by Sue Russell
Diane and Leo’s first child, Keith Edward Pittman, was born on 14 March 1955, ten months after their marriage. Keith was a fretful, unhappy baby who cried all the time, as Aileen would be too.
Leo’s true personality was soon unleashed with the security of a marriage certificate. Uncontrollably jealous, as if gripped by sickness, he made a prisoner of Diane. If she was at home alone with the baby, Leo made her keep the shades drawn and the doors locked, even in 90-degree heat. She couldn’t go out. She couldn’t look out. She was not allowed to wear makeup in case anyone noticed how pretty she was. She had to hang her washing indoors because if she went outside another man might spot her. She was a love prisoner—only it wasn’t love. It was a stultifying possessiveness.
Diane wasn’t allowed to receive phone calls. If she answered the door to the mailman, she’d be beaten. If he found out she had disobeyed him, Leo beat her. If she hadn’t disobeyed him, he beat her anyway. Behind closed doors, she met a far worse fate than Leo’s grandmother.
Even Larry wasn’t trusted by Leo, his supposed best friend. Larry also saw first-hand how little prompting Leo needed to lash out at Diane when Leo once ‘beat the shit out of her pretty bad’ in his presence. Visiting their apartment one afternoon, not knowing Leo wasn’t home, Larry was astonished when Diane refused to let him in.
‘I can’t open the door. I can’t talk to you. He’ll beat me!’ she cried.
She’d been willing to incur the considerable wrath of her father by eloping with Leo, but that obviously wasn’t enough to prove her love to him. Good-natured and easygoing, Diane didn’t give Leo any reason to question or doubt her fidelity, but she didn’t seem able to stand up to this ‘extremely violent’ man any more than she had to Lauri.
She craved freedom but to her horror, she’d gone from the proverbial frying pan into an open, roaring fire. During their year or so together, ‘He beat me up probably about every other day.’
Leo had lost his virginity at ten to an older woman. Hypersexual Leo’s libido demanded gratification five or six times a day, and Diane complained to her friends about his enormous appetite, asking if it was normal. But marriage did nothing to halt his quest to see how many women he could have on the side. Until he had his own car—bought for him by his grandmother—Leo enlisted Larry to chauffeur him around.
Diane trusted Leo but her belief in his fidelity was grossly misplaced. Larry’s car served as a place for Leo to ‘see’ the other girls he was ‘dating’ and one skinny, young slip of a girl in particular.
‘Leo was always banging her in the back seat,’ Larry recalls. ‘A couple of times he’d leave her with me. He’d say, “Don’t you dare touch her—I’ll kill you if you touch her!” I wouldn’t touch her with a ten-foot pole, but I didn’t say that. But he’d say, “I’ll kill you.” It didn’t scare me or nothing like that, it was just the way he talked.’
Leo wasn’t exactly Mr Popularity. Like both Lauri and Aileen, his attitude didn’t win him any points for charm or social graces, and he rapidly alienated potential friends. Since Larry refused to be intimidated by him, they got along just fine. Larry could whip Leo’s ass and vice-versa. The mix worked.
Leo and Fritz once dated a pair of twins, with Leo carefully selecting the more promiscuous one for himself. Fritz, who was always rather taken by Diane, couldn’t understand why Leo didn’t just go home to his wife.
Leo liked to drink, but (again like Aileen) the demon liquor had a very detrimental effect, making his moods uglier and meaner than ever. On a typical night, their marital status notwithstanding, Leo and Larry cruised around, threw back a few beers, then pulled in at Tony’s Drive-in restaurant, whistling at waitresses and munching burgers and fries. Larry even worked there for a while, slopping cheeseburgers and slinging hash, and put in tiring ten-hour days in a greasy factory. But Leo didn’t do much of anything, although he liked to talk about his various jobs—gardening, driving a truck, working at a gas station, and being a grinder/polisher—and the big money he made. Lauri Wuornos once landed Leo a job in a vain attempt to make him face up to his responsibilities, but Leo refused to take it.
Leo had one job making chrome bumpers where he was supposed to wear a mask to protect him. He deliberately left it off, inhaling the fumes, so that he wouldn’t pass the employees’ lead-level tests and could stay at home and still get paid.
Diane spent a lot of time alone with Keith, and Lauri often drove over to take them to Cadmus for a visit—being helpful or interfering, depending upon your point of view; Leo took the latter. Diane loved Leo, but fate took a hand and the break came in the summer of 1955, when Keith was just a few months old and she was newly pregnant with Aileen, but didn’t know it. Leo was, like a number of his contemporaries, a blossoming petty criminal who had progressed from stealing hubcaps to cars. (He was also arrested for furnishing liquor to minors.) In the fashion of the times, he took the option of going into the service rather than doing jail time and stayed in the Army until October 1957, thereby helping sixteen-year-old Diane liberate herself from their miserable life together.
Their divorce decree, issued on 14 November 1955, cited Leo as guilty of ‘several acts of extreme and repeated cruelty’. The divorce court ordered him to pay $15 a week child support and hospital costs for her second labour.
Diane was afraid of Leo and doubted he’d stay away.
With the help of an Army allowance she received, she’d been able to rent the top floor of a duplex, and Larry and Marge moved in too, sharing the expenses. Their troubled marriage ended shortly after. Drawn together during these painful times, Diane and Marge continued to be roommates. Bright, and a hard worker, Diane was over the moon when she landed a desirable operator’s job with Michigan Bell. She made good money and seemed to be picking up the pieces in her young life. While she worked, Marge babysat, then Diane babysat so Marge could go out. The system worked well enough for a while.
Diane had a brief affair with Fritz. When she divorced Leo, Fritz had gone with her to Pastor Cook, speaking up on her behalf to confirm Leo’s adulteries. Yet Diane never told Fritz about Leo’s temper or the physical abuse that, heaven knows, provided her with equally strong justification for ending her marriage. Then again, she rarely confided in anyone.
Diane reported a trouble-free pregnancy with Aileen during which she smoked less than a pack of cigarettes a day and says she didn’t drink. Working backwards, Diane eventually realised that she must have been a week or two pregnant and not known it when Leo subjected her to a particularly savage beating.
Aileen was born on 29 February 1956, via breech birth. Diane listed her parents’ address on Aileen’s birth certificate. After parting company with Leo, she did indeed make a couple of short-lived stabs at moving in with her folks, but it never worked out.
Aileen was, like Keith, a colicky, fractious baby, and Diane wondered about the effect on them both of all the stress she was under as she emerged from being a battered wife, only to end up arguing with her parents.
She tried to make a go of things as a single mother for about a year. For that brief time, she was a devoted mother. Larry Larson imagined that ‘she would die for those goddamn kids’.
The only less-than-exemplary incident came when Diane was dating Fritz. Working shifts in a bakery, he arrived at Diane’s home one lunchtime to hear loud wailing baby noises as he climbed the stairs. Entering by the back door, he saw Diane sprawled on the couch, sound asleep. She had been in the same room as the cots yet oblivious to her babies’ cries.
When Fritz shook her awake, she jumped up immediately, telling him she’d been drunk and hadn’t heard anything.
Later, Fritz ran into Diane in the street. She told him she’d had a fight with her downstairs neighbour who’d complained Diane had let her children cry all morning.
‘I don’t let my kids cry!’ Diane said indignantly.
‘That woman was right,’ Fritz countered. ‘I heard them right downstairs when I started walking up. I woke you up
. They were hungry. They was probably crying all morning.’
That incident aside, Diane nevertheless completely confounded all who knew her by one day going out for dinner and not returning.
No explanation. No phone call. Nothing.
Aileen was somewhere between six and nine months old. Marge couldn’t figure out what had prompted her to run off or, indeed, where she had gone. In fact, she never heard from Diane again. As best friends, their intimacy was obviously severely limited.
That Diane abandoned Aileen and Keith is not in question. That it was perhaps the first in a long line of dominoes that tipped over, adversely affecting both their lives, is also clear. But Aileen’s woeful tale that she and Keith were found in the attic at her grandparents’ home, covered with flies, is inaccurate.
Marge, who was babysitting that night, hung on to them for almost a week, fully expecting Diane to return and not wanting to get her into trouble with her family.
Marge couldn’t imagine ever leaving her own kids under any circumstances, but she felt shocked, upset and mystified rather than angry. Perhaps her own marital troubles made her especially empathetic.
‘People that walk off and leave their kids usually have a tendency to not give a damn what they do; not care if they’re washed or fed,’ she points out. ‘Diane did all that. She went to work every day and she fed them, kept them clean.’
Diane’s desertion came at a painful time for Marge, a young mother. Her own brief marriage disintegrated after Larry’s infidelity, and Diane had been supporting her, paying the rent. Suddenly, Marge was forced to move back in with her folks and to get a job in a local restaurant. When, in desperation, Marge finally informed Lauri and Britta that Diane had taken off, they were understandably shocked. ‘Mr Wuornos was upset. Who wouldn’t be? He had a fit about it.’ But he took in his grandchildren all the same.
Diane, it turned out, had gone to Texas. (Even Aunt Alma never learned why, and Diane, at this point in history, chooses not to clarify this era.) Some of her friends believed she’d run off with a girlfriend, or a young serviceman from one of the nearby Army bases. Marge doubted that, believing Diane would have told her about something like that. Yet it seems the most likely explanation.
After their separation, Leo Pittman had no contact whatsoever with Diane or his children. Besides his own lack of interest and concern, ‘Ain’t no way he would come around Mr Wuornos,’ Fritz Sturms says categorically. ‘He would have killed him. Mr Wuornos would have shot him dead.’
Diane wrote to her parents from Texas and in due course, signed the papers necessary for them to adopt Aileen and Keith officially. At eighteen she was facing a second failed marriage and returned to Troy briefly at her father’s request, even going back to school. (Marge, by then starting a new life away from Troy, knew nothing of this second chapter.) But Diane’s attempt to reintegrate herself into the family didn’t work. Her presence seemed to make Britta jealous, as if she felt threatened by Diane showing Aileen and Keith any love. Diane had always suspected that Britta lied to Lauri about her and undermined her. Suddenly, she heard it first-hand. Lauri and Britta were shut in their bedroom arguing when, unbeknownst to them, Diane overheard her mother say, ‘She’s just come back and she wants these children to love her more than they love me! And do you know what she does when you’re gone to work? She beats these children, Lauri.’
Diane wouldn’t have dared lay a hand on them even if it seemed warranted. They were no longer officially hers. But Diane’s niggling suspicions that Britta had been trying to drive a wedge between her and her father were confirmed in that one incident. Diane also cites an episode that may well have contributed to making living at home seem so unpalatable. A friend stayed over one night after a party in the house and she and Diane slept in the same bed that night. The next morning her friend recounted an incident that bothered Diane greatly:
‘She said that in the middle of the night she woke up and he was there and he … you know, that he wanted to ah … with her. And she said, “Lauri, for God’s sake, get out of here. Diane is right there. Get out of here and go back to your bedroom.”
Learning that her father had sexually propositioned her friend made Diane wonder, ‘What was he doing in my bedroom in the middle of the night … and how often did he go in there before?’
Lauri had told Diane that Britta didn’t much care for him physically. And Britta had told Diane that sex was an unpleasant chore that a woman had to do for her husband. Even before she left with Leo, Diane had had problems with Britta.
‘Daddy treated me and Barry equally, but my mother especially zeroed in on me. Just hateful, that’s all I can tell you,’ she’d later recall. Britta turned on her when Diane hit puberty at eleven or twelve. Whereas her dad seemed proud of her good school work, her mom seemed jealous. Perhaps, too, her dad was treating her differently as she blossomed into womanhood, and Britta knew something that Diane did not. Looking back, she’d wonder: ‘Was she seeing something in Daddy that I was too young to even understand? Was she seeing that his affection for me was possibly more than normal father-daughter affection?’
Yet Diane denies that any full-blown sexual abuse took place.
Being interviewed by investigator Marvin Padgett in 1991, she admitted her father ‘would just maybe accidentally touch me like he shouldn’t, and then I can remember one disgusting awful time when I was about fourteen and my mother was standing right there and he … I had never been kissed by anyone, and he said he wanted to kiss me. Like, you know, “Give your daddy a big kiss.” And he kissed me, now I realise, like a man would kiss a woman and it was just awful. But if Mother saw that, why wouldn’t she be angry, you know? She’s a human being too.’
Diane, who knew nothing of Aileen’s similar experience, can see that Britta had no choice but to stay with Lauri back in the late fifties. How could she have supported a family alone?
Ultimately, Diane realised she didn’t have the maturity to pull off living alone as a single mother, and when Aileen was two and Keith three, she headed back to Texas. That time, Alma and Ben’s 15-year-old daughter, Elaine (now Carol Connell), was left holding the babies.
After Diane had left for the evening, a man stopped by at her apartment. Elaine’s memory is blurred and she cannot be sure, but she wonders if it was perhaps Diane’s ex-husband, Leo Pittman. (Pittman did reappear at some point in Troy, wearing a paratrooper’s uniform.) Clearly, it was a man she knew because she was unafraid to let him in, but he soon left.
As the hour grew late, and Diane didn’t return at the appointed time, she remembers waiting, waiting, waiting, and growing more and more anxious. Finally, the telephone rang. It was Diane. She wasn’t coming back. Elaine sat on the couch in a state of shock and disbelief, then called Alma. She in turn alerted Lauri and Britta, who drove over with Barry to pick up the children and their baby clothes.
‘I was hysterical,’ Elaine admits, saying, ‘“How could a mother do that?” It was really traumatic for me … especially because I always liked Diane. A lot of people always said how we looked so much alike.’
Diane had always struck her as the perfect, caring mother, making considerate preparations for her each time she babysat, leaving, for instance, a little bowl of peaches and a chair right next to the crib.
The way that old upstairs apartment looked, with its back staircase, is also etched in Elaine’s memory. There, doubtless, lies the root of Aileen’s story about being abandoned, covered with flies. There was no screen on the door and when it was open, flies came in.
Did Diane return to a man in Texas? Or did Leo Pittman blow through town on furlough and rekindle the old flame? Either way, Diane had gone again and this time for good. It was thirteen years before she returned to Troy after Britta died.
In 1958, Leo Pittman was given three years’ probation for breaking and entering. He was becoming a blight on society and his criminal record was building steadily. In 1959, he was sentenced to Federal prison at Chillicothe, Ohio,
for car theft and for transporting stolen cars across state lines, serving three of six years before being paroled.
In the early sixties, Diane got a rudely blatant hint about the kind of path her ex had taken when detectives turned up at her door in Texas. They wanted to question her about Leo’s whereabouts way back on 24 March 1955, apparently hoping to tie him into an unsolved rape and child murder. Prompted by them to cast her mind back, she could recall the date with startling clarity, primarily because of its proximity to Keith’s birth just ten days earlier. She described to the detectives a scenario in which Leo had come into the apartment acting as if he were hiding from someone. He kept peeking out from behind the drapes and refusing to answer knocks on the door. As usual, he beat her, too.
Surveying her second marriage, which she also described as a trip from frying pan to fire, Diane later asked Aunt Alma: ‘Why does this have to happen to me? I get rid of one, and get another one just like him.’
Thankfully, not quite like him. Leo Pittman’s descent into depravity was just beginning.
7
The year was 1962, the month September, and the man, having violated his Federal parole, was on the run. He took his pregnant wife and small daughter and went into hiding 926 miles away in Wichita, Kansas. He couldn’t stay out of trouble for long, however, and the next time it was of a far darker nature.
On Friday 23 November his eye was caught by a group of young children romping in a school playground, and his fascination was far from innocent. A black temptation stirred within him. It was an impulse that he knew he should fight, and at first he did struggle to quash it, driving on by and pulling to the side of the road to think it over.
‘And then I got this urge, and I started west again.’
He wheeled his way back to the school and parked his car alongside the playground. Casually, he sidled over to join in the kids’ play, ingratiating himself with the group. Then he moved in on the target, chatting to the pretty seven-year-old who had drawn him there, easing her gently into a private conversation.