One wonders if Blanche, with her extremities in pain, numb feet, and loss of toenails, fingernails, and hair feels any guilt as to the agony she put her victims through.
AILEEN WUORNUS-
DAMSEL FOR SALE
Aileen Carol Wuornos was born on February 29th, 1956 and is probably one of the most notorious women serial killers of our time. Much has been written about Aileen; some of what has been written is true, and some of it is wrong.
What makes her stand out from most other women serial killers is that Aileen killed with a gun, and her victims were strangers. The majority of women serial killers normally use poison and their victims are usually (but not always) acquaintances or family members.
Early Days
Aileen was born to Diane Pittman, nee Wuornos, and Leo Dale Pittman in Rochester, Michigan. Diane Wuornos had eloped and married Leo Pittman when she was fifteen-years-old on June 3rd, 1954. Her parents had not approved of Leo. In February of 1955, Diane had a son named Keith. In June of 1955, Diane became pregnant for the second time with Aileen. By this time, Dianne was deathly afraid of her husband Leo. Just months before Aileen was born, he was arrested and imprisoned for raping and attempting to murder a young girl of seven. Diane divorced him shortly before Aileen was born.
The Author Terry Manners says of Leo Pittman, in his book Deadlier than the Male:
Leo Pitman
Leo, who never met Aileen, was thought to be a schizophrenic and hung himself in 1969 while in prison.
In January of 1960, Diane, unable to and not wanting to cope with two children on her own dumped five-year-old Keith and four-year-old Aileen on her parents, Britta and Lauri Wuornos, in Troy, twenty-four miles north of Detroit, Michigan.
Four-year-old Aileen
Six-year-old Keith
The Wuornos family had immigrated to the US from Finland. Their house was an unattractive, one-story, ranch-style home, situated among a cluster of trees on Cadmus Street, in a neighborhood of dirt roads. Lauri worked at the Ford auto plant in Detroit. Lauri and Britta formally adopted the children on the 18th of March in 1960 and changed their surname to Wuornos. They raised the children alongside their own: Barry and Lori. The children only found out their true identities when Keith was thirteen and Aileen twelve. They were both emotionally disturbed and distraught at the revelation.
The Wuornos Home
When Aileen was six, while playing with her brother Keith and firelighters, she became badly burned and received permanent scarring to her face. Aileen, as a child, suffered from violent temper tantrums that would come seemingly out of nowhere.
Lauri Wuornos
According to Aileen, her grandfather, Lauri, abused her sexually and physically from an exceptionally young age and whipped her with a willow branch right up to the time he kicked her out of his house, and her grandmother, Britta, was an abusive alcoholic. The young Aileen quickly learned to blank out any emotions. During her time at junior high school, Aileen began showing signs of poor hearing and vision problems. The school recorded her IQ as 81, which is in the range of low dull-normal. The school wanted Aileen to receive counseling and tried to improve her behavior by giving her a mild tranquilizer to control her fits of temper.
Blonde, brown-eyed Aileen was sexually promiscuous at a young age. By the age of ten, she and her brother Keith, who was her closest companion, experimented sexually with each other. Aileen was a happy and willing participant in these activities. Aileen’s attention then moved on, and she would sneak out of her parent’s house and make her way to a meeting spot the neighborhood kids called “the pits.” Here, at the age of only eleven and having just entered puberty, Aileen exchanged sex with the older students at Troy High School for cigarettes, drugs, and money. The boys treated Aileen with no respect and would call her names and ignore her in public. One of her friends from the “pit days” was Dawn Botkins, who ended up being the one true friend Aileen ever had. Dawn’s older brother was the best friend of Aileen’s brother Keith. When she was fourteen, Aileen found herself pregnant. She claimed an older man raped her. It is speculated now that a man in the neighborhood, known as “the chief,” may have been the culprit.
The Chief
Her grandparents sent her to a home for unmarried mothers in Detroit. Here, she gave birth on the 23rd of March in 1971 to a baby boy who was immediately given up for adoption. Aileen was resentful for years afterwards that she had never even been allowed to embrace her son before he was taken from her forever.
When Aileen returned home, she dropped out of school and spent her days hanging around the streets, drinking, and taking drugs. It was the time of the ending of the Vietnam War, and drugs such as marijuana, LSD, mescaline, and assorted pills were easily accessible. Her favorite music was Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and the Moody Blues. In July of 1971, her grandmother Britta died of liver failure. Aileen’s grandfather, no longer able to cope with Aileen or her brother, threw them out of the house. Aileen, now fifteen, took to prostitution to support herself through a bitterly cold winter in Michigan. She spent many nights sleeping rough in the woods in the snow near her home with a local cross dressing teenage transvestite. Other nights she would sleep in old abandoned cars and on, occasion, in a friend’s house. Occasionally, she would get lucky, and a client in exchange for sex would put her up for the night in a sleazy motel but for most of the time, it would be the woods. Troy’s climate during the summer is warm with temperatures tending to be in the 80s but during the winter it becomes extremely cold. She described this period of her life as a living hell. One wonders where the social workers where or why the close-knit community of Troy were allowing a fifteen-year-old child to live like this. This was supposedly a modern democracy, a caring Christian society, and not a third world country.
After two years of living like this, she eventually began hitch-hiking around the country, supporting herself with petty crime and prostitution, trying to find a place to call home. She didn’t dress like a prostitute in high heels or leather skirts but wore more casual attire such as jeans or shorts and T-shirts. In Aileen’s mind, prostitution was the best that she could do, that is what she was adept at, and that’s what she could earn a living at.
Hitchhiking and Prostitution
When she was seventeen and hitching, she stumbled across a headless, limbless body of a woman. An image, she said, that constantly haunted her as she plied her trade along the United States highways. Treated as criminals in the United States, prostitutes if they disappear are far less likely than other people to be searched for by law enforcement officers, making them a favored target of predators.
On May 27th, 1974, Aileen was jailed in Jefferson County, Colorado for drunken driving, disorderly conduct, and firing a .22-caliber pistol from a vehicle.
Following her release from jail, Aileen, now twenty, hitchhiked down to Florida, seeking some warmth. Here, she was picked up by sixty-nine-year-old Lewis Gratz Fell, a blue blood Philadelphian wealthy yacht club president. Lewis fell head over heels in love with the young, strawberry haired, brown-eyed, buxom, 5’4’’ Aileen and proposed to her. He placed an announcement of their nuptials in the local newspaper society pages. They married in March of 1976; the marriage did not last long as Aileen, unable to restrain her temper, continually got into drunken fights in Lewis’s local bar and demanded money off him. Aileen also hit Lewis with his walking stick, which led him to take out a restraining order against her and to have the marriage annulled on July 21st of 1976.
Aileen and Lewis
Aileen’s temper would be aroused even in supermarkets if she thought people were looking at her in a certain way. She would become extremely angry and start shouting, “What are you looking at me for?” Her irritability, sudden anger, and suspicion are typical symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia.
In Antrim County, on July 14, 1976, Aileen was arrested for disturbing the peace and assaulting a bartender by throwing a cue ball at his head. She was fined $105. Aileen’s brother Keith died of throa
t cancer on July 17th, 1976. Aileen hitchhiked back to Michigan for his funeral. Aileen received $10,000 from his life insurance policy and rapidly squandered the money; this included buying an expensive car that she trashed shortly after taking possession of it.
Aileen eventually returned to Florida continuing her life as a prostitute and petty criminal. At the age of twenty-two, unable to endure her life anymore, she took a .22 caliber pistol and shot herself in the abdomen. She told doctors at the hospital that it was not the first time she had attempted suicide. She recovered from the gunshot wound but received minimal psychiatric counseling.
In May of 1981 in Edgewater, Florida, she was arrested for armed robbery at a minimart, dressed only in a bikini. She was sentenced to three years in prison. She had stolen $35 and two packets of cigarettes. Aileen spent her time in jail reading the bible and complained of being locked up with lesbians. She was released in June of 1983 and made her way down to Key West, where she was arrested in a bank for trying to pass a forged check.
There followed a series of other offenses; some committed in her name and some in the name of Lori Grody, her aunt, whose ID she had stolen. Some of these offenses involved firearms.
In Miami on January 4th, 1986 Aileen was arrested and charged in her own name for stealing a car and resisting arrest. In the car, the arresting officers found a box of ammunition and a .38-caliber revolver. Aileen skipped bail, took on a new alias, Susan Blahovec, and moved to Daytona Beach, Florida an area popular with bikers, Hells Angels, holiday-makers, and the retired. It was here in a gay bar called Zodiac that she met 24-year-old lesbian motel maid Tyria Moore. After meeting, they left the bar together and spent the entire weekend in bed.
Tyria was a hefty,big-boned,jovial, freckled faced, red head who was often mistaken for a man. She grew up in the small Christian town of Cadiz, Ohio. Her father was a well-respected brick mason and carpenter. She had three brothers and one sister. Her parents were far from happy with their daughter’s lesbianism, and she left the restraints of Cadiz and moved to Florida.
Tyria
Aileen and Tyria began an intense and volatile relationship. Tyria quit her job, and Aileen supported them both on her prostitution earnings. It was the anchor Aileen had been searching for all her life. Aileen and Tyria had a nomadic lifestyle. They moved from one dingy apartment or seedy motel to another and on occasion slept in an old disused barn. Aileen fell for Tyria hard, probably more than anyone else she had ever cared for in her miserable life. Although Tyria appeared tougher and more butch, Aileen referred to her as her wife.
In July of 1987, the Daytona Beach police held Aileen and Tyria for questioning about a bar brawl in which they were accused of assault for attacking a man with a beer bottle. In March of 1988, Aileen, using the alias Cammie Greene, accused a bus driver in Daytona Beach of assault. Tyria was named as a witness in the police report.
In July of 1988, in Daytona Beach, Aileen (under the "Susan Blahovec" alias) and Tyria were accused by their landlord of vandalizing their apartment. By 1989, Aileen, according to Tyria, rarely traveled without a loaded .22 caliber gun telling Tyria that she carried the gun for self-protection. In the United States gun culture, .22 caliber guns are not particularly powerful and are typically used for self-defense.
Her job was dangerous, she explained to Tyria, and in the past, she had been maced, beaten, and raped by customers. Prostitution was a dangerous profession. In the United States, it’s estimated that the murder rate for female prostitutes is 204 per 100,000, making it the riskiest profession for women in the United States.
A recent study on 130 prostitutes in San Francisco found that 82% had been physically assaulted, 83% had been threatened with a weapon, and 68% had been raped by clients.
Frequently, murdered bodies of prostitutes are found around the United States without arousing serious attention.
Aileen’s earnings as a prostitute were never great and with the ravages of age, alcohol, and drugs, they dwindled even further. The lack of funds began to put a strain on their relationship. Tyria occasionally took jobs as a motel cleaner but didn’t like working and would complain to Aileen. This would make Aileen constantly worried that Tyria would leave her if she was unable to support her financially. For the first time in her life, she had found love and did not want to lose it. Aileen mainly worked as a prostitute along the highways of Central Florida. In the first week of December, Aileen left Tyria for a few days to work. When she returned home, intoxicated with alcohol, to the motel in Volusia County in which they were presently living, she, according to Tyria, told her that she had shot a man dead earlier and robbed him blind. Tyria never reported this to the police but stayed with Aileen not caring where or how Aileen brought the money home.
On December 13th, 1989 two teenage boys out riding their bikes found a wrapped dead body along a dirt road close to Interstate 95 in Florida. Fingerprints identified him as fifty-one-year-old Richard Mallory, the owner of an electronics store in Clearwater, Florida. He had been murdered with three gunshots from a .22 pistol.
Richard Mallory
On June 1, 1990, a naked man’s body was found in the woods of Citrus County, Florida. A used condom was lying near his body. He was identified as David Spears, a forty-three-year-old construction worker. He had been shot six times with a .22 pistol.
David Spears
On June 6th, 1990, a badly decomposed naked man’s body was discovered lying near Interstate 75. Nine bullets were found in his body from a .22 pistol. He was later identified as Charles Carskaddon, age forty.
Charles Carskaddon,
On July 4th, 1990, a Pontiac Sunbird car belonging to a missing man, retired merchant seaman, Peter Siems, age sixty-five, was found crashed and abandoned near Orange Springs, Florida. An eyewitness had seen two drunken women abandoning it. When the police examined it, there were bloodstains in t he interior, the license plate was missing, and Aileen’s finger-prints were on a door-handle.
Peter Siems
On August 4th, the body of sausage salesman, Troy Burress, age 50, was found in a wooded area near State Road 19 in Marion County, Florida. He had been shot twice with a .22 pistol.
Troy Burress
On September 12th, the body of Dick Humphreys, an investigator specializing in injured and abused children, was discovered in Marion County. He had been shot seven times with a.22 pistol.
Dick Humphreys
On November 19th, the almost naked body of Walter Jeno Antonio, a trucker and Police Reservist age sixty-two, was found in Dixie County, Florida on a remote road. He had been shot four times with a .22 gun.
Walter Jeno Antonio
It did not take too long for the police in the various Florida Counties to realize that they were dealing with a multiple killer. As more and more leads and forensic tests results came in, they realized they were searching for a female killer maybe even two. The names that constantly kept recurring were Tyria Moore, Aileen Wuornos, and her various aliases.
In November of 1990, the police asked the media for help. The police drew up composite sketches of two women they were seeking in relation to a series of murders. Reuters published the story about the men’s slayings on Florida Highways with the police sketches. Newspapers throughout Florida published the report.
Newspaper headlines screamed:
ANGELS OF DEATH
“Eight Men Dead And Police Ask Why?”
Tyria, on seeing the reports fled, to her sister’s house in Pittston, Pennsylvania telling Aileen that she was just going to visit for Thanksgiving. She was terrified she would be arrested with Aileen. Tyria failed to return.
Aileen wrote to Tyria, "You’re my left and right arm, my breath, I'd die for you."
Aileen had never murdered before she met Tyria and never committed any more murders after Tyria left.
For a short time after Tyria left, she had a brief affair with a man named Dick Mills, who later sold his story to the now disgraced British tabloid “The news of the World.” T
he headline read:
MY SEX ROMPS WITH KINKY MAN KILLER
He later said the story was widely inaccurate but admitted that he did have a brief affair with Aileen, as they were two lost souls. During their time together, he saw no indications that she was a “man-hater,” as the press portrayed her.
More leads were fed to the police who urgently began hunting Aileen and Tyria on January 5th, 1991. Their rootless life style did not help in the search but eventually two undercover drug detectives known as "Drums" and "Bucket" discovered Aileen on January 8th at a Port Orange Pub. They held off arresting her to see if she would take them to Tyria. They followed her to another bar, the Last Resort, a biker bar in Harbor Oaks, Volusia County. In this bar, she passed out on an old car seat. It was to be her last night of freedom.
The Last Resort Bar
Serial Killer?
The following day, January 9th, 1991, the police made the decision to detain Aileen on an outstanding warrant for Lori Grody, one of Aileen’s aliases.’ They arrested her on the steps outside the Last Resort. They made no allusion to her of the murders, as at that time they had no Tyria Moore or murder weapon.
The police then located Tyria Moore at her sister’s home in Pennsylvania. Two Florida detectives, Bruce Munster of Marion County and Jerry Thompson of Citrus County, flew to Pennsylvania to confront her. Tyria, when confronted by the detectives, was clearly frightened as she was read her rights.
She Devils Around the World Page 29