by Sue Russell
Given her tender age, there was really no decision to be made about whether or not she would keep the baby, but she did want to see it just once before it was taken away and put up for adoption. Lauri, however, wouldn’t hear of it. Aileen’s short life thus far had been one long series of rejections and losses. It was just one more.
Aileen claims she did get one peek of her son through a window. He was born, she remembered, on 24 March, weighing 7 pounds 11 ounces. The new mom was 4 feet 11 inches and weighed 145 pounds.
‘I’d see a baby that had two little front teeth,’ she muses in what seems story-like fashion. ‘Very, very tiny, like just about to protrude out of the gums. And also, long fingernails on his fingers making his face have itty-bitty scratches here and there. And his hair was full and dark brown on his head, which made me think he’d probably turn blond later on. He was cute. A real cute little boy.’ Again, her language sounds indicative of fantasising: ‘I’d look at him and say, “Sorry, young ’un, but if you knew my living situation, you’d understand why I have to give you up. You’ll be ten times better off.”’
She reminisces about being sorry to say goodbye to the friends she’d made. But while she was certainly bonded to the unwed home’s other young inhabitants by their mutual plight and common fear of the pain of labour, she did not get along well with them. Again, she fantasised about bonds that did not exist.
With Aileen safely removed from the house, her pregnancy was never discussed, becoming another family secret so shameful that Britta didn’t even confide in her own sister. Aunt Alma didn’t learn that Aileen had a child until many years later. Timid Lori didn’t dare ask questions, but took her parents’ fury and the fact that they didn’t call the police as evidence enough that they didn’t believe Aileen’s rape story. The whole episode was so successfully hushed up that no one in school besides Cheryl even had a clue where Aileen was. They just assumed she was off in juvy hall.
Aileen named the baby Keith Wuornos in honour of her brother. Entering the father’s name on sealed official forms, she sometimes claims to have written Lauri Wuornos, at others, ‘rapist’. Lauri relented and allowed her to return home, but fear froze on her face when he showed up to pick her up.
‘I was praying inside that he was not by himself. I was just so scared. Even if Keith or Lori was with him, I’d feel better. To be with him alone terrified me. Then he blurted out, “Mom’s in the car. She’s been sick lately. She’s sleeping in the back seat.”’ What ailed her would be debated later.
Relations between Aileen and Lauri reached their nadir. It was almost as if she finally abandoned any pretence that she loved him, or he her. Certainly, she felt abandoned by Britta. Old way beyond her years, a woman now, not a child, Aileen no longer pretended to tolerate being told what to do, or when to come home, or when she could leave.
Frank and Gary went looking for her one day, both a little afraid that she might have named them as the baby’s father. They tracked her down at a friend’s house in as mean a mood as they’d ever seen. She told them the baby was ‘an old man’s’. Then again, they heard on the grapevine that she’d fingered Keith. By then, Aileen’s paying customers began noticing that her young body was marred by stretchmarks.
Aileen re-enrolled in Troy High School that spring but dropped out after a few months. Simultaneously, the Oakland Juvenile Court requested her records from Smith Junior High for a pending court hearing, and her next stop was the Adrian girl’s home. Lori visited her there as she’d done in the previous juvy, listening to her litany of complaints all about the dykes she was shut in with, and her terror of their cat-calls and sexual propositions. On a more upbeat note, she had become quite proficient at shooting pool—a skill that stood her in good stead later, hustling in pool halls.
Lori couldn’t help worrying that instead of getting psychiatric help to straighten her out, her sister’s eyes were only being opened to even more avenues of potential trouble.
By the time she was finally allowed to return home several months later, Aileen was incurably restless, soon running away again. That time, when Lauri told her never to come back, he meant it.
Sleeping rough in the woods and in abandoned cars, hitchhiking on the highway, hanging out with men of all ages, whose treatment of her ran both ends of the spectrum, she wasted countless days on drugs and drinking binges. It was only a matter of time until she would be lost for ever.
9
Britta Wuornos’s alcohol problem ran a different course from Lauri’s. While neighbours believed that she was drinking behind closed doors, she either sustained a long period of abstinence or of extreme secrecy—because Lori didn’t see her touch a drop.
Aileen and Keith had been banished from the house in disgrace (Aileen was living in the woods and Keith with friends), when Lauri took Britta away for a few days vacation to help her frayed nerves recover.
The night of their homecoming, Lori spotted something strange: three bottles of beer nestled on the top shelf of the refrigerator.
‘Whose is this?’ she asked her dad, knowing he never drank anything but wine.
‘Oh, it’s your mother’s,’ Lauri replied.
‘Mom’s?’ Lori thought.
Certainly, Britta was acting strangely. What was odder still was that Lori suspected she’d been drinking. If so, Lori felt sure she’d done it because of her heartbreak over Aileen and Keith. The pregnancy, the truancy, the shoplifting, all of it. She could only resort to speculation because her mother never told her what was going on. There were never any intimate mother-daughter talks. (Lori started her periods without a clue what they were.) From that night on, Britta became so ill that Lori seriously doubted she could have lifted a beer bottle. She even missed Lori’s high school graduation on 7 June. She was so groggy that, visiting her in the back bedroom, Lori wondered if she might be suffering from the d.t.’s.
Repeatedly, Britta instructed Lori to open the front door and to yell out to the motorcyclists she could hear roaring past the house to quit riding up and down the road. Lori knew there was nobody there but it seemed easiest to humour her mother, so, embarrassed, she opened the door and shouted, ‘Stop! Stop!’, then quickly closed it. But Britta wasn’t satisfied. ‘They didn’t hear you! They’re driving me nuts.’ Lori opened the door and yelled again and again until her mother fell back asleep.
One afternoon soon after, Lori was on the couch watching TV when Britta suddenly pointed to the telephone directories, asking, ‘Lori, will you call AA?’
‘I looked in the phone book,’ Lori recalls, ‘and I didn’t know what AA was, so I said, “Well, there’s AAA here? I don’t know what you mean.” And she said, “Do you think I need AA?” I said, “What’s AA?” Then she dropped the subject. And now, of course, I know that AA is Alcoholics Anonymous.’
Britta’s condition continued to deteriorate and she started having convulsions. Once, as Lori was helping her to the bathroom, Britta’s eyes began to bulge and Lori was afraid she was going to swallow her tongue. She screamed for her father who rushed in and held Britta’s tongue down hard with a pencil until the spasms passed. Frightened, Lori pleaded with him, not for the first time, to call an ambulance. He told her they didn’t have insurance and couldn’t afford it. He merely helped Britta back to the bedroom and closed the door. Lori sat outside listening. All she could hear was the low drone of the television. She couldn’t turn to Aunt Alma and Uncle Ben for help because they were away on vacation. On 7 July 1971, Lauri emerged from the bedroom and told Lori to go in and check on her mother.
‘Feel her pulse. Feel if she’s alive.’
Immediately scared, Lori retorted, ‘No! I don’t want to.’
But when had she ever disobeyed her father? Despite herself, she edged gingerly towards Britta’s lifeless form. To her horror, her mother felt chillingly cold to the touch. Looking back, Lori knows she had been manipulated: ‘I knew he knew she was dead, but he wanted me to know it as part of an experience, or something. Like teaching
me to change a tyre or balance the chequebook. I didn’t think that was a good experience—but he thought it was.’
(Aileen, who was off in the woods, later claimed this experience for her own, telling Diane how Lauri had made her and Lori sit with Mom’s body from 5 a.m. until they notified police at noon, just so that they could experience death.)
Finally, but all too late, Lauri telephoned for an ambulance. Numb with shock and immobile, Lori watched as it pulled into the driveway and the drivers came into the house, put a sheet over her mother and removed her body.
Lori knew she had to find Aileen immediately, and tracked her down at the pits where she had been sleeping in an abandoned car. Then she located Keith.
Britta had believed in reincarnation and it had been her wish to be cremated. An Edgar Cayce fan, ‘She wanted to come back as a bird because birds are so free,’ Aileen recalls. ‘I told her, “Yeah, well what if an eagle comes and gets you?” “Well, that’s what I want to be—an eagle!” She was cool, she was neat, she was hip. A very humble lady.’
Finally, Lori, Aileen and Keith learned what their father, Diane and Barry had known all along: Britta was an alcoholic. Her liver had been in such poor condition that she’d been warned by doctors that if she drank again, it would kill her.
‘The autopsy said she died from cirrhosis of the liver from drinking, but how could she die from three bottles of beer?’ Lori ruminates. ‘I think she wanted to die. After what she went through with Diane, now it was starting all over again with Keith and Aileen, and I don’t think she could handle it.’
Aileen always spoke reverentially and adoringly of her grandmother, but this was the same woman who stood by and didn’t intervene when Aileen was abused by Lauri. Inappropriately dressed in blue jeans, Aileen showed up at the funeral home, viewed Britta’s casket, then frivolously switched the nameplates on the men’s and ladies’ restrooms. She then had to be thrown out for lighting up a cigarette and defiantly puffing smoke in Britta’s face, saying, ‘If I want to blow smoke in the old slob’s face, I will!’
Behind her rampant idealising lay Aileen’s anger at Britta for deserting her and not saving her from Lauri.
Lauri notified Diane of her mother’s death—but not until after the cremation.
‘He said, “The funeral is over and she’s been cremated … but I just wanted you to know you killed your mother.” That’s the kind of abuse that we put up with,’ Diane recalled.
His own role aside, Lauri certainly laid considerable blame for what happened to Britta at the feet of Aileen and Keith. There was no doubt she was devastated by Aileen’s pregnancy and by having police show up on the doorstep. And talking to Diane that day, Lauri threatened that he would kill the children if she didn’t come and get them.
Responding to his manipulation, she immediately drove to Michigan, but not until she’d called Uncle Ben, who strongly warned her against going to the house alone.
‘Go get Barry,’ he advised, ‘and then you go with Barry … because your daddy is really gone off the wall.’
Following Ben’s advice, Diane informed her father that she had checked into a local motel, saying she didn’t want to be in his way and also preferred to be by herself.
‘What’s the matter?’ sniped Lauri. ‘If you stay, you think I’m going to kill you too?’
Diane couldn’t help but notice the revealing ‘too’. It seemed to have slipped out by accident.
He also continued his litany of complaints about Aileen and Keith: ‘Those kids are no good … they’re rotten through and through. They’re no good, just like you.’
‘Daddy, I’ve listened to that being no good all my life, and I thought I was no good until I left home, went far away, and realised that I was a good person. And don’t you ever say that to me again, that I’m not any good.’
To Diane’s astonishment, her retort silenced him. But she felt a painful pang of realisation. Her children had probably been even more abused than she had, just by virtue of the fact that they were hers.
While Diane was reassured that there was no sign of foul play, her mother was dead at 54 of a fatty liver and chronic thyroiditis, and she wasn’t satisfied. Puzzled, she rang the coroner to request a copy of the autopsy report, thereby learning that Britta had died with bruises all over her body. She also smelled as if she had been drinking.
That was no surprise to Diane, ‘because that was the problem … it was alcohol … that was the problem … in the house.’
The coroner asked if Britta had often fallen down drunk. Diane was adamant. Definitely not. She staggered, maybe, but never fell. And she could think of no legitimate explanation for the bruises. Something else struck Diane as odd. Although no one ever accused Lauri of taking Britta’s life, until his own death five years later he repeatedly told people that he didn’t kill her. Meanwhile, in Troy, Diane was getting her first glimpse of the juvenile delinquents Aileen and Keith had become. Seeing them over a period of a few days, she was shocked by how hard they were; how unlike her other two children. She told Aileen that she wanted to take her back to Houston with her, saying, ‘You haven’t gotten love here and I made a mistake.’
How hard Diane worked to try to take them, only she knows for sure. She later said she explored the possibility but that Texas authorities wouldn’t permit it, predicting that without a husband she would be unable to cope with two more children who were already in trouble with the law and wards of the court.
‘It sounds so cold … not being able to take your own children … but there’s only so much a person can do,’ she said.
Aileen and Keith were ambivalent about the move anyway since Diane made it plain she intended to lay down some firm rules. It wasn’t going to be party time and she wouldn’t allow them to smoke marijuana. All in all, a rather unattractive agenda.
Lori later reflected on her father’s refusal to call an ambulance. At the time, she hadn’t known that an emergency call would have summoned immediate help, money or no. Slowly, she came to a painful realisation. Her father must have thought she was so dumb that she wouldn’t figure out what happened. And as an adult, she tearfully faced the disquieting truth. Her father had let her mother die.
Sometimes, she felt she hated him. Most of the time, she willed herself to block it out. She kept repeating to herself, ‘It’s over with. Thinking about it won’t do any good.’
Lonely and isolated for the bulk of her young years, Aileen finally met one kindred spirit in 10th grade. Dawn Nieman first became aware of Aileen as the kid all the others teased and whispered about behind her back. They said she carried around her mother’s ashes.
Dawn, who was eight days younger, wasn’t as wild as Aileen but was a fellow troublemaker and was expelled from school for fighting just around the time Aileen dropped out. She was frankly intrigued by her friend’s renegade reputation and the fact she’d already had a child and was a prostitute. Aileen never talked about the baby. She acted as if it was nothing. And she never said she’d been raped. The more the other kids urged Dawn to give Aileen a wide berth, the more she was drawn to her. A friendship, albeit a mercurial one, developed between them.
Britta’s death had marked a crucial turning point for Aileen. All semblance of family ties had disintegrated and by her fifteenth summer, while most of her peers were preoccupied with junior proms and the like, she was out of the nest completely, living in a kind of no-man’s-land, answering the call of the wild.
Dawn, for some long-forgotten reason, also ran away from home for a while, and together they took to living rough and sleeping in the abandoned cars they found in fields, in backyards and even in neighbours’ yards and driveways. Aileen briefly moved into an old Oldsmobile up on blocks in one family’s yard, and the Kretsches briefly allowed her to sleep in their old VW. After her benefactors left home for work, she went inside to shower. For a time, Aileen and Keith also stayed with the Richey family. Then when Dawn returned home, Aileen spent odd nights with her folks, too.
> Dawn thought of Aileen as a Jekyll and Hyde. She could be a bitch at times, but she also had an endearing side. When they hung out in bars (passing themselves off as eighteen wherever people weren’t too fussy about i.d.), or went to the mall or to eat at a burger joint, it was always Aileen’s treat. She enjoyed being generous, buying jeans for Dawn, who didn’t have any money of her own. And her apparently fearless friend carried a knife, so Dawn knew she’d look out for her even when they went panhandling.
Dawn knew exactly how Aileen got her pocketfuls of cash, they just never talked about it outright. Whereas Cheryl Stacy and Janet Craig tried to challenge Aileen about messing around with men, Dawn didn’t get on her case about the prostitution, even though Aileen sent her away a couple of times a day while she took care of business. Dawn didn’t judge her. Her silence was a mark of her respect for Aileen, who she thought was doing what was necessary to be able to give money and drugs to Keith and Lori. Although Aileen was the youngest, she seemed admirably protective of Lori, who was still into Barbie dolls and seemed much younger. Aileen even tried to shield Lori from sex by aggressively warning off Lori’s boyfriends. Dawn found something noble in the way Aileen took care of her family, albeit by questionable means.
Unlike Aileen’s previous attempts at friendship, her alliance with Dawn endured, weathering its storms.
Lori continued to live with Lauri and while he was off on a few days’ vacation, broke his cardinal rule, inviting Aileen and Keith to stay over. When he returned unexpectedly at seven o’clock one morning, he caught Keith sleeping in Lori’s bedroom. Enraged by the sight of him, he yelled so loudly that Keith didn’t even think of leaving by the door—he frantically crawled out through the bedroom window.
Shortly thereafter, Lauri sold the house, but he didn’t leave until he was forced to. And when he couldn’t get his piano out through the doorway, he chopped it up and threw it away. He was too mean-spirited to leave it for the next inhabitants. Lori cried over the fate of the piano. To her, he was closing the whole chapter of their lives involving Mom with that single, destructive gesture. ‘After what he did to my mother, I’m sure his head wasn’t in the right place.’