallory, became the cru
cial one in the series for several reasons. First, Wuornos would be tried separately for each murder and this would be the first case to go before a jury. And second, this would be the crucial testing of her claim of self-defense.

  After a long introductory statement explaining that she was alone in committing the killings, and that Tyria was in no way involved or knew the details of her crimes, Aileen made a rambling three-hour-long confession.

  She recounted that on the evening of November 30, 1989, she was hitching on the highway between Tampa and Daytona after a busy day of turning tricks. Richard Mallory pulled over and offered her a ride to Daytona where he was going to see a woman with whom he had an on-and-off relationship.

  According to Aileen, it started off as a pleasant drive across the state. They conversed pleasantly as Mallory smoked marijuana and drank vodka. She turned down his offer of the marijuana but accepted a mixed drink of orange juice and vodka. Along the way they pulled over at a convenience store and Mallory bought Aileen her drink of choice: a six-pack of beer. They arrived outside of Daytona around midnight, but instead of dropping Aileen off and heading to his destination, Mallory and Aileen pulled over to an isolated area away from the road and continued talking and drinking. At some point Aileen said she had told Mallory that she was a prostitute and asked if he wanted to “help her make some money.” After quickly negotiating a price, Mallory agreed.

  It was around 5:00 a.m., Wuornos said, when Mallory initiated sex. She took her clothes off and they hugged and kissed a little. But when Aileen suggested that Mallory take his clothes off, he refused, saying that he’d just unzip his pants. That is entirely conceivable. People who knew Mallory reported that he was somewhat paranoid and cautious. In the last three years he had changed his door locks eight times and was convinced that somebody was following him. Moreover, smoking weed can heighten a sense of paranoia.