Lethal Intent

by Sue Russell

  ‘I couldn’t care less about Lee, but I still think a lot of Tyria. But it’s wrong that she knew all of this, and had all of this stuff that didn’t belong to her, and didn’t think she could come to me or somebody else. I thought we were pretty close, too.’

  Sandy ran her theory past Ty: could Lee have felt threatened by her presence? Ty didn’t comment. She was too preoccupied with her own fear. She only prayed that Lee hadn’t killed for the money.

  At first, Cammie Greene felt sorry for Ty when she learned that Ty’s lover was behind bars, but the twinge of sympathy was short-lived. The more she pondered the situation, the more her conviction grew that the two women had been planning this together all along. And she was shocked and full of disbelief that Tyria had gone along with it. Because she must have gone along with it. For all their fondness of Ty, Cammie and Dinky didn’t buy the idea.

  ‘Tyria was strong,’ Cammie recalled. ‘Tyria could take care of herself. One time, you could hear the walls banging and stuff and I opened the door to see what was going on and they were falling around fighting. Tyria told me to get out, that she could handle it.’

  No, Ty hadn’t been scared of Lee. But then, if Lee was killing guys and Ty was the only one who knew about it, perhaps that changed things.

  Cammie also found it hard to believe that Ty would cut Lee off if she tried to tell her she had killed someone. If Lee had told Ty anything like that, she thinks Ty would have believed her and would not have been surprised. She certainly would have believed her and would not have been surprised. And she would have gone to the police.

  Cammie still felt an abiding affection for Ty, despite their ugly parting, yet seeing Lee up on murder charges, she couldn’t help feeling that justice wasn’t being done while Ty walked away scot-free.

  ‘She had to know about it from the beginning. I’m sure that’s what that conversation was about,’ she fretted. The way Cammie looked at it, ‘Ty was tested by God, and failed, because people lost their lives …’

  Cammie could see a certain perverted logic to the whole scenario, though. Neither Lee nor Ty had wanted to make it in the real world. They spurned responsibilities like paying rent and utilities. Lee was getting older and losing her looks. She had nothing saved for her future; no resources to fall back on. Cammie is sure she had the whole thing planned, and that stealing her licence was part of the scheme and a way of involving her.

  Around the time of Lee’s arrest, Cammie had learned of her own dose of unwelcome notoriety for which she had Lee to thank. Police officers and an FBI agent had called at the Publix store where Cammie supervised the meat and cheese sections. They’d found a lot of stolen property in a pawn shop under her name, they said. It was nothing to do with her, of course. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d been in a pawn shop. She was shown photographs of Lee and Ty and asked if she knew them, or had loaned either of them her licence. Cammie identified the pictures and explained that her licence had gone missing years ago. They seemed satisfied, and left.

  Cammie saw Ty’s role in the scheme as largely passive. Possibly nothing more than keeping her mouth shut. And once Ty left for Ohio, Cammie could envisage Lee waiting to get caught. Getting caught wasn’t that big a deal, given her belief that she would get off with self-defence. Cammie thought she knew she’d be labelled a serial killer, but didn’t think she’d get the electric chair:

  ‘Because she was saying that she was going to do something that no woman had ever done before—and that would be being a serial killer.’

  Looking back, other things would fall perturbingly into place. She did bring home an awful lot of cash to have made in prostitution. She wondered, too, about that mysterious white car they’d turned up with the day they’d moved out of her home? Thinking about it, she concluded that Richard Mallory was probably not Lee’s first victim.

  Dick Mills neither read the newspapers nor followed the news on TV, but his daughters, Tammy and Reveshia, upon whom Lee had made such an indelible impression, did. It was they who first heard of the arrest of Dick’s unsavoury companion. Dick, putting together the pieces, realised a call to the cops might be in order. He had a hunch they’d be interested in the storage unit he’d once driven her to.

  Dick, a man of no small temper, wasn’t a bit thrilled to hear that he’d been featured in one of the less salubrious supermarket tabloids, the Globe. He’d spoken to a reporter who represented himself as being from the BBC, and taped an interview for that sterling organisation—only to find the Globe was carrying stills lifted from the tape and a ludicrous story about how he’d wanted to make the serial killer his bride. Livid, he took a yellow highlighter pen to it, marking all the ‘errors’. The article was a blaze of yellow.

  The piece said that Lee had revealed her secret fantasies to Mills, saying that a favourite involved having a black hood put over her head while tied to a tree in a forest.

  ‘Then a guy would come up to her, rape her and then shoot her in the head,’ Mills was quoted as saying. ‘She said the killing would make her climax.’

  Mills said he had talked to a lawyer about taking the Globe to court but was told that unless he could prove financial loss as a result of the story, it wouldn’t be worth his while.

  In fact, Lee did speak of a black hood, of a fantasy that she’d be lying in a cabin up in the mountains and a man would come through the window and have sex with her all night long. A not uncommon fantasy, say psychologists. The mystery, faceless stranger relieving the woman of responsibility for her lustful feelings. In Lee’s case, it was also possible such a fantasy might pertain to subconscious memories of childhood sexual abuse.

  Either way, it is a far cry from the idea that being shot in the head would make her, the victim, climax. The wild story made Dick Mills furious.

  Looking back on his five wild days with Wuornos, Dick would not change his lingering feeling that she was a whole lot brighter than people had her pegged for. He felt that what she had ‘was a whole game she’s running. That’s just what it is to her. And regardless of the outcome … she still plays rather brilliantly. ’

  With Lee’s arrest, the victims’ families had something new to come to terms with, too, and for Letha Prater, Troy Burress’s sister, one of the hard parts was seeing Buddy turn into a faceless statistic, just one of Wuornos’s victims.

  ‘Buddy was not a group, he was a man,’ she explained. ‘A little boy that had a beautiful smile and he had pretty blue eyes. And I saw him grow up, you know? He was a decent person. He had a family. He liked to tell jokes; he had a million jokes. He loved to go home to his horses. This was his life. And it was taken by this person. The other men, too. They had their own lives. Seven slayings. And he’s just a name. If you’re going to give her a personality, give him a personality, too.

  ‘From the word go, she has been nothing but a pain in the neck to anybody that was ever around her. Her childhood is not a concern of mine. My brother is my concern. I’m not concerned about her. My concern is that she die in the electric chair. That’s what I want to happen, and I want to be there when she does.

  ‘It don’t get better. Not with his mother. And it don’t get better with me. I’ve learned how to cope with it.’ She sighs. ‘It’s never going to get any better. You have to try to let go, but it’s hard. I say out loud, “He’s gone. I’m never going to see him again.” I think I have to, because I don’t really want to admit he’s gone, you know? You think, “Maybe that wasn’t him?” I know it was! I just can’t quite say he’s gone.

  ‘And I can’t call him and say, “Hey Bud, my car’s broke down. Will you give me a hand?” “Sure, where you at? Alaska? I’ll be there.” That’s what he would have said. I tried not to abuse that. A lot of people never had that and never will have it, and I miss him, but I am so thankful that I did have that. I had fifty years of unconditional love.’

  She weeps. An escape valve for some of the pain. She loved him so much. And although she has a husband and a daughter, Buddy�
�Buddy had been in her life so much longer. He was her best friend, her best buddy. It is one thing to lose someone you love who becomes sick and dies. But for a man who would not have hurt a soul to meet a violent death is something else again.

  39

  While getting caught may not have been on their agendas—consciously, at any rate—many serial murderers ultimately bask in their notoriety and relish all the attention. For someone very inadequate, which the serial killer most commonly is, to grace the cover of a magazine can prove a heady, seductive experience. A highly appealing perk.

  Aileen Wuornos’s craving for fame was in place long before she got her first taste of media power, indeed, long before she started looking for a writer to work on her autobiography. Cammie Greene could never get out of her mind Lee and Ty’s talk of a mysterious scheme and how Lee said they’d be like Bonnie and Clyde.

  Given Lee’s determination to carve a place for herself in the spotlight, there was considerable irony in the fact that when her long-awaited shining moment in the public eye finally arrived she was overshadowed by global events, namely the Gulf War. Even after the Gulf War ended, her dubiously elite status as possibly the first full-blown woman serial killer didn’t receive the scrutiny or attention one would have expected. She never did command equal time with Jeffrey Dahmer and his cannibalistic killings. While Dahmer’s indescribably heinous crimes scored high on the revulsion scale, Wuornos’s were continually downplayed by the national news.

  The distinction seemed lost on Aileen, however. Behind bars, she revelled in the attention she did get, spouting more grandiosities than ever.

  But the paucity of the coverage was curious none the less. It seemed that scrutinising the actions of the clearly deranged (if not legally insane) Mr Dahmer was much more compelling than analysing what had made a woman like Lee crash through the feminine taboos against violence, aggression and bloodlust.

  Certainly, the public’s imagination was grabbed by Dahmer and the horrifying revelation that police had instead of rescuing a victim who ran to them for help, led him back into Dahmer’s chamber of horrors to meet his death. Wuornos, thankfully, was never so gruesome. But should not the public’s imagination have been equally grabbed by the first woman to go out and kill a string of strangers in cold blood?

  The discrepancy was sufficiently blatant that it begged the question: is the very idea of so cold-blooded a woman killer simply intolerable to many men? Men in droves lambasted the film Thelma and Louise—as if its cathartic enjoyment for women, and smorgasbord of vengeful fantasies, threatened their very beings—so perhaps Aileen Wuornos and the ramifications of her existence were too ugly a prospect to contemplate.

  Women have long been accustomed to their vulnerability, to coexisting with the ever-present fear of being overpowered, to living daily with the need to be careful. For a man, the idea that he might be murdered while with a woman, and perhaps while anticipating sexual pleasure to boot, is anathema.

  ‘If a man who thinks he’s going to get a blow-job is suddenly blown away instead, that’s pretty scary stuff for other men to deal with,’ says filmmaker Jackelyn Giroux, who did a deal with Aileen for her life story rights and who experienced first-hand the reluctance of male film and TV executives to discuss the subject matter.

  Perhaps Wuornos is an extreme symbol of the suspected bottomless pit of women’s rage. Perhaps, in an unwritten, unspoken way, the (predominantly male) media’s collective unconscious decided to ignore her, to give her less air time and column inches, in the hope that she and what she represented would go away.

  Aileen from a very early age was determined to make her mark on the world. And make it she undeniably did. That desire, that need, seems to have been a motivating force in a largely aimless life. With her notoriety comes an immortality, too. Truly lasting fame.

  Over time, Robert Ressler, formerly of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, had come to believe that among male serial killers a desire for notoriety can be subtly motivating.

  ‘I say subtly because what you’ll find … often times, the men who get involved in these types of crimes are very inadequate, unsure people who start feeling an omnipotence and a control over society, and, of course, eventually a recognition as a serial killer. Some of these people actually enjoy the title.’

  It may not be what she had in mind, but, perhaps, one day Lee Wuornos will, too.

  Ironically, in her wish for fame and fortune, Lee could hardly be singled out for criticism. Her methods were, of course, truly abhorrent, but that’s a different story. In looking for the limelight, however, she merely represented the most visible tip of the heap.

  Back on 4 February, Jackelyn Giroux was told that three Marion County law enforcement officers were involved in a script that was in the works on the case and were supposedly involved in a deal with CBS and Republic Pictures. That very day Giroux heard the same story a second time from a Lorimar TV executive with whom she was discussing her own script. Could three officers be involved in a movie deal so soon after the arrest and so far before trial? Giroux learned from Brian Jarvis, the man who had supervised the major crimes unit when the investigation began, that he’d been moved sideways allegedly to make room for others. There were question marks, too, about the integrity of the investigation. Ty Moore was rumoured to be involved in the deal, too. Had she been let off the hook because playing her as the innocent made a better story? Had Lee Wuornos become the fall guy?

  Suddenly, the story of the three cops and their alleged movie deal became big news, and as the scandal took on a life of its own, Sergeant Bruce Munster, Captain Steve Binegar and Major Dan Henry would each come to rue the day they’d heard the names of Aileen Wuornos and Tyria Moore.

  There was Geraldo Rivera’s Now It Can Be Told producer, Linda Sawyer, doggedly sniffing around town pursuing her story on Hollywood perhaps interfering with the course of justice.

  There was Jackelyn Giroux on the warpath because she believed she’d been discriminated against. Everywhere she went in Hollywood, she was told that they couldn’t read her script or do her movie because of the ‘three cops’, Republic Pictures, and CBS. Yet, officially, that deal was a figment of someone’s imagination. Everyone denied such a deal existed.

  To Giroux, hearing those repeated denials uttered while film industry folk kept telling her a script was being developed, was maddening. Signing up Wuornos’s life story rights by 30 January, just three weeks after her arrest, had been an enterprising if controversial achievement on Giroux’s part. (It was through Giroux, whom I knew from her days as a photojournalist, although our paths had not crossed in a decade, that I first learned of Aileen Wuornos.)

  She pulled it off with the help of attorney Russell Armstrong, to whom she was referred by Lee’s then defence attorney, Ray Cass. Jackye’s passion was to tell the child abuse story that she suspected must have led to the killings. Pursuing her movie, Jackye would be accused of glorifying a killer and lining that killer’s prison jumpsuit pockets. And when she received a letter from the office of Florida’s Attorney-General, Robert Butterworth, she was frankly amazed.

  She was, of course, already aware of the Son of Sam law, prohibiting a criminal from profiting from their crime, so was not surprised to learn that the State of Florida would attempt to put a lien on any money Lee might make. (Lee did not take this news so well and had in fact called Jackye, hysterical, a few days earlier, after receiving a similar letter.) It was a bridge Giroux had decided to cross when she came to it. But meanwhile she couldn’t help wondering about these three officers and their potential profits.

  She felt there was a little housecleaning that needed to be done in Florida before anyone chastised her. She was a professional filmmaker, this was her job. What were cops doing, pretrial, talking about a deal with a woman like Tyria? Tyria may have been the prosecution’s potential star witness, but she was no paragon of virtue. She had known about the murders and could have saved lives. She hadn’t been arrested even though she’
d gone back to Ohio with some of the dead men’s possessions.

  In fact, Tyria fell into a shadowy area of US law. Prosecuting her wouldn’t have been quite as easy as everyone imagined, according to Ric Ridgway, who would have been the man to do it in Marion County. Ty wasn’t an aider and abettor or a principal, who knew in advance of the murders, and assisted in the planning and carrying out of the crimes. So that was out. To charge her with being an accessory after the fact would require her to have done something to cover up the criminal’s crime, or to help the criminal get away, or to have knowingly taken stolen property. Therein lay the rub. Ty was adamant that while she may have suspected, she did not have actual knowledge of the crimes, and it would have been tough to prove otherwise. In some states it is a crime to know of a homicide and not to go to the police. But under Florida law, to know what Lee had done and not to tell, did not actually constitute a crime.

  Given the consensus that she neither encouraged nor participated in the murders, she was left alone.

  Ultimately, of course, she had, however belatedly, also played what was viewed as a crucial role in bringing Wuornos to justice. She was a little fish, used to reel in a bigger fish. A common tactic. Everyone denied that she’d been given any kind of a deal or immunity. Nevertheless, the fact that Ty walked away and might end up making money from a movie bothered many. It seemed downright unfair.

  Then when it came out that Ty was supposedly involved in some fashion with the three police officers and their possible movie deal, her not being prosecuted was viewed with even greater suspicion.

  Most damning of all for the ‘three cops’: there was Sergeant Brian Jarvis, one of their very own brotherhood, popping up on TV and tossing lighter fuel on the fire. He had been elbowed out, he claimed, to make room for glory-seekers who suddenly smelled fame and fortune and wanted to be in on the triumphant arrest.