Lethal Intent

by Sue Russell

  Whereas the plan had been clear, suddenly all bets were off. As Larry Horzepa explains: ‘As long as she didn’t endanger anybody else, and she didn’t attempt to pick anybody up, or to leave with anybody, we were just going to keep close surveillance on her.’

  With a pig roast in progress? Forget it. As Larry Horzepa and the other locals knew all too well, if such a party ran true to Last Resort form, it would be a wild and crazy affair attracting literally hundreds of people. Those shindigs often spilled out into the back behind a privacy fence where there were old bus benches and abandoned cars and lots of opportunity for sex and drugs.

  There was no doubt the bash could spell disaster for the operation. It was not as if they had a battalion of long-haired, biker undercovers who could suddenly slip into the Last Resort unnoticed. And should anything break inside the bar that meant they had to go in to get her, they could find themselves dealing with hundreds of bikers, too.

  In all their gear, those biker chicks all looked alike. So all Lee would have to do would be to pop on a cycle helmet and leap on the back of a hog, and she’d be history, before the surveillance team had even figured out which one she was. Since she’d slept on the car seat the previous night, it also looked very much as if she had no home to lead them to.

  Inevitably, it was a controversial decision either way. Assistant State Attorney Anthony Tatti was present. Everyone knew of the lawyers’ concern and understood the wisdom of waiting. But what if they did nothing and lost her in the shuffle? The way Larry Horzepa saw it, it was ultimately Volusia County’s decision to make since they were in their jurisdiction. In fact, on learning there would be a task force involved, Horzepa alerted his superior, Sergeant Jake Erhardt, that he might need to call on him to make some decisions. Of paramount importance while stalking Wuornos was the safety of the citizens of Volusia. There were also liability issues to consider.

  ‘It’s nice to be able to play out a scenario of “We’d like to follow her and see what she does”,’ Larry Horzepa points out. ‘But at the same time, on the other edge of that double-edged sword, is that you also have to take responsibility if she picks somebody up and injures them.’ Forget injure: what if she killed again before they caught up with her? That wouldn’t have been pretty.

  It would have been nice to see if she led them to Ty, but Sergeant Erhardt’s decision was that she should be brought out of the Last Resort while they still had control of the situation and while she was clearly under surveillance. So it was that it fell to Joyner to figure out how to get her outside. First, he gave Lee the room key. Still suspicious, she went straight to the pay phone and called the motel to make sure he’d actually signed her in. While she was gone, Joyner quickly filled in Martin on the arrest plan.

  Lee came back, finally convinced, and told Joyner she was going to go take a shower and clean up. Her parting shot was her last nice words to him. ‘Come pick me up around seven, eight o’clock. Come by yourself and we’ll party,’ she promised.

  The undercover officers then left, got in the silver pick-up, and pulled right alongside the front door of the bar. Stepping out of the truck, Joyner called through the doorway to Lee. ‘I need directions! Come here a minute!’

  Affably, she walked towards him. That was it. All of a sudden, there were cops everywhere. Larry Horzepa and Bernard Buscher, who were in the first car, confronted her, approaching her as Lori Grody. At just after 5 p.m., Larry Horzepa told ‘Lori’ that he’d been looking for her, and quietly handcuffed her and placed her under arrest.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re bothering with me!’ Lee retorted. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’

  Horzepa and the other officers duly put on a bit of a show for the folk inside the bar, protecting the covers of Bucket and Drums. After Lee was set in the back seat of a police vehicle, they turned their attention to Drums, pushing him around a little bit, cuffing him, then throwing him in the back seat with her while they checked him out on the computer. Bucket, meanwhile, the very picture of concern, ran back and forth in the bar, saying, ‘Hey, my pal’s being arrested! Anyone know a good lawyer or bondsman?’

  There was another motive to all this. Joyner was wired for sound and the back of the car was fitted with a hidden camera. They might get something useful. But when he asked her what was going on it was all too apparent that it was the end of a beautiful friendship. She unleashed a stream of expletives and snapped at him to keep his mouth shut.

  Eventually, an officer came back, unlocked his cuffs, read him the riot act, then told him he could go. End of performance.

  Lee’s purse was retrieved from the bar, along with her tan suitcase, which she’d had chained up for safety. Looking alternately enraged and dazed, she was then driven to Volusia County Branch Jail and officially booked. While the paperwork was completed, Bruce Munster ambled in and offered to get her coffee and some cigarettes, getting his first glimpse of their dirty, dishevelled and sleep-deprived suspect. She seemed very unemotional.

  It had been a long haul for Lee. Every mile of it, every year, was reflected in her hard, ravaged face. Just like Leo Pittman, who had relinquished his freedom long before her, she exuded the fearful menace of a caged wild animal. Beneath it all, she was tired, worn down and somehow beaten. She would be sleeping in a different kind of wild that night.

  After Larry Horzepa had explained to her about the outstanding 1986 warrant for grand theft and carrying a concealed firearm in the name of Lori Grody, Lee knew that that part of her game, at least, was up. Lori Grody, she admitted, was her sister. She knew why she was being arrested.

  Which was more than could be said for Marion County Assistant State Attorney Ric Ridgway, who was shocked by a call late that evening informing him that Wuornos had been taken into custody. Furious, he contacted Marion’s State Attorney Brad King, who was of like mind.

  ‘He hit the roof,’ Ridgway recalls. ‘We wound up driving over there—flying low over there—that night, and there was a bit of a confrontation over that decision between Brad and I, and Steve Binegar and Bruce Munster. There was a lot of emotion involved. Everybody was tired. We were hot, we were mad, and so we all kind of flared up.’

  Lee became quite agitated when her property was inventoried at the jail. Her purse and tan suitcase had been taken from her, but what bothered her most of all seemed to be the safety of her Eagle key. Over and over, she asked that it be kept with her property, begging, ‘Please don’t lose that key, it’s my life.’

  Had no one been suspicious of her before, her blatant anxiety would have soon tipped them off. And while she was fingerprinted, it really got the better of her. Later, she complained to anyone who would listen that they’d taken more prints than was usual. In addition, they’d also taken a palm print. That really worried her.

  Disappointingly, a search of her purse and suitcase drew a blank on stolen items, although she did have a couple of knives. The search yielded something, however: receipts from Jack’s Mini-Warehouses on 1104 North Nova Road in Daytona Beach. Dated 3 and 19 December, they revealed that ‘Cammie Greene’ had possession of space C-1-G. Bernie Buscher passed the information straight over to Bruce Munster.

  If those slips weren’t enough to give her away, her rampant indiscretion would have sufficed.

  In anticipation of Lee’s arrival, Karen Collins, a Pasco County detective, had already gone undercover in the detention centre holding cell after being placed under fake arrest for aggravated battery. A seven-year veteran of undercover vice and narcotics work, she had the guts to spend the night in the holding cell with Lee and to get her chatting. Collins opened up the conversation by asking Lee what she was in for? Taking the bait, Lee said they’d had an old warrant for her for carrying a concealed firearm. Collins said she’d shot someone. Common ground. The communication door was open.

  Lee talked about her guns and mentioned a friend accidentally shooting her with a .22 rifle. Later, she said she’d shot herself because she’d had a problem. Unable
to see the wisdom of keeping her own counsel, Lee chatted on about getting a .45 calibre revolver through a man who’d known she was down and out and had given her $25 to go pawn it for $100. Lately, she’d been hitchhiking around town and ‘doing men’ for money. She tried to come off like a call girl who wouldn’t touch anything for under $200, but later admitted she serviced people in biker bars for $20 or $25. She was worth more than $20, she said indignantly.

  She spoke, too, of an incident that sounded like a variation on the 1986 arrest that led to the outstanding warrant. Only the story omitted to mention that she’d had twelve rounds of ammunition in her overnight bag. Instead it had grown to include an attempted rape on the part of her companion. She also said he’d stolen $150 from her.

  Lee became very upset when she saw that Collins still had her shoelaces while hers had been taken from her.

  More poignantly, she confided that she’d lost her lover and her home before Christmas. Since then, she’d been drinking heavily and living on the streets. She’d used the Cammie Greene i.d., which she’d found on the beach, to rent the storage unit in which she kept her life’s possessions. Little did Lee know that a search warrant was already under way.

  Obviously unfamiliar with the maxim that loose lips sink ships, she expressed her concern that police suspected her of killing all those men who’d been murdered near the interstates. Since they seemed to think she resembled the sketches, she’d been keeping up with the case. In fact, she leapt upon the daily newspaper with such fervour that she had to be told she must let the other girls enjoy it before she commandeered it. She spent much of her time scribbling personal letters, her head encased in radio earphones.

  Most memorably, she talked about her boyfriend, Barry, with whom she’d broken up before Christmas. He didn’t love her any more, she told Collins, saying nothing about being gay. But when she changed clothes, Collins thought, ‘Oh God!’—Lee was wearing red men’s briefs. Putting two and two together, Collins surmised the Barry she was talking about must be Ty. (Of all the names she could substitute, how strange she should pick her brother Barry’s. Maybe she thought it would be easy to remember.)

  Lee talked again about her storage unit. It had a stereo in it, an Eagle blanket, clothing, knick-knacks and some small figurines. Collins was getting the picture. Lee was obviously afraid something incriminating might be found there.

  After breakfast the next morning, Collins was taken out to be debriefed by Tom Muck, then she went back in, was given proper prison clothes, and put in a pod. Unlike Lee, she knew she could get out, yet she still didn’t relish her tiny taste of incarceration. Meanwhile, the trustee inmates had been getting suspicious because the holding cell was sealed off. It was time to pull Karen Collins out again.

  The next day, 10 January, Investigator Buscher drove over to Jack’s Mini-Warehouses where he met the owners, Alice and Melvin Colbert, and learned that Cammie Greene had paid up on her locker until February. Spotting an Eagle padlock on the bin, Buscher passed that little titbit on to Bruce Munster. By 4 p.m., Sergeant Mike Joyner had it and its mysterious contents under round-the-clock surveillance.

  The wisdom of putting stolen goods into a rented bin was dubious to say the least, but then, she wasn’t expecting to get caught. Lee’s aliases, Larry Horzepa noted, had been highly successful for her for a very long time. She had hidden behind someone else’s name and i.d. for every key act, from pawning stolen goods to renting the storage unit. And if anyone ever questioned her too closely on the fact that she didn’t quite resemble her Cammie Greene photograph, she brought up her old burn scars as an excuse. She was manipulative enough to brazen it out, claiming the picture really was her, but her face had gone through a windshield in an accident. Hearing that, who would dare call her a liar?

  Dick Humphreys’ Sylacauga police chief badge was but one item on a very lengthy list of evidence the detectives hoped to find when they unsealed her stash of treasures. On 14 January, Judge Foxman signed Bruce Munster’s 22-page affidavit for the search warrant and Bernard Buscher served it that same day. When they finally opened the storage unit, Larry Horzepa had the videotape camera running throughout.

  The motley collection of goods inside was seized and taken into evidence by FDLE evidence technicians. It included everything from tools to a scrap of a Daytona newspaper and an open Handiwipe sachet with the wipe still inside. There were three football playing cards, six shower-curtain rings, an electrical cord, a vibrator, a bottle of aftershave, a guitar pick, a butter container, matchbooks, a shoehorn and numerous wire coat-hangers. Thankfully, some items were decidedly more intriguing, like the driver’s licence receipts, birth and baptism certificates and Social Security card for Susan Blahovec. Disappointingly, there was no sign whatsoever of David Spears’s distinctive black ceramic panther.

  Needless to say, it took some time to disseminate the hundreds of items, but Larry Horzepa was soon amply satisfied. There it was. A maroon Polaroid 600 camera of the type that Richard Mallory was carrying when he died.

  35

  Before Aileen’s arrest, the Ohio-Michigan effort was still under way. Dan Henry had gone on to Michigan to do further checks on the aliases Lori Grody and Sandra Kretsch on 9 January, meeting up with Detective-Sergeant Leonard Goretski and Detective-Lieutenant Richard Duthler of the Michigan State Police. Together, Henry and Goretski had uncovered Aileen Wuornos’s lengthy list of run-ins with police.

  Sandra Kretsch was found to be an old neighbour of Aileen’s from Troy and was cleared on the strength of mug shots on her ‘record’. Dan Henry had had a little more background checking to do before visiting Lori Grody in Mancelona. Lori was by then known to be Aileen’s aunt by bloodline and sister by adoption.

  At the time Wuornos had been spotted in Daytona and was under surveillance, Dan Henry later wrote, there were mounting fears that ‘Tyria may have been eliminated by Wuornos’. Some of the detectives thought that a bit far-fetched since the real nitty-gritty search for Ty had barely begun. In any event, after consulting with Steve Binegar back in Florida and hearing that Lee had been picked up, Dan Henry headed straight back to Cadiz, where the local law enforcement was finally instigating intensive surveillance on the Moore family, the next morning, Thursday 11 January. That same morning, the court-ordered phone tap would finally be on line. The local officers didn’t plan to move in until 3 p.m., giving Dan Henry time to make it back from Michigan by car.

  When he arrived, Henry found that Ty’s father had been under the eagle eyes of deputies since 7.20 a.m. Her brother Jackie had also been located, as had her stepmother, Mary Ann, plus another female who did not fit Ty’s description and who later turned out to be Ty’s stepsister, Tracey Moore.

  Sheriff Rensi picked up Jack Moore and brought him in for questioning. Jack Moore knew just where his daughter Ty was, but he was playing it cautious at first and was wary of handing her number over to Dan Henry. Eventually he did so, on the understanding that he and Mary Ann would get a chance to call her before he spoke to her. Henry agreed, but immediately Jack Moore had written down the number, Chief Neely slipped out of the room to trace it.

  Obviously, at that juncture, they had no intention of letting Ty slip through their net. They didn’t have enough evidence to charge her and they didn’t want her skipping off or even calling an attorney if they could help it. Neely traced the number to Swoyersville, Pennsylvania, and rang it. No one was home.

  Dan Henry spoke next to the Pennsylvania State Police who were asked to locate the residence, to secure it and endeavour to find Tyria. Very soon, the address was ascertained to be that of Ty’s sister Twyla. Descending upon the house, they learned that Ty was at work. Within minutes, the state police had, with her permission, embraced her in protective custody: her only proviso being that she would only talk to Florida authorities.

  Major Henry reported back to Captain Binegar, who was ensconced in the command post at the Pirate’s Cove motel in Daytona, and they put their heads together to determine th
e next step. Binegar’s immediate instinct was to send up what he considered the two most experienced homicide detectives he could lay his hands on to conduct the all-important Ty interview. Without hesitating, he picked Bruce Munster and Jerry Thompson. They both had excellent track records and had been ‘part of the core work group since the beginning’. They’d fly to Pennsylvania, but Dan Henry would meanwhile hotfoot it over there and take up the slack until they arrived, meeting up with Ty in the hotel next to Scranton airport where the state police had lodged her. Captain Binegar felt comfortable with his decision.

  ‘I felt that these two were the best people for the job. I mean, this was going to be kind of like the Super Bowl,’ he explained in his deposition. ‘You send what I consider to be the best people in.

  ‘Well, I got a call back. There was some dissension as to who was going to go. The group wanted to have Tyria put on a bus … sent down, and then they would all interview her. Well, that’s just not … I mean, that’s just not practical. It’s not good police practice.

  ‘My job through most of this investigation … I spent ninety per cent of my energies keeping everybody from killing each other.’

  Binegar understood all the keen minds who’d worked so hard wanting to stay involved in the high points of the case. He didn’t take it personally. But neither was he swayed.

  In a neatly dove-tailed manoeuvre, Ty’s brother Jackie and Mary Ann Moore had been approached by agents at exactly the same time as Jack Moore was picked up. They were all interviewed separately and given no chance to communicate with one another beforehand, though Mary Ann was joined by Ty’s half-sister, Tracey. Through these family members, officers learned of Tracey’s stay in Florida the previous summer for a period that covered the time of Peter Siems’s disappearance. Tracey confirmed that Lee had appeared with a vehicle like Mr Siems’s. And Mary Ann readily handed over a package and letter addressed to Ty that had recently arrived from Lee. Mary Ann impressed upon the officers how terribly afraid Ty was of Lee.