by Sue Russell
‘Would you like to go for a ride and see my pony?’
‘Well, yes. But I have to take my little sister home first.’
‘OK, but don’t tell your friends or anyone else about it.’
Dutifully, the little girl escorted her small sister back to Grandma’s across the street, then returned to the man who waited, heart pounding, preparing to spring his trap.
He drove the little girl a few miles out into the country and as she lay along the front seat, trustingly, her head resting against his lap, the tone of the outing changed. Before stopping the car, he warned his by then terrified captive that if she tried to resist him, he would kill her. Once in a suitably deserted spot away from the road, he brutally raped and sodomised her. Afterwards, with perverse consideration, he drove her right back to her neighbourhood, dropping her off near the school. Letting her go, he warned her again that if she told on him, he’d kill her mother and grandmother.
Once free, the child ran straight back into the warmth and safety of her grandmother’s arms. Immediately, she blurted out, ‘Some man picked me up and took me out in the country and done something real dirty to me.’
Her grandmother rushed her to the emergency room at the nearby hospital. The child was so traumatized, so distraught, that the doctor’s examination had to be cut short, but not before it had categorically confirmed the sexual assault.
According to her grandmother, ‘For a long time afterwards, she would wake up in her sleep and scream and carry on.’
Gently questioned by the deputy sheriff, the little girl managed to proffer a surprisingly sharp description of her attacker. The sheriff also coaxed her into drawing the design of the car upholstery that she’d described. She carefully reproduced a diamond pattern, interspersed with bars.
The observant child’s physical description of the pony man was good enough for a gas station attendant, questioned by police during a mass canvass of the area, to recognise him.
The station worker led detectives straight to the door of Leo Arthur Pittman, father of Aileen Carol Wuornos. They arrested this inept, but none the less sinister and dangerous sex offender the very day after the assault, finding him easily at his cabin in a hotel right round the corner from the school. He’d been helping pay his bill by doing odd jobs around the motel yard.
On his person when he was taken into custody was a private detective badge that he’d bought in California. He had recently left that state, he told officers, with his pregnant wife and daughter. In a line-up, the little girl readily picked out Leo, as did two young male witnesses who’d been at the playground.
A detective described Leo, just after his arrest, as being dirty and long-haired, bearing the ‘wild look of a man caught’.
Leo confessed to the assault of the little girl and the next day was examined by a court-appointed psychologist, but he refused to take a lie detector test. His introduction to sex at the age often with an older female neighbour emerged, as did his pattern of promiscuity. He no longer drank, he said, because it made him aggressive, giving him an uncontrollable urge to pick fights.
He was held without bail on charges of First Degree Kidnapping, and was shaken to learn that he’d committed a capital offence and could earn the death penalty. He was also charged with forcible rape and ‘the abominable and detestable’ crime against nature of sodomy.
His preliminary hearing (at which he contradicted his previous story and claimed to be single and unemployed) was set for 10 December.
What followed was what the then prosecutor, Keith Sanborn, would always remember as ‘The most amazing identification I was ever witness to.’ When Leo was led into the courtroom, the girl reacted so strongly to his very presence that she broke out in hives before his eyes—and the eyes of everyone else in the courtroom.
Sanborn recalls it as vividly as if it were yesterday. ‘That was pretty hair-raising to me as a young prosecutor,’ he explains, ‘… and then he got away.’
Leo Pittman was arraigned without bond. He confided in three cellmates (young men who were AWOL from the Navy) of his plan to convince everyone he was insane so that he’d be sent to a mental hospital instead of prison, and could then escape. The cellmates spilled the beans and testified to what Leo had told them, and Sanborn argued an effective case for Leo’s manipulative behaviour.
In June of 1962, Leo had been considered a suspect in a case in Michigan of indecent liberties taken with two ten-year-old girls. On 12 March 1963, the Detroit Police Department had also begun investigating him in connection with a child murder charge, yet in April he was ruled by Judge Clement F. Clark to be schizophrenic and unable to comprehend his situation. To Sanborn’s dismay, he was ferried off to Larned State Hospital for psychiatric observation and evaluation, edging his escape plan one step closer to fruition.
Sure enough, just thirteen days later, Leo seized his opportunity. Along with two other prisoners, he sawed through the steel bars of a hospital window, then made a run for it.
‘We were pretty hot at Larned State Hospital for not letting us know immediately he escaped,’ recalls Keith Sanborn. He wasn’t notified until noon the next day and detectives told him that Pittman had threatened to return to Wichita and kill Sanborn’s entire family, just so that everyone would know for sure he was crazy.
FBI agents picked Leo up in Cassanova, Michigan, in August as a parole violator, at which point he was charged with the earlier sex offence, which he denied. He was found innocent by reason of insanity. He was then sent to Ionia State Mental Institution in Michigan where he was held until February 1965. Word filtered out that he was due to be released as cured. Getting wind of this, with just a matter of days to go, County Attorney Sanborn and Wichita law enforcement pulled out all the stops, determined to avert his release. They used an unlawful flight warrant to hold him and return him to Wichita.
Finally, three whole years after the crime, he was brought to trial for his assault on the little girl. In January 1966 such was the social climate that only seven of the 151 prospective jurors were excused because they could not, under any circumstances, impose the death penalty.
In the courtroom, the child was flanked for support by her mother and aunt. Everyone was a little nervous about the solidity of the victim. Years had passed. How good would her young memory prove to be? But as Leo was escorted in, she turned to her mother and without wavering for an instant said: ‘There he is, Mommy!’
A member of the defence team approached the grandfather, planting the idea that Sanborn was just pushing the trial for publicity, and that testifying would do irreparable harm to the child. Sanborn saw that as ‘an attempt at psychological warfare to scare the grandfather to try to get him to come and see me and ask me to drop the case’.
Sanborn knew his motives were pure, but was relieved all the same to learn from a psychiatrist that testifying would actually be cathartic for the child.
With the jury finally seated, Leo denied committing the selfsame crimes to which he’d earlier confessed. He also accused the detective of threatening to take his children (one, and another on the way) from him and his wife if he didn’t take sodium pentothal.
‘I could not tell Detective Williamson anything about the crime because I did not commit the crime,’ he complained.
His defence attorney, not surprisingly, set out to prove an insanity defence. One psychiatrist testified that Leo was insane on the day of the assault and had been for ‘at least ten years’. Another also testified for Pittman, saying, ‘I found this man was suffering from schizophrenic reaction, paranoid type, which involves a thought disorder, disassociation between emotion and thought control, and general feelings of hostility towards society, and also some degree of depression. And I felt that if this man knew what he had been doing … that he was not emotionally or intellectually able to appreciate that he was doing wrong like other people, as I understand it.’
County Attorney Sanborn argued that being diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic did not prove Pitt
man’s insanity. There were plenty of such individuals, he was at pains to point out, who functioned well in society without doing anything wrong. Sanborn then took a sledgehammer to Pittman’s already dubious credibility, bringing on a clinical psychologist who testified that in his professional opinion, the defendant had fudged the answers on his sanity tests, hoping to con his way to a lighter sentence. Dr Roy B. Henderson said Pittman ‘overplayed the role of being unable to comprehend’.
One test had required Leo to reproduce geometric designs and Dr Henderson found fault with the manner in which he did so. He said Pittman reproduced them ‘In a real distorted fashion … not as you would expect a psychotic to do. When you try to fake something, there is a tendency to over-fake, and this, I think, is what happened here.’
Also testifying for the state was psychologist Dr Paul G. Murphy. Dr Murphy said that while Pittman had a ‘schizoid personality’, he was not psychotic when he examined him in 1962. Dr Murphy pointed up Pittman’s sexual obsession—citing the fact that in the ink-blot test he took, in almost every case he identified the blots with female genitals.
In another of Dr Henderson’s tests, Pittman was unable to add two single-digit numbers correctly. Yet when he believed he wasn’t being observed, the doctor watched Leo play a good game of Ping-Pong, keeping score perfectly well as he went.
The Wichita Eagle newspaper reported that Leo’s con-man abilities had been put to yet another test by Dr Henderson. After making certain that Pittman was within earshot and listening, Dr Henderson rather loudly declared to a colleague that if Pittman was suffering from the disorder he indeed thought he was suffering from, he would make an ‘x’ in a particular place on a piece of paper. Falling headlong into the trap, Leo did just that.
The mental health professionals who testified for the defence began by claiming Leo didn’t know right from wrong. Yet eventually, under the careful and persistent questioning of prosecutor Sanborn, they were pushed to concede that he did.
More damning still for Leo was the child’s testimony, and her accurate drawing of the slipcover on the front seat of his car—a drawing that was done before Leo’s car was even found.
Just before closing arguments, word was sent to Keith Sanborn: Leo’s faithful grandmother was threatening his life.
‘She had said that if Leo was convicted, I was going to be shot. So I told some press in the courtroom, “Don’t sit between me and her!” Of course, nothing like that happened, but I do remember it, naturally. I’d already made the only decision that a person can make, and that’s that you don’t worry about stuff like that. A detective once told me, “Don’t worry about the ones that tell you they’re going to do it.”’
At 8.45 p.m. on Saturday 15 January 1966, the jury retreated to deliberate, returning just after midnight. Leo’s beloved grandmother was present in the courtroom for the reading of the three guilty verdicts and looked on impotently as he was sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labour. On 28 January an extra 31 years were added to his life sentence after the judge denied a defence motion for a new trial.
Leo was incarcerated at the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing to serve out his sentence and was put to work in the cannery.
Keith Sanborn, now a judge, was finally satisfied. ‘I was a prosecutor for twenty-four years, and I never got to the point where anything wasn’t personal. And it wasn’t a matter of me against him. It was a matter of what he did. It was really a terrible thing.’
Prison officers found Leo in his cell, hanging from a rope that he’d fashioned from his bedsheet and strung over his cell bars. It was January of 1969, and he was 33 years old.
He was rushed first to the prison hospital then to Kansas Medical Center, in a coma. A few days later he was returned to the Kansas State Penitentiary. He died there on 30 January from complications arising from the suicide attempt, without ever regaining consciousness.
The autopsy noted that Leo’s body was adorned with eight tattoos including, on his chest, one of a woman’s head.
Later that year, Aileen Carol Wuornos, the daughter Leo had never met, gave birth to her only child, a baby boy, propelling the Pittman genes one generation further.
Leo’s legacy of love to Aileen was non-existent. Instead, his potent contribution to the recipe for a ticking time bomb that was his daughter, was an inherited predisposition towards criminal behaviour.
Being raised by adoptive parents with a criminal record increases the probability that a child will follow suit. But studies have shown that the biological legacy of criminality is even more powerful than the environmental in determining the outcome of the child. Even if that child is removed from the parent soon after birth (or, in Aileen’s case, before it) and raised in a different environment, the odds are that they will be a chip off the old block.
8
Aileen’s pregnancy when she was fourteen was a better kept secret than her incest with Keith. Set against the backdrop of her inappropriate and premature sexual activity, it could hardly be called a surprise, yet it had a catastrophic effect on her already tenuous family relationships.
An inhabitant of this household of denial, where everything even mildly unpleasant was brushed under the carpet, Aileen not surprisingly concocted a story that seemed at least partially fantasy. She said a brutal rape by an Elvis Presley look-alike led to her pregnancy and that she had been molested at gun-and knife-point for six hours.
‘He was almost going to kill me but I begged for my life, and he let me go,’ she says.
It was a story that, in various guises, she returned to over the years, but just one among many. Sometimes she said that the man was a friend of Lauri’s. Like the boy who cried wolf, Aileen said so many things, gave so many different versions, that any truths were lost in the shuffle. She has claimed to have been raped nine times in her life, and was doubtless raped at some stage, probably more than once. Perhaps the nameless stranger was an easier culprit to latch on to to have brought about such dire consequences? Tellingly, however, despite Aileen’s tender age, Britta and Lauri didn’t believe her. Regardless of whether Britta and Lauri knew of Aileen’s prostitution, evidently they considered her a liar, promiscuous, or both.
During her pregnancy, Aileen continued to name other men as the baby’s father. Keith. Lauri. Dean—a neighbourhood boy she earlier claimed had raped her. And Mr Podlack. She confronted some with the paternity issue. Dean laughed in her face, and Keith scoffed that there was no way she could know who the father was.
Condoms later became part of her prostitute’s paraphernalia, but her teenage partners didn’t wear them, relying instead on coitus interruptus.
It was a lonely, frightening time for Aileen, who was more isolated than ever with her secret. She first confided her fears in her neighbour and friend, Cheryl Stacy, a student assistant in cooking class and (more relevantly) in family planning. What were the first signs of pregnancy? Aileen asked. How could she tell? Cheryl explained that her breasts would swell and she’d have morning sickness, and demanded to know who was the father. She was floored when Aileen told her that it was old Mr Podlack: ‘But she always said that he was very nice to her and he’d give her money and they’d go places together.’
The idea of Aileen and Mr Podlack was so sublimely ridiculous to Cheryl that it almost had to be true. It certainly wasn’t news to her that her friend had learned to make money through sex, but she was amazed at how well Aileen hid her condition. She put it down to the fact that they weren’t a very close family. Her own mom would have known immediately.
By the time Aileen broke down and told Lori, her pants were so stretched to capacity that they left angry red marks ingrained in her flesh. In the privacy of their bedroom, she pulled up her sweater and revealed her protruding belly. Tearfully, she explained that she hadn’t had her period in months, but was petrified about telling Mom and Dad, afraid they would throw her out. Lori begged her to see that she had no choice. Besides, Mom would notice she hadn’t been using sanitary pad
s. (But Mom hadn’t noticed or had looked the other way.) Lori felt sorry for Aileen, but she didn’t believe her rape story for a second. When Aileen finally plucked up the courage to tell, Lauri yelled and Britta cried. Lauri wanted Aileen—and the disgrace she’d visited on the family—gone as quickly as possible. Britta was embarrassed, shamed, and bitterly disappointed in her. They were convinced their unhappy history with Diane was destined to repeat itself.
Britta sought advice at Troy High in January of 1971 and was sent to the Michigan Children’s Aid Society for help. Aileen was fourteen when she became pregnant, not thirteen as she claims, and had just passed her fifteenth birthday by the baby’s birth. Mrs Verduin, her case worker, was struck by her immaturity. Aileen didn’t seem to look beyond the moment. She seemed to find the subject of her future a completely alien concept.
Despite Barry’s claim that he was never out of work while Aileen lived at home, Lauri had been unemployed since the previous October, so DSS paid for the baby’s delivery. On 19 January, Aileen was whisked off to the sombre institution-like Florence Crittenton Unwed Mothers’ Home in Detroit. Cheryl didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye to her. It was only Aileen’s second visit to the big Motown. She viewed with distaste its dirt, noise and pollution, deciding it wasn’t at all a place she’d ever choose to live, although she had one fond memory of a family outing to a ball game there. She could still remember the hot dogs, peanuts and popcorn tasting so good to her young tastebuds. ‘Too bad Dad couldn’t always be affectionate and full of bubbliness like that.’
‘The wretched man’, as she more often thought of him, drove her to the unwed home. ‘With that damn drinking of his, the car stunk like leftover puke.’ She couldn’t help feeling he took pleasure in abandoning her in a strange place. And because of the way they parted, she didn’t even know if she had a home to go back to. She cherished Britta’s letters, but no visits were forthcoming. Lauri wouldn’t allow it; nor would he drive her. Britta told Aileen she could only make one call a week.