by Sue Russell
What Ty viewed as a choice on Lee’s part was largely, however, symptomatic of her inability to control her impulses in a fashion that would allow her to enter the workforce. Whatever her intentions, she simply couldn’t maintain her good behaviour long enough to hold down a nine-to-five type job. This failing was nothing new. It was part of a lifelong pattern. One reason that prostitution worked for her in practical terms was because it involved encounters of limited and usually brief duration. She could move on before things turned sour. Most of the time, at least.
To Ty, however, Lee’s change of lifestyle was a case of promises, promises. Lee talked like a big shot about how she supported her, but her income was actually very erratic. The flipside of Lee’s bragging was that, increasingly, Ty’s hard-earned dollars went into subsidising her. True, Ty could knock back beer like a champion. Nevertheless, she faithfully roused herself each morning to roll into the Casa Del Mar on time. Lee, who drank round the clock, would often sit up all night, partying solo, then sleep in so late, recovering, that she’d effectively waste the next day. ‘God,’ Lee later admitted, ‘… all we did was stick around home and get drunk.’ Meanwhile, Ty bust her ass for four dollars and change per hour.
Their biggest expenditure, next to keeping a roof over their heads, was the daily beer bill. Ty was often short of money, so Sandy sometimes paid for her lunch or gave her a loan. Ty never took advantage, however, and when Sandy was short, returned the favour.
While it was abundantly clear that Lee not only depended on Ty but was wild about her, Ty, on the other hand, seemed just to be making the best of things, to be hanging on. As disenchantment set in, what kept her might simply have been that she didn’t have anywhere else to go—or anyone else to go to.
Later she said, ‘I didn’t really have any feelings for her … I was afraid of her … and I just stayed around her … because of fear, I guess …’
She didn’t specify whether she was afraid of a woman who was capable of killing, or was afraid of being alone.
Living with Lee’s ugly moods was not easy for Ty. It wasn’t even easy for those at a distance. James Legary and his longtime lady friend, Beth, who owned the house next door to Lee and Ty’s apartment, found having them for neighbours ‘grossly unpleasant’. Mr Legary’s first sight of Lee was of her glaring him down with an ugly ‘I’ll kick your ass’ expression as he innocently pulled his car into his driveway. He laughed wryly to himself. It looked as if fate had bestowed upon him yet another in a seemingly long procession of less than perfect neighbours. Later, Legary heard Lee’s perception of that first chilly (albeit distant) encounter from Lee’s landlady. Lee had assumed he was laughing at her and took offence.
Over the months, Lee, who mangled anyone’s minimum expectations of neighbourly peaceful coexistence, levelled three separate complaints against Legary’s 15-year-old son, Lenny. He’d stolen her cat. He’d doused her garbage can with paint. And he’d stolen the hubcaps from her little car.
For good measure, each allegation was lodged to Legary Sr accompanied by a threat to kick his ass. That, or an equally antagonistic assurance that she had a gun and would shoot him. Once, she feigned taking a lunge at him. For a moment, it had looked for all the world as if she was about to come around the fence and tackle him physically.
Lenny eventually spoke directly to Lee about the cat incident and returned placated, bearing news of a truce. She wasn’t really that bad a person, he informed his father. Legary was not impressed. His patience had by then been stretched to the limit by her perpetually blasting stereo. Worse, she once tossed firecrackers out of her window, cackling all the while like the Wicked Witch of the West.
One day, while Sandy was visiting Ty and Lee, a delivery man arrived to collect their rented stereo system to take it away to be fixed. Merely the messenger, he demonstrated no interest in anything beyond getting in and out as quietly and unobtrusively as possible. Lee wouldn’t let it go at that. She laid into him, cussing him out as if he’d maliciously broken the thing himself. Livid about something that Sandy couldn’t fathom, she paced back and forth in the hallway like a mad thing, cursing furiously.
Mild-mannered Sandy was appalled and absolutely mortified. She’d have loved the sofa to open and just swallow her up. Ty, on the other hand, seemed to take it all in her stride. She was accustomed to Lee’s mood swings.
It is hard to reconcile the blandly compliant, unquestioning Ty with the picture painted by those who knew her as assertive and a generally dynamic individual. And it presented a dichotomy.
Take the Ty who accompanied Lee to throw out two big bags full of goodness knows what in a dump up near Holly Hill. Ty would have everyone believe that she didn’t ask what was in the bags. Simple human curiosity makes that difficult to imagine. Either she lied, or she really did belong to the ‘what you don’t know won’t hurt you’ school of thought.
Ty was altogether too feisty a character to fit the classic parameters of the battered wife syndrome. They fought and wrestled around on the floor, but Ty gave as good as she got and the two women certainly didn’t have the monopoly on such behaviour. Many couples functioned thus. More important, that alone did not provide evidence of any battering. And Ty always maintained that Lee never hurt her physically.
Secondly, there were too many contrary clues for the relationship to be labelled quite so easily. Scrutinised closely, it defied the pat, superficial assumption that Lee was dominant and Ty intimidated and subservient. Lee was unarguably aggressive, assertive and sometimes domineering. She was also clinging, babyish, and dependent. Often, her speaking voice adopted a sing-song, girlish tone belying her years, seeming to be an outward manifestation of the child within, reaching out and trying to get its needs met.
Cammie Greene was thoroughly disturbed when rudely presented with a glimpse of a thoroughly different Ty that ugly day when they suddenly flew the coop. Ty was equally culpable, if not more so, for the way, like a couple of mean-spirited ingrates, they left the friend who had been so supportive, generous and non-judgemental.
Lee’s allegations later sowed the seeds for a different interpretation of her lover. Perhaps Ty was not a malleable, unquestioning, forgetful woman living in denial. Perhaps she was someone who enjoyed the fruits of Lee’s labours, knew from whence they came, and was quite happy to submerge any qualms she had, so long as she wasn’t directly or adversely affected.
Reinforcing the shadow of doubt cast over Ty as an abused wife, came an observation by Sandy made while trying to fathom the balance of power between them. She was perhaps closer to them than anyone, and believed their relationship broke the usual rules. It seemed to her that even in a union between two females, one partner generally adopted the stereotypically male role, and the other the female. Ty and Lee struck her as odd that way. ‘Ty always acted like the man,’ she observed. ‘Lee acted like the woman sometimes, and the man sometimes. It was weird.’
As that sweltering summer rolled on, somehow Lee and Ty’s alliance appeared to have weathered two more major hurdles: Tracey’s departure, and the upsetting car crash. For all that was implicit in Lee’s alleged revelation that it was the car of a man she’d murdered, Ty was still there at her side. By August, they were once again on the move. Ty approached Alzada Sherman, a co-worker of hers in the laundry room. Lee was leaving to go and live in Las Vegas so Ty needed a place to live. Alzada had an apartment nearby on Butler Boulevard and Ty asked whether she could move in as her roommate? Alzada, who liked Ty and could use help with the rent, agreed.
She was far from thrilled when Ty suddenly sprang another request for a favour. Could Lee stay, too, just for a couple of days, until she headed west? Alzada agreed, but only very reluctantly. She wasn’t keen on having lesbians under her roof. (She had no idea Lee was a hooker and later found it hard to believe. She couldn’t imagine anyone wanting her. She didn’t even look clean most of the time.) Confirming Alzada’s worst fears, this temporary stop-gap arrangement dragged on and on. Periodically
, Lee disappeared for a day or so—but, to Alzada’s dismay, she kept coming back.
During one such absence, Ty got to partying and was believed by her friends to have spent the night with a guy. If so, it was a sure sign of her disenchantment with Lee, who was wildly jealous of any men.
Another night at Alzada’s, Lee, drunkenly shooting off her mouth, began veering into dangerous territory. She bragged pointedly about how she and Ty used to have a car until ‘some bitch wrecked it’. Ranting on, she complained that she’d hurt her shoulder in the smash. Ignoring Ty’s commands to ‘Shut up!’, Lee merely looked at her angry girlfriend, grinning wildly.
Right after Troy Burress’s disappearance, the investigation took a detour following a male hitchhiker whom eyewitnesses had seen leaning against his Gilchrist truck. One witness who was shown Troy’s picture identified him as being the barefoot hitchhiker in a flowered shirt and shorts that he’d picked up and given a ride. The hitchhiker said the truck on the roadside was his and that its fuel pump had broken. He asked for a ride to a camping area where he spent the night. He had next to no money and when asked why he wasn’t wearing boots, he said that because it was hot he’d left them in the truck. Perhaps something had snapped in Troy Burress’s mind?
Studying the area around Troy’s truck later, Letha saw these male footprints and they looked huge, not even close to her brother’s size seven and a half. So when officers told her that Troy had been spotted, she was adamant that it wasn’t him. In fact, the mystery hitchhiker in the flowered shirt was soon identified as Curtis Blankenship, an apparently disturbed young man who had been involved in some minor scrapes with the law. Once, Blankenship had filed his own obituary with his hometown newspaper.
If he wasn’t Troy Burress, perhaps he was a witness or was even Troy’s murderer? Certainly, he was in the right place at the right time—or the wrong place at the wrong time.
Troy’s daughter, Wanda, her husband Gary and Letha’s husband Bob, were out searching the forest on the afternoon of 4 August. Running out of ideas, at around four they stopped to talk to a retired policeman who lived in the area. ‘If anyone would know where to look, he would,’ Bob told the others, approaching the house. Bob introduced Wanda and Gary and explained their plight. Unbeknownst to them, the ex-cop had been inside, monitoring his scanner.
‘I want you to wait right here a minute,’ he told them, going back into the house. He emerged a couple of minutes later and he looked at Wanda, then he turned to Bob and said gently, ‘Take her home. Take her home and wait for a phone call.’
In that instant, Wanda knew it. She knew right then and there that her daddy had been found. Devastated, she asked Bob to drive her to where Troy’s truck had turned up.
‘No,’ Bob said softly. ‘We’re going home.’
Back at the house, Letha, who had been cooking, was just getting ready to call her older brother and to go back out and join in the search.
‘Don’t call him yet,’ Bob told her as they walked in. ‘They found someone in the woods.’
They had been back just five minutes when a reporter from the Ocala Star-Banner called and informed Letha that a body had been found: they were pretty sure it was her brother. Then Investigator John Tilley telephoned and officially broke the news. There was little doubt it was Troy because of his clothes. Poignantly, his shirt still bore his name.
It had been around 2.30 p.m. when Margie and Ned Livingston, who were out sightseeing and looking for a pretty place to picnic, stumbled across the body of Troy Burress. Troy’s body lay off a small dirt road in the National Forest approximately seven miles north of SR 40, just off CR 19, a spot just about three miles from where Bob, Wanda and Gary had been searching. When the police and emergency services personnel arrived, they saw a male lying face down. The two bullet wounds in his body would later be identified as having come from a .22 calibre weapon. Marion County’s investigator John Tilley arrived on the scene at 4.22 p.m. and assumed control.
Partway down the dirt road, the victim’s credit cards, Gilchrist cheques, receipts and clipboard were discovered among the bushes. The bank bag which would have held the day’s cash receipts was nowhere in sight.
At 6 p.m. Tilley gently took the wedding ring from the body and drove over to Sharon. She positively identified it as Troy’s. Sharon gave Tilley the name of Troy’s dentist so he could provide dental charts for positive identification. Wanda and her husband spent the night with Troy’s widow, then drove back down south to fetch the children for the funeral.
Wanda, like the rest of the family, was reeling in shock. The abject horror hadn’t sunk in. All she kept thinking was ‘I’m too young to lose my father!’ Her head swam with muddled thoughts. Her dad had wanted to retire in Ocala with his horses and chickens. That had been his dream. Now it was all gone. And Troy’s mom; she’d never survive it. Wanda thought, too, of the trips her dad had taken her on as a kid to Sea World, to Monkey Jungle, Parrot Jungle and the Seaquarium down in Fort Lauderdale and Miami.
Over and over again, the same thoughts tumbled around. Why? Why would anyone do this? And who would do it? Who would want to kill him?
She felt sure, as did the rest of the family, that the only kind of person her dad would have stopped to help would be a woman having car trouble, something like that. ‘He was a people person, he’d talk to everybody, very friendly.’ She felt sure he’d never pick up a hitchhiker, though. They’d even talked about it. But he’d stop to help a woman because he’d want someone to do the same for the women in his family.
There was fear, too, mingled in with all the anger and sorrow and pain. Perhaps whoever did this might be after the rest of the family, too? For around 25 years her father had lived down near Wanda in Delray. Perhaps it was someone from down there?
After the discovery of Troy’s body, the family posted a reward and pinned flyers up and down I-95, urging anyone who knew anything that could help find his murderer, to come forward. On 5 August, an autopsy was performed in Leesburg by Dr Shutze. Hearing how decomposed Troy’s body was had been an added burden for the family.
On 7 August, Letha visited John Tilley for an interview at Marion County SO. She was distraught as she told him about Troy’s money worries, about him not getting all he was owed on the sale of his pool business in West Palm Beach, and his problems at Gilchrist. Tears flowed as she talked.
The funeral, around a week later, was another ordeal that had to be endured. ‘The hardest part for me,’ Wanda recalls, ‘was that my dad’s casket was closed because he was in a body bag. The fact that I couldn’t say goodbye to him, the fact I couldn’t see him for one last time. He was just gone. Somebody took him, and it was unfair.’
Wanda’s two children and Vicky’s four kept asking their moms, ‘Who would do this to my Grandpa?’
Wanda later arranged a memorial service down in Delray, inviting her father’s legion of friends, who turned out in force to pay their respects. Vicky, who had remarried just a couple of months earlier, comforted herself remembering how happy her dad had looked at her wedding reception.
Fortunately, Troy’s mother had Buddy’s stepfather to console her up in Tennessee, but she kept a lot of her anguish locked inside. That was just her nature. She couldn’t switch off her brain and all the thoughts that ran around inside it.
She just didn’t understand, and never would, how someone could take her son out and shoot him in cold blood.
Curtis Blankenship, who was under investigation for the murder of Troy Burress, was arrested in Indiana on 8 August for vehicle theft in a truck that appeared to have been stolen back in Marion County. Its owner was Mr Biscardi, a man who had befriended Blankenship and let him stay with him. Blankenship clearly was in trouble and suicidally inclined. A local pastor, Pastor McWilliams, had visited him and prayed with him before he made off with the truck.
On 19 August, John Tilley and Sergeant Brian Jarvis flew to Indiana and came face to face with Blankenship at the State Police Headquarters in Conn
ersville. He denied any knowledge of or involvement in the death of Troy Burress. He said he hadn’t even walked up to Troy’s truck, although he could remember saying he’d been in a truck that broke down. By 21 August, his story was that although he’d once tried to scare someone by claiming to own a gun, he’d made it up.
On 27 August, Troy’s family were shocked at the news that tests had shown him to have 0.08 per cent blood alcohol level. Although he drank occasionally, they would all have sworn that he wouldn’t have been drinking in the middle of the day. He was against drinking and driving, particularly while working. It seemed most out of character. Later, their minds would be put at rest. Although the point was not made in court, in fact the blood alcohol level had risen naturally after death as a result of decomposition.
Alzada Sherman had repeatedly urged Ty to move out and take Lee with her, and to her immense relief, she regained her apartment on 27 August. Her contention that she couldn’t have that many people in the apartment without breaking the terms of her lease had finally been heeded. Lee and Ty checked into the optimistically named Happy Holidays, a cheap, clean motel right on Atlantic Avenue, making the trip in a white, compact, older-model car. Signing the motel register, Lee didn’t log the registration, explaining to owner Vishnu Harripersaud that it wasn’t her car. She’d just borrowed it from some friends who were helping her out with the move.
Lee told the Harripersauds that she had a job sandblasting houses in Orlando. That, they concluded, must be why she had so many tools.
Sandy also helped them move that day, agreeing to let them temporarily store some of their belongings in her garage. While shifting boxes, Sandy noted a couple of men’s business briefcases among their stuff. It seemed inconsequential at the time, but it did flash through her mind: where did those come from?