by Sue Russell
From there, it was just a short leap to being able to ‘make’ the bloody palm print left behind on Peter Siems’s abandoned Sunbird back on 4 July.
‘We knew then that we definitely had the person we were looking for,’ Larry Horzepa recalls.
Lee Wuotnos was in big trouble.
The real Cammie Marsh Greene was paid a cautious visit by law enforcement. They’d found an address for her and her husband in Bunnell and details of their two cars. She shared her story of Lee and Ty living in her home and of the not so coincidental disappearance of her driver’s licence. There was one woman in the clear.
All the known fingerprints were sent off for comparison with all the latent fingerprints held in connection with the homicides. Then steps were taken to have all the technical evidence, which had been scattered among various crime labs, sent to Tallahassee so that all the evidence in all the homicides could be compared one to another.
That evening a team went down to Port Orange where Munster, Allen Blair, also of Marion County, and Jimmy Pinner of Dixie County SO all visited the Fairview to interview Rose McNeill in person. They trotted out photopacks and Rose duly picked out Ty and Lee. Lee she knew as Cammie Greene. That was whose driver’s licence Lee showed when registering. And Ty, she pointed out, looked considerably slimmer in the face in the photograph than in life. The officers took the cheap ring that Lee had left with Rose as collateral and, in fair exchange, left her a receipt.
Consulting with Ric Ridgway, the Marion County Assistant State Attorney, the investigators decided that they’d asked enough questions for the time being in Port Orange. Now it was time to lie low.
32
Lee Wuornos and Dick Mills collided like a pair of guided missiles the week before Christmas. Both were bar-hopping down Daytona’s seediest, red-light strip, drowning their respective relationship sorrows in a hazy blur of alcohol. Lee was immediately drawn to Dick, a tattooed bulldog of a Vietnam veteran in his mid-forties who was just separated from his new wife. Something about him so resembled Ty that she couldn’t get over it. Depressed and lonely, Dick missed Connie badly and was wallowing in his misery, propping up the bar at Wet Willie’s, when Lee walked by him that afternoon.
She was in similar shape, grieving over Ty, but, working an angle as usual, Lee asked Dick if he had a car because she had some stuff at a Greyhound bus station she needed to pick up. He drove her there and took her on to Jack’s Mini-Warehouses where Lee put down some more money on her storage unit and paused long enough to try to sell the owner, Melvin Colbert, some gold and silver. Colbert turned it down sight unseen: he didn’t buy from clients, and he was broke.
Dick Mills, through his own fog of alcohol, was struck by the way Lee managed to be smart and trashy at the same time. That appealed to him. He also liked the way she could dart from talking about parapsychology to history. A couple of feisty, volatile and lively personalities, he saw them as two inhabitants of ‘the pits of hell’. They filled the voids for one another and it worked out pretty well—for a while.
Even if he hadn’t endured her constant stream of talk of Ty, Dick Mills had her pegged as a hard-core lesbian, but that didn’t bother him. So she liked women? So did he. It was a taste they had in common. It didn’t bother him, either, that she was a hooker. As was her wont, Lee treated him to a quick peek at her walletful of business cards and her speech about her regular, high-powered clientele. He looked and didn’t really question it. When she said she got $100 per trick and once received $200 from an Orlando businessman for less than a minute of her time, he didn’t question that either.
Over and over, she told him that she and Ty had done things together that no one else had ever done. He definitely didn’t question that.
Lesbian or no, the only thing that came close to her insatiable appetite for beer was her voracious appetite for sex, and that appetite obviously wasn’t restricted to women. She and Dick would be chatting and suddenly she’d exclaim: ‘You wanna fuck?’ or ‘Let’s fuck now!’
He’d remember her as ‘a wild, savage, party animal’. But her obsession, there was no question, was with Ty. She wept over her lost lover more than once and when she tried calling Ty, she came back bawling. Wherever Lee and Dick’s conversations rambled, they always returned to the same point: How could Ty do this to Lee? They’d done things together, pulled things off in this lifetime, that no other living being had ever done or would ever know.
One night, while out in Dick’s car, they were pulled over by the police, and Lee made no attempt to disguise her loathing for the cops, uttering a mouthful that Dick was surprised didn’t land her in jail.
Dick liked to walk on the wild side, but the novelty of this stop-gap relationship soon wore off, given Lee’s dramatic mood swings and dreadful behaviour when she’d had too much beer. The last straw was when Dick took her over to his daughter, Reveshia’s, for a family gathering that included his other daughter, Tammy Sibbernsen. He soon bitterly regretted it. Lee was a beast. She was rude, aggressive and very drunk, and would insist on regaling his daughters with stories of her fights in prison and her drug use.
Amidst her rambling diatribe, Lee also told the family she had been abused as a child. That didn’t excuse her behaviour or make it any more bearable. As the night wore on, and Dick had placated her by buying her another half-case of beer, Reveshia could see that she was trying to bait her dad into a fight. She’d finally had enough. She pulled him to one side and told him, ‘Just get her out of my home and don’t bring her back.’
No matter. Dick didn’t want Lee, anyway. Dick wanted Connie; he wanted to give it one more try. It was Christmas Eve, Connie filled his thoughts, and Lee had to go.
Kindly, Dick drove her to the Hawaii Motel on Ridgewood, handed her $50 and wished her luck. He didn’t know it just then, but she’d made off with his LA Gear blue and white sneakers.
For Lee, with her limited tolerance for solitude, this parting of the ways was a dismal low point. Thanks to Dick’s generosity, at least she had a bed to wake up in on Christmas Day, which was more than could be said for some nights, but holidays always heighten feelings of isolation for those without family. For Lee, being dumped by Dick like that, hot on the heels of the emotionally wrenching separation from Ty, was difficult to bear. The knowledge that she was a wanted woman didn’t improve the mix. For Lee, the so-called season of goodwill was distinctly devoid of it.
She tried to alleviate her blues and isolation by spending money she could ill afford in bars and on motel rooms. She went through $600 (that magical figure again) in less than two weeks, she later told Ty, adding: ‘Every time I was fucking in a room, I was so depressed and bored and crying. I was pissed when you left and shit, and I’d go to a bar and I’d just get myself floppy, fucking drunk. So money would just go.’
A few days after parting company with Dick, however, Lee demonstrated her resilience and optimism by calling in at Moore’s Auto Lot, perusing the display of used cars, and enquiring about payments and terms. She was going to be coming into some money, she said, and she’d be back.
Despite its depressing name and greying array of underwear dangling from the ceiling, the infamous Last Resort biker bar was decidedly more upbeat than some of the watering holes Lee frequented during her desperate hours. Animal dens, the locals call them. The worst of the worst. Rough, skid-row-type dives where hard-core drinkers and druggers spent long, wasted hours. The homeless and derelicts planted themselves along the sidewalks outside, propping up walls, the odour of human waste mingling heavily with that of dead beer and putrid smoke. Those confined by budgetary concerns to the sidewalk consumed liquids from bottles concealed in brown paper bags.
All of drug life was—and is—there, dope being the native currency. On the wrong side of Ridgewood Avenue, gang-bangers boldly pushed nickel bags of rock in your face whether you liked it or not.
To entice a classier clientele, the nearby stripjoints and topless bars bore fresher paint. Lee once claimed to have been
a dancer in such an establishment. With her potbelly and dishevelled appearance, if it was so, it was probably years ago. No one remembers her.
Commerce operated at all levels and some neighbourhood hookers, finding the pickings of solvent clients very slim, were reduced to giving blow jobs for two paltry bucks. That’s right. Two bucks. If Lee ever worked that strip, where the sultry ladies of the night change their names more often than their eye makeup, no one remembers or cares.
Lee reappeared on Dick Mills’s doorstep a week or so after he threw her out. Connie answered the door; Dick wasn’t home. Lee stood there, clutching a can of Busch and a little suitcase. Seemed pleasant enough. Connie didn’t invite her in, but neither did she say she couldn’t wait. But Lee didn’t show her face there again.
Word was out on the trucker grapevine. Some women were knocking off guys. Sam and Rowdy knew all about it. Truck drivers are rarely angelic and Sam and Rowdy never professed to be, rather proudly and cheerfully billing themselves ‘two of the worst perverts on the road’. Both had been off on long hauls—Sam up north, Rowdy to Texas—when they cruised back into their Florida base and heard the warning: ‘Don’t pick up any hitchhikers or any hookers in Daytona. These girl killers are out there and they’re whacko.’
Sam and Rowdy, who’d been running together for years, made a pact of sorts, a cursory nod in the direction of safety and survival. ‘Well,’ they decided, ‘we just won’t pick nothing up in the state of Florida.’
Good resolutions aside, they’d had a weird run-in with a girl hitchhiker in Gainesville. Pretty, too. The usual unwritten agreement when picking up a hitchhiker is the fair exchange theory: a ride in return for a sexual favour. But this woman started talking money right away, which rang an alarm bell. Then when she started sounding ‘kooky’, Rowdy didn’t wait for the jury to come in, just kicked her right out of his truck to be on the safe side. Sam, who’d been having forty winks, felt sure his partner had lost it. ‘That was a good-looking lady!’ he complained. Rowdy didn’t care. He wasn’t taking any chances in Florida.
Not that he was afraid of much. He prided himself on that, too. In his private car, he carried more hardware than most law enforcement officers. Rowdy heard the warning again from the guys at Circus, a girlie bar in Daytona where they knew his appetite for sex on the road. His reputation preceded him, which he kind of liked. He was single, what the hell.
Truckers hear warnings all the time. Look out for this, watch out for that. The brotherhood keeping an eye out for its own. Not so long before, a driver lost his life over 38 cents. Stopped to phone and tell his wife he was an hour from home, and was shot for his trouble. The radio was a way of fighting back. Strength in numbers. Rowdy learned long ago that there’s every kind of kook imaginable out there and maintained a lot of them were women. Word was already out on one who’d been dubbed The Strangler.
‘If you pick her up and her bra comes off and she’s got two eagles on her chest, you get rid of her,’ Rowdy said flatly.
Very simple and to the point. Her modus operandi was to strip off her top then, while bending over to give a blow job, to wrap a piece of wire she’d got hidden in her hand around his jewels and castrate him, leaving him to bleed to death.
Why wait for the cops? The next time that broad bared her breasts in a truck she’d be history. Truckers, they looked out for their own.
33
It was time to move. On 26 December, Jerry Thompson and Marvin Padgett arrived at the Marion County SO bright and early to meet with the rest of the task force. The investigators now knew of Ty’s job at the Casa Del Mar and of the motorcycle and moped she’d once had registered in her name. Slowly, the picture was being fleshed out.
A division of labour was worked out. Padgett and Investigator Jenny Combs would do a background check on the two suspects. Rickey Deen from the State Attorney’s office would work on a subpoena for Ty’s parents’ phone in Ohio and for the pay phones in Port Orange. The FDLE folk would do further checks on pawnshops to see if the suspects had pawned anything else.
Jerry Thompson and Tom Muck were in for a little surprise. The two investigators who’d worked so hard on the case for so long had been all set to go to Ohio to execute the background check on Tyria, but at the last minute were told there’d been a change of plan. Marion County’s Binegar and Henry would put down their pencils, emerge from behind their desks and do it themselves. (That move, particularly on the part of Major Henry, gave rise to questions later.) They’d leave the next day.
As the two senior officers made their way north, Jerry Thompson picked up from the old evidence storage the .22 revolver that Lori Grody had been carrying when she was arrested in June of ’86. It was sent to the lab for comparison with the bullets in an old homicide case. Throughout the entire investigation, all the detectives were constantly combing old files for unsolved murders that might turn out to be linked to these suspects.
Meanwhile an updated outstanding warrant was issued for that 1986 arrest of Lori Grody, this one listing all her known aliases. When they found Lee Wuornos, they’d be ready for her.
On 28 December, Jerry Thompson was back at Marion County SO, and Bruce Munster filled him in on a call from a woman on Highridge in Holly Hill. She said she’d rented an apartment to Ty and Lee, that Lee hated men, that she and Ty hitchhiked everywhere, and that the two had first met in a lesbian bar in 1985 in Daytona.
Tom Muck reported in, too. He’d found out that Lori Grody was a suspect in the 1985 theft of a .38 gun in his county.
On 31 December, Bob Kelley checked in. Volusia’s hand search of pawn records had turned up something else. Cammie Marsh Greene had pawned a man’s gold nugget diamond ring on 7 December for $20. She’d used the same licence, date of birth and address as before.
Bruce Munster perused the three pawn slips he had; to the naked eye, all three signatures looked identical.
Bob Kelley called back. He’d collected the nugget diamond ring from the pawn shop and Jimmy Pinner of Dixie County had driven it over to the family of the late victim’s fiancée. Sure enough, Aleen Berry and her daughters, Linda and Carol, verified that it was identical to the one stolen from Walter Gino Antonio on 18 November. They’d had it sized down to fit Gino, and Pinner checked with the jeweller who, while not able to identify his own work, confirmed the ring had been sized the same as Antonio’s.
Bruce Munster added the information that Ty had flown Eastern Airlines to Pittsburgh on 17 November at 5.30 p.m., and had flown back into Daytona on 25 November at 2.30 p.m. She, at least, had the beginnings of a good alibi for the Walter Gino Antonio murder.
That same day, he received Lee’s Colorado arrest history which included the prohibited use of a firearm. A clear picture was emerging of a career criminal. He and all the other key detectives headed over to Volusia County and, through interviews, learned of Lee and Ty’s stay at the Belgrade restaurant.
Bruce Munster was the first to interview Vera Ivkovitch, who confirmed that they’d kept lots of tools in their room and she had once seen them cleaning a small handgun which Lee said she had because she was a lesbian. Vera made no mention of the black ceramic panther statue that victim David Spears was believed to have been carrying in his truck to give to his wife, Dee. (Later, she told Jerry Thompson she had seen it in their room, but it was never recovered.)
Susan Lynn Blahovec.
Cammie Marsh Greene.
Lori Kristine Grody.
Aileen Wuornos’s stolen personae were steadily rising up, en masse, to haunt her.
Meanwhile, up in Ohio, Binegar and Henry had been working on the assumption that since Ty had spent Thanksgiving with her family, it was a fair bet that she might show up there again for the holidays. In the best possible scenario, they would locate her. Moving cautiously, the out-of-towners attempted to slip unnoticed into Cadiz’s tight-knit community of less than five thousand people. Fat chance. Cadiz is no Ocala. According to Dan Henry, the Harrison County Sheriff, Richard Rensi, received phon
e calls tipping him off about their unmarked car within minutes of their arrival.
With the help of local law enforcement, however, they started in what is often a highly illuminating place: the school records. For a suspect who’s never been in prison, it is often the only place to start trying to build a picture of them. They met with Harrison County School Superintendent, Don Hyde, and learned that Tyria’s files had no notation of discipline problems or psychological problems or anything else untoward. She was a C-grade student and in 11th and 12th grades, transferred to Harrison Hills Vocational School, leaving in 1980. Getting a handle on Ty’s personality was crucial.
Ty’s father Jack, Binegar and Henry learned from Sheriff Rensi who knew him, was an industrious carpenter and bricklayer, well regarded in the community. Ty’s mother, Janet, died when she was a toddler, and her father then married Mary Ann. One sister, Twyla, who was then living in Pennsylvania with her husband, an ex-deputy sheriff, had been through a wild stage. The Sheriff said she was one of the first streakers in the country. Besides her sisters, Ty also had three brothers registered with the school board: James, Jackie (known as Brent) and Michael. Sheriff Rensi cruised by the Moore residence, showing it to Binegar and Henry.
Later, they would be told that Ty had been there, but had they made a move on her too soon, before Lee was in custody, the big question had been, what would she do? There were no grounds for arrest right then. If investigators had approached her head on, asking questions about the murders, she might have told them to get out of her house, picked up the phone, and tipped off Lee. They had to tread softly.
Another vital item on the agenda was verifying Ty’s travel arrangements for the Thanksgiving period, a task that fell to Special Agent Gerald Mroczkowski of the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation. If, as Henry and Binegar believed, Ty had indeed been in Cadiz at that time, it would give her an ironclad alibi for when Walter Gino Antonio was murdered. It would also support the swelling belief that Ty was the weak link in the duo and as such, once they were apprehended, she would be the first one they would try to break. Binegar and Henry headed back to Florida.