by Sue Russell
John Tanner, a zealous porn-fighter, ardent Christian and member of the Assembly of God, had spent seventeen years as a defence attorney. The 52-year-old prosecutor had 22 years’ experience in court and was a private criminal defence lawyer before joining the State Attorney’s office. He felt some sympathy for Arlene Pralle’s role in Wuornos’s life because he himself had developed a relationship with serial killer Ted Bundy and had worked hard on saving Bundy’s soul before he was executed. Tanner felt the death penalty was sometimes warranted, however, and would spare no effort in ensuring that Aileen Wuornos got to meet ‘Old Sparky’, as Shirley Humphreys so wanted her to.
Adjusting his spectacles, Mr Tanner began his opening statement by explaining to the jury that Aileen Carol Wuornos stood charged with murder in the first degree, by premeditation, and with armed robbery. The evidence they would see and hear would show that Richard Mallory did not know that 30 November 1989, a little over two years ago, would be the last day of his life.
‘He didn’t know that in less than ten hours he would be robbed, murdered, his body left to rot in the woods. Of course, he didn’t know that he was about to pick up a predatory prostitute who had sex with over 250,000 men by her own admission. He didn’t know he was about to admit into his car Aileen Carol Wuornos. Her appetite for lust and control had taken a lethal turn. She was no longer satisfied with just taking men’s bodies and money, now she wanted the ultimate control. She wanted all that Mr Mallory had—the car, property, his life.’
Tanner then detailed the discovery of Mallory’s abandoned car, followed two weeks later by the discovery of his decaying body, bearing four bullet holes. He told the jury that after killing Mr Mallory, Wuornos returned to ‘her lesbian lover, best friend, Tyria Moore’, and used Mr Mallory’s car to move them to another residence. He told of her confession to Deputy Sheriff Larry Horzepa, of Lee’s several accounts of events, and of how she’d admitted to soliciting Richard Mallory for prostitution by saying she needed money for rent and they’d finally ended up, hugging and kissing, in the woods.
Tanner then spelled out Lee’s conflicting accounts of what followed. There was the version that he’d paid her in advance but she became concerned he might try to take it back, so she jumped out of the car and told him to do the same. In another version, he’d stayed in the car, she didn’t tell him to get out, and she shot him behind the wheel. Tanner told how she’d said they’d been having fun together in the woods for five hours, that she’d decided he was a nice guy and abandoned her usual practice of demanding her money first because she really didn’t feel she needed to. But all that changed when he wouldn’t take off his clothes and wanted just to unzip his pants, and she didn’t like it that way. Then she’d said, Tanner reported, ‘Oh no, you’re not going to just fuck me!’, and shot him where he sat behind the wheel.
In both stories, John Tanner pointed out, she had admitted that he was sitting in the car, fully clothed, when she shot him. (Something that would become crucial later on in a way that even John Tanner could never have dreamed.) That Mallory then crawled out of the driver’s door and shut it. Tanner had a point to make: ‘Because on the other side of that doorway was a woman who was pumping bullets into him. She says he crawled out the door and then she ran around to the front of the car. Difficult to imagine,’ he said, his voice rising, then pausing for effect, ‘but she shot him again. He fell to the ground and she shot him again.’
Mr Tanner then moved on to list the several different reasons Lee had cited for shooting Richard Mallory. She didn’t really understand why. He didn’t pay. He was going to try to take his money back. He wouldn’t take his pants off. Then Tanner reached a crescendo.
‘From her statements, we know that it was partly because he was middle-aged, and according to her, it didn’t make much difference if she killed him because he didn’t have any parents. The real reasons, as you sort out the evidence in its totality, are not all that complex. She said she doesn’t really know why she killed him, but the evidence tells you why she killed him. She killed him out of greed. She was no longer satisfied with $10, $20, $40. She wanted it all. And she had to take it. And she did. And she used a gun to take it. And she shot him to keep it.’
Next, Tanner wanted them to know that Lee had told Larry Horzepa that she needed to kill Richard Mallory dead because if she didn’t, she couldn’t go back out on the highway as a prostitute. Intent, Mr Tanner reiterated, hammering home the key point to the watchful jurors—she said she intended to let him die.
‘Ultimately, the bottom line is the evidence in its totality will show that Aileen Carol Wuornos liked control. She had been ex-cercising control for years over men. Tremendous power that she had through prostitution. She had devised a plan now and carried it out to have the ultimate control. All that Richard Mallory had, she took, including his life. Under the law, under the law, she must pay with her life.’
Then it was Tricia Jenkins’s turn to state her case and of course it all sounded quite different. Her evidence would show that when Aileen Wuornos got into Richard Mallory’s car that rainy night, ‘She had no idea that she was going to be travelling with him into a nightmare … and that ride would ultimately bring her into this courtroom today.’
Jenkins painted a picture of a vulnerable woman taking shelter from the rain in the shadows beneath a highway underpass. A woman who was scared. A woman who’d lived on the road. who’d been a prostitute, who’d stayed in motels when things were good and she could afford it, who’d been finding that life on the road was getting more dangerous. Time after time after time, the defence counsel said, she’d been raped, beaten up, not paid, and she had finally armed herself.
Jenkins then offered a different account of the tentative way her frightened client got into the car, anxious to get home to Ty, and therefore taking Richard Mallory up on his offer of a ride all the way to Daytona. ‘She knew that her very best friend, her roommate, the person that she was helping to support, would be waiting for her and wondering why she was out so late.’
Lee drank out on the road for Dutch courage, Jenkins contended, and accepted the mixed drink Mallory offered her, but refused his offer of marijuana. She told of Lee worrying that Mallory was drinking too much, of him buying beer for her on the road, of his looking for a good time and of Lee needing to earn money for groceries and rent. Jenkins told of them talking, drinking and having fun in the woods until 5 a.m., of Lee feeling comfortable and deciding she could trust him. Then Mallory asked her if she was ready to earn her money and requested she remove her clothes, which she did while he went to the boot. Lee had heard the boot shut and the car door open. That door opened a nightmare for Lee, Jenkins said imploringly to the jury, ‘of bondage, rape, sodomy and degradation. And Lee was a victim of that.’
Contained in her dramatic remarks was the first glaring clue that Lee Wuornos’s tale had changed in tone and thrust from the one she had related to Larry Horzepa and Bruce Munster. Bondage, rape and sodomy?
All eyes were fixed on Jenkins as she elaborated, saying that as he abused her, Mallory told Lee he had done the same to other women and that he wanted to see her pain. Lee had been able to get the weapon she had in her purse on the floor of the passenger side and she shot him. She got out of the car and warned him not to come closer or she’d shoot again. He was cursing, wounded and angry, Jenkins said, and he kept coming and she shot him again. Terrified, frantic, trying to get away, Jenkins continued, Lee had driven off in his car. Lee knew she couldn’t go to the police or tell anybody: who would believe her? She was a prostitute. Mr Mallory was a businessman. She did go to Ty, and told her. And Ty said that she should defend herself, that she shouldn’t be treated like that. Now Ty was under fire with Jenkins’s allegations.
‘You’re going to hear that Ty has kind of changed her mind about that. You’re going to hear that she changed her mind when there was a composite on TV. And you’re going to hear that Ty agreed to assist law enforcement and come down to Florida and
help them catch her friend, her love. And you’ll hear that she did that.’
Jenkins said that Ty had been put up in a motel and had worked with law enforcement to get Lee to confess and to say that Ty hadn’t had anything to do with it, and didn’t know about it.
‘Finally, after Ty threatened to kill herself, after Ty had told her that her family was being threatened, she finally convinced Lee to tell law enforcement about it.’
Jenkins had to address the videotape, to take a preemptive strike against it, to prepare the jury for seeing an interview with law enforcement that was not only incriminating but was also shocking. She had to take the sting out of it as best she could.
‘Contrary to what the prosecutor has told you, you are not going to hear several stories about what happened. You’re going to hear her say, “I will protect Ty, I will do anything, I will even die for her”, and you’ll hear her give one version of what occurred. And you will also hear her saying, “I was so drunk—I was just so drunk.” She will say, “I was drunk royal.”’
They would also hear, Jenkins promised, how Richard Mallory got violent with her client. She did not want to labour the points. Wrapping it up, she said solemnly: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Lee Wuornos is not guilty of first-degree premeditated murder, or armed robbery. She defended herself. She had had enough. Not one more time could she take it. Not one more time.’
Never far from the surface bubbled perhaps the most crucial issue in the case, and the one weighing especially heavily on the defence: the extent to which counsel could mention the other murders for which Lee had already been indicted. Judge Blount had yet to rule on the Similar Fact Evidence, or Williams Rule, as it is otherwise known. For now, they would have to wait and wonder.
The prosecution began its procession of witnesses with Sergeant John Bonnevier, previously a deputy, who had discovered Mallory’s abandoned car. As they were introduced into evidence piece by piece, Bonnevier described Mr Mallory’s belongings that were found near the car. On direct, Tanner established that they had been not just tossed out, but furtively hidden in the sand by Lee.
On cross-examination, Billy Nolas established that they were only partially hidden.
A sequence of evidence technicians, sheriff’s deputies, and crime lab analysts stepped up, escorting the jury along the investigative journey. Finding the body. The condition of Mr Mallory’s clothing (pants fully zipped, belt buckle off to the left side by four to six inches). The blood on Mr Mallory’s car seat.
Jeff Davis, the son of Richard Mallory’s ex-girlfriend, Jackie Davis, took the stand. He’d worked for Mallory but had since become a parole officer. Davis identified the picture of his birthday party that depicted Richard’s maroon Polaroid camera, then identified the camera itself. The OK Pawn Shop’s owner’s daughter was put on to tie in the thumbprint left on the receipt with the person who’d pawned the camera using Cammie Marsh Greene’s driver’s licence.
FDLE fingerprint expert, Jenny Aherne, brought together Lee’s various aliases. She testified that the Cammie Greene thumbprint, the Lori Grody prints, and those she took of Aileen Wuornos in jail in January ’91 were one and the same.
Lieutenant Carl Clifford, a member of the diving team that recovered Lee’s .22 from Rose Bay, identified the rusted gun and the Styrofoam cooler he’d used to keep it in stable condition while he transported it to the laboratory. At 4.30 p.m., the judge called it a day.
Former medical examiner and forensic pathologist, Dr Arthur J. Botting, was the first witness in the box on Thursday 16 January. John Tanner had him take the jury methodically through the findings of his autopsy on Richard Mallory and of the bullets that had killed him. The jury saw Mr Mallory’s shirt, complete with dark brown bullet holes. Dr Botting concluded that of the four bullet wounds, it was the two that struck the left lung that caused the fatal haemorrhaging.
Over the objections of the defence, Mr Tanner was able to convey to the jury the clear impression that death was not instantaneous. He gave them a palpable sense that Richard Mallory would have struggled desperately for air until so much blood was lost that his life simply ceased.
William Miller, on cross-examination, hit a few salient points. The bullet in the back of Mallory’s shoulder-blade had entered from the front, not the back. Botting could not know what had happened between the shots. Couldn’t know what the victim was doing to the assailant. Couldn’t know the position of either party. Couldn’t know whether Mallory was reaching out. His subtext was obvious: Mallory could all the while have been trying to hurt her. Miller also hoped the expert would say that the .05 per cent blood alcohol level meant that Mallory was under the influence, and might have been more so because the decomposition could have broken down the true amount of alcohol in his system. Dr Botting, however, had seen no sign of the bacteria growing in the blood sample that would have led him to believe that it had altered Mr Mallory’s blood alcohol level.
FDLE agent, William ‘Ward’ Schwoob Jr, a crime scene analyst, was the prosecution’s next witness. He’d searched Lee’s storage unit and, with Larry Horzepa, had videotaped the locker both before and during its opening and as it was being searched. Schwoob was the man who’d documented and inventoried the eclectic contents and tried, in the lab, to lift latent prints from them. Assistant State Attorney, David Damore, after opening some big, brown, sealed evidence bags, presented Schwoob with a procession of victims’ items for identification. Among them, a brown wallet whose contents included a driver’s licence receipt for Ty Moore.
One primary defence goal was to tie in Tyria as much as possible, to let her enigmatic presence around Lee cast shadows of doubt on what Lee had actually done herself and on the presumption she acted alone. To the prosecution, Ty was a red herring. They pointed out that the receipt found in the wallet in Ty’s name was just one of a collection of papers in the storage bin that even included an i.d. of Susan Blahovec’s.
Lee, throughout this long process, busied herself repeatedly whispering in the ear of whichever counsel was currently seated beside her. What was keeping her spirits up through her ordeal, Arlene Pralle confided, was her fierce desire to get on with writing her autobiography.
Next up was Donald Champagne. Like Judge Blount, retired but brought back for the trial. The silver-haired, silver-bearded veteran was previously a FDLE firearms examiner, with 23 years’ service. He was an ex-Royal Canadian Mountie to boot.
‘Even a screwdriver makes individual marks,’ he said, explaining to the jury his field and its intricacies. He testified that the .22 calibre revolver was indeed one of the calibre of weapons used most often. ‘In my experience, yes, they do kill a lot of people. ’
After identifying the CCI brand, .22 calibre, copper-coated, hollow-point Stinger cartridges, he admitted, under Tricia Jenkins’s questioning, that he couldn’t say they came from that weapon.
John Tanner couldn’t let that impression linger: ‘The class characteristics of the weapon you examined and the one that fired those projectiles [are the same]?’ he asked.
‘They are the same,’ Champagne agreed.
‘But there are other brands the same?’ Tricia Jenkins came back.
‘Yes,’ the witness admitted, before finally being allowed to step down.
After lunch, Susan Komar, an FDLE firearms crime lab analyst who had studied Richard Mallory’s shirt, testified that the bullets had been fired from within six feet. There were a total of seven holes, she said, but possibly fewer than seven shots. And the hole in the back of the sleeve would be consistent with the muzzle of a gun being aimed from the back side of the arm. The chest shots could have been fired from the front; the arm shot could not.
The holes in the collar, she said, meant that the gun would have had to have been aimed at the collar.
She did not know, William Miller got her to agree, whether the individual was sitting, standing, or doing anything else.
Word had filtered through to the press corps that Tyria Moore was to be the state’
s next witness. For the current contingent of spectators, the presence of Wuornos’s 29-year-old, lesbian ex-lover was a welcome bonus. The long, punkish ponytail-strand of red hair that hung down her back in December had been cut off. Rumour had it that law enforcement had persuaded her to clean up her image for court.
David Damore led nervous Tyria through a potted autobiographical sketch, then had her describe the morning Lee showed up with Mallory’s car and told her they were going to use it to move home immediately. She confirmed that she was not expecting to move that day. Later, Lee had come home and said she had shot and killed a man that day, that she’d taken his car and put his body in the woods. Ty told of the jacket and scarf Lee gave her, and the other items she’d brought into the apartment.
Crucially, Ty testified that she had seen no sign of injury on Lee whatsoever.
‘How long did you remain living with the defendant after she told you she shot this man?’ asked Damore.
‘Approximately a year.’
‘At any time, in the period of that relationship, as lovers, as roommates, as friends, did she ever advise you that the man she had shot had done anything to her?’
‘No, she didn’t.’
‘She never suggested she’d been raped by this man? Did she ever say anything?’
‘No.’
‘Did she ever give you an explanation as to why she had shot this man?’
‘No.’
‘Was this a close relationship between you?’
‘I believe it was.’
‘She never, ever suggested that the man she told you she shot on December 1, and whose car you used to move to Burleigh Avenue, had done anything to her, on the morning of December 1, 1989?’
‘No.’
Ty had known of Lee’s prostitution, had never known her make a living any other way, and knew she owned a firearm for her protection.
‘During that period of time, from the time she told you that she shot the man on December 1, 1989, back to when you first met her, did she ever indicate to you that she had been beaten and raped and robbed by people that she was going out and prostituting herself to, while you two lived together?’