Lethal Intent

by Sue Russell

  Volusia investigators contacted Detective Bonnie Richway at the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, located near Richard Mallory’s home on the west coast, and requested that she try to locate Mallory at his apartment or business address. She was unsuccessful, but came back with a good physical description of the man.

  There would be further reason to suspect that Mallory had met with foul play. What appeared to be a blood stain loomed ominously on the backrest of the driver’s seat.

  Judging by the way the driver’s seat had been pulled forward as far as it would go, the last person behind the wheel had been considerably shorter than Mallory himself. The ignition key was missing and the car had been stripped of identification and wiped clean of fingerprints. Someone seemed to know just what they were doing. Richard Mallory’s spectacles were the only item left in the car.

  Also found half-buried were two clear plastic tumblers and a brown bag containing a half-empty Smirnoff vodka bottle. Apparently, Mr Mallory had had a companion.

  ‘I killed a guy today.’

  Shocking words uttered with alarming dispassion. Lee’s disclosure sounded almost nonchalant. A memorable punctuation to their first evening in the Burleigh apartment which was being spent in an otherwise normal fashion, sitting around on the floor, knocking back a few beers, staying glued to the TV.

  Equally shocking was Tyria’s ostrich-like reaction. Whatever Lee was saying, she didn’t want to hear about it. Didn’t want to believe her ears. Didn’t believe them at first. Thought it was a lie or some kind of joke. Lee lied all the time.

  If the strange ‘borrowed’ car they’d used, or the man’s jacket she’d been given, or the unfamiliar possessions—the suitcase, the clothing, the blanket, the comforter, the tool box, the Polaroid camera—she had seen Lee clean out of the car that morning or bring into the apartment later, were setting off any alarm bells, she didn’t let on. She didn’t even ask Lee what on earth she was talking about. Rather, she merely let the enormity of her girlfriend’s statement sit there like a twenty-ton white elephant.

  They then simply went back to watching TV.

  Later, more details trickled out, whether Ty wanted to hear them or not. Lee told her that she’d shot the man, then put his body in the woods. Covered it with carpet, then taken his car and dumped it up in Ormond Beach. As Ty worked desperately to avert her eyes, Lee tried to flash in front of her a photograph of the man she’d killed, plus a piece of paper. Don’t tell me! Don’t show me! Determined not to look, Ty successfully avoided the photograph. But before she could push away the paper Lee was waving, she saw the name ‘Richard’.

  Hearing about the hooking was bad enough, why would she want to hear about something like that?

  She was afraid. Truly afraid. While she had been able to block it out, it had been OK. But knowing for sure that Lee had killed meant she should do something about it—like go to the authorities.

  Why did Lee kill him? She didn’t ask, maybe afraid of what she’d hear. Lee certainly never said that Richard Mallory had hurt or raped or abused her. She bore no bruises. No physical signs she’d been attacked. It was no secret that Lee hated men, although Ty had never quite understood the logic of being a hustler if she hated them so much.

  Now Ty felt stuck in quicksand. ‘I wanted to get out of the relationship then … but I just … I was scared,’ she recalled. Lee had always told her she would never hurt her, but Ty didn’t trust Lee’s words any more.

  If there was any lingering doubt as to where fiction ended and fact began in her lover’s murderous confession, it didn’t last for long. It was rudely replaced by cold, hard facts a couple of weeks later when Ty saw a TV news bulletin reporting Richard Mallory’s murder and showing his car. Ty definitely recognised it. It was the car they’d borrowed.

  So, the woman who said she’d die for Ty was really a killer.

  Reluctantly banging up against reality, Tyria Jolene Moore was faced with a number of choices, none of them easy and some more unpalatable than others. She could have blown the whistle by calling the police. She could have hotfooted it out of Florida as fast and as far as a Greyhound bus would carry her. She could have left Lee immediately, but maintained her silence.

  Instead, she stayed put.

  On 6 December, using her Cammie Greene i.d., Lee pawned Richard Mallory’s camera and radar detector for $30 at the OK Pawn Shop in Daytona.

  Dutifully, she pressed her thumb into the inkpad, transferring a nice, clear print into the shop’s receipt book where it would remain for posterity.

  Richard Mallory’s body was found across the river from his car on Wednesday 13 December, five miles away as the crow flies. Thirteen days after his disappearance, he bore little resemblance to the man he was in life. With nature working its inevitable course, the empty shell was already in an advanced stage of decomposition. A couple of young men out sifting trash and debris, scavenging for scrap metal, stumbled across it when they noticed birds circling and a hand sticking out. They rushed to a pay phone and alerted police.

  It seemed Richard Mallory had come to an ignominious rest in a small clearing amidst the palmettos. It was an area littered with debris and garbage because of its proximity to an illegal dump site in a deeply wooded area to the west of US 1, about three-quarters of a mile north of I-95. An insultingly ugly environment.

  Summoned to the murder scene that afternoon, lead investigator Larry Horzepa noted that this dump site, accessed by a trail worn down by a traffic of trucks and cars, was in fact visible from US 1.

  Horzepa, a tall, lean, serious-looking man with dark hair, spectacles and a dry sense of humour, came to the Mallory case after six years with the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office and ten with the Brevard County Sheriff’s Department. He’d first heard Mallory’s name on 4 December when paperwork on his abandoned car filtered through his office.

  As Horzepa approached, stepping over the crime scene tape with which deputies had cordoned off the area, he saw at once that it was no accident that the body had lain almost entirely hidden from view. Someone had had the foresight to cover it with a rubber-backed, red carpet runner. Working with video and still cameras and floodlights, technicians recorded the scene.

  With the video still running and camera clicking, as darkness fell the rug was finally lifted away, revealing to Horzepa and the other officers the remnants of a man lying face down, his legs crossed at the ankles. He was fully clothed in a short-sleeved white shirt, blue jeans, two pairs of socks and brown loafers. As he was turned over, a full set of dentures fell away from the decaying body. His jeans were fastened and fully zipped and his brown belt was buckled, though the buckle was twisted four inches or so off-centre.

  His front pants pockets were pulled slightly inside-out as if they had been emptied.

  Horzepa didn’t know for sure the man’s identity, but he had a pretty good hunch. He thought back to that car that had been found about twelve miles away and the description Bonnie Richway had provided. He thought he had his man.

  Later, at the autopsy, law enforcement would learn that four gunshot wounds to the chest had sucked the life out of him. The bullets used would turn out to be of the copper-coated, hollow-nosed variety and fired from a .22 handgun.

  At least one had penetrated his body while he was still sitting in his car, accounting for the blood stain on the backrest.

  But surveying his body that day, just on the surface, the progression of the decomposition struck Larry Horzepa as strange. The body was totally skeletonised from the collarbone to the top of the head.

  ‘It led me to believe there was a possibility if there had been a wound, it might have been a knife wound where his throat might have been slashed,’ he recalls. The autopsy could be no more conclusive.

  Given Florida’s temperate climate, the corpse was actually in relatively good condition, preserved at least a little by some recent cold snaps. Horzepa had no idea whether the carpet would have hindered disintegration of the body, or accelerated it. T
he body was also sufficiently decayed that it was impossible to see any bullet holes. Even the experts wouldn’t be able to say whether the victim’s body had also been bruised, battered, or beaten.

  A blood alcohol test later revealed a level of .05 per cent, so if Richard Mallory was under the influence of alcohol at the time of his death, he was very much at the lower limits of the scale. There was not yet any sign in the blood sample of the bacteria that eventually grows after death, changing the blood alcohol level and clouding the picture as far as determining the true source is concerned.

  The victim’s hands were removed and taken separately to the FDLE (Florida Department of Law Enforcement) crime lab where a set of latent prints were taken. Thanks to a match with a set of fingerprints on file from Richard Mallory’s single DUI arrest, the corpse was positively identified.

  Mr Mallory was a man who wore jewellery, particularly when he was going out on the town, but none was found. It must have been stolen on his drive of death.

  Painstakingly piecing together what had befallen him, the Volusia County investigators worked against the disadvantages inherent in dealing with a private man, a loner, a man who didn’t confide his every move to anyone. There was no doting wife or girlfriend waving him off to work each day. They didn’t have the luxury of knowing about Richard Mallory and what he had with him in gloriously detailed description.

  Horzepa worked with what he’d got. Both Mallory’s Clearwater apartment and his shop were searched, but there was no sign of foul play in either place—although lots of complaining letters and work receipts showed that the victim was clearly way behind in his repairs. A Christmas card was found from a sister in Texas and she was duly notified of her brother’s death. Richard also had two brothers who lived in Virginia and Maryland who had to be told.

  Detectives combed the victim’s home, work and social environments, interviewing everyone they could find who knew him. Most importantly, they talked to Jackie Davis. From her, they learned that when Richard disappeared he probably had with him a 35mm Minolta camera, a Polaroid 600 (helpfully distinctive because of its highly unusual maroon colour), a gold Seiko watch, and a Radio Shack radar detector. Jackie Davis handed over pictures of her son Jeff at his birthday party that actually showed the Polaroid camera in the background.

  Maryann Beatty, the worried president of the MCI dating service Mallory had belonged to, was instructed to notify the females among her thousand-plus members that the sheriff’s office would be contacting them. Detectives busily canvassed the motels and bars in the Daytona area. Perhaps the victim checked in somewhere before he died. No luck.

  Horzepa had no reason to suspect that Mallory had deviated from his customary ritual of religiously carrying with him his black attaché case with its Mallory Electronics stationery, personal papers and cash supply inside. His assortment of luggage would have held items like his weekend clothing, his hairbrush and hair dryer. He had had a tool box, too, judging by the deep impression mark in the lining of the boot, alongside the spare tyre. There was no sign of a single one of them.

  Later, viewing photographs taken after the FDLE evidence technicians had coated the Cadillac from one end to the other with fingerprint powder, Horzepa could clearly observe the white arcing curves revealing where it had been wiped down. It was so clean that it looked as if it had come fresh from a car wash.

  By the end of January 1990, Larry Horzepa had established that prior to leaving town his last night alive, Richard Mallory had already engaged in a paid sexual encounter with two dancers named Chastity and Danielle, whom he’d met previously at Tampa’s 2001 Odyssey club. Chastity left the club in the early hours of 1 December and didn’t return until mid-December. Both women’s phone numbers were found on Mallory’s kitchen counter, scribbled on slips of paper.

  Working with the Tampa homicide department, Volusia investigators Horzepa and Bob Kelley first tracked down 26-year-old Danielle. She confirmed that in November Mallory had tried to date her, but that she’d told him she was gay. He gave her a 19-inch TV, a Fisher VCR and $50 in exchange for bumping and grinding ‘lap dances’ and sex.

  Within a week, Larry Horzepa had found Chastity, a thin, large-breasted, heavily tattooed, 27-year-old blonde (like Lee, an adoptee with a wild streak, a string of aliases and a history of violent behaviour) and her bouncer boyfriend, Doug. Chastity, who had danced at local clubs like Circus, Candy-Bar and Boobie Trap, told Horzepa that she and Danielle had fulfilled one of Mallory’s favourite fantasies, having sex with him and with each other, back at his repair shop where he’d driven them in his van.

  Chastity was somewhat foggy on dates, but piecing together eyewitness accounts, Horzepa pinpointed her as one of the last people to see Richard Mallory alive in the Clearwater area.

  Ronnie Poulter, a female night manager at the 2001, said she’d spent Christmas with Chastity who had made a couple of tantalisingly suspicious comments. She said, ‘I’m hot as a firecracker, I’ve got to get out of town’, ‘I’ve seen and done everything now’, and ‘I’m in big trouble’.

  By 30 March, when Horzepa and Kelley went back across the state to Tampa hoping to polygraph the two women, Chastity had left for South Carolina. She and Doug had split up because of her violence. While being re-interviewed, Doug broke down and cried. Chastity had told him things concerning the Mallory homicide. The investigators’ ears pricked up.

  First, Chastity told Doug that she had gone to Daytona for a few days with Richard Mallory to party. She also told Doug, not once but several times, that she had killed Richard Mallory. She repeatedly threatened to call Volusia investigators and admit to killing him.

  On the face of it, Chastity seemed a likely, close to perfect, suspect, particularly in light of her confession. She had a criminal history and had in the past been seen with a .22 calibre handgun. She was adopted when she was nine but after two years her adoptive parents gave her up, unable to handle her violence and stealing. She was familiar with some of the Daytona area bars and streets, whereas Mallory was not. He had, it seemed, no friends, relatives or business in Daytona. So it was not hard to envisage her being his tour guide to Daytona’s notoriously decadent underbelly.

  A warrant was issued on 5 April for Chastity’s arrest for first degree murder and a search began for her in the South Carolina area (where she worked for an escort service), in San Francisco and in Texas. On 25 May, Horzepa learned she had been arrested in New Orleans on local prostitution charges and was also wanted in Orange County, Florida, for a drug-related parole violation. Flying to New Orleans to interview her, Horzepa and Kelley found Chastity by then denying any involvement in Richard Mallory’s murder. She was extradited to Florida but Horzepa worried that something just didn’t smell right.

  It had all seemed to fit so neatly. Too neatly, apparently.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says, recalling that day with a half-smile and shaking his head. ‘After sixteen years of doing this job and interviewing people, when she was talking to me, it was just a sort of a gut feeling I had that it wasn’t her, even though everything pointed to her.’

  Horzepa concluded that Chastity’s confession to Doug had more to do with their fights, ‘and something in the air about him wanting her to move out’, than with reality. ‘I think she just might have said that to get his attention,’ Horzepa surmised. ‘And she just happened to say the wrong thing.’

  Back in Volusia, he and Kelley consulted with assistant state attorney David Damore, and shared their misgivings. Meanwhile, Chastity’s friend Danielle, although at one time implicated by Chastity, had passed a polygraph test. All law enforcement parties were in accord that there simply wasn’t physical evidence tying Chastity to Mallory’s murder. The charges were dropped.

  Chastity or no, Horzepa didn’t waver from his original position. Mallory’s homicide bore the female imprint. Women generally kill people they know, but there was good reason to think that a woman had murdered Mr Mallory, given his personality. He never confided in any
one. He was wary. Wary of men, especially. The women in his life were adamant that he would never, ever, have stopped to pick up a male, not under any circumstances. If he gave someone a ride, all logic demanded it had to have been a woman.

  ‘It would be very easy for him to stop and pick up a lone, female hitchhiker. He would not have felt threatened by that,’ Horzepa reasoned.

  Despite Mallory’s encounter with two women on the very night he was murdered, Larry Horzepa was also convinced he’d had a single companion on his journey.

  His educated deduction, based on long acquaintance with the quirks of human behaviour, was that Mr Mallory’s enjoyment of two women would not supersede his underlying paranoia. A man like Mallory simply would not undertake that kind of drive with two women because one would have had to sit behind him. This was a man who always needed to feel in control, to have the upper hand. The kind of wary man who, in a restaurant, probably chose a table where he could have his back against the wall. It seemed highly unlikely he’d put himself in a vulnerable situation with women he didn’t know well. It just wasn’t his style. No, the encounter was one-on-one, Horzepa felt sure of it. And two, not three, glasses were found behind the car, bearing out his theory.

  But if Chastity was no longer in the picture, who was?

  18

  Lee hated to share Ty. She loathed not having every scrap of her woman’s undivided attention. She ‘loved her to the max’. Why did Ty feel the need to have anyone else around? Especially guys. Lee couldn’t understand Ty wanting to hang out with them. When Ty brought Dion, a drinking buddy of hers and colleague from the Casa Del Mar, home for a beer, Lee’d gotten so mad she’d thrown a yelling and screaming fit, scaring him off in short order. Other women were an unwelcome intrusion, but she really couldn’t stand having men around the place. In their three years together, they’d developed remarkably few outside friendships as they moved around Florida, a tightly-wound, self-contained, isolated little unit, deflecting just about everyone from getting close. It was the way Lee liked it.