She claimed she was forced to bend, stripped naked, over the kitchen table; the petrified child was beaten frequently with the doubled-over belt. Sometimes she lay face down, spread-eagled naked on her bed to receive her whippings, while all the while her drunken adoptive father screamed that she was worthless and should never have been born. ‘You ain’t even worthy of the air you breathe,’ he shouted, as the belt lashed down again and again.
Sydney Shovan, who grew up two blocks from Lee, rode the same bus to Troy High School on Livernois Road. Looking back on those days, he recalled with a sigh, ‘Lee always had bruises on her arms, cheeks and chin.’ He added that everyone knew she was sexually active with her brother Keith. In fact, Keith was teased by the local kids about having sex with Lee while they were both drunk. Lee admits that she was having sex with her brother at an early age – how early we do not know.
‘We all used to congregate at a place called The Pits,’ said Shovan’s sister Cynthia, who was a grade higher than Lee at Troy High. ‘One time she was dumped from a moving van, fell badly on her head and no one attended to help her. I guess no one liked her that much.’
In fact, Lee was very much a loner amongst her peers. While the other kids sat around kissing and cuddling, Lee would watch from the fringes. No boys wanted to kiss her, but they would buy sexual favours from her in exchange for cigarettes. Thereafter, Lee became known as the Cigarette Pig or the Cigarette Bandit.
During her ninth year, a chemical explosion which Lee and a friend accidentally set off resulted in her sustaining severe burns on her face and arms. She was hospitalised for several days and confined for months afterwards. The burns healed slowly, but Lee worried that she would be deformed and scarred for life. The faint scars on her forehead and her arms bore grim testimony to the accident until the end of her days.
Aged 11, Lee had the shock of her life when she learned that Lauri and Britta were indeed her grandparents. She was already incorrigible, with her fearsome trailer-trash defiance and socially unacceptable temper. But now the girl felt she had been completely deceived. She became uncontrollable and her volcanic verbal explosions, which were unpredictable and seemingly unprovoked, inevitably drove a further wedge between her and her adoptive parents. Her adoptive father, the man she says had so brutalised her as a helpless child, the man who had claimed to be her dad for all those years, was a twisted fraud. She would take out her hatred for him on many of the men she would meet in the future, and she had an excellent tool at her disposal: sex.
Thrashing Lee had never worked – it only served to harden her resolve – so one Christmas her grandfather threw her out into the snow. She lived rough in the woods with a lad for two days before she returned home. Then she was thrown out again and slept in abandoned cars. Following this, and tired of freezing and having nowhere to stay, she ran away for a period of time with a girlfriend called Dawn Botkins. They hitchhiked to California. Dawn would remain Lee’s closest friend until the day she was executed.
The two girls would sometimes hitchhike to Hawthorne Park in Detroit, visiting the extremely dangerous Seven Mile Road where they would buy drugs for Lee – she used them all, including downers.
A heavy drinker by the age of 12, on one occasion Lee awoke from a drunken stupor to find dried semen stains all over her clothing. On another occasion, at a party, other children watched as two boys took her while she lay drunk and curled up in the foetal position on the floor. Lee’s troubles had well and truly started; soon they would be set in stone.
At school, teachers found Lee to be a poor student with some artistic talent. She could not concentrate, her mind wandered and she seemed to have a convenient hearing problem. By the age of 14, staff were so concerned by her behaviour – in one instance she set fire to a roll of toilet paper in a school washroom – that a teacher wrote, ‘It is vital for this girl’s welfare that she seeks counselling immediately.’ No one took a blind bit of notice, especially her adoptive parents, a lapse which would cost them, eight men and their families dearly.
But she did have one other friend. A man with the Dickensian name of Mr Portlock, he was nicknamed ‘Chief’. Hookers would visit him frequently. A creepy guy, Portlock lived in a rundown house close by and he had a reputation as an unsavoury character. Toni Nazar, who was employed as a housekeeper, claimed Portlock was ‘a strange, weird man who had cancer’. Lee had no record player at home, so Portlock encouraged her to play her albums at his house while he would sit around leering as she danced. Then, with the young girl on his lap, he would fuss over her and give her money.
Lee became pregnant – some claim it was by her grandfather, or her brother Keith – and was sent to an unmarried mothers’ home to await the birth of her child. The staff found her hostile, uncooperative and unable to get along with the other girls in the same boat. Lee gave birth to a baby boy who was put up for adoption in January 1971; the child vanished into obscurity forever.
The stigma of having a pregnant teenage granddaughter proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Lauri Wuornos had had enough. He threatened to kill Lee and Keith if they did not leave his house forever. There were terrible arguments between the strict disciplinarian and the more understanding Britta. Then, on 7 July of the same year under somewhat sinister circumstances, Britta Wuornos died. For whatever reason, the man’s mind became unhinged. Bizarrely, he attempted suicide by trying to electrocute himself by flooding his basement and standing knee-deep in water with the power on. Shortly afterwards he moved home, and some years later he succeeded in taking his own life. Lauri gassed himself in his garage and Lee stumbled across the body. At his funeral, she turned up only to blow cigarette smoke into the corpse’s face.
Diane suspects that her father murdered her mother, although the official story was that she had died of liver failure.
Shortly before her execution, Lee Wuornos radically changed her sentiments about her grandparents; however, by now, as Nick Broomfield confirms, she was tottering on the edge of insanity: ‘My dad was so straight and clean… he wouldn’t even take his shirt off to mow the lawn. I came from a clean and decent family… my dad blamed me for killing his wife. It was all my fault that she died.’
At her murder trial, Barry Wuornos was called to the witness stand to be questioned by the counsel for the accused, and he faced several searching questions as to Lee’s early days. Barry started by stating that, ‘It was a normal lifestyle, a pretty straight and narrow family. Very little trouble in the family while Aileen was growing up. They picked her up when I would say she was two years old. Father was a kind of disciplinarian.’
‘What was your impression of your father?’
‘Well, he was a strong character… a gentle man… laid down strong rules.’
‘Did you ever see him beat her? Was he the kind of man who would beat a child.’
‘Absolutely not,’ came the emphatic answer.
Barry then went on to describe his father’s interaction with Lee from the time she arrived at the house until he went into the army.
‘Would you describe her grandfather as being abusive?’
‘Not at all. Normal spankings, but the general rule was grounding for two or three days.’
‘After you left for the service, did you stay in touch with Miss Wuornos?’
‘Well, I stayed in contact with my mom and dad.’
‘Did your mother and father provide her with a home, shelter, food and clothing?’
‘Oh, yes,’ came the solid reply.
He began to question the period during which Lee had been badly burned.
‘Was medical care denied to Miss Wuornos?’
‘She did go to the doctor for a period of eight months and received salves,’ Barry replied. ‘Mom took care of those things. She was a very quiet, studious, laid-back woman, very in the background. Much easier-going than my father, and no punishment of any kind came from her. My father worked at Ford and Chrysler as an engineer, was a janitor for a while and then w
orked in quality control … He was strong on school. He was disappointed because I started at the university and dropped out to go into the service.’
He was not getting the answers he wanted from Barry Wuornos, so he turned up the heat. ‘Was Aileen treated differently than any of the rest?’ he asked.
‘Not that I ever saw,’ replied Barry Wuornos. ‘One time she was going to be spanked and she brought up the fact that she was adopted and she said, “Don’t lay your hands on me. You’re not even my real dad.” From that time, I never saw any attempts on the part of my dad to physically spank her.’
At the defence table, Lee was visibly angry at her adoptive brother’s testimony and she started scribbling furiously on a legal pad.
‘When did she learn that she was adopted?’ the attorney continued.
‘She was ten or eleven at the time. How long before that she knew, I don’t know.’
The attorney now turned his focus towards Lee’s mother – Barry Wuornos’s sister.
‘Lee’s mother. What was she like?’
‘She was like a normal older sister. She had run-ins with her first husband, naturally. We picked up Aileen at the age of two. And she was in no trouble at that point, but before that she was a model student at Troy and she got mixed up with Leo Pittman … She was with Leo – an on-and-off marriage.’
‘What about Aileen’s father?’
‘I knew very little about Leo. I remember he was trying to date Diane. He was pretty abusive. I remember one day he threw me down and threatened to choke me if I didn’t give a message to Diane. He was generally a criminal type … He was sent to prison and later killed himself.’
The attorney elicited from the witness that Diane had married around the age of 15 or 16 and that it had been a sore point in the family at the time.
‘Did Lee do well at school?’ asked the lawyer.
‘Yeah, I think she did well in school until she reached the ninth grade. She had great artistic ability … through letters in the service I heard that she was getting into trouble.’
The court learned that Lauri Wuornos drank around a bottle of wine a day, and finally that Barry came home one day and found his father dead in the garage. Lee claims she found her father and her brother was not around.
On hearing the sad news about Lauri, Diane Wuornos invited Lee and Keith to stay with her in Texas, but they declined. Lee, although now a ward of the court, dropped out of school, left home and took up a feral existence, a life of hitchhiking and prostitution, drifting across the country as her spirit moved her.
So, much to the relief of Troy, Lee was leaving on her right thumb. Taking little more than the clothes she wore and carrying a few possessions in a bag, she hit the road, seemingly ill-equipped to start a new life down south. In truth, Lee had all the necessary skills required of the profession that was beckoning. She had good looks, a tough spirit, a neat figure, a cheeky smile, the morals of an alley cat and a strong right hook. She knew what men wanted from her and she would do well out of any gullible guy who crossed her path. Her mind, however, was brooding and silent, a dormant volcano building up to an eruption.
CHAPTER TWO
THE ODD COUPLE
SURE, I THREATENED HIM WITH A MEAT SKEWER. SO FUCKING WHAT? HE LOOKED AT ME LIKE ALL MEN DID. RIGHT FROM THE OFF. DIRTY OLD FUCKER.
Lee Wuornos next comes to our attention in 1974 when, using the alias Sandra Kretsch, she was jailed in Jefferson County, Colorado for disorderly conduct, drunk driving and firing a .22-calibre pistol from a moving vehicle. Additional charges were filed when she skipped bail ahead of her trial.
In March 1976, Lee, now aged 20, married multi-millionaire Lewis Gratz Fell. By any measure, this was a curious match. Silver-haired Fell, with his reputable Philadelphia background, was 69 years old when he picked up Lee while she was hitchhiking. He was well connected and kept a plastic business card case containing all of his contacts which included judges, attorneys, state’s attorneys and police officers, among others. When Lee and Lewis parted company under somewhat acrimonious circumstances, this wallet went missing, the significance of which we shall soon discover.
Lee saw Fell coming from the word go and, as we now know, this young lady was not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. We have to give her credit for that. However, what we can see is that Lee’s first big hit, even if it was not a murderous act, was against an elderly man who was several years older than her grandfather.
Quite what was going through Lewis’s mind at that time can only be a matter for conjecture: perhaps he was thinking with the parts he hadn’t used for several decades. Nevertheless, he offered Lee his hand in marriage, which she accepted in a heartbeat and, after buying her a very expensive engagement ring, they married in Kingsley, Georgia.
The wedding took place less than two months after the death of Lee’s 65-year-old grandfather Lauri.
Most of those who knew Lee viewed her marriage cynically. They racked their brains and scratched their heads, finding it impossible to judge it as anything other than a purely mercenary move, which it certainly was. They knew that Lee was capable of just about anything.
The unwitting Lewis Fell had no idea what he was letting himself in for. He was clueless. Some on the fringes took the view that it was a mutually acceptable relationship, and they would be correct. Others thought he was stark raving bonkers. For his part, Lewis had a pretty young woman on his arm and in his bed, while Lee enjoyed the fruits of what his money could buy.
Early in July 1976, husband and wife rolled into Michigan in a brand-new, cream-coloured Cadillac and, while raising a few eyebrows, they checked into a motel. Now smiling all the way to the next bank, Lee stuck a finger up at small-city Troy by sending a few friends newspaper cuttings of their wedding announcement. Carefully clipped from the society pages of the Daytona press, they came complete with a photograph of a man who looked old enough to be her grandfather, knees buckling and leaning heavily on a stick.
Lee knew that word travelled faster over backyard fences than by phone in hick Troy, so, to rub the citizens’ noses further in the seed, she highlighted the portion describing Fell as the president of nothing less than a yacht club, with nothing less than a private income derived from nothing less than railroad stocks and shares.
While perky Lee had hit pay dirt, geriatric Lewis had wandered into a very serious problem. His idyllic dream of settling down each night with a young piece of skirt to satisfy his sexual desires was about to become his worst nightmare, one that Stephen King would have been hard-pushed to better.
On Tuesday, 13 July, Lee, against her husband’s express wish, decided to go out on the town, while Lewis stayed at home to watch TV. After visiting a few bars she ended up at Bernie’s Club in Mancelona where she flaunted her body and started to hustle at the pool table. With a figure many women would die for, clad in an off-the-shoulder top, a micro-miniskirt and thigh-high boots, Lee was as hot as a kitchen stove.
Nevertheless, despite her physical attributes which had the locals drooling at the mouth, sometime after midnight the barman and manager Danny Moore decided he had seen enough of her. Lee was drunk, rowdy, shouting obscenities, uttering threats to other patrons and generally being objectionable. Danny casually walked over to the game and announced that the table was closing down. As he was gathering up the balls, he heard someone shout, ‘Duck!’ He turned just in time to see Lee aim a cue ball at his head. It missed him only by inches, but the missile had been hurled with such force that it became lodged in the wall.
When a smiling Deputy Jimmie Patrick of the Antrim County Sheriff’s Department arrived, Lee was arrested for assault and battery and hauled off to jail. She was also charged on fugitive warrants from the Troy Police Department who had requested that she be picked up on charges of drinking alcohol in a car, unlawful use of a driver’s licence and not having a Michigan driver’s licence. She was bailed when a friend turned up with her purse containing $1,450 – her husband’s money.
Three days later her brother Keith, aged 21, died of throat cancer. It had been in his body for ages and had finally eaten him up. Keith was cremated at the same funeral home as Britta and Lauri Wuornos. Lee arrived late for the service, but in time to place a rose in his hands.
Having rejected her son in life, but acknowledging him in death, Diane flew in from Texas for Keith’s funeral. Other mourners were surprised to see her apparently too distraught to sit through the service for the son she had abandoned.
The reader does not need to be a clairvoyant to predict that things did not bode well between Lee and Lewis, and that the marriage would be short-lived. Lee had been torn between her desire to get drunk and hang out in bars, and the less desirable option: long periods of abject boredom, sitting around at her aged husband’s feet in his plush, beachside condominium, their eyes glued to TV programmes about trains, boats and the stock market. With problems looming from every direction, Lewis tried the well-tested and universally approved ‘I am older than you, please respect your elders’ trick. Trained most comprehensively in this area by her late adoptive father, whose family communication skills were considerably less than poor, Lee responded by awarding her new husband a black eye.
Shaken, and very likely stirred, by this outburst from his sweet young wife, Lewis tried another idea. After all, it had worked with his late wife, and the other two before that, so why shouldn’t it work with his new one? He would cut Lee’s allowance, and, if that failed, he would not give her any money at all. After considering the plan overnight, breakfast came. Dressed in his gown, his feet warm in his furry slippers, he got as far as saying, ‘I will stop your allow–’ when she beat him up with his walking cane and pointed a meat skewer uncomfortably close to his throat.
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