by Sue Russell
The overriding impression to strike Horzepa was the way she tried to justify what she had done, claiming none of it was her fault. She’d been backed into a corner by Ty, and since she had no choice but to talk to officers in great and incriminating detail, she seemed determined to try to show herself in the best possible light. Larry Horzepa had this sense of the underlying message: ‘It was like, “Hey, I’ve had a terrible childhood. This is rough, and none of this is my fault. I’m just a victim of my upbringing, and these people deserved it because they were trying to hurt me.”’
He did not doubt that she was the product of her environment, but he was no bleeding heart for Lee Wuornos. He felt her crimes were planned.
‘She had her mind made up. I have no doubt about that … that there was something that occurred between these men and her that made her decide that these men were going to die. And, you know, there was absolutely no doubt in her mind that she was going to do this, everything from wiping down the cars to getting rid of the evidence in different locations. And she was going to do everything in her power not to get caught, so that she could continue to enjoy her freedom.’
He was puzzled and intrigued by what set her off after not 250,000 men but ‘I’ll conservatively say hundreds’, and spent many long hours pondering why. But there were no concrete answers.
‘For someone to talk about going out and doing their job as a prostitute and then going ahead and differentiating between having a regular business day with customers and a killing day, you know. Obviously when someone is in a mind-set of “I’m going to kill today” then as far as I’m concerned, they’ve got it planned out. They know exactly what they’re going to do, how they’re going to do it, and where they’re going to do it. It’s just a matter of picking the person that they’ve decided is going to fall prey.’
38
Even though the suspect was behind bars, FDLE agents systematically combed through the list of men whose business cards had the dubious honour of taking pride of place in Lee’s wallet. None belonged to cops, despite her repeated boasts, but each card owner had a story to tell.
She had told George Trujillo, who gave her a ride in his truck in the spring of 1988, that she was hitchhiking to Fort Myers to pick up a Corvette. He couldn’t remember giving her a business card and suspected she must have taken it. ‘That’s her!’ he said, picking Lee out of the photopack special agents Walter Rice and James Brady showed him.
She flagged down Joe Palak in Pasco County in the summer of ’89. It was on 52 just past a traffic accident, which is why he was moving slowly enough for her to bend down and knock on the passenger window, asking for a ride to I-75. Spotting the holster he had in his car by the console, she asked if he was a cop. The holster might explain why she didn’t proposition him sexually and seemed in a hurry. Palak also picked Lee out in a photopack line-up.
Pompie Carnley picked her up in the spring of 1990 on I-75 and I-4, the same junction where Richard Mallory picked her up. It was raining. He didn’t think she looked like a hooker or a hobo, so he took her back to his home for a couple of beers, then invited her to ride with him further up I-75. During that leg of the journey, he claimed she repeatedly offered sex for money. Her car had broken down in Sarasota, and she needed $200. Could he help her out? She would do anything for the money. He turned her down but the requests didn’t stop until he showed her his empty wallet. He kept a pile of loose change in the car, to which she helped herself.
At the intersection of US 98 and 19, she asked him to turn south on 19, then instructed him to turn down a side road where they stopped after twenty-five yards or so to answer a call of nature. Making it sound like some kind of werewolf-like transition, Carnley, a veteran of Vietnam and Korea, then claims that Lee changed before his very eyes and as she came around the back of his jeep behind him, the hairs on the back of his neck jumped up on end. He had to get out of there, so he hopped in the Jeep and drove away, leaving Lee just standing there.
They were within half a mile of the area where David Spears’ body was found on 1 June 1990.
In February ’91, Jim Brady and Walter Rice also interviewed Dennis Sobczak, the man who’d reported his .38 stolen by Lori Grody back in 1985. He couldn’t pick her out of a photopack; it had been too long.
After Lee’s arrest, newspapers reported how she’d slept in a drunken stupor on the old tan car seat on the porch outside the Last Resort on her last night of freedom. And a handful of women, heartbroken over missing husbands, descended on the biker bar clutching photographs of their men, hoping someone had seen them. Sad, Cannonball thought. But he didn’t recognise a single one of them.
When Lee Wuornos was newly behind bars, Lori Grody’s 8 a.m. lunch break (she did shift work) was interrupted when her boss told her that four policemen were outside asking to speak with her. Immediately, she thought it must have something to do with Aileen. ‘I knew I didn’t do nothing wrong, and who else is there? I thought, “Oh, shoot!”’
Nervously, she went into the office to meet them. It seemed to Lori that the two senior officers, Detective-Sergeants Leonard Goretski and Gregory Somers, were inexplicably cheerful and smiley as they enquired whether she had a sister named Aileen Wuornos.
‘Yes. Is she dead?’ asked Lori. Her first thought was that they were there to tell her that her sister had ended up in the bottom of a ditch somewhere, having finally hitched the wrong ride. In the months before the police picked her up at work, because it had been so long since she’d heard from Aileen, Lori had taken to scanning the newspaper’s deaths column, half expecting to read that a transient girl had been shot or killed. Usually the calls from Aileen came every year or so. It had been so long, she must be dead.
‘No, she’s not dead,’ the officers replied, still very cordial.
‘I take it she’s in trouble?’
‘Yeah.’
The officers had Lori accompany them to the police station in Traverse City some forty miles away, where they quizzed her about Aileen’s visits to Michigan. They declined to enlighten her any further about what was going on. Aileen hadn’t yet been arrested or formally charged, they explained. They couldn’t elaborate in case Lori opened her mouth and told anyone. In her usual passive fashion, Lori didn’t push. But during the four-hour interview, their line of questioning about Aileen’s troubled past led her to speculate. If Aileen wasn’t dead, perhaps she had killed somebody? While it was a truly preposterous and irrational line of thought for most sisters, to Lori it seemed almost logical. She did learn that Aileen had stolen her i.d. years earlier and had been using it in Florida with her own picture imprinted on a driver’s licence in Lori’s name.
‘They said they knew who I was, but they had to prove it because she’d used my i.d. when she was arrested. I had a list in Florida against my name with so many tickets she had and arrests. They said the way to clear my name was to prove who I was with fingerprints and credit cards.’
Meanwhile, Ervin’s aunt, who worked with Lori, had telephoned his parents who in turn called Erv at work to let him know his wife had been taken in for questioning. Erv telephoned Traverse City. ‘My wife was abducted from work tonight by four policemen,’ he said. An officer quickly came on the line to reassure him. They didn’t believe Lori was in any trouble; she was just helping them with their enquiries.
‘I hadn’t hung up the phone more than ten minutes, when four of them were right at the house,’ Erv recalls. ‘Two of them were left with me, and the others took off.’ He had no better luck than his wife in eliciting information. When the Grodys were reunited later that night, they spent a fitful, sleepless night.
The next day, Erv was interviewed again at work. He was shown his wife’s ‘rap sheet’ from Florida. He thought back to the day Lori had been stopped for driving with a headlight out. The officer planned to run a check on her, but was interrupted by a call for an accident down the road. Erv realised Lori could easily have been arrested.
After everything they’d been t
hrough with Aileen, nothing could have prepared them for the moment they heard that the police believed that Lori’s troubled sister had been involved in multiple murders.
Stunned, Lori didn’t want to believe a word, and at first she didn’t. Ultimately, it was TV that made the horror of it all sink in. Even so, there was something surreal about hearing that Aileen was suspected of murdering seven men. The first two reports Lori saw didn’t carry Aileen’s photograph, then suddenly, the third did. Up popped Aileen’s face looking so terrible, so manly, so rough and rugged, her skin all pitted, that Lori could barely believe it was her. Watching in her bedroom, Lori broke down, her body racked with sobs. She felt anger, fear and shame, humiliation and guilt. The hardest emotions in the world collided and all began their painful procession.
For shell-shocked Lori, hearing her long-lost sister’s voice on the other end of the line, calling from jail, was the next emotional assault. Within moments, all her fury at Aileen for bringing disgrace on the family, for shattering her life, all their lives, bubbled like bile to the surface. She could hardly hold it back.
Aileen, on the other hand, sounded soft and gentle—if not exactly remorseful. Repeatedly, she denied to Lori that she was guilty of the murders.
‘I know what you did, and all you have to do is just admit it!’ Lori cried in exasperation. ‘Admit what you did and get the trials over with. And you’ll probably get the electric chair!’
‘Who told you that?’ Aileen demanded agitatedly.
‘Nobody. To me, it just seems automatic after murdering so many men that you’ll get the electric chair.’
‘Don’t listen to the news reports and don’t listen to other people, ’ Aileen advised her.
Lori soon realised that Aileen simply didn’t grasp the fact that she was in deep, deep trouble. Clearly, she was not prepared for the possible eventuality of being sentenced to death. If anything, it sounded to Lori as if she truly expected to be set free and let back out on the streets at any moment. The more Aileen talked, the more Lori’s frustration mounted. Obviously, she didn’t think she’d done anything terribly bad. If anything, she seemed to think she’d done some good. Putting her behind bars clearly had been a major mistake that would quickly be rectified.
To Lori, she sounded like a child being slapped on the wrist for doing something wrong, who takes the slap fully expecting that then all will immediately be forgiven.
‘It was like she knew, but she didn’t know,’ Lori recalled. ‘I think her mind is so messed up, she’s not dealing with reality.’
Another call followed shortly after, but Aileen’s mood had done an about-face. The conversation was laced with screaming abuse. To Lori, it was the last straw from this sister who had caused her so much pain.
‘Don’t call here again!’ she shouted finally, exasperated and furious.
‘I won’t!’ Aileen retorted.
And she didn’t. She wrote instead. But the letters from those first days in jail were equally dramatic in their contrasts. Sisterly love and nostalgia one minute, ready to meet her maker the next, followed by anger and venom. For all the lashing out and hateful words they exchanged, however, Lori never seriously doubted Aileen’s deep affection for her.
It was telling that when she was arrested, one of her very few personal possessions in the whole world was a letter from Lori, written way back in 1975, which had somehow survived with her the intervening years. From town to town, sleeping rough, hustling, living one day to the next, she’d clung to that letter. In it, Lori had given directions to her home in Mancelona. Symbolically, to Aileen it represented tangible evidence that somebody wanted her. Perhaps for that reason alone she’d kept it close to her heart through thick and thin.
‘I don’t care what she says, I think she still loves me dearly,’ Lori observes. ‘That letter was the only thing she had left from family to hang onto. That’s a long time to keep a letter, and living the life she lived, it’s amazing that anything survived all her travels, isn’t it?’
In the first days after Aileen’s arrest, Lori had limited capacity for such reflection, however. She was consumed with terror about how her friends and workmates would react. What if everyone looked the other way or turned their backs when she walked into a room? What if her sons were ridiculed at school, or treated like outcasts? How would she bear it if everyone ostracised them, or her and Erv? In reality, she found everyone worlds more supportive than she could ever have hoped. All her fears proved unfounded. No one judged her or blamed her. In fact, no one even broached the subject unless she did so first.
‘People know it’s not my fault, and I didn’t do it, and I’m not her,’ she muses. ‘But I couldn’t believe it, because I went to work just like this—bawling my eyes out—because I didn’t know what they’d do, and they were so nice.’
All the same, she felt reluctant to contact any of their old childhood friends. Perhaps they wouldn’t like hearing from her? Maybe they wouldn’t want anything to do with it, or her. She certainly wasn’t keen on talking about it any more than she had to. Whenever she did, it was like a dam bursting, and she just cried and cried. Couldn’t stop herself. She was only thankful her mother wasn’t still around. It would have truly broken her heart.
Shame crept over her, deeper and more painful than she could ever have imagined. Lori was so ashamed that Aileen knocked down her ex-husband, Lewis Fell, that she couldn’t bring herself to admit to the police that that was what had happened. Instead, when questioned, she simply perpetuated Aileen’s lie that he’d attacked her. And if she found that well nigh impossible to swallow, this went beyond anything she could describe.
If there was ever a time in Lori’s life when she might have gladly relegated Aileen to the position of being her niece, this surely was it. But, no. Murderer or no, Aileen would always be her sister.
As the weeks and months slipped by, Lori found herself running the full spectrum of feelings, plagued by a traffic of conflicting emotions. It was all so confusing. Sometimes she felt she hated Aileen when her head swam with thoughts of the victims and their families and what they’d all suffered. At other times, she just cried and cried and she’d realise that the tears she was shedding were for Aileen. Still loving her. Feeling sorry for her. Wondering what she could or should have done for her to make her life turn out differently. Waiting for news that she can’t help feeling is inevitable: that Aileen has killed herself in prison. Wondering why it had to be this way.
‘I still cry that we rejected her when she was little. The times she wanted to play and we wouldn’t let her,’ she reflects, her eyes brimming with tears.
She can’t help feeling that had Aileen’s uncontrollable tantrums and outbursts happened in the more psychologically enlightened eighties or nineties, rather than the sixties and seventies, someone might have paid attention to the danger signs, and Aileen might have gotten some psychiatric help.
‘I think it started when she was little and I think there’s always been something wrong up there,’ says Lori, tapping her forehead.
At times, she’d feel a strong impulse to contact Aileen, but she’d quash the urge, still bound by her inhibitions about how she’s perceived by others.
‘It’s image,’ she admits. ‘If I go see her, what are people going to think?’
Swallowing hard, she gives voice to the most difficult words of all—her opinion that her sister should die in the electric chair.
‘I still love her, but there is no help for her. Not any more. No pills, no people to talk to. Even if they declared her insane, it wouldn’t help for her to go somewhere or be locked away. I think she needs to be gone to relieve her own mind. Even though she may not believe that. Because I think if she ever got out, she’d do it again.
‘The way her mind is about men, anyway, that’s never going to change. Not after all these years. I think she should [die] just to end her own life and end her misery, because it’s never going to get any better now. Seems like if I was in her shoes I wou
ld want to die, just knowing what I did.’
In Ormond Beach, a stunned Sandy Russell had a lot of thinking to do. ‘Oh God!’ she thought, appalled. ‘I’ve been sitting in the same room with this woman who killed all these people!’
Groping to understand what Lee had done, Sandy’s mind worked overtime. If Lee killed Richard Mallory, she did it a few days after that first Thanksgiving Dinner when they met. She’d known Lee was uncomfortable around her at first. Could Lee have thought she was going to take Ty away from her? None of it made sense.
Tyria’s role in the whole business was what Sandy had to fathom. Instinctively, Sandy felt sure that her friend couldn’t possibly have been a party to murder, or have played any kind of active role. Never. Not possible. If anyone was able to prove to her that Tyria did have some involvement, ‘I would really be shocked!’ she said emphatically. ‘I really don’t think she could pull anything like that.’
Nevertheless, she still had to face some harsh realisations. Ty’s complicity bothered her greatly.
‘She knew what was going on and didn’t do anything about her. She maybe could have saved somebody’s life. Maybe several lives. That bothers me. I always thought Ty was stronger than that, that she could have done something. But you don’t know how a person like Lee is to live with.’
Once Lee was behind bars, Ty telephoned Sandy; a call that took some courage.
‘She was real shaky,’ Sandy recalls. ‘I guess she didn’t know how I was going to react. I still care about her as a friend. I wanted to know why she couldn’t come to me, and why she let this go on without doing anything. That’s why I talked to her. I asked her all that. She said she was afraid of Lee and what she might do.’
Exactly why Ty was in fear of Lee mystified Sandy. ‘That’s what I couldn’t understand. As much as Lee was in love with Tyria … and Ty was a pretty strong person. How could she be afraid of Lee?