by Sue Russell
Once, Vel Ivkovitch bumped into her over there and asked her, ‘Where’s my money?’
‘You’re a sorry sonofabitch, you’re lucky you’re alive!’ Lee snapped.
Of course, Vera and Vel thought she was joking. She was just mad because they’d kicked her out.
Lee once asked Brenda McGarry for a job application while simultaneously bragging that she made $2,000 to $3,000 a month in her current line of work.
Later, checking her records, Rose McNeill could tell that somewhere between 17 and 19 November, Lee paid another $90 for the room. The largest amount of cash she and Ty ever handed over during their stays. What Rose did know for sure was that on the 19th (which might, therefore, have been later that same day), Lee came in asking for a small loan. First she wanted a dollar, then two dollars. Rose handed it over, duly adding the small amounts to their card.
Rose struggled to pin down the date she received the $90, but was torn. On the one hand, she couldn’t imagine herself letting them have a room without money down, which meant it must have been on the 17th. Then again it could have been the 19th, because she’d remembered it striking her as peculiar, Lee putting down a large sum one minute, then running out of money the next. Perhaps she took the TV on the 17th, and the cash on the 19th. The day after she killed him.
On 19 November, detectives in at least two counties were having busy days.
She’d assumed it would take them a while to find him. She hardly knew where the body was herself. But Walter Gino Antonio was found the very next day, pitifully naked, except for his tube socks. That was how he looked to Captain J. Small of the Tampa Police Department who came across him while out hunting near Cross City.
Jimmy Pinner of Dixie County Sheriff’s Office was assigned to investigate.
Mr Antonio was identified by his fingerprints. Once his name was known, Pinner spoke to his fiancée, Aleen Berry, who racked her brain to draw up a list of the belongings she thought he had had with him when he left home.
There was the police badge from his days as a reserve deputy with the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office, a police-style billyclub with a black, plaited handle, a black flashlight, and a pair of handcuffs. On a more mundane level there was his Timex watch, a few suitcases. Aleen also thought he had a red metal tool box full of mechanical tools and a green canvas military-style bag, also filled with tools. He might have had a baseball cap, possibly with NASA written on it. And there was the ring, of course.
The very same day, the white 1986 Olds Ciera belonging to Curtis ‘Corky’ Reid, a Titusville man who had been missing since 7 September, was at long last spotted by Orlando police, in a parking lot near Orlando’s east–west expressway.
The mystery disappearance of the 50-year-old roofing engineer had been as perplexing as the Peter Siems case. Dan Carter, the Titusville detective investigating, had hit a brick wall. Corky, who worked for a company that serviced NASA, had gone missing on a Thursday; a pay day. He’d gone home, shaved, showered, left his security badge on the dresser. He left the air-conditioning on, obviously planning to return. On his way out again, he said ‘Hi’ to his neighbour, climbed into his car, and headed off, purportedly to keep a dinner date in Cocoa Beach with a buddy from work. Then he promptly disappeared off the face of the earth.
He, like the other missing men, didn’t seem the type to do a disappearing act voluntarily. His house was on the market and he’d run up some substantial debts, but he was a devoted son who kept in almost daily contact with his mother who was dying of emphysema (and has since died). One of his sisters had cancer. His sister, Deanie, and her husband, Jim Stewart, were alerted to his disappearance on Tuesday morning by a phone call from his office wondering if they knew where he was. They were immediately alarmed. Corky’s calls to his mom stopped stone cold. And there was no activity on his credit cards after the day he disappeared. A divorced man, he liked to visit bars and had recently had a female house-guest for a couple of weeks but she’d left by then. His 18-year-old son, John, had recently been living with him, too. They checked his home, found no sign of foul play, and immediately notified the Titusville Police Department.
Corky had been seen cashing a cheque the day he disappeared, and his family and Dan Carter suspected he was carrying anywhere from $600 up to $1,000. ‘He couldn’t hold on to money, bless his heart,’ said Jim Stewart, noting that he’d recently paid out over $2,000 in back bills. If he’d planned to walk away from his life, why do that? Why not hang on to the money?
The discovery of Corky’s car looked like the break Dan Carter needed. Carter had recently begun attending the task force meetings, but noted that Corky’s Olds Ciera didn’t quite fit the pattern. There were similarities. The driver’s seat was pulled all the way forward, and the mirror was tilted down, so perhaps a woman had been driving it. There was also a blonde hair on the steering wheel. But the licence plates had not been removed, nor had the Masonic emblem on Corky’s trunk. His passport and Masonic apron, which he usually kept in his glove box, were missing, though, as were his wallet, credit cards, jewellery. Both his car and house keys—breaking the pattern—were on the floor of the driver’s side. Also, the car had not been wiped clean like the others. He was lost without his spectacles, and both pairs were in the car. It was a mystery.
The car was a break, but for Reid’s family, the torment continued because there was still no sign whatsoever of Corky. It was the not knowing. The gaping hole of not knowing.
Walter Gino Antonio’s maroon Pontiac Grand Prix was found on Saturday 24 November. Detectives came to learn he had a ritual; whenever he bought gas, he meticulously recorded his mileage on the receipts. From this methodical behaviour, they could deduce that in the week since his disappearance, his car had been put through its paces to the tune of over one thousand miles.
Ty was due to fly back into Daytona on Sunday 25 November, arriving on Eastern Airlines flight 301. No longer having the car, Lee headed out early to meet her, unsure of the Sunday bus schedule and anticipating she might have to hitch a ride. As she walked down Spruce Creek Road, a small blue car that had already cruised past her once, pulled over and stopped. She recognised the man behind the wheel just as he’d recognised her.
She’d first officially met bearded Donald Willingham a year earlier in Geneva’s bar down on Beach Street about a block from Wet Willie’s, although they’d seen each other around for years. She was standing in the doorway that morning, combing the numbers on some Lotto tickets and ‘waiting for my old man’. They went inside, played a little pool together, and she’d talked him into buying her some beers. Donald heard talk about her later, about how she’d turned loud and obnoxious. Since then, he’d spotted her numerous times out hitchhiking on the highway, and sometimes stopped and gave her rides in his red truck (later replaced by a blue car) and bought her a few beers. ‘She needed me, and I needed her, it was a fair trade,’ is how he summed up his acquaintance with the hitchhiking hooker. But he hadn’t seen her in a good while before that November day.
‘Where are you going?’ he called out.
‘I’m trying to get to the airport.’
‘The airport? What are you going to the airport for?’
‘My girlfriend is coming in.’
‘Who?’
‘Ty. Would you do me a favour and take me there?’ Donald, who had no plans, told her to hop in.
‘I need a beer,’ Lee sighed.
Not averse to the idea himself, Donald stopped and bought some, then they just drove around, drinking, killing time and hanging out, until Ty’s plane landed.
Ty was coming back, to all intents and purposes, of her own free will. Coming back one full year after Lee first confessed to her that she had killed someone. If indeed she feared for her life as she’d later claim, quite why she returned is a mystery. It wasn’t as if she was bound to Florida by earthly possessions. They travelled light, weighed down for the most part by odd clutter. Stolen work tools can hardly have been the irresistible magnet p
ulling her back.
She was returning, but probably not for long. Lee knew that. Or at least strongly suspected it. Ty had warned her of that. Almost as soon as Ty emerged from the airport terminal, Lee hit on Donald for a ride for the next leg of their ongoing shuffle. Ty would be leaving, Lee said. They were splitting up, and she was going back up north. Then again, she’d threatened to leave before and Lee hoped to change her mind.
Meeting Ty took Donald by surprise. He’d never heard Lee was a lesbian and she’d never struck him that way. Ty was equally confused by his presence, wondering if he was one of Lee’s tricks. Lee prevailed upon Donald to make another beer stop en route to the Fairview. Pulling up outside, Ty lugged her bags to their room while Lee heaved in the case of beer she’d bought to celebrate Ty’s return.
Watching from her vantage point across the forecourt, Rose noted the beer, then quickly looked away. She tried to avoid seeing anything like that. Rose knew her mother would be furious if she knew they were buying cases of beer while they were behind with their bill.
In the privacy of their room, Lee presented Ty, her ‘wife’, with Gino Antonio’s gold diamond ring. Ty slipped it on her finger.
Ty wasn’t so afraid for her life that it stopped her from cheerfully showing Rose a happy family snap from Thanksgiving and waxing enthusiastic about her great vacation. Whatever Ty and Lee’s plans were, they evidently weren’t set in stone. Lee told Rose they’d seen an apartment they were hoping to get. But when Rose asked if it was nearby, Lee took umbrage. Ty, who was lounging on the bed, stayed silent as Lee angrily repeated her speech about her business being private. Once she left the motel, she informed Rose, in a tone that left no room for misinterpretation, she didn’t want anyone knowing where she was or knowing anything about her.
‘Fine,’ retorted Rose, more than a little annoyed at being chastised. ‘To tell you the truth, I couldn’t care less what you’re doing.’
Rose retreated back to the room next door where she and her mother had been cleaning. They both muttered darkly. One minute Lee was falling over herself with gratitude for being allowed to have the room back, then this! You just didn’t know where you stood with the woman.
Shortly after, Lee came in and apologised for her behaviour. Ty had told her she’d been rude.
‘Lee, I don’t care what you do,’ Rose replied, still irked about the whole episode. ‘When people come here, I don’t butt into their business.’
31
The discovery of Walter Gino Antonio’s naked body and the knowledge that yet another victim had met his death at the end of a .22 calibre firearm, infused the investigators with a still greater sense of urgency. Official channels were buzzing. On 29 November 1990, just around the time Ty called her stepmother in Ohio and asked her to send her the bus fare home, a massive, inter-agency meeting was held at Marion County SO under the helm of Captain Steve Binegar. It drew in all involved law enforcement, not just from Marion County but also from Brevard, Sumter, Dixie, Citrus and Pasco Sheriff’s Offices, from Titusville Police Department, and from the FDLE.
Investigators like Tom Muck and Jerry Thompson weren’t the only ones to have been sharing information and collaborating on their homicides. Now it was time to knit together all the separate strands of detective work.
For Larry Horzepa of Volusia, who had just started attending the joint meetings, the task force’s female theory certainly made perfect sense. It dove-tailed neatly with his own thoughts on Mallory, although he still held firm to the idea that Mallory had been murdered by a single female. Now, hearing about these other homicides in detail, Horzepa was even more convinced. He wasn’t so much swayed by the preponderance of bullets to the torso as Munster had been, as by the way each murder victim appeared to have been accosted.
‘We found that they were always alone, that they didn’t have a wife or a girlfriend or family members in the car, that they were travelling extensively,’ he recalls.
As the pace of the investigation accelerated, so, too, did the need to make a decision about whether or not to go public with the search for two female murder suspects. The local paper in Marion County, the Ocala Star-Banner, had run a piece suggesting a link between the murders, and had floated the possibility there was a highway serial killer on the loose. While the story had taken a back seat to the Gainesville student slayings, Captain Steve Binegar knew that would not continue indefinitely. It was a tough call. If they were tipped off about the search, there was a strong risk that the suspects might flee, disappearing without trace into the underbelly of the state. Or worse, leave Florida entirely.
Tom Muck of Pasco was especially vocal with his worry that the suspects might get nervous and dump the murder weapon. Those were the very real and major drawbacks. But the Ocala Star-Banner’s story would sooner or later have to be called false, or be confirmed and amplified. Weighing in on the other side of the scale was law enforcement’s powerful duty to warn the public of the danger in helping or picking up women who appeared to be in distress on the road.
Above all, in broadcasting the search, the investigators were praying for help. Leads. Places to start. And with the strong likelihood that Siems’s disappearance was part of the sinister chain of events, those composite drawings done by Marion County’s in-house forensic artists in July, which had been given such a very limited release back in September, seemed the prime avenue to explore.
When the news release finally went out on 29 November, concerned citizens did not disappoint. The sketches of the two women seen fleeing the scene of missing missionary Peter Siems’s crashed car were printed in newspapers and flashed on TV screens across the state and the response was immediate. Phone calls flooded the Marion County command post and poured into other law enforcement agencies across the state. Via the proliferation of leads generated, the uneasy alliance between media and public was showing its better face. In the words of Florida’s own pre-eminent crime reporter, Edna Buchanan: Put it in the paper, it works. And work it did. The ‘war room’ that had been hastily set up with extra phones to man the calls, was soon under siege.
The team’s best hope had been that repeated names and identities would be thrown up by the leads. Sergeant Brian Jarvis, a devout computer enthusiast, had devised a program to digest and sift the tips, picking up on common factors in names or geographic locations. Jarvis, who would have liked the sketches to have had broad distribution months earlier, watched intently as the process began to work.
The first three leads filtered in on the very night of the initial news break.
The next day, there were another twenty-six. Lead no. 5 came from Billy Copeland of Homosassa Springs, upon whom Lee’s ‘death-row eyes’ had made such a lingering impression when she and Tyria Moore occupied a neighbouring trailer there a year earlier. He provided names, and the tip that when they left they had said they were going to head towards the East Coast. Copeland and his wife Cindy vividly remembered the women and the procession of men flowing to their trailer carrying TVs and other goods, and the way Lee went off hitchhiking with a gun for protection. They felt sure they were the two.
What is more, after seeing a photograph of Richard Mallory, the Copelands were so convinced that he was the man who’d visited Lee and Ty—the one who showed up in a van and gave them a TV, and that Lee later ran off the park—that they simply took to referring to him as Mallory. (Their account, unwittingly, would later pose an interesting question mark. Had Mallory been a regular of Lee’s, not a stranger, Lee would not have met the FBI guidelines for a true serial killer. But Billy and Cindy’s belief that they’d seen Mallory with her was never corroborated.)
Each day, criminal records were checked on any likely-sounding tips. Since the crime scenes had been so ‘clean’ and so devoid of physical evidence, that seemed to point to a pro. Someone knew what they were doing, and that someone probably had a record. The leads were priority-classified as As, Bs or Cs. And the sources of the leads seemed to cluster in the areas of the murders: anoth
er good sign they were on the right track.
There were the usual madcap calls, like the one saying the woman wanted was last seen in New York dressed as a nun.
But for all the red herrings, by 20 December, Tyria Moore’s name had leapt to the fore. Ironically, the name Aileen Wuornos, diluted by Lee’s longtime propensity for aliases, took longer to surface.
Tyria Moore watched the media blitz trumpeting the hunt for the two females with no less interest but with far less enthusiasm. She was badly shaken by this new development. The drawings were hardly perfect resemblances and wouldn’t win any art prizes, yet uncannily they bore enough of a superficial likeness to scare Ty.
The input of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit had suggested that the perpetrators of these homicides were likely to be transients, uninvolved in world politics, unexposed to newspapers. Yet Lee and Ty pored over the papers daily. And Ty was horrified to find herself centre stage in a drama she wanted no part of.
Suddenly, the prospect of capture and the slow realisation of how close she was to the fire, hit home. She was in over her head. She wanted to get out of there—fast.
Exactly when Ty finally decided to abandon ship was later hotly debated. After Thanksgiving, Lee had asked Donald Willingham to help them move out of the Fairview because Ty was going back up north. That was just before the sketches were released, but definitely before. Yet when on Sunday 2 December, the women announced to Rose McNeill that they were leaving and going their separate ways, it struck her as sudden and very peculiar. They’d seemed so close. She cast her mind back to all that talk of getting an apartment and Ty getting a job. To her, their splitting up came out of nowhere. And although Lee seemed ‘a little bit bummed out by it’, Rose would have expected them both to be a lot more upset.
Ty claims to have left for Ohio on the 3rd (although there’d be some questions asked about that), but first she took part in one last jaunt with Lee. Sandy Russell had flatly refused to store their stuff in her garage again. So when Donald Willingham picked them up to take Ty to the Greyhound station, they first made a stop at a storage unit Lee had found in Holly Hill. They’d been sealing up the last of their boxes when Donald arrived, and he stood and watched while they loaded them into the boot and the back of his car. Ty also had a couple of suitcases with her for her journey.