by Sue Russell
Within the department, the story went differently, of course. Jarvis had been moved because he wasn’t performing. Whereas he’d claimed that the computer program he devised came up with the four names ultimately responsible for locating the two suspects, there was another side to the story. The counter-attack was that he’d ignored an earlier warning about spending undue amounts of time fiddling with computer programs, his great love, rather than keeping abreast of his investigation work. Certainly, Jarvis’s claim to have been the first person to have realised that the killer or killers were female, seemed debatable.
In any event, he went out on a limb and started lobbing hand grenades back into his old department. Amidst a flurry of charges of sour grapes, he kept repeating his charges that evidence that suggested Tyria Moore’s presence at one or more crime scenes was not followed up on. Usual procedure, he maintained, would have been to investigate those leads to the full before letting Tyria off the hook in return for testifying against her lover. Those three cops, he felt, had other motives for not following through, and weren’t interested in pursuing those leads that might implicate Tyria Moore because she was more valuable to the movie as an innocent party.
Ignoring evidence for monetary motives was a serious charge. It was ugly, all of it, and it wasn’t going away.
Why, Brian Jarvis wanted to know, had Dan Henry emerged from his usual supervisory stance to leap on planes and conduct the hands-on investigation in Ohio? (Jarvis wasn’t alone in that observation, even within the ranks of law enforcement.) Jarvis and Jackelyn Giroux contended that Henry was playing a more colourful part with one eye on the future screenplay.
Captain Steve Binegar, an ex-FBI man, had fallen into the role of team commander on the Wuornos investigation. While there was no formal chain of command in effect between the different agencies people looked to Steve because of his rank. And when he and Henry went off on what might very easily have turned out to be a wild goose chase, eyebrows were raised all around. It seemed amazing that they were leaving the ship without a captain. Binegar later maintained that it wasn’t unusual for him to travel on a major homicide case. (Binegar was also a close personal friend of Major Henry’s; indeed it was Dan Henry who recruited him back from the FBI.)
Ultimately, Brian Jarvis’s charges seemed shaky. Anita Armstrong, for instance, the cashier at the Speedway store in Wildwood, whose account (which put Ty in the vicinity of Dick Humphreys) he claimed had not been properly investigated, was discredited.
There was a fatal flaw in her eyewitness account that effectively demolished her credibility. One of the two women she’d seen that she believed matched the drawings was, she thought, black. By anyone’s standards, this was no small discrepancy. Tyria, with her pale, freckled skin and Irish colouring, couldn’t even pass for olive-skinned.
If more thorough investigation of Armstrong’s story was, as Jarvis contended, a piece of detective work that fell through the cracks, unfortunately for him it turned out not to mean very much.
Meanwhile, the thrower of darts had left his own back exposed: he himself had signed a curious deal with agent/writer/entrepreneur Michael McCarthy to tell his own story. McCarthy paid $1 to cement their agreement and Brian Jarvis gave him $500 to get him started on trying to secure them a deal.
As Ric Ridgway observed, ‘When cops and lawyers and murder defendants need agents, we’ve put the cart before the horse here.’
When in the summer Sheriff Moreland requested an investigation into the propriety of Munster, Binegar and Henry’s behaviour, it was undertaken by the State Attorney’s office with considerable vigour, but no differently from anything else the office approaches.
But Ridgway felt Bruce Munster and Steve Binegar erroneously suspected it had been undertaken with extra zeal because Ridgway’s and Brad King’s noses had been so visibly put out of joint over the sudden arrest. Had they been a little too thorough? Were they settling the score?
In fact, the investigation exculpated the trio of the allegation that they had actually received money for a movie deal and Ric Ridgway trusted its findings: ‘I don’t believe they were paid anything. Now, if you come in and prove to me they did [receive money], I won’t fall over dead, but I just don’t think so.’
Bottom line, he says, ‘If anybody was paid any money, then somebody’s guilty of perjury, and I just don’t see any of those guys risking their careers over $10,000 or $5,000.’
And $50,000? That was the amount bandied around and the amount that Ty Moore supposedly said Bruce Munster had mentioned. As he learned a little more about the entertainment business than he’d ever expected to, Ridgway came to believe that would be an unlikely sum to pay up front for an assignment of rights before a project was even underway.
Ridgway and an investigator visited Tyria Moore at Twyla’s home as part of the enquiry and came away convinced that if Ty had been paid, she had hidden it very well.
‘We were convinced she was being dead honest with us and she made clear that she hadn’t been paid anything. She wouldn’t mind being paid, she wouldn’t object if somebody came along and gave her money, but nobody had.’
During the investigation, the three officers’ bank records were not subpoenaed. Had they been, the antagonism would have ballooned, and for what? Hypothetically, the reasoning went, had money changed hands, it would not have been sitting smack bang in the middle of a cheque account. It would not have left a visible paper trail. It would have been, perhaps, stashed in a safety deposit box somewhere.
A New York magazine cover story by Eric Pooley in March 1992, entitled ‘Cop Stars’, pointed out another salient fact with regard to true crime films in an anonymous quote from a Hollywood producer: ‘There’s so much competition, you can’t wait that long. So you have a wink or a handshake with the key players while the case is still going on. It’s a huge grey area.’
Frayed nerves and friendships were put under even more stress by the circulation of the movie script itself. Either screenwriter, Fred Mills, had glamorised the roles played (not to mention the superior brain power and deductive abilities) of the three named cops, or the cops had done it themselves in telling their stories. Either way, it wouldn’t sit well with the other key players.
Inevitably, the screenplay form telescopes events, and that compounded the erroneous impression given that the three officers had found Aileen Wuornos almost single-handedly. Munster always said it was very much a team effort, but that wasn’t the way it was going to play on TV.
John Tilley and David Taylor were just a couple of other Marion County investigators who had made valuable contributions. And Brian Jarvis, while not exactly the man who solved the case either, also played a role.
Yet Taylor, Tilley and Jarvis, as they were moving in for the climax, suddenly found themselves out investigating old robberies while other officers were out there making the arrest.
All but the names of the three cops and Tyria Moore had been changed, too, reinforcing the assumption that those parties had been reimbursed. Yet none of the other key characters involved needed to be psychic to spot themselves in this roman à clef. Enough of the details were spot-on for them to know that the screenwriter had been privy to inside information.
The most likely scenario seemed to be that Munster, Binegar and Henry had begun talks for some kind of deal with enthusiasm and a surprising, but not implausible, degree of naivety. At the right time—after trial and conviction—there would have been nothing wrong with them telling their stories. Indeed, there would have been nothing new about it either. What was different and unpalatable to colleagues and victims’ families alike, was the premature timing. When the unpopularity of the steps they had taken manifested itself so rudely, it seems they slammed on the brakes and backed off. By then, it was too late for the Teflon effect to save them.
Steve Binegar said in his deposition in January of 1992 that it was his understanding that before a movie could use his name they would need his permission. And he said, under oath,
that he had not given it. He admitted to the negotiations between the cops’ attorney, Robbie Bradshaw, and various movie production companies but said that ‘that never got past first base as far as I’m concerned’. He also said he had no knowledge of a sum of $50,000 and hadn’t received it. He claimed the only figures he heard were those repeated to him by people writing books.
Before the end of his deposition he did admit to having met with Chuck McLain of Republic Pictures who had a person with him whose name he couldn’t remember but who could have been Fred Mills. He also met with a woman from Carolco Pictures. But he emphatically maintained he had not sold permission to use his name to anyone in the entertainment industry, nor had he sold or given out the Wuornos videotape.
During his deposition, Tricia Jenkins, Lee’s defence lawyer, questioned him on why, if there’d been no discussion of money and no deal done, a statement was issued saying that the proceeds would be given to a victims’ fund that in essence did not exist? Binegar said the victims’ fund was something to be established later if any of this ever came about, and if money was ever received. That was said, he claimed, in the window between those early talks and their decision to back away and tell Mr Bradshaw, ‘No deals.’
He was very firm on one thing; whatever Tyria’s alleged involvement in any potential deal, he had no part in that.
‘… as far as I’m concerned, she was never a part of any package deal. I don’t put myself in package deals with people who live the lifestyle that … that Tyria has lived. She’s a witness in the case.’
Entertainment law is complex and constantly in flux, and the ‘rights’ situation is especially volatile, but one school of thought was that, by then, the interviews they had freely given were no longer theirs to control. That since they were freely given, they had become Fred Mills’s to do with what he would, just as would an interview given to a journalist or author.
Meanwhile, relations were strained between Munster and Binegar and the State Attorney’s office. Among big boys, the damage clearly ran deep. There were a lot of hurt feelings that might never heal completely.
Among the ranks of cops and investigators themselves, the Munster, Binegar and Henry triumvirate—what Brian Jarvis’s collaborator, Michael McCarthy, privately came to call ‘the unholy alliance’—was no more popular.
There was much mud flying and some of it was sticking to the office. No one liked that.
40
Arlene Pralle was another moth to the flame of fame. The diminutive, featherweight-fragile package is deceptive. Arlene Pralle admits to being drawn to living life on the edge. It does not require a quantum leap, then, to envisage notoriety also appealing to her. She found it in abundance when she began communicating with Lee Wuornos at the end of January after Lee’s arrest and all the more so when the following fall, she and her husband Robert adopted her. Arlene was 44, Lee 35. Arlene believes they were brought together by divine intervention. But while she had some supporters, most saw her as misguided or crazy.
Arlene’s place in Lee’s turbulent life seemed to nourish her in various ways.
First, it allowed her to be notorious while also being good. She was the angel of mercy, the do-gooder, the soul-saver, the bearer of a knowing, beatific smile. Implicit in that was the message that everyone who didn’t share her perspective was unenlightened. The ridicule and nasty, hateful comments she garnered only fed that picture of her as the loving, wrongly maligned martyr.
Then there was the living-on-the-edge factor. That was present in abundance. The daily dramas, the soap opera-like sagas, the fraught phone calls with Lee, the moods, the tension, the intensity. So long as her demanding, difficult, adoptive daughter remained behind bars, Arlene could fly close to the flame without risking everything. She might get singed, but she would not get fatally burned. She could relish the potent danger close by, knowing she was safe.
She and Lee could fantasise freely about being together on the farm—Oh, what a time they would have!—without Arlene having to confront the reality of what that would actually be like. Judging by others’ past experiences, it would be far from idyllic. Eventually there came moments when Arlene recognised that.
In some ways, Arlene portrayed herself as a kind of baby-talking good girl, a perennial child, but, through Lee, she could also voyeuristically live out some bad-girl fantasies.
Curiously, both Lee and Arlene seemed to share the illusion that they were the powerful one in the relationship.
Arlene had been Lee’s counsellor, her adviser, the only person who could calm Lee, the only person she loved and who loved her back. More pragmatically, she was the person who, acting as Lee’s agent, decided whom she would allow into Lee’s life. She would either champion someone trying to visit her, or block their path. She’d speak and Lee would listen.
The flipside of that was Lee, sitting behind bars, pulling at the strings of her puppet on the outside. (‘Don’t you know who I am! I’m Aileen Wuornos of television!’) Lee could, when a documentary crew from England paid a $10,000 fee (via Steve Glazer, the lawyer who handled the adoption and with whom Lee later replaced Tricia Jenkins) for interview access, dictate how that money would be divided up.
Dawn Botkins, newly embraced by Lee after writing to her and offering to testify on her behalf, would get the first $4,000, Lee declared, because she was ill with multiple sclerosis. Arlene, Lee decided, would wait for her $2,500. Arlene, who had accepted Lee’s costly collect calls on the special phone line she’d had installed for her, and who had been paying for extra help on the horse farm she ran whenever she made the long drives to visit Lee on Death Row, felt betrayed. Lee knew how much financial stress she was under. After being on the receiving end of some of Lee’s less attractive behaviour, Arlene’s patience seemed stretched to the limit. In the heat of the moment, her fury erupted.
Interestingly, the Dawn Botkins, Lee’s old schoolfriend, who suddenly usurped Arlene in the summer of ’92 was the same Dawn that Lee wrote about to Lori Grody in March of ’91, saying: ‘I hate Dawn’s guts. We never were friends. You know that. I get sick thinking of her. Uk! Puke! (spit)’
No one is exempt from Lee’s volatile temper. Not Lori. (Not Lori whom Arlene Pralle, when Pralle first entered Lee’s life, was presumptuous enough to call and tell: ‘You don’t know your sister.’ Lori hung up. Ms Pralle would find out for herself soon enough about her precious sister. No, Lori was not exempt.) Not Dawn. Not Tricia Jenkins. Not Jackelyn Giroux (whom Lee repeatedly maligned, while meanwhile continuing to take small sums of money from her and writing or calling, demanding more). No one was exempt. Arlene Pralle’s mistake was in thinking that she would be different.
What would be diagnosed as Lee’s borderline personality manifests itself with her ‘splitting’ behaviour, her way of seeing things and people as black and white but never grey. As good or bad, but never a truly human mixture of both. And Arlene, after the initial honeymoon period, has discovered how painful it feels to fall foul of that, to go even briefly from being the best-loved to the bad guy.
In fact, her rose-tinted, glowing picture of Lee was rocked to its foundations soon after they met. While smiling publicly, Arlene endured a mixed diet of sweetness and abuse from her new friend. Phone calls in which Lee was ‘so ugly’ to her left her weak and tearful. Yet she went ahead and adopted her anyway. Arlene would claim that she was giving Lee the unconditional love she’d never experienced. But Arlene had a history of taking in lame ducks only to have them turn on her—one friend she helped threatened to kill her. Somehow, she was drawn into adopting Lee despite the warning signs.
For instance, Lee suddenly decided that in ‘protecting’ her from the feminist writer Phyllis Chesler, Arlene had kept her from the one person who could have championed her. (Dr Chesler had written in the New York Times that Lee was spending ‘long periods of time in solitary confinement, freezing and naked … denied … permission … to see a gynecologist for her almost continual heavy bleeding’. Pralle denies t
elling Chesler that Lee was bleeding.)
For a long time (right through the first trial and conviction), Arlene held fast to her denial that Lee was a serial killer, clinging to what Lee had told her, to the self-defence arguments, even after weeks of evidence and testimony in court, after viewing segments of the confession tape and hearing Lee herself describe killing.
Women who love men who kill commonly exist in a state of denial of their loved ones’ crimes. That is how they are able to do what they do and to keep their fantasies alive. Yet on some level most do know the truth and are titillated by it. Lee confessed to her crimes and confession makes denial harder to support. Arlene, one got the impression, accepted what Lee had done, she just didn’t admit it out loud. It was the circumstances of Lee’s killing that were in dispute, rather than that she’d killed.
There was denial, and the extent of that denial seemed to ebb and flow. Her original cries were that all of the men were brutish beasts who had hurt Lee badly. (Cries that naturally enraged the victims’ families.) Those cries had softened over time, but occasionally crept back in diluted form. Who did what to whom varied, too. Speaking of the men her adopted daughter had killed, Arlene vacillated. At one time she would say, for instance, that two were beasts, but the rest were not. At another, that one man had treated Lee nicely, but the others were awful.
This shifting judgement seemed manipulative. Almost as if even truth itself could be controlled, could be rewritten at whim, could be doled out as a reward to someone currently in favour.
Visiting prisoners as a socially conscious act is hardly new, but Arlene Pralle does not belong in that category. From day one, she did not check her feelings and objectivity at the door. The fervour with which she pursued this relationship with Lee echoed the phenomenon of women who fall in romantic love with convicted male murderers: a documented syndrome. Lee happens to be female, Arlene happens to be married to someone else, otherwise the features are remarkably similar. Arlene has said that she loves Lee more than she loves her husband. He shares an apartment in Chicago, while she lives in Florida, but how must he have felt to hear that?