by Sue Russell
Strict rules were enforced, with each child being delegated duties like dusting and vacuuming. Edicts were issued rather than requests made: ‘Aileen, clean your room spotless now!’ ‘Keith, mow the lawn now!’ Bedtime was 8 p.m. during the week, 9 p.m. at weekends. There was no question of being ten or twenty minutes late or straggling. They all knew that the consequences of rebelling or being mouthy were to be grounded, spanked, or both.
Once, catching them skipping school, Lauri grounded them for a month. They were allowed to play in the front yard but were forbidden to see friends or to receive phone calls. Even Lori felt that that was a little excessive. For most of her friends, it would have been two weeks, tops.
Rashomon-like, Lori and Barry report quite different punishments from Aileen.
‘We got spankings and groundings but we never got beat,’ Lori insists. ‘We did get yelled at.’
Aileen describes being hit with a leather belt on bare skin, sometimes on consecutive days with the skin still painfully raw from the previous session. Sometimes with the belt folded in half and grasped in the middle, so the loose ends and buckle struck the skin. That by far exceeds the commonly accepted idea of spankings. Aileen has not proved herself to be a consistent source of information, but her account is definitely long-standing. Both Aileen and Keith complained at the time to friends of the ‘bare-ass spankings’. Other kids knew they were harshly punished.
Some neighbours heard Lauri’s screaming and yelling echoing around the neighbourhood so loudly it could be heard from half a block away. ‘That was just how he talked,’ Cheryl Stacy would recall. ‘He didn’t treat them like human beings. He treated them worse than anybody would treat an animal.’
For being ten minutes late, Lauri hollered, ‘Get in your rooms and pull your pants down!’ and went to fetch his belt. Britta just stood back compliantly and did nothing to stop him. ‘Maybe that will teach you to come home when I tell you to,’ Lauri announced when they cried.
‘It wasn’t so bad that we had bruises … but it hurts when you’re little,’ Lori reluctantly admits, obviously pained by giving or hearing any criticism of her father. ‘I got smart enough eventually to start crying right away because then the spanking was shorter. We were spanked until we cried.’
Being yelled at was far more upsetting to Lori than being spanked. A spanking was soon over. Being yelled at hurt your feelings, making you feel unloved or even hated; an emotional pain that could last for days.
In the sixties, before corporal punishment was the politically incorrect hot potato it is today, it wasn’t uncommon to see a neighbourhood kid dancing around in the yard trying to elude an angry parent wielding a strap. In what is more than mere semantics, however, the wicked, sadistic beatings that Aileen claimed terrorised her were categorically minimised and dismissed as just spankings by Lori and by Barry. Barry even claims that while the boys got spankings, the girls did not. (Barry’s experiences should be put in context: he was out of the house and off in the Air Force by 1967 when Aileen was eleven and coming into her era of greatest conflict with Lauri.)
Whom to believe? Major discrepancies in memories within the same family are common. (Barry, for instance, described Aileen as a ‘well-liked’ child. A unique claim.) But it’s also true that adults in denial of childhood abuse sometimes belittle the punishment they suffered.
In a fashion common in alcoholic families, much remained hidden. Lori maintains she knew nothing of Aileen’s teenage prostitution, or of Britta’s alcoholism until after her mother’s death. She can’t remember her ever drinking. She only remembers that her mom seemed worn down from trying to exert herself in the face of Lauri’s domineering personality and temper.
Lauri was a habitual, blatantly overt drinker. He didn’t care who knew it. He sat in his armchair each night, imbibing cheap wine (often two or three bottles of muscatel) and brandishing a cigar in his stubby fingers until he all but passed out. At the last moment he’d come to and would shuffle off to bed. At weekends, he drank more.
Occasionally he was rowdily drunk. He had a fierce aversion to motorcycles and once when he and Lori visited Veterans Hospital, he stopped the car outside and deliberately let his foot off the brake, sliding into a motorcycle and bumping its rider off into the road. Lori was petrified. Lauri laughed.
The alcohol generally made him quiet rather than violent, but he nevertheless had a fearsome temper and a dogmatic manner. What he said was law, Lori concedes: ‘I’d say, “It’s raining out,” and he’d say, “No, it’s not,” and he’d be right. He had to be right—and it didn’t matter if you could prove him wrong.’
As a couple, Lauri and Britta seemed distant. There was little warmth between them. Their interaction focused primarily on mundane chores like bill-paying. Even in Lori’s accepting eyes, they were like a couple married so long that they had nothing left to say to one another. They rarely went out together even for a meal unless they were on vacation. They shared a bed but, around the family at least, there was no physical affection between them or really towards their children. Certainly not as much as Lori would have liked. Lauri wasn’t the type to sit a child on his lap and offer a kind word or affection, yet the children were made to ritualistically kiss each parent goodnight, something Keith loathed. Finally, Lauri relented, allowing him to shake his hand.
Like Barry, Keith also detested the short, neat ‘butch’ haircuts that Lauri insisted on, but Lauri was skilled with the scissors. When the mood took him, he’d bellow for the boys to come in and get their hair cut.
Keith so hated following any of Lauri’s orders that by the age often, even carrying a little garbage out back was enough to reduce him to tears of frustration. He always argued with Lauri, but Lauri never backed down. Yet he wasn’t a merciless tyrant and on weekends chauffeured groups of children to see a film like The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, or to go tobogganing or ice-skating. And he saw to it that Aileen was included … whether the other kids wanted her along or not.
Each summer the family shared a two-week vacation up north, camping and staying in motels. Evenings at home were spent, with the television tuned to Lawrence Welk or Jackie Gleason, or to old World War II movies, which Lauri loved. Having served in the Army, Lauri proudly regaled his family with war stories including a tale of how he claimed he earned a Purple Heart. When his parents were out, Barry sometimes sneaked John into their dark room for a look at Lauri’s war medals and photographs. Barry was proud his dad had fought in the trenches and got shrapnel in his back. (Lauri said he was injured by fallout from a hand grenade.) A stout and stocky figure of 5 feet 9 inches, he had the tips of two fingertips missing from a bout of frostbite during a logging expedition. Lauri Wuornos didn’t keep guns in the house or have any interest in hunting. Aileen didn’t learn about firearms at home.
Like Aileen, Keith made it plain to his closest friends that he hated his parents, reporting that they were often locked in their rooms for long periods. Both sometimes bore bruises, but they never told their friends how they got them.
The ‘cat incident’ made a lasting impact not just on them but a number of neighbourhood children. A family of wild kittens had been living in the attic, and all but one had been taken to the pound when the remaining kitten scratched at Aileen’s face. The next day it was playing nicely with her when Lauri demanded, ‘Is that the damned cat who scratched you?’ Hearing her ‘yes’, he grabbed the flailing animal and made her follow him into the sauna and watch while he held the kitten under water until it was dead.
Like every other childhood, theirs wasn’t free of misadventure and near disaster. It was Keith’s bright idea to mix gasoline and oil in a little trail and then set light to it. Aileen, who was nine, and Lori decided to copy him, but they carelessly splashed too heavy a trail and the flames licked up instantly, burning Lori’s leg and catching Aileen’s face and hair. Hearing Aileen’s screams, Lauri came running but couldn’t extinguish the fire before Aileen was burned badly enough to leave scars on h
er face and to warrant a few days in the hospital. She was traumatised.
‘That’s when everybody started to tease me. I was like a misfit, ’ she now says. To her mind, Lori then refused to have anything to do with her and treated her like a freak. An accusation everyone scoffs at. Aileen describes blisters the size of fifty-cent pieces all over her face and her hair being charred. Certainly there was swelling initially, but the scars weren’t disfiguring. With a fringe, they weren’t even visible. Yet to Aileen it all assumed monumental importance.
Keith was definitely mischievous, his antics ranging from rock fights to BB gun fights, and at least five times, at Keith’s suggestion, he and Mark set fire to a nearby field. ‘Keith’d say, “We’re just gonna light a little one”,’ Mark recalls, ‘and we’d end up with the whole damn field on fire.’ Aileen also lit fires in a nearby field, and, in junior high, she set some toilet paper alight in the school bathroom. Lori would never forget the ruckus that caused.
As an adult, Aileen often claimed to be part of a singing group, and indeed always fancied herself as a singer. As a child, with her short hair swept back like a boy’s, she pretended she had a microphone and pranced around the living room as if she was out onstage.
It was the prospect of the attention she relished, of being admired and idolised—that and being rich. She was always preoccupied with money or, rather, with what having it could do for her.
She began shoplifting in her early teens, at first on a minor scale, stealing record albums from a store in nearby Rochester and smuggling them out under her coat. Inevitably, she was caught. Store officials telephoned Lauri, who, fuming, had to collect her. Presumably it was no accident that Aileen also targeted for shoplifting the very Kmart store where Britta worked part-time. Completely humiliated, Britta decided she couldn’t live with the embarrassment and quit her job.
She was no less mortified the time a gaggle of neighbours gathered to watch open-mouthed as a couple of policemen chased Aileen down the street. Aileen was clutching a take-away tub of spaghetti she obviously didn’t want to lose, but finally dumped it so she could run faster. Gathering speed, she then took off across the field with the cops in pursuit.
‘Aileen and Keith both could rip you off pretty quick,’ Mark admits. Yet brother and sister had markedly different temperaments. Keith held things inside and let them fester, but if something bothered Aileen, she’d just blurt it out without editing. It took a lot to get Keith to say what was on his mind.
The Wuornos kids had it worse than any others in the subdivision, that was the consensus. It seemed nobody ever cared about Aileen. She was on her own and no one appeared to give a damn.
While other families rose in the morning and lifted their blinds, letting sunlight stream over their breakfast tables, the Wuornoses lived in gloom. ‘It was like a dungeon most of the time,’ one friend observed. ‘The Wuornoses were lucky if they got a bowl of breakfast cereal, let alone lunch money for school. Sometimes a teacher gave them a loan or other kids shared a sandwich with them. Generally, they took bag lunches because they couldn’t afford hot lunches.’
As Aileen and Keith entered their teens they were already alienated at home. It was unthinkable that Aileen might have confided how she felt about the other kids in school not liking her. Her parents would never have understood. The friction was so bad that it seemed Aileen and Keith’s very existence infuriated Lauri. He couldn’t tolerate them being sassy. When they became rebellious and uncontrollable things only got worse.
‘Do the dishes now,’ Lauri commanded them.
‘I don’t want to right now,’ Aileen whined.
‘Now!’ Laurie retorted, his voice rising.
‘I’m sick of you ordering us around,’ Aileen shot back, growing wilder by the moment.
‘Go to your room,’ Lauri ordered.
When the moment came, Aileen took her spanking but kept screaming, ‘I hate you, old man!’
Aileen and Keith often accused Lori of being the favourite. ‘No way,’ Lori argued back. ‘I get grounded and spanked just as much as you, and I don’t get any extra toys or extra clothes or extra love.’
Aileen did not have a single good, healthy, supportive or nurturing relationship with a man during her formative years.
Aileen and Keith heard the distressing news of their adoption when Aileen was eleven and just beginning her sexual acting out. Aileen and Keith were being passed off as Lori and Barry’s siblings but were in fact their nephew and niece. Dad and Mom weren’t their parents after all. And it wasn’t Lauri Wuornos who dropped the genealogical bombshell. In an era when divorce was still a disgrace in school, this had a major shaming effect on Aileen and Keith. Their real mother, Diane (Lauri and Britta’s eldest), had just upped and abandoned them when they were babies. Lauri and Mom had officially adopted them. But Lauri refused to reveal the identity of their real father.
The revelations made relations deteriorate still further. And when Lauri went from being their dad to being their mean old grandfather, the discipline problems escalated, too. Aileen and Keith taunted Lauri with their new weapon: ‘You’re not my real father!’ Lauri shot back at them with equal force. Lori merely watched, distressed, or ran crying to her room.
The truth was out, but the subject of Diane (let alone Leo Pittman, their real father) was tantamount to taboo. The only time her name was mentioned was at Christmas. Diane sent gifts which Lauri promptly confiscated. It seemed to Aileen, Keith and Lori that Diane had disowned her mother and father and that they in turn had disowned her. Dimly, the children were made aware that Diane had remarried and had two more children, Rusty and Kathy, but their paths never crossed and details remained very sketchy.
Frequent runaways, Aileen and Keith took to going off, separately and together, hitchhiking until they were stopped and picked up by the police who telephoned for the Wuornoses to come and collect them. They’d then be grounded for two weeks, but the cycle was soon repeated.
Once Aileen and Keith informed Lauri in advance that they were running away together.
‘Good!’ he shouted. ‘And don’t you ever try to come back to this house again, do you hear me?’
‘Fine! We don’t ever want to come back because we hate your guts!’ they retorted in unison.
When Lauri received the customary call—Aileen and Keith had been picked up by the police—he was true to his word and refused to collect them. Aileen was taken for the first of her visits to juvenile hall. She ran away.
Even Lori ran away from home briefly, but when Lauri collected her and gave her a choice between going home or to juvy, Lori unhesitatingly chose home. She didn’t run off because she hated her parents, either. She did it just to do it. Aileen and Keith’s hatred for Father (as they continued to refer to Lauri) was monumental. Sufficiently powerful, Lori often thought, to prompt Aileen to get even. She could imagine her thinking in some perverse way, ‘I’ll show you! Even after you’re dead, I’ll ruin you!’
She’s sure that the idea of bringing her father low would have given Aileen and Keith great pleasure.
4
Lured by its promise of beer, cigarettes and a laissez-faire atmosphere, Aileen, like many of the other local kids, often gravitated to the home of the Podlacks. The ramshackle, cluttered dwelling of Alfonse Podlack, commonly known as Chief, and Dixie, his common-law wife, provided a haven. It was different from their own homes, somewhere to hang out and drink and swear without censorship. Birds and rabbits inhabited the yard and the enclosed front porch was piled high with junk and boxes. Sometimes, kids stayed on the bunk in the old camper that sat out back on cement blocks among the chicken coops, or used it for making out, which no one seemed to mind.
Chief (‘Chief of the Polacks’) was an eccentric character, a onetime polio victim with a withered leg and a severe limp, who wore a bandanna around his head. After work at night, he made his rounds, rifling in the garbage cans behind the local grocery stores for food for his chickens. Tuesdays and Thursdays, they
threw out baked goods and Chief would be there with his fireplace tongs, retrieving them from the Dumpsters.
While described as ‘a grouchy old sonofabitch who reminded you of Aileen’s dad’ by some, others would recall Mr Podlack fondly, remembering how he’d always help fix a broken bike, or be ready to play chess, or to teach them to use a bow and arrow or to care for a gun. (He was a hunter.) He enjoyed regaling the kids with tales of the adventures of his youth, hopping trains and travelling the world.
Dixie, a retired burlesque dancer, was definitely the wild one. A vivacious, if blowsy, fun-loving drunk, she was a sociable soul who often chattered about her own childhood days in Alabama in the 1920s and the back-breaking work picking cotton on the farm.
She liked having the youngsters around, particularly when Chief wasn’t there, because they all chipped in for beer, which, because of the legal age limit, she would be dispatched to go and buy. She and Chief brewed their own elderberry and dandelion wine in the basement, but Chief was always chastising Dixie for her excessive drinking. Hanging out with the kids was a way of getting access to more liquor. Some of the visiting kids smoked dope with the Podlacks, buying weed and rolling joints.
Dixie, then in her fifties, was nothing if not memorable, often dressed in flimsy clothes. Her tales of burlesque seemed to enthral young Aileen, for whom Dixie became kind of a role model; a representative of worlds more exotic than Troy. Others would describe her rather ruthlessly as looking more like an old farm lady from a remote part of Italy than an ex-dancer, but Aileen didn’t see her that way.
Teenage Mark found Dixie not seductive but ‘A scary looking thing with red hair, the typical drunk. You could see whatever she had if you wanted to look, but who wanted to look? To me at that time she was like looking at an eighty-year-old woman. She wasn’t that old, but she looked it, from all the drinking. She had a filthy mouth. I don’t think she really talked about sex but she cussed a lot which was something you didn’t see much of then in an older woman.’