by Sue Russell
Ty’s recorded offences were chicken-feed compared to her companion’s. Ty was arrested in July of 1986 for failing to obey a traffic sign, and was cited for driving without headlights in March of 1987. After whooping it up on 4 July 1987, Ty was treated at the Halifax Medical Center for scalp lacerations. She’d had an altercation in the Barn Door Lounge and a man knocked her to the ground. Tame stuff, by Lee’s standards.
One of their many pit stops in Daytona was the Carnival Motel, although there was little festive about it. They had no phone in their spartan room, so Lee would use the pay phone outside a nearby convenience store, then pop in to pick up cigarettes and other life-sustaining essentials. Sometimes, she hung around outside.
The heavens opened the day that Paul, acting as assistant manager of the store to help a friend, stuck his head around the door. ‘Why don’t you step inside to take shelter?’ he asked, assuring her she didn’t have to buy anything. They’d exchanged a few words before. He remembered her saying she worked for a cleaning business or maid service or something. And since she had no wheels of her own, she had to wait in the street for someone to pick her up.
Single at the time, he found himself a little turned on by her. She wasn’t bad looking at all. Making conversation, though, Paul felt she was a bit of a cold fish. Maybe a little hostile. Yet as soon as he mentioned that he was a part-time writer, her demeanour changed dramatically. It was as if a light bulb had switched on somewhere. She’d been looking for a ghost writer to help her with her autobiography, she enthused. And she was willing to pay a lot of money. Several thousand dollars. Could they meet later at her motel room, to discuss it in more detail?
Paul headed over to the Carnival that night, armed with a healthy degree of scepticism born of experience and past disappointment. He wasn’t seduced by her talk of big bucks. Thinking logically, his first concern was whether this woman had any kind of original story to tell. Was it even worth his while to get involved? He’d worry about the specifics later.
When he arrived, Lee welcomed him. She then gave her pudgy, homely, and decidedly masculine-looking companion a highly memorable introduction, saying: ‘This is my wife, Ty.’ It was Paul’s first intimation of Lee’s lesbianism.
Staying professional, he opened the meeting by delivering his usual speech, just laying out the basics. The uninitiated always needed to be set straight on the way things worked. Paul pointed out grimly that in order to write anything commercial, you must have an audience. That you must identify a group of people out there who will be sufficiently fascinated to buy your product. Lots of famous people have biographies and autobiographies gathering dust on bookstore shelves because no one cared to spend money on them, he said.
What did Lee feel was so special about her life? She was a little ticked off by this confrontational tactic, but he’d seen that reaction before. People never liked marketplace realities interfering with their dreams and aspirations.
Lee thought he was questioning her worth and, challenged, she rose to the bait. What did she have that was special? Well, she’d tell him what. She knew of some unsolved murders, that’s what. And she could name names.
That got Paul’s attention.
Two facts emerged. One: Lee desperately wanted to become a public figure, and was hell-bent on trying to gain some kind of notoriety for herself; two: Lee and Ty had been drinking before he arrived, which put him off since he himself was on the wagon and in the AA programme. Yet she’d aroused his curiosity enough to make him delve deeper.
Lee’s sinister stories began to tumble out, the flow lubricated by her beer consumption. What they lacked in detail, they made up for in mood. He had a creeping but certain feeling that she was capable of anything. She tried to cajole him into drinking with them. She didn’t like it when he told her he’d been sober for a few years. Kept pushing beers at him regardless.
While Lee talked, Ty listened, pacing the room, feeling left out. She was more passive, yet every so often she chimed in, each interjection some feeble attempt to outdo Lee and her heavy-duty stories. Paul quickly deduced that Ty wasn’t that bright, and found her competitive efforts rather comical.
Undeterred and still intent on her potential autobiography, Lee pulled out an old newspaper clipping detailing her 1976 marriage to Lewis Fell. It hadn’t lasted long, but he had megabucks. She’d lost out badly there. Been dealt out of the fortune and didn’t get a thing. Pissed her off so bad, she picked up with a biker gang. She had a wild streak, and that crazy biker lifestyle had always appealed to her.
Gradually, Paul got a taste of her stories. While she was living in Fell’s penthouse, she told him, and sunbathing nude on the terrace, she’d deliberately flashed her body, luring a telephone or TV-cable worker. She’d driven him so crazy with desire that he came over to try and get friendly. Then she took her revenge. Hit him, then screamed. She liked to know she had the power to draw a man to her—then to reject him. Pretty sick stuff, Paul decided, liking the sound of her and her life less and less by the minute. Not something he wanted to get involved in. It was glaringly obvious she was full of anger at men, but he didn’t know why. In all her stories, she made no mention of being beaten as a child, or of being sexually abused.
She claimed that when running with the bikers, she’d been used as bait, flaunting her body to entice men into a trap, but hating them all along and getting pleasure out of making them suffer.
She hinted around the subject of killing, tantalising rather than revealing. Never came right out and admitted to killing anyone herself, or even to witnessing any murders. Just sat there with a kind of smug smile, repeating her claim that she knew about some murders no one else knew about. She also bragged how tough she was and said she knew her way around weapons. When she ran with the biker gang, she was into a lot of violence.
The beer supply was drying up and Lee was anxious to replenish it. There were people who owed her money, so she didn’t have any cash right now: could Paul loan her some?
‘You know I work in the store and it doesn’t pay,’ he hedged, not liking this turn of events. ‘I don’t have but a few dollars on me.’
‘Give me what you’ve got,’ she said aggressively.
‘No, ma’am. I have to live till pay day.’
‘Don’t give me that bullshit you don’t have any money. What are you afraid of?’
With his refusal to comply, the so-called interview took a vicious turn. Lee grew belligerent, calling him ugly names and using foul language.
Paul tried to steer the conversation back onto the presumably safer ground of her book. Privately, he’d already decided he wanted no part of it. He didn’t want to deal with her, let alone write about her.
Making his excuses, he edged towards the door with Lee still pushing for money. By the time he pulled away from the Carnival, she had somehow talked him out of ten bucks. That left him just five for himself.
‘I’ll bring it into the store in a couple of days,’ she promised.
‘Fine.’
‘What are you going to do about the writing?’
‘I’ll be in touch,’ Paul lied, more than happy to write off the ten bucks to experience. He decided this must be her pattern. Hitting people up for cash. He counted himself lucky to get off so lightly. But he still felt rattled. It had been an upsetting, disturbing encounter and he wanted to forget it as quickly as possible.
Predictably, he didn’t see his money again, but he did see Lee a few months later, bumping into her back in the store. He was then dating one of the staff (who later became his wife) and had just stopped by when Lee appeared in the company of a homely-looking, much older man. The fellow was perhaps in his late sixties and behaved as if he thought he’d struck pay dirt with her.
Lee ran up and down the aisles, gathering beer and stacking it on the counter, giggling merrily. Then she went over to her companion and held out her hand, and he pulled out a wad of bills. Paul was alarmed. She then scampered over to another aisle and returned with a pa
ck of condoms which she waved, teasingly, under the man’s nose. He looked happier than a clam. He paid for everything, then they took off in his beaten old van.
Paul agonised over what he’d seen. During their evening together, she had not mentioned prostitution. But she had mentioned violence. What was going to happen to that old fellow? Was she going to rob him blind? He thought hard about calling the cops and debated it with his girlfriend.
‘I know what they’ll tell me,’ he fretted. ‘They’ll say, “Nobody has committed any crime. Forget it!”’ He had talked himself out of doing anything.
But Lee’s ambition to have an autobiography burned on, undimmed. She talked to another writer and clipped and carefully saved those questionable advertisements that run in the backs of magazines, enticing amateur hopefuls with messages like, ‘Looking For a Publisher?’ or ‘Be An Author’. One day there’d be a book about her.
Meanwhile, Lee railed against the world with a sense of righteous indignation that sometimes drove her to put pen to paper herself.
In January of 1988, she wrote to the clerk of the circuit court contesting a traffic offence—she’d been caught walking on the interstate on 18 December 1987—for which she felt she’d been wrongfully ticketed. She ended her letter with the postscript. ‘I wrote this in all honesty. Now Please, get it squared away. Because I’ll be *#D if I am falsely charged or accussed [sic].’
Early in February, having had no reply, she once again committed her sense of outrage to paper. She had only walked on the interstate when she stepped out of a car to retrieve a piece of paper that had flown out of the window! She wrote: ‘FHP decided to [lie] and accuse us of improperly pulling over for no emergency reasons …’
She complained that another ticket had been written out later, outside her presence, for something she felt was irrelevant. What did it matter that the licence she carried (Susan Lynn Blahovec’s) was suspended? She didn’t drive on it anyway, she grandly asserted, she had someone to drive for her.
Equally grandly, she wrote: ‘If this is not erased from my record and I get arrested from this improper accussation [sic] Well then be prepared for one hell of a lawsuit against the department the county, the jail system, the officers and what else my lawyer can dig up from law books. I will not tolarate [sic] a made up conjecture of lies.’ (Actual punctuation.)
It would not be the last time she would bandy around threats of a lawsuit. Then, after accusing the authorities of having ‘the gall’ to do all this, she herself had the gall to blithely sign off as Susan Blahovec.
One of the troublesome tickets bore a telling little notation by the citing officer: ‘Att. poor. Thinks she is above the law.’
Since August ’87, Ty and Lee had been ensconced in a rear apartment on Oleander Avenue in the Daytona area. Ty worked variously at the El Caribe Motel, where she’d been employed when she first met Lee, and at a laundry from which she was eventually fired (unjustly they’d claim) after some money disappeared. It had been a relatively stable period, but on 25 July a police officer was dispatched to their apartment in response to a vandalism complaint lodged by Brian Donley, the landlord. Donley could hear banging and crashing and was afraid the place was being wrecked. His upstairs tenant had also complained that the women had made too much noise the night before.
At first, Lee and Ty refused to let the officer in. Eventually, he gained access, along with Donley who, taking a look around, noted that a fifty-dollar carpet had been removed without his permission and that the walls had been re-painted brown, also without his permission. Lee and Ty maintained that they’d had his OK. And the noise? They’d just been having a party. Donley evicted them anyway, giving them notice to be out by 1 August.
Homeless again, they briefly camped out in the woods, living very primitively, but soon hitched back over to Zephyrhills and knocked on Kathy Beasman’s door at the Pierre Motel. Kathy, who needed someone, agreed to give them a second chance. This time, they seemed anxious to fit in and made an effort to play by the rules. Kathy was pleased.
But every so often, Lee had an outburst. She just seemed to lose control, and it invariably happened when she got into a debate with one of the male guests. It was as if she couldn’t bear to be wrong and a man to be right; she had to have the last word. She never yelled at Kathy, only at the men.
In their room, Lee and Ty kept a cat called Zephyr, which Lee babied completely, bathing it and sitting it out in the sunshine to dry. The cat became pregnant, and when the kittens were born, Kathy said they could keep them just until they were old enough to farm out to good homes. At which point, Kathy’s father stopped by to tell them it was time to get rid of them.
Hearing that, Lee spat out a torrent of abuse so vicious that it quite upset him. He’d never seen a woman so angry. It was positively frightening. If only Kathy could have seen it for herself. Lee was always so sweet to her. He felt sure that Lee had something seriously wrong with her to change like that.
Lee got into another altercation in the Publix store in the shopping centre next to the motel. She’d bought some lottery tickets and when the assistant manager, Robert McManus, made a mistake on the numbers she wanted, she turned abusive. Finally, she stormed out, but, soon after, McManus began getting nasty, harassing phone calls at the store. An anonymous woman threatened him with bodily injury. She’d put him in the hospital! She had a contract out on him! McManus had a pretty good idea who she was. Even so, he was sufficiently scared to wear a bullet-proof vest to work, and to call the police.
With the help of the Pierre Motel’s phone records, they were able to track those calls to their source. Room 5. The residence of Lee and Ty. When confronted, Lee admitted to having had a run-in with McManus and to calling Publix’s main office to have him fired. But she flatly denied making the calls to the store. McManus had taken the precaution of having a couple of fellow employees listen in on the line as witnesses, and the time and date they cited coincided exactly with a call on the Pierre’s records. Proof enough. Lee was trapped. She was given a stern warning to back off.
The staff of Votran, the East Volusia Transit System, became all too familiar with Lee Wuornos (known to them as Cammie Greene) in the spring of 1988. She was a regular rider, normally boarding on Spruce Creek Road and riding to the end of the route, close to the Amoco on I-95, her hitching beat. During these rides, she’d had some hassles with late-night trolley driver, Gary Thomson. When the police were called to a Union ’76 station to check out a report of assault and battery on a bus passenger, the complainant was ‘Cammie Greene’.
According to Thomson, she had pulled him out of his seat and struggled with him, before crashing through the glass doors. But ‘Cammie’ accused Thomson of standing up and making vulgar comments at girls while driving, of taking the wrong route, and as she exited, of knocking her down the steps, making her fall. When she tried to climb back aboard, she said, he kicked her in the stomach, then drove off. Ty Moore was a witness for ‘Cammie’, who actually sued Votran and was given a small settlement. When the police arrived, ‘Cammie’ said she wanted to press charges against the driver but a few days later, changed her mind. Thomson was subsequently fired by Votran on an unrelated matter.
George Soloway, the director of transportation, didn’t meet ‘Cammie’ that time, but wasn’t deprived of the pleasure. She had yet another verbal run-in with a driver and threatened to sue again. Soloway was alerted immediately. In a diplomatic gesture, he went to pick her up at the bus stop where the altercation took place, then drove her to her destination himself in the company van, calming her down.
(In December of 1990, another Votran supervisor, David Hope, received one more angry, vulgar phone call complaining that a driver had failed to stop for ‘Cammie’. She’d sued Votran once, and she could certainly sue them again!)
By January of 1989, Lee and Ty had left the Pierre, and since Ty was unemployed were slowly meandering their way over to Homosassa Springs on Florida’s east coast, north of Tampa. First th
ey stayed in a motel, then shuttled around a few trailer parks, the proliferation of which leads to the observation that much of Florida is on wheels. Landing at the RV park Billy Copeland managed, they settled into a trailer for a bargain $95 a month. During those lazy days, Lee and Ty made no attempt to hide their firearms as they hung around outside, taking aim at beer cans. Hardly unobtrusive neighbours, they fought loudly and often. Billy and Cindy Copeland say they saw Lee ‘beat the hell’ out of hefty Tyria. Intrigued by their traffic of male visitors, Billy and Cindy nevertheless presumed the women to be lesbians.
‘She met ugly old Ty and Ty was a good lover to her,’ Billy observed, ‘and she had her own little wife right there. Lee saw something she could grab onto and have somebody to come home to. Somebody she could have and love … good love.’
Ty and Lee were sometimes given vegetables and groceries by the Copelands, and Cindy frequently gave Lee a ride to the highway. Neither of them fell for the ‘pressure-cleaning business in New Port Richey’ line. Lee just disappeared for four hours, then reappeared. ‘There’s no way you could even get to New Port Richey in four hours, much less pressure clean!’ Billy noted disbelievingly.
One day, Lee strolled over to Billy, complaining bitterly about a male visitor Billy had seen arrive, clutching a TV. He also saw him leave again in his van. Didn’t notice the colour, just that it was a van.
‘Billy, you’re going to have to do something if this sonofabitch comes back,’ Lee said. ‘I don’t want him coming back after his TV. He gave it to us, and now he wants it back.’
‘Listen, Lee, let me tell you something,’ Billy snapped. ‘I don’t want any trouble. But if that sonofabitch wants some of my ass, you just tell him to come in my back door and I’ll give it to him.’