by Sue Russell
If the killing-the-grandfather underlying motive does exist, realistically it will take years of careful study to slice through Aileen’s self-serving rhetoric to reveal and confirm it. Until then, says Robert Ressler, we’re shooting in the dark.
Some serial killers have the strong sense that they’re ridding the earth of people who don’t deserve to live—prostitutes (commonly murdered by men whose mothers were prostitutes), homosexuals or domineering, manipulative women. But when Aileen said her victims were old, their parents were probably dead anyway, and that they were cheating on their wives, it seemed more like a rationalisation of what she’d done than a motivation. Implicit in her remarks, however, is the sense that while their families or parents might have warranted consideration, the victims themselves were less than human.
By virtue of the terribly young age at which she began prostituting herself, Aileen was certainly a victim. We don’t know exactly where she learned her behaviour, but psychology, research into the backgrounds of prostitutes, and even plain old common sense, all suggest that at least one adult had abused her sexually when she was very young. Lauri was publicly dead-set against sex before marriage. Nevertheless, Aileen was selling sex at the age of eleven at a time when her peers were, possibly without exception, virgins. Statistics show that the overwhelming majority of prostitutes were sexually abused children.
Aileen has claimed at different stages to have been sexually abused by her grandfather, but has spent far more time denying it. Lauri is dead, as are Alfonse Podlack, Keith and Britta. And Aileen is once again quite likely the only living witness to her own early betrayal of innocence.
Like other victims of abuse, she may also have a vested interest in keeping family secrets, or even in denial. Shame at what took place, too, might be playing a part. A family trance of denial, a kind of self-preserving amnesia, is also common in incest families, along with a need to hide potentially embarrassing material. On the other hand, Aileen has pulled no punches in denigrating her grandfather in other ways, and hasn’t seemed concerned to protect him.
Lori Grody gives short shrift to a completely unsubstantiated rumour long-circulated in Troy that Lauri was in fact Aileen’s real father via an incestuous relationship with Diane. Were it true, given the patterns of incest, such a relationship may well have repeated itself one generation down. If, in some way, Aileen and Keith were ever-present reminders of Diane and his feelings for Diane went beyond fatherly, or he’d been rebuffed by her, it might go some way towards explaining Lauri’s especially antagonistic relationships with them.
But this is pure conjecture, undertaken in the spirit of ‘we know there was a terrible car collision, let’s try to figure out how the cars were positioned’. And Diane, while having called herself the victim of ‘almost sexual abuse’, has categorically denied that penetration took place.
After revealing to investigating officer Bruce Munster the incident when Lauri came into her bedroom in the dead of night and sexually propositioned her girlfriend who was sleeping over, Diane said something that seemed classic for someone brought up amidst denial: ‘I wish my girlfriend had never told me about this … because then I wouldn’t have to think about it.’ She also went on to admit: ‘But yet, there may be some unconscious stuff that’s bothering me.’
Harking back to that bedroom incident also set Diane wondering and questioning. ‘That makes these other incidences about how he touched me or how he held me … and stuff like that … ah … more dramatic.’
Britta’s harsh treatment of Diane may well have been the behaviour of a woman fearing desperately that abuse might occur and that if it did, she would have to leave her man and would never be able to manage. Instead, Diane said (making a slip that revealed her unwarranted feelings of guilt), the woman turns on the kid ‘that is doing it … I mean, that is the target.’
In January 1991, Bruce Munster asked Diane about Aileen’s pregnancy and if she’d had any questions about it. Diane said she’d blocked the pregnancy right out. When Munster asked if there was any chance that Keith had ever been bothered in the family, sexually, Diane’s nervous answer again revealed repression: ‘I can’t say that Keith ever said anything and I would never even right now … talk with you … ah … if it happened … Keith is … you know, Keith died of cancer. And ah … if it happened … ah … I don’t … we should not be discussing this.’
The second time she was interviewed by police, she added a telling coda to her account of Lauri sexually propositioning her friend that showed how well-trained she was in silence. In a household such as the one in which she grew up, you were not supposed to tell what went on, she explained. Nobody exactly tells you not to, it’s just an unwritten rule. Diane said that after giving them her statement about Lauri sexually propositioning her friend, she’d woken up a couple of days later: ‘And this horrible fear came in me—“You told!”’
Given the repressive atmosphere in the home—swearing was not allowed, sex was not discussed—just what might she have forgotten? (Interesting, too, that Diane never heard her father utter a swear word, yet neighbours often referred to his colourful language.)
In the months after the arrest of the daughter she had abandoned, Diane Tuley spent many long hours pondering over what had happened. Diane had recently taken a year’s sabbatical from the food store supervisory job she’d had for 24 years, and much of her energy during that year had gone on reading about abuse and trying to unravel the mysteries of her own childhood. A perhaps fortuitous preparation for dealing with what was to come.
The great majority of multiple criminal offenders, men and women alike, commonly had ineffectual parenting and emerged from dysfunctional family backgrounds. And the vast majority of serial killers came from families with alcohol abuse, emotional abuse (including indifference), verbal abuse and humiliation. Frequently, they were unwanted children who had in effect been punished for existing.
While a severe mental disorder may conceivably override a troubled childhood as a cause, it is unusual. Robert Ressler’s never seen it. And he simply doesn’t believe that somebody who behaves like Aileen Wuornos or John Wayne Gacy (who killed over thirty young boys) came from a model family.
With the wave of self-help and twelve-step groups, and what is seen by some as a self-indulgent tendency to blame all ills on the parents, there has also been a backlash against holding the parents responsible for any sins of the child. To Robert Ressler, that can be an easy way out for the parents of people who commit awful crimes.
‘They say, “By God, it’s not me! Don’t look at me! It’s not me! I didn’t do this!” My position on that is: “If it’s not you, let’s prove it.” Kids don’t grow up without a strong influence from the parents. And it can be overt and aggressive activities—sexual, psychological, physical abuse—or it can be absence of nurturing, and ignoring behaviour.’
The John Hinckley case was a classic example. The Hinckleys were a wealthy family with everything going for them on paper, yet their son shot the president. Experts and laymen alike scratch their heads and wonder what went on in that home. (Ressler’s several attempts to interview Hinckley were rebuffed.) Mrs Bundy clung desperately to the veneer of normality she painted on her family right through Ted’s execution in 1989.
‘Who wants to admit to raising or giving birth to a monster like Ted Bundy?’ Ressler concedes. ‘The man is probably one of the worst examples of humanity ever to come down the course of history. And my heart goes out to these people that have been parents. I’m a parent. And most parents get upset if their kid has an auto accident or throws an eraser at school. It’s not an easy cross to bear, but the fact is these people know what they raised. They know how they raised them. And getting at that information is difficult because nobody’s going to tell publicly what has gone on here.’
Interviewed by police on 29 January 1991, Diane Tuley described herself as ‘the natural—not the legal mother’ of Aileen Wuornos. After her marriage to Leo Pittman ended, Diane immed
iately reverted to the name Wuornos when applying for her driver’s licence and upon Aileen’s arrest, the reluctant interviewee reflected on the irony of that choice. Had she not put the name Wuornos on the form, she doubted (rather naively) that police would have been able to find her.
‘Things will come back to haunt you … no matter how you try to get away from them,’ she told Bruce Munster in their telephone interview.
Twenty-six years after Leo’s death, Diane told Munster she didn’t know of the end Leo came to in prison. On hearing the story, she said: ‘What a life, huh? No wonder the reporters would like to get a hold of it.’
But when Munster offered to show her some papers about Leo, she declined. At 51, she didn’t care about it. She’d tried hard to put that part of her life behind her. She’d also tried hard to put her first-and second-born children behind her. Obviously she’d been singularly unsuccessful in the case of Aileen.
With hindsight, she viewed her decision to leave her babies with her parents as ‘probably the biggest mistake I have ever made in my life’.
Now recognising herself as something she didn’t back then—a victim of a form of child abuse—she felt she’d have done better to let strangers adopt them.
‘My father was verbally abusive … my mother verbally abusive and we were always told we were no good … we didn’t do good enough,’ Diane told Bruce Munster. ‘My daddy was the meanest man in the neighbourhood … everybody would say that.’
Both parents struck her. ‘We got whippings all the time with belts, and that was the normal way to treat children,’ she told Marvin Padgett in March 1991.
Until a few years ago, however, she kept her mother’s maltreatment and seeming hatred of her to herself. It finally came up with Alma and Ben one day when they discussed her dad’s suicide and Britta’s curious death. ‘Diane, it must have been awful for you,’ Aunt Alma sympathised. ‘We had no idea.’
Those who subscribe to the ‘bad seed’ theory would find amply rich pickings in Aileen’s deeply flawed father whose violence, criminal career, and eventual suicide in prison, inevitably made the issue of genetic predisposition loom large.
If research showed it was common for people with antisocial personalities to have come from at least one antisocial parent, Leo Arthur Pittman did not disappoint.
For Barry Wuornos and Lori Grody, of course, nothing could be tidier than the explanation that it was Aileen’s bloodline and heritage—somewhat different from their own—that delivered the recipe for violence. That the bad part of her was the part that came from Pittman. There is strong evidence to suggest that perhaps it was, at least to some noteworthy extent. Heaven knows, it was understandable that Lori and other members of the Wuornos clan would clutch at this theory as a straw of relief, a life-raft of vindication. Its implicit message was that Aileen didn’t learn her wicked ways in her family; her family was a good family. Since thankfully few of us can imagine the horror of learning that one’s flesh and blood stands accused of brutal, cold-blooded murder, it is hard to blame them for that.
It is certainly true that with the benefit of hindsight, some curious parallels and eerie foreshadowings of Aileen’s path were evident in Leo Pittman’s short antisocial life.
Like Aileen and Keith, Leo Pittman (who was abandoned at five months old) ultimately had a new birth certificate registered in his name listing his grandparents as his parents. (He was seven at the time.) Like Aileen, Leo freely confessed to his crimes, only to claim later that he’d been coerced. Father and daughter both unsuccessfully attempted to get their confessions kept from their trials.
Like twins separated at birth, father and daughter both exploded in heinous fashion and, most uncanny of all, faced charges that could bring the death penalty.
Behaviourally, they shared a lifelong pattern of explosive tempers, of outbursts of violence and of a dire reaction to alcohol. They both lied at the drop of a hat and changed their fanciful stories repeatedly.
Both treated their partners more as hostages than lovers and were exceedingly jealous and possessive. Both had marriages in which they successfully managed to conceal the worst of their behaviour until the union was sealed, although Aileen’s marriage to Lewis Fell was, of course, dramatically shorter than even Leo’s to Diane. Leo’s treatment of both his grandmother and Diane was violent, that much we know. And his crime against the little girl was brutal. That, too, sent him down a path that Aileen would also walk.
When Leo was arrested, he had a fake sheriff’s badge he claimed he bought in California. Aileen claimed to be an undercover agent in Colorado and to have once wanted to become a cop, and two of her victims carried law enforcement badges.
Both were highly manipulative personalities. In an especially unappealing parallel, neither showed true remorse for their crimes. Like Leo before her, the only pity Aileen seemed able to dredge up appeared to be for herself. When Leo’s guilty verdicts were read, he remained emotionless. But although Aileen appeared likewise flabbergasted into momentary silence in court, she soon exhibited less impulse control than her dad, spewing abuse at the jury.
Prison records show that while doing his time, Leo destroyed a state-owned dustpan. He wanted a new one. Like a petulant child, he was furious when that demand was turned down by the officer in charge, who’d decided there was nothing wrong with his existing one. In retaliation, Leo then bent it so badly out of shape that it couldn’t possibly be used. Just as Lee once painted her Daytona apartment without permission, so Leo painted his cell a different colour without authority to do so.
Aileen’s time in jail awaiting her first trial might easily have been far more disruptive, although full prison records for Leo Pittman’s day-to-day behaviour were not available. Also, Aileen lived under the cloud of the possibility of multiple death sentences.
During Leo’s trial, the Wichita Eagle reported Prosecutor Keith Sanborn’s closing statement to the jury in which he acknowledged the tough task of defence counsel Fettis. It was a message that 26 years later might have applied perfectly to Aileen’s team. Sanborn said: ‘It isn’t a pleasant job to defend a person like this, gentlemen, and don’t you forget it. They don’t call you a hero, but it’s your system of justice and you have provided that [Pittman] is entitled to the best counsel obtainable, and you know he has had good counsel.’
Yet another curious quirk in this story: when Leo was arrested in Wichita, he was wearing his red hair in a long curl that hung down the back of his neck. Up until the time of trial, Tyria Moore, whose colouring and even physique so resembled his, wore her red hair with a long red strand hanging down at the back. (She’d said she intended to let the strand grow until Aileen was convicted, then to cut it off and mail it to her, but it was gone by January 1992.)
It is truly frightening to contemplate, but Leo Pittman did have at least one more child (and indications are that there were probably more) after his failed marriage to Diane, so Aileen has a sibling or siblings she does not know. And somewhere out there in the mists of adoption secrecy, Aileen, too, has a male heir, carrying on her bloodline. Leo Pittman’s genetic heritage, it seems, has become the lot in life of several persons unknown. It would be fascinating to know what became of them.
Criminologist Robert Ressler happens not to subscribe to the ‘bad seed’ theory, largely because he hasn’t studied the proper correlations, but given mental illness’s known potential for genetic carry-over, neither does he reject it. The crime man points his finger to history. There were many lawless families even in the Wild West who, over the decades, went on to produce multi-generations of bandits and killers.
This, of course, is where the nature versus nurture argument rears its head again.
Aileen and Leo never came face to face, yet studies have shown that there does appear to be a biological or genetic component to some criminal behaviours. Even if a child is separated from a parent very soon after birth and raised in a different environment, if the biological parents were criminally inclined there is
a greater likelihood than usual that the child will also engage in criminal or delinquent acts and ultimately be arrested.
‘We have a child coming out of the chute who has a certain kind of genes,’ Candice Skrapec admits. ‘If neither the biological parents nor adoptive parents are criminally inclined, especially in terms of property type crimes … the research has shown that the child, sort of by chance, may grow up and offend. But if the adoptive parents have a criminal record, then the probability the child will also have a record goes up.’ But it does not go up as much, however, as if the biological parents are criminally inclined.
‘So there does appear to be some overriding genetic kind of factor here that contributes to the criminality of the individual,’ Skrapec acknowledges.
Perhaps in Aileen’s case that ‘nature’ legacy, coupled with the cold, unloving, violent and alcoholic personality of Lauri Wuornos to which she was exposed during her ‘nurture’ stages, combined in a lethal way. Perhaps Lauri was the extra fatal ingredient in the mix.
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In March 1991, Tricia Jenkins, Chief Assistant Public Defender for the Fifth Judicial Circuit, was appointed to replace Ray Cass as Lee’s counsel on the Richard Mallory case in Volusia’s Seventh Judicial Circuit. Jenkins was by then already representing Wuornos in Marion County (Jenkins’s home turf), and she would also be handling Citrus County’s David Spears case. The move marked yet another step in the difficult passage of bringing Wuornos in front of a jury.
In January, when Ray Cass put movie producer, Jackelyn Giroux, in touch with Russell Armstrong, the Daytona lawyer who’d represented Lee back in 1981 for her armed robbery charges, Armstrong executed the agreement between them.
Cass, who as a public defender, was not allowed to be involved in any civil matters, believed he had acted properly by merely introducing the parties then withdrawing forthwith. Judge Gayle Graziano (who later withdrew from the case) said that Cass should never have made the referral. She believed that there had been at least the appearance of impropriety.