Lethal Intent

by Sue Russell

Tracey couldn’t bear the tension level that resonated around Lee or the stress of coping with these wildly fluctuating moods. She was by then ‘a nervous wreck’. She’d simply had enough.

  When they got home Tracey took Ty to one side and told her that she wanted to go home right away. She was upset about it, but she just couldn’t be around Lee any more. She was just too unpredictable. Ty was upset and embarrassed. But she also understood. She knew how Lee felt about Tracey. Tracey didn’t need to be a mind-reader to pick up on it. Perhaps it would be better all around if Tracey left, but Ty was livid that it had come to that. Now their parents would have to hear all about it. Together, they put a call in to Ohio and Tracey broke the news.

  Later, Tracey reflected on that awful night and remembered how upset Lee became: ‘Because I think she thought my sister was leaving too … and she wasn’t … Ty didn’t, you know, say that … but I think that’s why she was upset with me … because she thought that my sister was leaving.’

  24

  While most citizens venture into the woods to spot wildlife, gather wildflowers, or to picnic, Lee and Ty went because Lee was anxious for Ty to hear the difference in sound between the shots fired from two weapons. There was the .45 she’d stolen from one victim, and the .22 with which she’d murdered others, although she didn’t spell that out at the time. So it was that late one June afternoon they meandered their way into a quiet spot in the woods near Ormond Beach. Treating the loaded weapons in cavalier fashion and flagrantly flouting the law, Lee didn’t lock them discreetly in the boot, but laid them on the floor by the back seat.

  As they had done so many times before with the BB gun, they took turns in firing, peering intently along the barrels. Point, then fire. Since they weren’t aiming for anything in particular, Ty couldn’t evaluate Lee’s marksmanship with these decidedly lethal weapons. But they both listened intently as the shots cracked in the stillness around them, like a couple of musicians with their ears tuned to pitch. Before the ammunition ran dry and without reloading, they stored the firearms back in the car and pulled away.

  A curious outing, to say the least. If the dark spectre of Richard Mallory was hovering—if the very thought of his murder haunted and so terrified Ty that she couldn’t bear to think or talk about it—why participate in such an event? Not for the first time, nor for the last, her behaviour begged the question: what on earth was she thinking?

  On 19 June, Ursula Siems, still in Europe, waited in vain for her husband’s promised call. When it didn’t come as arranged, she repeatedly called their home, but no one ever answered. Worried, she called relatives and learned that no one had heard a word from Peter.

  Three days later, Kathleen Siems, Peter’s niece and a reporter, walked into the Jupiter Police Department and reported him missing. Because of his elastic and solitary touring schedule, because his wife was away in Europe, it had taken a couple of weeks for his disappearance to be noted, she explained. Now, they knew he’d neither arrived at his New Jersey destination after leaving Jupiter, nor called his mother, nor changed his plan and gone direct to Stefan’s in Arkansas. The alarm was finally being sounded.

  There was always the chance he was travelling with the Christ Is The Answer Crusade, the tent revival crusade headquartered in El Paso, Texas. Confusing the issue for Detective John Wisnieski, who began investigating, was the fact that the mobile Florida chapter had gone off and set up camp somewhere in Alabama. He did ascertain that Peter Siems had met with Bill Lowery from the Texas branch not long before. Beyond that, no one had any answers.

  Stefan managed to procure his father’s American Express account number and with it Wisnieski attempted to find out if there’d been any activity on the card since 7 June. He hit a brick wall. In an age of rampant computer information and virtually non-existent privacy, security-conscious American Express held that information sacred without a subpoena.

  Wisnieski did the one other thing he could do. He sent out teletypes to law enforcement in Fort Payne, Alabama, asking that they try to locate Peter Siems or his car. Word filtered back: fellow Crusade members, many of whom knew and liked him, were concerned because no one had seen him.

  On 20 June, Marvin Padgett and Jerry Thompson met up with Tom Muck to thrash out the possible similarities between their two cases. And on 28 June, Muck informed Thompson that the FDLE’s monthly Florida Criminal Activity Bulletin detailed some homicides in Georgia that might also conceivably be linked. Muck had learned of a nude, white, male victim up there in Brooks County who had also been shot with a .22. Things seemed to be moving in an ominous direction.

  So it was that on 9 July, a brainstorming session on the three I-75 cases was held in Tallahassee. Thompson, Padgett and David Strickland attended from Citrus County, Tom Muck from Pasco, two Georgia investigators, Wayne Porter of the FDLE, the FDLE’s violent crime profiler, Dayle Hinman, and FDLE crime analyst, Teresa Gatlin. Pooling what they knew, the investigators felt a link was likely, and a spirit of cooperation was in the air.

  For Ty 4 July 1990 began in a singularly unfestive fashion with the 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. shift at the Casa Del Mar. When she got off work, she and Lee got into the holiday spirit and decided to go find some firework displays. Attired in their usual T-shirts and beer caps, Ty wearing shorts and Lee blue jeans, they went for a drive at the tail end of the afternoon. They were killing time until it got dark. In the back of the Sunbird they’d stashed a few firecrackers and bottle rockets of their own, leftovers from the previous year, to set off later.

  They stopped at a store on the coast road in Flagler Beach. While Ty went in to buy beer, Lee filled the car up—after conning her way into free gas by telling the store clerks that she was in the service and was waiting on her government cheque. They drove and drank some more, moseying along, enjoying the day. When they finished their beer, they pulled in at a Jiffy store to replenish the supply.

  ‘I’m too drunk: do you want to drive?’ Lee asked. ‘OK,’ Ty agreed.

  It was Ty who spotted a sign for an Indian reservation. Never having seen a camp of Florida’s American Indian Seminoles, she was curious and suggested they check it out. Lee agreed, so Ty turned back, navigating the winding road. When the camp didn’t quickly reveal itself, they turned back, deciding to forget it. It was clear and dry at that point, but the hours of drinking had taken their toll and on the way out, Ty swung round a curve too fast and didn’t quite make it. Losing control, she smashed the car through a steel gate and a barbed-wire fence. It listed as if to roll over, then righted itself, coming to a wounded halt in a field, the passenger side smacking into a tree.

  ‘Man! We gotta get outta here! Get in the bushes,’ Lee shouted, heaving herself out of the badly damaged car. She could hear the drone of other cars nearby. Responding on instinct, Ty ran out into the dirt road, but two thoughts soon flashed through her mind simultaneously. Was Lee afraid the gas tank was going to explode—or was the car stolen? But she did as she was told, stepping out of sight, swallowing her burning questions, but only momentarily. ‘Why? What the fuck is the deal here?’ she blurted seconds later.

  ‘I’m going to tell you something,’ Lee would later say she replied. ‘We can’t let the cops know anything right now. This is a cop car. I killed somebody! This is the car of a murdered guy.’

  ‘What?’ Lee claims Ty looked at her in horror.

  ‘I said, I killed somebody.’

  ‘You idiot! What are you? Crazy? Why did you do that?’

  Lee says their incendiary exchange was nipped in the bud by the approach of local residents, Rhonda and Jim Bailey. They and Rhonda’s cousin Brad had been out on the Baileys’ porch when they heard the screech of tyres followed by a loud bang. They were all too familiar with the treacherously sharp curve by their house. Another accident, the Baileys groaned.

  Their view partially obstructed by a profusion of greenery, they heard female voices screaming and saw a few beer cans flying through the air. Whoever it was had presumably been drinking and was dis
pensing with the evidence. The Baileys ran over to see if anyone needed assistance. They knew immediately that of the two women walking away from the car, the livid blonde had obviously been the passenger. Filling the air with profanities, she shouted to the other woman that she had warned her not to go so fast. Seeing the Baileys approach, the women returned to the car to talk to them and Lee’s demeanour softened dramatically.

  ‘Don’t call the cops, please don’t call the cops!’ she implored them. ‘My dad just lives up the road here a little bit. I’ll go get him and we’ll pull it out.’

  ‘Do you want to come in here and use the phone or something? ’ Rhonda asked.

  ‘No!’ No!’ the blonde assured them, leading her friend away, apparently anxious to leave.

  The Baileys headed back to their home thinking, they’ll never get that car out of there. It looked impossible because of the way the passenger side was rammed against the tree. But glancing back a minute or two later, they saw the women had obviously had a change of plan about fetching the father. They were running back down the road towards the car.

  Lee used brute force to rip the licence plate from the Sunbird’s rear with her bare hands, tossing it into a field. She then climbed in behind the wheel and tried to start the engine. Ty clambered into the back seat behind her as the tenacious little Sunbird sprang to noisy life. It sounded as if the fan belt was catching, but to the Baileys’ amazement, it pulled away.

  Both Lee and Ty felt considerably the worse for wear. Ty had banged her leg on both the steering wheel and the gear shift, but it was Lee who bore the brunt of it. Her shoulder and right arm were bleeding profusely where she’d been cut on broken window glass. In foul moods, they gingerly headed back down the dirt road and out on the highway. Within minutes, a front tyre completely collapsed. There was nothing for it but to leave it. Pulling over to the side, Lee once again instructed Ty to run but first she paused to rip off the front licence plate, tossing it as hard as she could into a field. Meanwhile, Ty grabbed the ice chest out of the back seat of the car. They didn’t want to leave that: it still had beer in it. But they left the coasters (one Florida Gators, one Bass Fishing) they used to hold their cans.

  Harmon Jeters saw the two women walking towards the fire station and SR 40. Thinking they were locals, he pulled over, planning to offer them a ride. As he drew close, however, the young man saw all the blood and quickly changed his mind. It seemed to him that they had blood on their faces, arms and hands, even around their fingernails. Lee told him they’d been in a bad accident and no one would give them a ride. They asked him for a lift to the main road but he refused and Lee became irate.

  ‘Gee whizz! Thanks a lot! We’re out here, just had an accident, and you won’t take us nowhere!’

  ‘Well, I got to go,’ Harmon said, quickly pulling away.

  Running into the woods, Lee cleaned some of the blood from her arm, then they headed down the road looking as nonchalant as possible. As they walked, Lee threw Peter Siems’s car keys and registration into the foliage.

  Immediately after he left them (at around 8.30 p.m.), Harmon stopped at his brother-in-law’s and called Brenda and Hubert Hewett, his aunt and uncle. Hubert was Orange Springs’ Volunteer Fire Department Chief and Brenda worked alongside him. On hearing Harmon’s story, they promptly climbed into their fire vehicles and took to the road, looking for the accident victims. They must have passed by when Lee and Ty stepped into the woods, because they didn’t see any sign of them.

  After they turned around, however, and began heading back to home base, suddenly there were the women, carrying the distinctive red and white cooler Harmon had mentioned. But where was all the blood? Were they the people in the wreck, the Hewetts asked? No, they were not, Lee said emphatically, while her friend shook her head in agreement.

  ‘Where did you get that idea? I don’t know why people tell lies like that, but we haven’t been in no accident,’ Lee spat, cussing and carrying on.

  They’d been out hitchhiking, she said, and two guys had picked them up, then dropped them off. They were on their way to Daytona to find some fireworks but they’d been given wrong directions. Lee did all the talking while Ty stood back and stayed silent. They were obviously keen to be on their way, and, puzzled, the Hewetts let them go.

  They then hitched a couple of short rides, approaching a man whose house they came to, and a woman with a couple of children. Then they had a stroke of luck and met a man who was willing to take them almost to their door in Holly Hill.

  Ty was shaken to the core and once they were safely away from the accident scene, her fear turned to fury. She was seething. At that moment, she hated Lee’s guts. She could think of nothing she wanted more than to get as far away from her as possible.

  Had she hurt this car’s owner, too? Lee was always shooting her mouth off. Saying stuff that wasn’t true. Getting drunk, playing with her mind. Hopefully, that’s all it was. Ty’s worst suspicions were all too horribly true. As the news reports would later confirm, Lee had indeed killed again.

  Ever since Richard Mallory, Ty knew she should get out while the going was good. She knew she should turn Lee in, but she couldn’t do that. She was confused and scared. Yet, somehow she couldn’t tear herself away. Lee loved her. She was bonded to Lee. They needed each other. She didn’t want to be alone. She was hurting and suffering, but she didn’t know what else to do.

  It was 9.44 p.m. when trooper Rickey responded to the accident scene in Orange Springs—or at least to the Sunbird’s final resting place. Not until almost two months later would detectives learn where exactly the Sunbird had crashed or hear the Baileys’ account. For now at least, they were dealing with part two of the incident. Marion County’s Deputy Lawing was dispatched to investigate the abandoned, smashed-up vehicle. Looking it over, seeing the grass on its upper body regions, he surmised it had rolled over.

  He also saw blood on the seat and on the exterior. Marvin Wood, who lived some five hundred yards away, had seen the blood, too. Wood told Lawing he’d watched Lee and Ty leave the Sunbird with the red and white cooler. He’d also seen what looked like blood on them. He’d thought it funny the way they kept disappearing into the bushes each time a car went by.

  He described them as follows. A tall blonde of about forty, accompanied by an overweight white male of 280 to 300 pounds. He’d watched the blonde (who looked drunk) rip off the front licence tag and throw it in the grass nearby. After they walked off, he retrieved the tag, carefully picking it up with a piece of paper.

  Checking the grey 1988 Sunbird’s VIN number, Lawing found it to be registered to Peter Siems, a man who was listed as missing and endangered, so he immediately reported to his supervisor. Deputy Baskin arrived at the scene to relieve Lawing and spoke briefly to Hubert and Brenda Hewett before escorting the car as it was towed into the impound yard for processing.

  In response to their notification, Marion County soon received a teletype from Jupiter PD asking that the car be held and treated as a possible homicide crime scene.

  Calling the Hewetts later to continue their conversation, Baskin learned about Harmon Jeters’s call regarding the two women and how the Hewetts then searched for them. The Hewetts described the women as being dirty and wet, but with no sign of the blood Harmon Jeters had seen. Perhaps they’d cleaned up with the water hose outside the nearby Tappan Realty building? As it had been uncoiled and the tap turned on, this seemed likely, but it was also raining lightly. (The hose nozzle was taken in as evidence.)

  The Hewetts’ descriptions of the women were markedly different again. They told Baskin one was 5 feet 10 inches, maybe 5 feet 11, and 130 pounds, the other between 5 feet 4 and 5 feet 6, mannish in appearance, the more silent of the two, and weighing up to 200 pounds. Through the wet T-shirt of the short heavy one they’d seen a bra. It was definitely a woman.

  Small witnesses customarily overestimate size just as tall ones often underestimate, and Harmon Jeters, who is short, described the blonde as around
six feet, big-boned and heavy. The second, shorter girl had short, dark-red hair.

  When Investigator Leo Smith, who works multitudes of stolen car cases, saw the Sunbird the next day, the decorative American Eagle tag Lee had bought was on the front seat where Mr Wood and the trooper had put it. Busch and Budweiser cans lay on the car floor along with bottle rocket fireworks and a multicoloured dishwashing cloth.

  The car was in bad shape. Both side front windows were shattered and knocked out, and the windscreen had also shattered. There was blood, too, on the boot, on the left rear passenger door, on the column between the doors, on the driver’s seat, on the passenger seat, on the steering wheel and on the driver’s door handle.

  On 7 July, forensic artist Beth Gee met with the Hewetts in Orange Springs and prepared sketches of the two females. Jeters showed up and added his input. The end product was ferried off to the FDLE and to various law enforcement agencies.

  On 11 July, Sergeant Jacobsen and Detective Sprauer visited Siems’s home and met up with his wife Ursula, who had just returned from Europe. Assuring the officers of the good state of her marriage and that she and Peter were devout Christians, she handed over a photograph of her missing husband.

  25

  Eugene ‘Troy’ Burress turned 50 in January of 1990, kicking, screaming and complaining all the way. Time to turn around and go backwards, he said, that was all there was to it. Slightly built, with blue eyes and blond hair, Troy was only around 5 feet 6 inches and weighed in at 155 pounds, but he exuded charm. Down-to-earth, popular and fun-loving, he was blessed with a natural gift of the gab. He could excite Eskimos about ice-creams, so what better place for him than working in sales?

  Prior to moving to Ocala (a resort town in central Florida) a year earlier, he had his own company, Troy’s Pools, in Boca Raton. Having gladly dropped the headaches that are the lot in life of a small business owner, he’d begun driving a delivery truck for the Gilchrist Sausage Company. Not that his new job was without problems. Those trucks—always breaking down at the worst possible moment. No air conditioning in the cabs, either—that was rough during the summer. Still, he liked Ocala. He didn’t miss his old neighbourhood’s seedier influences. Prostitution had been creeping too close for comfort. He could definitely do without that. And he didn’t miss sniffing all those harsh pool chemicals. Workaholic that he was, he still did a little pool-cleaning work on the side for Glenn Miller Realty. You couldn’t keep too busy, that was Troy’s way of thinking. A proud grandaddy, he had two grown daughters, Wanda and Vicky, 29 and 32 respectively, from his first marriage, and three grown stepdaughters via his current wife of sixteen years, Rose ‘Sharon’ Burress.