Lethal Intent

by Sue Russell

  Larry Horzepa had snapped to attention the minute he received a phone call summoning him to the operations centre. As he pulled into the parking lot, Sergeant Jake Erhardt greeted him with news that was music to his ears: ‘Wuornos wants to talk to local investigators, and you and Bruce Munster are going to go on over there and speak to her.’

  Jerry Thompson was originally lined up to do the all-important interview with Munster, but since Wuornos was being housed in Volusia’s jail, one interviewer needed to be local. Horzepa, the Mallory expert, was the natural choice to supplement Munster, who had an overview of all the homicides from his task force work.

  Munster’s adrenalin should also have been pumping at what was, by anyone’s standards, a career highpoint, yet he felt as sick as a dog. Struggling under the effects of flu, he fantasised about being tucked up in bed. Who’d want to conduct the ultimate, crucial interview feeling like that? Just his bad luck.

  Outwardly calm, Larry Horzepa was nevertheless on full alert as he finally came face to face with the woman he believed had killed Richard Mallory. Horzepa gave great credit to Ty Moore’s contribution for having brought them thus far. Had Lee not been utterly convinced that pressure was being brought to bear on her beloved Ty’s family, and that police had been in Ohio ‘harassing’ them, he strongly suspects Lee might now still be languishing in jail without having spoken a single incriminating word.

  Horzepa was reasonably confident that Ty had not played an active role in at least Mallory’s homicide, but didn’t see her as lily-white either, and was decidedly curious to hear what Lee would say on that score. Had Ty been covering up for her? Had she sold any of the victims’ property or helped Lee out somehow?

  Interviewing Ty between the crucial phone calls, he’d been struck by her matter-of-factness. As far as he could tell, she’d been truthful. Everything he tried to verify checked out. ‘I felt that she was giving a hundred per cent when she was talking to us,’ he recalls.

  Then again, she came across like a woman who had control over her own life: ‘I really didn’t see her being manipulated by Lee.’

  His prime agenda that afternoon was to do everything in his power to ensure that when Lee Wuornos walked into court the case would be watertight. He wanted the jury weighing the facts to have not a shadow of doubt that it was she who’d ended Mallory’s life. He wanted them to realise, as he did, that she possessed the kind of detailed information that could only have come from the murderer.

  Events were suddenly moving fast, but the interview strategy had been carefully planned. Two inquisitors seemed the optimum number with which to get the best out of a delicate situation. They didn’t need too many voices chiming in. It would be too distracting. Besides, extra officers might make her more apprehensive. They definitely wanted her as calm and relaxed as possible.

  Horzepa and Munster faced an enviable challenge but a somewhat daunting task in confronting this alleged serial killer. The pressure was on: they had to deliver the goods. While all indications pointed to her being ready to spill the beans, no one knew her true state of mind or quite what might happen once she faced two officers in an interview room. This apparent willingness and resolve to come clean to save Ty’s skin might be very shaky indeed. One wrong word could make her clam up.

  If she requested a public defender and heeded their inevitable advice not to say any more on the grounds that what she did say might incriminate her, the whole thing could all be over in a flash. Bang might go their only bite at talking to her directly.

  Horzepa and Munster were in total accord on one thing: they needed to cover their rear ends in every which way possible. If Lee Wuornos did confess, they didn’t want to leave themselves vulnerable to the slightest suggestion of impropriety later as to just how that confession was elicited. Gearing themselves up for what inevitably would be a potentially controversial piece of evidence in terms of its admissibility, they took the precaution of having the videotape and audio recorders whirring when they and Wuornos first walked into the empty interview room.

  The tape began with a close-up on an empty chair and the officers introducing themselves to Lee. (Larry Horzepa, of course, had arrested her outside the Last Resort but she apparently did not recognise him.) This introduction ritual would have been ludicrous had Munster and Horzepa already spent time with Lee, and would become important later.

  Sauntering in, their casual demeanours belied the full agendas they carried close to their chests. Including their own cases, they were questioning on a total of eight homicides in which Lee was a suspect.

  Richard Mallory.

  Troy Burress.

  David Spears.

  Dick Humphreys.

  Charles Carskaddon.

  Walter Gino Antonio.

  There were also the two disappearances where cars had been found but no bodies. Peter Siems, and Curtis Reid (the Titusville man who went missing in September), might or might not have met tragic ends at the hands of Wuornos. (The case of Douglas Giddens, the Marion County victim with the .38 bullet to the head, had been solved. Someone else had killed him.)

  Privately, Munster thought Reid’s disappearance was probably unconnected. His Olds Ciera had been dirty and the car keys were found under the seat, yet it was found parked near an interstate system. That much fitted the picture. Other things bothered Munster, however. Reid’s car was found in a shopping mall lot. Wuornos generally tried to hide cars in the woods or some other out-of-the-way spot.

  More crucial, to him, was that she’d driven Walter Gino Antonio’s maroon Grand Prix during the same time span. How could she drive two cars at once? But he knew enough to know that nothing could be taken for granted or assumed. She couldn’t be eliminated from Reid’s case.

  As they began, the investigators had no clue what was in store, but as the interview got under way, Horzepa felt a small surge of confidence. It seemed clear that ‘she was relieved that we knew, and that she just basically wanted to get it over with’. He could hardly fathom the stress of keeping such crimes buried inside her.

  Sure enough, Lee did exercise her right to have a lawyer present. Larry Horzepa swiftly excused himself and put in an urgent call to the public defender’s office. They promised to dispatch an attorney, and fast. While they waited, Lee’s verbal diarrhoea continued, confirming Horzepa’s belief about her need to get it off her chest.

  He and Munster, meanwhile, sat back and listened, mindful of the fine line they were treading, hands metaphorically shackled behind their backs. Their goal was to interact with Lee just enough to sustain her mood of cooperation. But it was imperative that they didn’t question her about the crimes. More than once, the officers interrupted her self-incriminating chatter: ‘Lee, let me stop you just a second,’ Munster said at one point. ‘You know, you’ve exercised your right to have an attorney here and maybe you shouldn’t be talking about these things.’

  Inadvertently adding a little levity to the proceedings, Munster brought Lee some coffee in a mug bearing the slogan ‘If it feels good, do it. If it feels great, do it again.’ Reading it aloud, Lee laughed.

  ‘I guess I should have read it before I brought it in,’ Munster said wryly.

  ‘That’s fine sexually,’ Lee added. ‘But don’t go around killing somebody when you don’t have to.’

  When Mr O’Neill appeared, sporting an Irish brogue you could cut with a blunt butter knife, he cautioned Lee that these investigators were not her friends, but were police officers doing their jobs. He consulted with her privately but his repeated attempts to show her the wisdom of silence (at one point, hammered home in a marathon forty-minute session) were brushed aside with complete lack of interest. Lee was hell-bent on giving the interview whatever he said. Would Lee like him to stay or leave? She didn’t care.

  What followed was a certainly voluntary confession that, despite off-the-record breaks when O’Neill periodically talked further to Lee, gave birth to three hours of videotape. What propelled Lee was difficult to miss. Over
and over, she reiterated her desire to clear Tyria, to distance her lover from her crimes. Ty didn’t know those cars were the cars of dead people, she claimed. She’d told her she borrowed them. She didn’t know anything, other than what she’d heard Lee mumble or murmur in her drunken state which could all have been lies. She had told her about Richard Mallory and the body beneath the rug because she knew she’d see it on the news. ‘I was trying to be a show-off is what I was doing,’ she said. Apparently, to Lee, murder was an achievement to brag about.

  The session rambled, veering somewhat chaotically from victim to victim, with the detectives struggling to keep it on a comprehensible track and to pin down the key elements they needed. Horzepa’s focus was on Mallory, of course. It was his jurisdiction and would probably be the first and a crucial case. Lee’s own testimony could provide a massive missing piece in what seemed an astonishingly complex puzzle. He wanted to hear everything that transpired that night between her and Mallory and he told her to take her time telling it.

  She claimed that it was only in the past year she seemed to have hit all these problems with guys giving her a hassle.

  ‘People just started messin’ with me … they just started comin’ like flies on shit, startin’ to mess with me,’ she said.

  What would turn out to be crucial later was that at no time did Lee claim that Mr Mallory had beaten, raped or brutalised her.

  ‘In my sixteen years of law enforcement experience,’ Larry Horzepa later reflected, ‘any time that I’ve dealt with a rape victim, or a victim of a violent crime, the first thing that comes out—after being able to positively identify the person that did it—they’d give me a very descriptive, exact, detailed account of what happened to them. And she never did that in any of the cases.’

  If anything, this suspected serial killer seemed singularly unaffected by her plight and by the stories she told detectives. Bruce Munster and Larry Horzepa registered, without showing it on their faces, the truly chilling measure of her dissociation. Horzepa wanted to pin her down as much as possible. ‘Let me ask you something, Lee. Uh, you said that you carried the gun for protection. Is that correct?’

  ‘Yeah. Yes.’

  ‘OK. Uh, from all the shootings that you have told us about, for the most part, you’ve always gotten the drop on these guys. You’ve been able to get your gun and point it at them.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘OK. At that particular time, you were in control. Why didn’t you just run? Why didn’t you …’

  ‘Because I was always basically totally nude with my shoes off and everything and I wasn’t gonna run through the woods and briars and the …’ her voice trailed off.

  ‘No, but still. Like I say, you’re in control. You got that gun. You could go ahead and get dressed while you had, you know, them do whatever you basically wanted. Why did you go ahead and shoot these people?’

  ‘Because they physically fought with me and I was … well, I guess I was afraid, ’cause they were physically fighting with me and I … what am I supposed to do, you know? Hold the gun there until I get dressed and now I’m gonna walk outta here? When the guy, you know, might … you know, run me over with his truck or might come back when I’m walking out of the woods or something … uh, have a gun on him, too, or something. I didn’t know if they had a gun or not.’

  ‘So was it … was it your intent, during each of these times, to kill this person so that they couldn’t come back at you later?’

  ‘’Cause I didn’t know if they had a gun or anything. I … once I got my gun I was like, “Hey, man, I’ve gotta shoot you ’cause I think you’re gonna kill me.” See?’

  ‘What about the ones who didn’t have a gun, like Mr Mallory? ’

  ‘I didn’t know they had … didn’t have a gun.’

  ‘OK,’ said Horzepa, ‘so you were taking no chances.’

  Among the many muddled story strands Lee gave the two investigators was a lead on the missing Peter Siems. She told them that she’d dumped his body somewhere up in Georgia, but even with aid of a map, she was unable to remember where.

  (Criminal Intelligence Analyst, Claudia Swain, who had already enlisted the FBI’s help in searching for all unidentified bodies reported by law enforcement agencies between November 1989 and January 1991, compared their data with Wuornos’s input, but drew a blank, too.)

  By the conclusion of their interview, despite the repeated warnings of public defender O’Neill, Lee had effectively incriminated herself in seven homicides.

  The investigators knew, however, that there was a good chance that there might be more victims out there; victims who might never be discovered.

  Mary Ann was still terribly shocked and upset when Henry got there. She just couldn’t believe that her stepdaughter was mixed up in something like this. Tracey was also distraught. But they were both cooperative, and Tracey presented Henry with a pair of scissors which had come from Lee and a Sea World brochure from her visit there in Siems’s car.

  On 17 January, a dive team finally recovered Lee’s nine-shot .22 calibre revolver from the bottom of Rose Bay where it lay in a suitcase along with a set of handcuffs and a flashlight.

  Also on the 17th, Sheriff Moreland notified the press that the 13-month-long investigation was over and that Aileen Carol Wuornos had been charged with one count of first-degree murder. Other charges were pending.

  On the night of 18 January, just two days after Lee’s confession, correctional officer Susan Hansen was perched on a chair outside her room, watching her through the glass. Lee’s every word, cough or bathroom visit was being logged while she was on 15-minute watch in the medical segregation unit which was occasionally used to isolate an inmate. (She was not ill, but had at the time been prescribed a mild tranquilliser.) Susan Hansen, like her colleagues, had been instructed not to initiate any conversations with their celebrated inmate, but merely to document whatever she said. They were to restrict their comments to ‘Here’s your food’ or ‘Do you need to take a shower?’

  Medic Robert John Heaton III, a staff nurse, somehow missed that briefing, however. When he walked back to the filing cabinets to retrieve a chart, he noticed Wuornos poring over the local Daytona paper’s story about her, making comments and laughing. Struck by how cheerful she was, he asked her if any of what was printed was true? Not all of it, said Lee, claiming that she and Ty had been together six years, not four. Was she really a working girl, Heaton asked? Both Heaton and Hansen looked a little aghast as Lee boasted of having had over 250,000 men in the past nine years.

  When Heaton left, Lee, who was standing with one foot propped on the room’s open toilet, asked Susan Hansen if she’d read the story too? Hansen hadn’t, but that didn’t stop Lee chatting on for hours without encouragement. Hansen struggled to keep up, taking notes as she spoke. When Lee asked if she was going to report their conversation, she merely shrugged noncommittally. She was afraid to say anything because she’d been explicitly briefed not to.

  Instead, she jotted the crucial words and phrases Wuornos uttered. Lee spoke, specifically, of shooting the guy with the .45 (Charles Carskaddon). If she hadn’t killed him, he would have killed other people. Hansen just listened. And some of what Lee said lodged permanently in her brain. She would remember it, with or without notes. At one point, Lee said: ‘I figured if these guys lived and I got fried for attempted murder, I thought, fuck it, I might as well get fried for murder instead.’ She reported one victim as saying, ‘I’m going to die. Oh, my God, I’m dying.’

  Hansen also reported Lee saying that she was doing some good, killing these guys because otherwise they’d have hurt someone else:

  ‘I had lots of guys, maybe ten to twelve a day. I could have killed all of them, but I didn’t want to. I’m really just a nice person. I’m describing a normal day to you here, but a killing day would be just about the same. On a normal day we would just do it by the side of the road if they just wante
d [oral sex] or behind a building or maybe just off the road in the woods if they wanted it all.

  ‘On a killing day, those guys always wanted to go way, way back in the woods. Now I know why they did it: they were gonna hurt me.’

  Hansen noticed that Lee was almost jovial, laughing easily. And she seemed calm, not sad.

  ‘Never once,’ Hansen reported, ‘did she say, “I’m upset about this.”’

  Reflecting on the confession, Bruce Munster felt it had been curiously anticlimactic. Lee had held no great surprises for him, somehow. He rated her a smart criminal, well above average. Her curiosity about how she had been caught was largely intellectual; like that of a professional, interested in why a plan hadn’t worked as expected. She’d forgotten the thumbprint on the pawn shop receipt. His theory was that her motive was purely monetary.

  ‘She’s a pretty rough-looking girl right now, but if you look at the pictures of her when she was younger, she was an attractive young lady. I think she was able to get money, either hustling, scamming the guys out of it, or as a prostitute.

  ‘The latter years, she’s pretty rough looking, she’s drinking. She’s obnoxious when she drinks. I don’t know where you draw the line. Is it one beer, two beers, three beers, a six-pack, a twelve-pack, or whatever? But at some point in time, when she’s drinking, she’s obnoxious. She needs money. She’s got bills that she has to pay, just like she said. She needs the money, and I think that she took these men out and she killed them. She definitely says she killed to eliminate the witnesses. She says, “You don’t understand. I couldn’t do my job. If I didn’t kill these guys, I couldn’t do my job.” Why? “Because the cops would have my face plastered up everywhere, and I couldn’t work.”’

  Larry Horzepa observed that ‘She ran through the gamut of emotions. She went from basically almost defiant, all the way to crying. My personal opinion is that there was no doubt or no mistaking what she did. I have no doubt at all that she meant to kill these people. But as far as remorse? There was no remorse I could detect.’