by Sue Russell
Aileen’s explanation was that her clothes-buying sprees had finally gotten too much for Fell, who meted out money thirty dollars at a time, and when he reprimanded her, she grabbed his cane and beat him.
No stranger to drunken arguments in bars, on 13 July she made a lasting impression on Bernie’s Club (later Club 131) in Mancelona. The evening began peaceably enough with Earl Junior Castle (more commonly known as Bud), a slightly built 27-year-old construction worker, dropping in after work as was his custom to relax over a couple of drinks.
His eye was caught by an attractive young blonde in blue jeans and a cream sweater who was busy hustling pool for money and drinks. He’d never seen her before and decided he’d like to get to know her. When she challenged him to join her at the table, he rose to the bait, playing three or four games, which she won. Bud kept watching her and noticed that as the evening wore on she grew rowdier, shouting obscenities, uttering threats to other patrons, and generally being objectionable.
Sometime after midnight, the bartender and manager, Danny Moore, had finally had enough. He also smelled trouble brewing. Young, tough and confident, he ran the establishment in a ‘kick ass’ fashion (meaning he wasn’t afraid to ‘kick ass’ when need be), yet something prompted him to handle this differently. He casually walked over to the pool table, sweeping the balls together and announcing that the table was closing down. Just as he was doing so, he heard someone shout, ‘Duck!’ He turned just in time to see Aileen aim a cue ball at his head. It flew past, missing him only by inches, but she had hurled it with such incredible force that it literally lodged itself in the wall. If she had been on target, she might have killed him.
Once again guided by the wisdom of experience, something told Danny not to try to deal with this incendiary situation himself. He called the police.
When Deputy Jimmie Pattrick of the Antrim County Sheriff’s Department arrived, being single, he noted how attractive Aileen was and was baffled as to why someone so good-looking should be involved in a barroom scuffle. Yet Aileen was duly arrested for Assault and Battery and hauled off to jail. She was also charged on fugitive warrants from the Troy Police Department requesting that she be picked up within a hundred-mile radius for charges of consuming alcohol in a car, unlawful use of a driver’s licence, and for not having a Michigan driver’s licence.
Small town that it was, Jimmie Pattrick knew Erv and telephoned to tell him what had happened to his sister-in-law. Erv and Lori quickly jumped in their grey pick-up truck and headed for the bar to try to persuade them to drop the charges, but Danny wouldn’t budge. ‘If I drop the charges now, then every time I call a cop, they won’t come out,’ he argued.
Filling in the jail forms, Aileen noted that she was under a doctor’s care and on nerve medication. She was living back at the Grodys’ home, but had a motel key in her purse along with $20.78. She then slept off the liquor in the drunk tank, but not before she threatened the officers present, saying, ‘I’m an undercover narcotics agent in Colorado and you guys will be really sorry!’
Despite the different charges against her, Aileen was quickly released on bail after an unidentified friend arrived with her purse containing $1,450. It certainly wasn’t Erv Grody: ‘She could have stayed there and rotted for all I really cared.’
Erv and Lori had grown more accustomed to Aileen’s exploits than they cared to. When Aileen was playing pool, she loved to flirt and flaunt her body. Reading her blatant availability signals, a couple of womanising married men set their sights on getting her into the backwoods.
Paul, once a friend of Erv’s, took her for a ride in his car out into a desolate area and parked, thinking he’d got lucky. But the encounter then went awry. Reporting back to Erv, he said, ‘Man, that sister-in-law of yours is a wild person.’ They’d been making out for a while and both had their clothes off, but just as Paul was about to climb on top of her, Aileen snapped at him: ‘What do you think you’re going to do with that?’
‘You know what I’m going to do.’
‘No, you aren’t!’ Aileen shouted, as she began pounding on him with her fists, kicking furiously and screaming her head off.
‘I kicked her ass out of the car and told her she was walking home,’ Paul said, showing Erv the scratches he bore to back up his story.
Aileen reprimanded Barry for hardly visiting Keith in the hospital—blithely ignoring the fact that it was Barry who took him in and cared for him when the hospital could do no more. She had hitchhiked halfway across the country to see him. Yet, for all this lip-service Aileen paid to the importance she put on Keith, no one remembers her visiting her dying brother. Dawn, however, stopped by weekly with candy and books. (She didn’t tell her husband, who might have misinterpreted it.) Lori went too, meeting Keith’s curious craving for chocolate-covered cherries which he explained he hoped would help him put on weight. He couldn’t chew anything solid, or even brush his teeth. His gums and teeth were too fragile. Keith also requested Playboy magazines which Lori duly took him.
When his body could stand no more and doctors knew it was near the end, they allowed Keith his dying wish to live out his last days at home. Jerry Moss drove him to Barry’s house in Keith’s new Corvette: he’d bought it with cash from the Army cheques he’d saved, but never had a chance to drive it himself.
It was just three days after Aileen’s cue ball incident arrest, on 17 July, that Keith finally lost his fight against the cancer. He was just 21. On 19 July, Aileen’s marriage officially ended with a divorce issued at the Volusia County courthouse in Florida. She pawned the ring. Two days after that, Keith was cremated at the same funeral home as Britta and Lauri. Aileen arrived late.
Having rejected him in life, but acknowledging him in death, Diane arrived from Texas for the funeral. Other mourners were surprised to see her apparently too distraught to sit through the service for her abandoned son. She attended the viewing of Keith’s body, carefully avoiding being left alone in a room with Aileen, who also put in a surprise appearance. Aileen, seeming uncharacteristically vulnerable, followed her around like a little puppy looking for attention. Diane left just as the mourners reached the steps.
Aunt Alma, Uncle Ben, and Jerry Moss didn’t know it then, but it was the last time they’d see Aileen. And they’d remember the way she gently slipped a rose into her brother’s hand.
Lori didn’t fare well that day, breaking down in floods of tears. She also got into an argument with Dawn because she thought the drugs Dawn’s brother Ducky had taken Keith in the hospital, supposedly to relieve the pain, might have hastened his death. Janet Craig had to usher Lori into the bathroom and help settle her down.
Had Keith lived, Lori would later reflect, he’d probably have ended up in trouble for dealing and using drugs. But she couldn’t imagine in her worst nightmares that he’d ever be capable of committing any violent crime. He had a temper, but never like Aileen’s.
Fondly, Lori recalled how in an effort to get her to be less timid and more outgoing, he had once bought her a provocatively sheer, sexy, black blouse. She was too shy to wear it.
On 4 August, Aileen pleaded guilty to the Assault and Battery charge for the cue ball outburst, paying a fine and costs of $105. She’d left town again by Lori and Erv’s wedding. But not before issuing one of her unfriendly warnings to Erv: ‘If you ever hurt Lori, I’ll kill you and bury your body where no one will ever find it. Don’t think I can’t do it.’
A few months after Keith died, each of his siblings inherited $10,000, courtesy of payments on his Army life insurance. Aileen claimed to have camped out on the doorstep of the insurance company until they issued her a cheque. With money in hand, she promptly put a down payment on a shiny black Pontiac (which was soon repossessed) and tooled over to Lori and Erv’s, flashing her wad of money.
She also bought a mixed bag of antiques and a massive stereo system (she had no home but apparently saw no incongruity), and blew the lot in three months, pronouncing, ‘This is death money—I don�
��t want it!’ Referring back to their inheritances, Aileen said: ‘Barry’s money-hungry too, by the way. I’m not the only black sheep of the family. I’m not materialistic because I got into the Lord.’
When, inevitably, she moved out of Lori and Erv’s, her purchases went into storage. She called a while later—by which time the storage rental fees were delinquent—asking Lori and Erv to retrieve her stuff. They did so and kept it in their home until her next visit.
The stereo system was hooked up to two powerful speakers set outside the house. Lori and Erv returned one day to find Aileen, the self-professed ‘music freak’, totally oblivious to any need to show consideration for other residents, blasting it out across the whole neighbourhood. She was inside the house, clutching the plug-in mike and crooning along.
Her visits always ended in animosity. Acting as if it were her home, not Lori and Erv’s, she would come in and change the TV channel at whim overriding Lori and Erv and never consulting anyone else in the room. She might be on her best behaviour for a couple of days, then she’d settle into her usual routine. She contributed nothing to the household expenses, didn’t cook a single meal, didn’t clean, and generally lounged around the house all day without even a semblance of pulling her weight.
She sometimes took three showers a day. And each night she’d say, ‘I need a beer to help calm my nerves,’ as though she’d been working hard all day and was under pressure. Unlike them, she had no responsibilities. At least she didn’t break the place up, Lori thought, saying a silent ‘thank you’. Erv often imagined the sisters coming to blows, yet, miraculously, they didn’t. There was no doubt, however, that Aileen’s prolonged presence would put a lethal strain on their marriage. Ultimately, it was them or her, and she had to go.
She bragged openly about her dubious survival methods, such as finding the minister in a new town and conning him and his family into taking her in. ‘That was her way of getting back on her feet several times,’ Erv Grody recalls. ‘Then she’d end up robbing them blind.’ When she hitched, she boasted, there were always plenty of truckers who stopped, ready for sex.
On one of her visits, Erv drove her to a storage unit she’d rented. In it, she kept an old trunk of clothing, a crossbow, and an antique .22 calibre rifle. That time, when Lori and Erv asked her to leave after a couple of tense weeks, she pleaded poverty. To help her out, Erv found someone willing to buy her stereo with its huge home-made speakers for $450. For his trouble, Erv received another of the by then familiar warnings about treating Lori right. As always, he knew instinctively that she meant what she said.
Instead of using the money to fly to Florida as she’d promised, Aileen asked Lori to drive her to the highway.
They bid farewell that time on a rainy morning. Lori felt bad about leaving her sister out there, but what could she do? ‘It killed me, but I couldn’t have her living with us.’ Off went Aileen, her thumb extended.
Not long after Keith’s death, Aileen turned up unannounced at Diane’s home in Texas for a two-week stay; an unwelcome guest in what Diane would call ‘a very horrible experience’. By then, Diane’s fear of her estranged daughter was sky high. What she had witnessed during her stay in Michigan for Keith’s funeral had primed her for trouble. ‘I could see the violence in her, and she frightened me to death,’ she said. Barry had tried to soothe her fears, but Diane wouldn’t be placated, saying, ‘There’s something that’s in her that frightens me, that’s all I can tell you.’
It hadn’t helped when the family had got together and discussed Aileen’s threatening of Lori with the skewer. Nor did the infamous cue ball incident—which in Diane’s mind translated into attempted murder—alleviate her deep anxiety.
Its root cause, of course, harked back to her firm belief that Aileen had been raised to hate her by Lauri and Britta. If Aileen had such vast quantities of anger seething inside her, how much of it might be aimed at Diane?
When she arrived on her doorstep, Aileen got off on the right foot, informing Diane that she planned to find a job. But it rapidly became apparent that this was just a token gesture designed to keep Diane off her back. When Diane returned from work each day, Aileen would be either drunk or high. Diane didn’t know what she’d been taking because—she’s not sure why—she didn’t ask her.
(‘She kept trying to get me drunk on whisky,’ Aileen would allege, referring to Diane as a ‘wet-brain’.)
Diane would claim not to be averse to giving Aileen a home, it was just that Aileen wouldn’t stop the violent talk, the drink, the drugs. The violent talk, the drink and the drugs, of course, were Aileen. So, hard though it may have been to admit, Diane didn’t actually want this troublesome daughter at all.
And who could blame her? She’d heard what the Texas authorities said about children’s personalities being locked in by the age of ten, and the prognosis for sudden miraculous change did not look good. However much her heart ached to be able to, it just seemed too late to start over.
Lori believed it wasn’t so much that Diane hated Aileen as that she felt guilty for having left her and Keith, particularly for having left them with her parents. And, of course, she had made another life for herself. A life upon which she didn’t want a disruptive influence like Aileen to intrude.
The upshot was that each night Diane went to bed in fear that Aileen would kill her in her sleep. She slept restlessly with her keys tucked inside her pillowcase the entire time, thinking that at the very least, her daughter might try to steal her car. That was no way to live.
After a couple of weeks, Aileen grew tired of Diane’s rules and regulations. She complained that she didn’t like it there and wanted to leave. But faster than Diane could heave a sigh of relief and offer her the money for a bus ticket, Aileen changed her mind again. She’d stay.
Diane’s frayed nerves, however, could take little more. She told Aileen that it would be best if she went and handed her the bus money. Diane told the family that when she drove her to the bus terminal, she had watched from her car as Aileen walked in the front door of the terminal, went right through and straight out the back, obviously intent on hitching.
Aileen’s version? ‘I hated her guts, and I told her to take me to the freeway, and then let me out of here. She took me to I-10 in Texas. I wasn’t going to put up with her shit.’
12
Aileen’s teenage runaway jags and well-honed hitchhiking skills had segued into a permanent lifestyle of rootless wanderings. Her natural habitat was, by the late seventies, the vast expanse of flat woodlands fringing the central Florida highways. The sunbelt, with its casual way of life, was a seductive magnet that had long exerted its powerful pull on the shiftless and unconnected. But Aileen also harboured a special fondness for the starkly contrasting mountainous peaks of Colorado. She often spoke of them longingly, saying, ‘It was the prettiest place that I really liked to be in and that felt right.’
Hanging out there with a rough biker crowd, she was in her element. She’d always been drawn to the outlaw life, ever since as a little girl at the pits she’d watched the biker gangs from afar. Now, she was among them, riding motorcycles in the Rockies and living dangerously. She claims she was once run off the road by a rival bunch of bikers who managed to send her sailing over the handlebars, right into a ditch. Drink flowed, and on one occasion when she’d been out riding with the guys, she’d imbibed such vast quantities of alcohol that she passed out cold. She felt safe because of one guy in particular whom she liked. She had the feeling he would look out for her. Wrong. She awoke the next morning to find herself tied hand and foot to a bed and had to scream blue murder until the biker boys relented and cut her loose.
Also legend according to Wuornos is that, while living the wild life in Colorado, she had a job to do for the guys she ran with. She had to get all decked out in her leather jacket, leather pants and thigh-high boots, then position herself outside a restaurant or truck-stop, acting as bait to lure a rival bike gang into a fight. Or worse.
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sp; On an earlier visit to Colorado, in May of 1974, she was arrested as ‘Sandra B. Kretsch’ for disorderly conduct (with the stolen licence of the woman in whose abandoned VW she had briefly slept). She spent ten days in jail. But when she moved there in 1977, her crimes became more serious. She had two DUI (driving under the influence) arrests and two arrests for weapons offences.
That August, Aileen was spotted driving a brown Grand Prix (highly erratically), and blithely waving around and firing a handgun out of the car window—much to the horror of passing motorists. The car weaved from lane to lane without signalling, its driver apparently unaware of the other vehicles that were being forced to swerve to avoid it. It hurtled through red lights, then slowed to 30 m.p.h., or screeched to a halt only suddenly to speed up again to close to 60 m.p.h., tyres squealing. Finally intercepted, Aileen stepped from the car, her breath preceding her. She fairly reeked of alcohol (a blood test would reveal a level of .129 per cent), her eyes were blood-red, her speech slurred and her gait staggering.
A .25 calibre automatic pistol containing three hollow-point bullets was found in the car’s console. Aileen told the officers that her boyfriend owned the car and the gun.
On 23 December 1977, she was arrested again for the same charges: prohibited use of a firearm, no operator’s licence, and DUI.
Along with her money hunger, Aileen’s craving for love unarguably remained a major driving force in her life. Her poor track record for relationships notwithstanding, Aileen was repeatedly propelled into situations by that urgent hunger she had to bond closely with another human being.
She was 25 when her path crossed that of Jay Watts, a 52-year-old automobile worker, in the spring of 1981. She approached him at the Talk of the Town, a lounge in the Daytona Beach area. (Daytona, home of the International Speedway, with its 23 miles of 500-foot wide, hard-packed, pale, sandy beaches, would repeatedly draw her.) The Talk of the Town boasted a pool room at the back, but Aileen didn’t attempt to hustle Jay, they just had a drink together. An innocuous and rather pleasurable encounter that they repeated six or seven times. Jay ‘didn’t spot her as being on the make or anything’. Aileen always offered to buy him a drink but gentleman that he is, he insisted on paying.