by Sue Russell
Jay could always tell immediately when Aileen was in the bar because he’d spot her decrepit, white, ten-speed bicycle, which couldn’t have been worth more than five bucks, chained to the lamp-post outside. The chain—hefty enough to hold a tractor—always struck him as funny.
One night the pattern changed when Aileen tapped Jay for a $15 loan with a hard-luck story about being short on her rent at the old Troy hotel. A couple of weeks later she reappeared, planted a kiss on his cheek and, without any prompting, paid him back in full.
Another month went by before he next heard her customary greeting—‘Hey, Jay’—drift down the darkened bar. She had nowhere to stay; could she crash with him for a couple of nights? He said yes, without knowing whether she would sleep with him. One step at a time, he thought. They stopped to buy a fifth of whisky then drove on to his mobile home.
‘I’ve got to go to the bathroom,’ Aileen said when they arrived.
‘Go. If you’re going to stay here, you might as well make yourself at home.’ Sex or no was OK with him. One thing about Daytona Beach, men didn’t have to worry about their sex lives.
‘I fixed us a couple of real nice drinks,’ he remembers, ‘turned on the stereo, turned on the TV. She was gone for the longest kind of time, then I saw the lights go off in the bedroom and she said, “Hey, Jay! Aren’t you going to come back here?” I walked back and she was in bed. She said, “Let’s go.” And I said, “Why not?”’
It was a curious alliance. And, informal arrangement that it was, it was experienced—and remembered—very differently by the parties involved. To Jay, since the affair lasted just a couple of months before ‘the incident’, it was very much a casual involvement.
To Aileen, it assumed monumental importance, being the closest thing to stability she’d experienced in years. Jay worked in used cars and acquired an old 1971 Ford station wagon for her to tool around in so she could go to the beach and (at his prodding) job-hunting. She treated the gift as if it were a Mercedes, cleaning it until she could see her face in it and seeming happily content with their semblance of domestic bliss. When Jay said he needed a vacuum cleaner, Aileen leapt up, saying, ‘I can take care of that.’ She returned an hour later with one so antiquated it looked as if it had come over on the Mayflower.
‘Where did you get that?’
‘I borrowed it from the hotel. I just went in and got it and put it in the station wagon.’
‘You’re going to take it back, though, aren’t you?’
‘Oh sure,’ she said.
She liked sex. But she also loved being affectionate. She loved nothing better than to cuddle up when they lay back and relaxed in the evenings, just watching TV. She’d craved a boyfriend ever since Mark Fearn and Jerry Moss turned her down. With Jay, she had one.
She shared some of her past: her one-month marriage to a man of 69 who beat her with his cane. She spoke, too, of another Mark whom she described to Jay as the first man she’d ever wanted to marry. She said his mother was responsible for splitting them up because she disapproved of Aileen’s drinking, and she threatened to shoot Aileen rather than let Mark marry such a no-good. If what Aileen told Jay was true, it marked another major rejection. A crushing blow.
Jay got the feeling that Aileen liked the idea of being able to put a man on a pedestal and to lean on him. He didn’t know it, but that was very much Aileen’s way of relating to other human beings. Either putting them on pedestals or hating them.
Aileen also confessed that back in 1978 she’d drunkenly shot herself in the stomach; that she had been an unhappy girl. Jay didn’t think she sounded suicidal when she was with him, but wouldn’t remember anyway. As a policy, he never paid any attention when women talked that way.
By contrast, he would have good reason to recall the night of 19 May 1981.
‘We were watching one of those slam-bang, cops-and-robbers things they had on TV, something like Miami Vice. After it was over, she said, “You know,” and she got that faraway look in her eyes—and I never will forget this, it’s the first thing I remembered when I heard about her being in trouble—she said, “You know, I think it would really be neat to be …” Then I’m not sure if she said Ma Barker or a gun moll, but where she’d be famous and be somebody. I said, “Well, yeah, if you want to spend the rest of your days in the slammer or worse.” Dumb question followed by a dumb answer.’
Later that evening they had a few angry words but they were sufficiently inconsequential for Jay not to remember for the life of him what about. Perhaps it was about sex, which Jay believed she really liked. ‘OK, shweetheart,’ she’d say in a Bogey imitation, ‘this will be the time of your life!’ The sex was OK, but not especially memorable. Personally, he’d just as soon play golf with her. When she had a pitcher of Manhattans and got on the golf course, she was great fun. She had a natural talent for golf. Jay took her to the clubhouse once but suddenly worried that everyone might think she was his daughter. Just to tease him, she started calling him Daddy. They had a good laugh about that.
They went to bed together that night of the argument, but Aileen couldn’t settle down. She got up, went outside and lay on a chaise-longue in her favourite spot above the carport for about four hours before finally going back to bed. She was moody, but Jay never saw any glimpse of violence. Never saw her do drugs either, except that she liked Qualuudes and sometimes took some of the prescription Libriums that he himself used to wind down after a tense day selling cars.
‘The next day, the police were calling me at work. “Do you know Aileen Wuornos?” I said, “Yup!” They said, “Well, Jay, she’s really bought it this time. We got her down at the truck stop. In her bikini bathing suit. We got the gun, we got everything. She hit a Majik Market.”’
At approximately 1.25 p.m. on 20 May, like something out of a bad movie, Aileen held up Elizabeth Smith, the cashier of the Majik Market on Ridgewood Avenue in Edgewater, Florida, brandishing a .22 calibre pistol.
‘Would you believe this is an armed robbery? Give me all your money and make it fast,’ she said.
She was formally charged with Robbery with a Deadly Weapon, a first-degree felony. And all for $35 and two packs of cigarettes. She had $90 on her when she was arrested. Neither Jay nor attorney Russell Armstrong knew where she got the money to buy the gun. And she refused to tell them.
Before her sentencing, she wrote a letter to Judge Hammond, pleading for lenience. Her naïve language, her childlike handwriting and her poor spelling indicated a far more youthful author. Simplistically, she explained how in 1976 she was madly in love with a fellow and wanted to marry him but that his mother had broken them up. She became depressed to a degree she could not explain, and began drinking herself to craziness. Because she loved Mark so much, losing him made her want to die and so, in 1978, she shot herself in the stomach and spent two weeks in the hospital recovering.
She began to realise that it was stupid to try to take her own life over a guy, when she’d probably meet another one just like him some day. But first loves die hard and she couldn’t get Mark off her mind.
Her degree of obsession doubtless explains why Jay was under the impression that she and Mark had split up just a month or two before they met—not three or four years earlier.
‘When I fall in love, I know I fall too deep,’ Aileen observed in a poignant postscript to the judge who held her fate in his hands.
Aileen’s recollection of her argument with Jay the previous night predictably differed from his. She’d had a lot on her mind and wanted to be alone to think, so when Jay came out of the shower and into the bedroom, she’d asked if he wanted to be in there? She needed some privacy, so maybe she’d better go outside to think? Jay took it all the wrong way, as if she was trying to tell him what to do in his own home.
‘You can leave my room and the rest of the house for that matter!’
‘Good, I’ll sleep in the car!’ Aileen retorted.
She didn’t, but she cried herself to sleep. The nex
t morning, still feeling angry and hurt, she convinced herself that she had lost him. Leaving the mobile home at around 7 a.m., she stopped at the fridge to grab a six-pack, then drove to the beach and drank it. She bought more beer, picked up a .22 pistol at a pawn shop, thinking she would kill herself. She stopped at Kmart and bought the bullets, but still didn’t feel quite high enough to do the deed, so added whisky and Librium to the day’s cocktail.
Driving around, she noticed a light flickering on the dashboard, signalling that the car was overheating. A gas station attendant helped her locate a big hole in the radiator, but told her she should make it home.
Pulling away, she spotted the Majik Market across the street and parked in front and just sat there, staring at the pay phones. Should she call Jay to find out if they were really breaking up or not? She was pretty darn drunk (the cashier claimed differently) when she entered the Majik Market, an unlikely bikini bandit. When she pulled out her newly acquired gun, thoroughly terrifying the cashier, Aileen says she wasn’t thinking ahead to the repercussions. (A theme in her life.) She was too busy wondering what Jay would do if she was caught robbing a store. If he loved her, he’d stand by her and rescue her. Bail her out and take her home. Then she’d know for sure. It would be a true test of his love.
Leaving the Majik, Aileen climbed back into her complaining car and headed towards Jay’s place. (She was no longer sure whether it was her place or not.) When the car sputtered to a halt, two Good Samaritans in a pick-up truck helped her push it to the nearest gas station. And there she waited.
When the arresting officers arrived, Aileen went quietly. With her plea of guilty to Robbery with a Weapon, her history as a runaway surfaced, as did the fact that Aileen Carol Wuornos was wanted by the Pueblo, Colorado, Sheriff’s Department for Grand Larceny, a crime allegedly committed in 1979.
The complainant was a woman who’d befriended Aileen, given her a place to stay and even handed over $25 for a bus ticket. Aileen had repaid her kindness by stealing a diamond ring worth $1,200, a cassette tape recorder, and a set of luggage. The state of Colorado wanted to extradite her to answer these charges.
Meanwhile, on 4 June 1981, a bewildered Jay Watts enlisted attorney Russell Armstrong to represent his wayward and emotionally precarious young girlfriend. It was a move prompted by friendship and compassion for a fellow human being, rather than an act of love or an investment in a joint future. Russell Armstrong, however, had a profound effect on Jay’s course of action. He persuaded Jay that his continuing presence in Aileen’s life was essential for her well-being. He was the only thing she had to cling to.
‘It’s kind of humorous,’ Jay recalls. ‘Russell said I had such an intense effect on her and she was so deeply involved with me, that he thought it would be traumatic if I just cut the girl off after she got convicted.’
‘I told Jay, “If you just cut it cold, I worry about her emotional status,”’ Armstrong confirms. So Jay, who never had any intention of getting involved but had a good heart and often came to the aid of lame ducks, stayed in her life. His conscience was clear. He’d never led her on into thinking he had deep feelings for her. But he felt compassion for her, all the same.
Aileen was observed in a psychiatric evaluation for the Department of Corrections to be an unstable individual who, besides claiming to have been repeatedly sexually abused, had suffered a lot of emotional upheavals in her life.
Dr Barnard wrote in his report: ‘Clinically, she is judged to be of average intelligence. She has a mild deficit in recent and remote memory. There is no indication of a thought disorder and specifically no loosening of associations or delusions.
Russell Armstrong, however, said it was hard for him to communicate with her: ‘I thought her train of thought wasn’t following what we were doing. She would fantasise. I wondered if she was in touch with reality.’
Her plea for probation denied, Aileen was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment in the Correctional Institute in Lowell, Florida. Dutifully, Jay kept her bicycle and Keith’s Bible, and visited weekly. In between times, aching for contact, Aileen wrote him an average of three to five letters a week. Repetitive in content, they addressed her loathing of being shut in with all the lesbian inmates, her embracing of the Bible, and her overwhelming longing to get out and be back with Jay. Whenever he visited her, she lavished him with affection and declarations of love.
‘The first time I went, she just started crying a little bit. I said, “Honey, cheer up. I’ll be back out here again.” Sometimes, Aileen was downright sexually aggressive. ‘I’d think I’d need a crowbar to get her off of me. She didn’t have any lesbian tendencies then!’
He kept up the visits for a year, but when, one Saturday, he couldn’t get there, she just went to pieces. During visits, they were allowed to sit out in the courtyard to get some sun and while guards looked the other way, inmates and their visitors did just about anything short of intercourse. On Jay’s last visit before she was moved to Hollywood Community Correctional Center in Pembroke Pines, down near Fort Lauderdale, they were allowed to go back into the laundry area. Before Jay knew it, Aileen was hungrily peeling off his clothes, but he stopped her short. He didn’t care how she felt about it, but he had no intention of having sex in some prison laundry room.
Languishing in Pembroke Pines, with Jay’s letters and visits increasingly scarce, Aileen put an ad in the personals of a biker magazine. In her last letter to Jay, she wrote that she was afraid he was falling out of love with her. She’d had a hundred replies to her ad, which she’d narrowed down to the ten best, and a man from Maryland had been sending her money. She thought Jay should know. He was ecstatic, thinking, ‘Wunderbar! The annuity stops!’ Finally, she would be out of his hair, and he could stop sending her the fifty bucks or so he mailed off each month.
By the time Aileen was released a few months later, after serving eighteen months, she had lined up a new life for herself. It was to this total stranger that she went, not to loyal, faithful Jay—the proclaimed great love of her life—whose actions had gone so far beyond the call of duty.
13
The 47-year-old Maryland engineer Aileen had corresponded with had answered ads and joined a lonely-hearts-type club looking for romance. Ed was divorced and his brood of grown children had left home. He was the caretaking kind of man who loved having a woman to be good to, but found it increasingly difficult to find one willing to admit she needed help. Aileen, who wrote back to him three times, seemed like she might be the answer to his prayers. She was a country and western singer who was temporarily having problems with her voice. He knew she was incarcerated but was intrigued, and sent her a letter, too. He had no idea of the seriousness of her crime since she dismissed it as a mix-up in a fast-food store. Someone thought she’d been stealing when she hadn’t.
Upon her release in August 1983, Aileen hitched her way right to Washington, DC, to meet this new target of her affections. Without warning, she telephoned Ed. She was out, and wanted directions to his place. Excitedly, Ed drove into DC to pick her up, but when his eyes first lit upon his pen pal, she was hardly the personification of his fantasies. She looked older than 27. Slender, though. But very puffy around the eyes. What is more, she was blind, roaring drunk. Somehow, through the haze of alcohol, she slurred out an even less appealing message. She was gay, and he was to keep his hands off her. ‘There was to be no touching. She stressed that very strongly,’ he recalls.
This news bulletin, coupled with her unattractive inebriation, shifted his mind right away from any tingle of anticipation he’d been feeling. What in heaven had he gotten himself into?
There was one point in her favour. She seemed determined to go straight.
‘I’ll never go back to prison,’ she hissed fiercely. ‘I’ll kill myself first! I’ll die before I ever go back!’
A tumultuous relationship ensued, and it wasn’t even a romance. Aileen was in Ed’s life for approximately three rollercoaster months during which she hitched
down to Florida twice, only to return like the proverbial bad penny. If he added it up, he doubted she spent more than a total of four weeks under his roof, but it felt like longer. Much longer.
He paid her to do some yard work and housework, and to clean the basement. It gave her some pin money, and she did a decent job. A veritable motor-mouth, she talked incessantly, but nevertheless had a knack with a story and a good sense of humour. She told Ed about her fantasies, or visions, or whatever you’d like to call them. Once, on her way to Florida, she’d seen a spaceship or chariot-like vision in the sky. She talked about religion, too.
One subject she returned to repeatedly was her grandmother Britta, for whom she obviously cared deeply. She didn’t talk much about her grandfather, except to say that he beat her and favoured his own children over her and Keith. She wasn’t close to Barry, but one day she telephoned Lori for a chat. She spoke of Keith as if her life had been progressing fine until he died of cancer. She’d sat there and watched him die, she said.
She was positively vitriolic when she spoke of her ex-husband, because he mistreated her. She said he was probably lucky to have got out of the marriage alive. Ed got the clear impression that very few men in her life had treated her decently. Just Jay Watts and himself, really. Aileen told Ed he reminded her of her grandmother. A thoughtful man with a kind heart, he took that as a compliment.
He didn’t know she was a hooker. But he realised she was getting extra money from somewhere.
Ed was painfully aware of her alcoholism from the very first day they met and they talked often about her drinking. She wanted so much to kick all her bad habits. One day, driving up in the mountains, she made Ed stop the car while, ceremoniously, she tipped all her cigarettes out onto the ground and stomped them into oblivion. She then took her omnipresent bottle of booze, poured it out and smashed it. She climbed back into the car with a smirk of satisfaction spreading across her face.