Lethal Intent

by Sue Russell

  By the time Lee sought to replace Cass as her defence counsel, Cass had also filed a motion to withdraw because he felt he was in an untenable position. It was granted on 1 March. But, he said, ‘I assure you there was no impropriety. I was not brokering for anyone.’

  Cass had also taken some flak from Lee as she went through her on-off periods of disenchantment with the contract she’d signed and with Jackelyn Giroux. As Giroux battled to get her film made, she continued to send Lee the allowable monthly sum of $60 as promised, but the problem wasn’t difficult to pinpoint. Lee had expected to get rich quick. Not just rich, but ultra, mega-wealthy. In reality, the film industry with which Giroux was grappling was fickle and difficult. Lee’s expectations, in this as in so many things, were outrageous multi-million-dollar pipe-dreams. Of course she wasn’t satisfied.

  Lee was not happy with Cass anyway, movie contracts aside. Cass and his colleague Don Jacobsen had failed to accept all her collect calls and had not visited her as often as she wanted. With input from Arlene Pralle, Lee had decided she wanted a woman lawyer, and when Judge Graziano approved the switch to Jenkins, Cass, for one, certainly didn’t lose any sleep over it.

  One of the most crucial battles facing Lee Wuornos’s defence lawyers was to keep their client’s highly incriminating videotaped confession out of the courtroom in the Richard Mallory trial. A hearing was held in December of 1991 in front of Judge Graziano to determine whether it would be suppressed. The question was whether it would be more prejudicial than probative. In other words, whether showing it would compromise Lee’s right to a fair trial more than it would illuminate the events that had taken place.

  The tape’s mere existence had already sown a powerful seed of presumption of guilt in the minds of the public. If it were released to the press and public, it might contaminate the minds of the entire jury pool. It would be hard, if not downright impossible, the defence argued, to find impartial jurors.

  Of course, the videotape was not Lee’s only confession. (Hearing of the motion to suppress it, Bruce Munster quipped: ‘Which one? There’ve been so many!’) Indeed, some of those incriminating statements Lee made in jail had already leaked out to the press. Then there were the taped phone calls. Transcripts of them had been making the rounds on the black market with a high price tag attached. Various writers had been offered a copy.

  But in December, Judge Graziano took the steam out of the black market in one fell swoop by agreeing to the tape’s public release. She also judged it admissible in Lee’s first murder trial. Immediately, extracts from the videotape were given wide play on television and in the newspapers, irretrievably cementing in the minds of many Lee’s status as a cold-blooded killer. It was a rare piece of footage in every sense and destined to gain notoriety fast.

  To the families of Lee Wuornos’s victims, it was a double-edged sword, at best. Its content was hardly objective, since it presented at length the accused’s highly dubious, yet uncontested, account of the murders. It came from the subjective, self-serving perspective of a self-confessed murderer. An alleged murderer whose victims were all too painfully absent and unable to defend themselves.

  While some of the men were found nude, others were fully clothed and found with no evidence to suggest sexual activity had taken place. True, Wuornos was a career prostitute, but police heard from and contacted a number of men who’d met and encountered her with no sex involved. Even allowing for their reluctance to admit to sex, at least some seemed to be telling the truth. Those men had given her rides and had heard her ‘cons.’ The sob stories of kids she couldn’t feed and of broken-down cars. The requests for money.

  In spite of these factors, many of the press had taken to lumping together all Lee Wuornos’s male victims as men soliciting the services of a prostitute, ignoring any evidence to the contrary.

  Yet Shirley Humphreys cried with relief when Judge Graziano ruled in favour of releasing the confession tapes to the media. Although Wuornos, before trial, had already succeeded in conveying to many (through the printed word) how callous she was, Shirley felt that the tapes, in their ugly, unemotional and visual way, would show the world just what this woman had done.

  Shirley had borne the pain of hearing Wuornos say: ‘I felt sorry for him ’cause he was gurgling. Well, I shot him in the head and tried to put him out of his misery.’ And she, for one, had little patience with hearing about the highway harlot’s terrible childhood. Nor was she swayed by the news that Wuornos had been born-again in March of 1991. And she found some solace in knowing that with the videotape everyone would witness first-hand Lee’s lack of remorse.

  But it was painful, nevertheless.

  ‘Every time you pick up a newspaper article, you hurt,’ Shirley said. ‘Every time you see a picture splashed in the paper, you hurt. Turn on the boob tube, you hurt. The tapes that Geraldo Rivera did—you hurt. There’s just no getting around it. Hell, that woman will outlive me! She has to be judged by her maker.’

  Saying this, Shirley trembled, her palpable anger barely reined-in. She wiped away a tear before conceding, ‘Some days are worse than others. Some days you feel like somebody kicked you in the stomach, just riding down the highway. And I am out on the highway a lot.’

  Personally, Shirley Humphreys had no misgivings or doubts whatsoever about the propriety of her late husband’s conduct. She cited, to support her total conviction, the autopsy report, the absence of semen or condoms, and the fact that he was fully clothed. She spoke of this difficult subject with the quiet, matter-of-fact dignity of the wife of an ex-cop. The wife of a man who had spent the bulk of his career in law enforcement or investigation.

  How painful for her to have to deal with seeing him referred to, shorthand-style, as one of the male clients killed by this woman prostitute. How painful for all of the loved ones and friends of these men to see footage of Lee Wuornos recounting how they’d met their deaths. To listen to her unconscionable lies about their violence.

  Letha Prater hadn’t seen the videotape in December of ’91 and didn’t know exactly what was on it, but she hoped it would at least seal Wuornos’s date with the electric chair. But Dee Spears fretted that David’s name would never be cleared, would never be free of Lee’s vile accusations that he was going to attack her with a lead pipe in the back of his truck.

  For the dark side to all Lee’s cries of self-defence was their implicit message that branded her victims attackers. They were being portrayed as violent, aggressive rapists. Salt in the wounds of the bereaved.

  Letha Prater didn’t pretend Buddy was a paragon of virtue. He might, if provoked, have gotten into a fight. Neither she nor Wanda doubted that he’d get physical if anyone threatened his family, or if his own life was in jeopardy. But they were all certain that if Wuornos offered sex and he wasn’t interested, Buddy wouldn’t turn rough or mean. He certainly wouldn’t have beaten her up. He might have pushed her if she wouldn’t get out of his truck. Letha couldn’t actually imagine her brother being interested in sex with Lee Wuornos, but, unlike Lee Wuornos, she wouldn’t presume to speak for him.

  And rape? Never. Had he wanted another woman, he could have found one without picking up someone as scruffy as Lee, and without paying for prostitution.

  Lee Wuornos raised a rare issue. Just as no family wants to accept that a daughter is selling her body, no family or wife wants to believe that a man they love is out on the highway negotiating for prostitution, or having sex in the woods with a less than salubrious woman. The unpalatable news that this might sometimes be the case, with the arrest of a prostitute, is mortifying. And the assumption of the victims’ complicity in sex with Wuornos added a salacious taint to an already unbearable situation. It was an added burden in a horrendous ordeal for the already shattered and devastated families behind the headlines.

  In the fall of 1991, Lee’s lawyers tried to make a deal with the various counties in which she’d been indicted, so as to offer her life sentences in exchange for five guilty pleas. Four count
ies were ready to settle, but James Russell, Pasco County’s State Attorney, demanded a death sentence. Lee had murdered Charles Carskaddon with nine bullets.

  Once the deal crumbled, the defence changed tack. With no choice but to go to trial, they would argue that Lee killed in self-defence. It would be a tough nut to crack, of course. Self-defence once, maybe. But seven times? The defence also planned to attack the way the investigation had been tainted by the split loyalties of three key law enforcement officers—Sergeant Bruce Munster, Captain Steve Binegar, and Major Dan Henry—whose negotiations for a movie deal, the defence contended, had got in the way of their police work.

  In July 1991, there’d been an official investigation into the officers’ actions, initiated by Marion County Sheriff, Don Moreland, and headed by Chief Assistant State Attorney, Ric Ridgway. The resulting report on 13 August showed no wrongdoing. Nor did it find evidence to support the claim that their work had been affected because of improper motives. But it did suggest that some investigative leads needed further following up. The defence planned to capitalise on that as much as possible in January.

  45

  Aileen Wuornos Pralle’s trial for the murder of Richard Mallory began in DeLand on Monday 13 January 1992. Theatre-like, the courtroom rapidly took on its distinct flavour, echoing the foibles, quirks and personalities of the key players, most especially Judge Uriel ‘Bunky’ Blount. Presiding in no uncertain terms, he was officially retired from the bench but retrieved his robe for this one last important stand. A gruff, mildly curmudgeonly fellow with a ready reprimand but an equally ready smile, he commanded immediate respect.

  From the start it was apparent he would tolerate no foolishness and brook no delays. He conducted his courtroom decisively with the sure and fearless hand of a virtuoso. With his silver, spiky, flat-top brush cut, his squat face sinking into his robes in repose, he resembled an approachable bulldog. Out of sight of the jury, at the end of a long day, while inquiring into the welfare of the inhabitants of his packed-to-capacity press gallery, he’d slip off the robe to reveal a pastel polo-shirt beneath, topped with a formal, black bow-tie.

  Before him that first morning stood the defence team, led by Tricia Jenkins, Chief Assistant Public Defender of the Fifth Judicial Circuit, a husky-voiced, confident ex-journalist with angelically waved blonde hair and a penchant for print, Puritan-style dresses. Forty-two-year-old Jenkins had represented Danny Rolling, a suspect in the Gainesville student slayings, on robbery and burglary charges, and, over nine years, had represented around fifty alleged murderers. She’d been in charge of all death penalty cases in her area for five years.

  At Jenkins’s elbow stood Assistant Public Defender Billy Nolas: short, dark, bookish, bespectacled and with a razor-sharp legal mind. Deceptively youthful-looking, 33-year-old Nolas was a graduate of Georgetown Law School, the son of immigrant parents ‘who kicked me through school, so I finished a couple of years ahead of schedule’. He came to the Wuornos case a veteran of over a hundred capital cases, having spent six years as the Chief Assistant at Capital Collateral Representatives, working on appeals. A onetime law teacher, he soon revealed himself as the most vocal defence counsel, armed with a wealth of case law and a ceaseless supply of objections.

  A third, quietly spoken attorney William Miller, played a low-key role throughout most of the trial. He and the team’s often-present, ponytailed investigator, Don Sanchez, were kept busy listening to the defendant’s comments and complaints.

  For also present at the defendant’s table, of course, was the star of the show herself, Aileen Carol Wuornos Pralle, newly trimmed down by around 25 pounds, her skin prison pale. She looked oddly vulnerable in an inappropriately transparent white blouse that, according to her frustrated adoptive mother, Arlene Pralle, was intended only to be worn beneath a jacket.

  Across the courtroom sat Volusia County’s wiry State Attorney, John Tanner. The head man himself, trying this most public of cases in an election year. David Damore, the chief of the felony/homicide division and the Assistant State Attorney who had led the case thus far, sat beside him as co-counsel. A tall, dark, moustached and rather dashing figure, Damore’s volatile energy balanced well with Mr Tanner’s unruffled calm.

  The search for jurors quickly clarified the prosecution’s and defence’s diametrically polarised aims. On voir dire, the prosecution repeatedly probed what was for them a crucial issue: willingness to dish out the death penalty. Were they to win a conviction on one or both counts of first-degree murder, when the penalty phase followed, they didn’t want anything short of the electric chair. That meant weeding out bleeding-heart liberals, the faint-hearted, and all points in between. They didn’t want anyone unduly squeamish because of sexual bias. If someone felt incapable of voting to put a woman to death, they wanted to know now. With the death penalty currently the law in Florida, they could discount anyone unprepared to live up to its letter.

  Times were more liberal than when Leo Pittman faced a capital charge 26 years earlier; then only seven of 151 prospective jurors were excused because they felt unable, under the circumstances, to impose the death penalty.

  The defence fished hard among the prospective jurors for signs of a capacity for mercy and a willingness to consider mitigating circumstances. The defence also pursued what it had deemed impossible to find: a jury untainted by the flagrant media coverage. The team was especially intent on sniffing out those who’d been exposed to the so-called tabloid TV shows, such as Geraldo Rivera’s Now It Can Be Told, Hard Copy and A Current Affair, all singled out for such scrutiny because they had aired segments of Lee’s controversial confession tapes. Anyone exposed to that little lot, they felt, would be irreversibly prejudiced against Lee.

  Their interrogation of prospective jurors would have warmed the hearts of the circulation directors of National Geographic and Reader’s Digest—but revealed an astonishing dearth of viewers of the highly successful TV tabloids. Some folk admitted to having seen the lot. Others said they’d seen limited coverage and felt they could put it aside in the interests of fairness, and could judge the defendant’s guilt or innocence on the evidence offered in court alone.

  Arlene Pralle immediately made her presence felt in court revealing both her devotion to Lee and her sense of drama. She arrived with tales of the death threats and weird mail that had come to the house. At each break, she signalled Lee, carried on mouthed conversations, slipped notes to her team and updated the media on Lee’s latest woes and complaints. That very first day Arlene learned to her chagrin that even as the defendant’s adoptive mother she didn’t get a vote injury selection.

  Pressing on with their task, the defence team looked for people who hadn’t been the victims of major crime, who weren’t closely tied to law enforcement, and who harboured no deep-seated prejudices against prostitutes. More vital by far, they sought jurors who appreciated the defence’s lack of responsibility to prove anything, and who understood the prosecution bore the burden of proof. If Lee declined to take the stand on her own behalf, they didn’t want that interpreted as a reflection upon her innocence.

  On Tuesday, Pralle sat with tears flowing after a prospective juror disqualified herself, saying she’d been awake all night and had decided she couldn’t support a death penalty vote under any circumstances. Praise the Lord, Arlene cried. She was also upset because her requests to visit Lee after court so that they could pray together, had been denied. Lee was in lock-up for some infraction which precluded phone contact, too. Deanie Stewart, sister of the missing Curtis Reid, was in court and generously offered Arlene a comforting hug. Mrs Stewart’s ire was not so much for Arlene but for Tyria Moore; she felt it horribly unjust that she had not been charged with any crime. Because the seat in Corky’s car had been pulled all the way forward, she’d become convinced that if Lee and Ty had killed Corky, then Ty, the shorter of the two, had been driving his car.

  By the middle of Tuesday afternoon, 58 prospective jurors later, the panel was seated and included
a lady jeweller with a taste for historical novels, an equestrienne, a chemist and a high school English teacher.

  By Wednesday morning, when the prosecution and defence teams were due to lay out their cases, elder statesman Judge Blount had ably demonstrated why he was so respected a local character. A charter member of a local breakfast group, The Loudmouth Club, this George Burns of judges was undaunted by retirement and continued to meet his cronies daily at Hunter’s restaurant.

  Stories about ‘Sometimes in error, but never in doubt’ Blount abounded. Besides being fast with the gavel, the native Floridian was a hanging judge, they said. But not heartless. On Christmas Eves, legend had it, he used to dress up as Santa and set free jail inmates who were facing misdemeanour charges—as long as they first sang ‘Jingle Bells’ for him. He’d often determine the need for a recess by looking at the jury and seeing ‘a lot of hairy eyeballs over there’. He had not been hard to persuade out of retirement for the case: ‘You know what they say about old fire horses! You aim for the bell!’

  A judge since 1955, ‘before TV was allowed in the courtroom’, he was adamant that there would be no William Kennedy Smith-style circus with him on the bench. To this end, the 65-year-old jurist had insisted on using his old, familiar (but exceedingly small and stuffy) courtroom in DeLand. Consequently, the three designated press rows on the left were overflowing, and the floor between the benches was a minefield of electronic equipment and wires feeding off the pool TV camera. Curious spectators sat across the aisle. Outside, a metal detector had been hurriedly installed: a last-minute nod to Wuornos’s high-profile case.

  As the attorneys took up their places, Lee turned to smile at Arlene who was seated behind Shirley Humphreys and her daughter, Terry Slay. Arlene was most afraid of the wrath of Shirley Humphreys and of Letha Prater.