Lethal Intent

by Sue Russell

  He referred to Tanner’s point about Lee’s chosen way of life as a prostitute. ‘But did Aileen Wuornos ask to be slapped? Did she ask to be tied to the steering wheel? Did she ask to be anally assaulted? Each and every one of you, in jury selection, indicated that you could be fair. Each and every one of you indicated that a prostitute, yes a prostitute, can be raped. Mr Tanner suggested that somehow she brought this all on herself because of her profession. She was raped and she was brutalised, and despite her profession, she had a right to defend herself.’

  John Tanner stood. He’d plucked a few last words of testimony to highlight. The defendant had told Horzepa that when someone gave her a hassle, she had to kill them because she didn’t want to leave a witness. There was her intent.

  And Deputy Susan Hansen had heard her say in January of ’91 that sometimes she felt guilty, but at others she felt like a hero or something.

  Aileen Wuornos did not even have remorse for the life she had taken. And for that murder, if the jury found her guilty in the first degree, she would get death, or a life sentence with a minimum 25-year mandatory sentence.

  Judge Blount briefed the jury. Aileen Wuornos sobbed at the defence table as the people who would decide her fate were told there was no time limit on their deliberations and were led out. They only needed 91 minutes. At 6 p.m., they were back.

  Guilty on the first count. Guilty on the second count. Aileen crumbled as did her sobbing adoptive mother, Arlene Pralle. A scan of the faces in the courtroom could not pick up any other expressions of surprise. Emotion, grief, relief and pain, yes. Shock, no.

  Shirley Humphreys, weeping silently, was led out by her daughter Terry. The verdict wouldn’t bring Dick back, but it was justice. Justice at last.

  Then suddenly, Lee’s shock turned to fury, manifesting itself in a snarling parting shot to the jury members sombrely filing out across the courtroom: ‘Sonsofbitches! I was raped! I hope you get raped! Scumbags of America!’

  There it was again. Her inability to control herself, to resist even the most foolish or self-destructive impulses. In what could hardly be called a politic move, she had just cursed out the very people who would, the next day, begin to decide whether she would live or die.

  49

  On 28 January 1992, judge, jury, and the by then familiar cast of players reconvened for Lee’s sentencing: for many the most suspenseful part of the hearings, in which the jury would recommend to the judge whether Aileen Carol Wuornos Pralle go to meet her maker via the electric chair, or serve a life sentence with the possibility of parole after 25 years.

  Judge Blount instructed the jury to weigh aggravating versus mitigating factors, then John Tanner launched into his opening statement, pointing out that a verdict to recommend the death penalty need not be unanimous, but required a majority vote of seven jurors. He said that they should consider that while the burden of proof still rested on the state, most of the aggravating factors had already been proven in trial.

  Aileen turned and grinned at Arlene Pralle, apparently oblivious to what was being said. She had tuned in by the time he listed the factors that could lead them to recommend death: such as murder in the first degree committed while in the act of robbery, or murder committed for the purpose of financial gain. Tanner said the state believed that the evidence supported their contention that Aileen Wuornos deserved to be put to death. Suddenly, her grin was a glower.

  Billy Nolas stood to address the jury. They’d heard, he said, two weeks of the state’s evidence regarding Aileen’s guilt and they’d had an opportunity to observe her demeanour.

  ‘I daresay that many of you are sitting there, thinking to yourselves, “Why? Why is Lee the way she is?”’

  Now they would get those answers, he promised, explaining that Lee did not simply fall from the sky. He spoke of her sad background; of the father who hanged himself in the penitentiary, of the mother who abandoned her, of the biological, genetic and environmental factors. He spoke of the child whose school records noted a need for help she didn’t get. The alcoholic, abusive grandfather and the meek, humble grandmother who couldn’t deal with what was going on. The fire in which Lee was burned, her problems with her self-image, her rape at fourteen and pregnancy, her being put out of the home at fifteen with no skills.

  He cited her way of life selling her body, being abused, and being alcoholic. And he cited the young man who left her whom she loved so much that she shot herself in the stomach. And he refreshed in the minds of jurors that, to Lee Wuornos, the world was a hostile, frightening and bitter place that she simply didn’t understand.

  John Tanner recalled Larry Horzepa and after once again laying to rest any ghost of a doubt cast by Aileen on the fairness of the videotaped confession, he asked what the detective had heard about Lee’s reasons for killing Richard Mallory. Horzepa, quiet and believable, delivered the damning message. Aileen had claimed that in her heart she didn’t really want to kill, but she couldn’t leave witnesses. She didn’t want to get caught.

  David Damore then used Deputy Susan Hansen, the jail officer, to describe Aileen as animated, laughing and joking behind bars. During their couple of hours’ chat, Aileen at no time mentioned that Richard Mallory had attacked or raped her.

  Billy Nolas got Susan Hansen to concede that there was another side to the story and that Aileen had also said ‘Sure I shot them, but it was self-defence. I’ve been raped eight times in the last nine years, and I just got sick of it.’

  He also elicited from Hansen the fact that Lee became angry at times, and could be laughing and angry within the same conversation.

  With those preliminaries out of the way, out trotted the first of the defence’s procession of expert witnesses, designed to provide real insight into what had made Lee kill, and into why she couldn’t control her impulses.

  At 2.55 p.m., Billy Nolas called Elizabeth McMahon, Ph.D., an expert in neuropsychology, clinical psychology and the study of deviant human behaviour. McMahon, a diminutive, elfin figure with short silver hair, dressed in a pale blue sweater and navy suit, was in for a long session. She described how she had evaluated Aileen five times for a total of twenty-two hours and did over six hours of neuropsychology testing on her.

  David Damore pointed out that she was like a doctor in English, who cannot prescribe drugs. He also pushed across the impression that she was in the habit of testifying for the defence by asking if she’d ever been retained by the state. Dr McMahon believed so, but couldn’t remember.

  In assessing Aileen, she’d also reviewed depositions, school records, police reports, prior psychiatric evaluations, and had talked to people who knew her. She’d also run a battery of tests. Her suggestion that Lee might have some cortical brain damage was doubtless clinically sound, but came across as too nebulous to be effective in swaying a jury. Her primary diagnosis, however, was that Lee was a borderline personality.

  Dr McMahon described borderline personality for the jury as someone who has intense and unstable personal relationships; who is very labile in their emotions, like a rollercoaster—one minute happy, one minute sad, one minute angry, one minute laughing, and subject to very rapid mood changes. A borderline is impulsive and has a regular problem with intense anger and cannot moderate it well. They may behave self-destructively, either very overtly in the form of suicide attempts, or more subtly. Borderlines commonly have identity disturbances: ‘And by that, one may mean a gender identity disturbance, or disturbance in terms of long-range goals, values, what they want from life. Someone who experiences high feelings of emptiness, alienation, and who has a great fear of aloneness and abandonment. These are people who have what’s called impaired cognition in terms of the way they view the world and the way their thought-processing operates. They have very intense, overwhelming feelings that they have a great deal of trouble modulating, and their life tends to revolve around two primary feelings: victimisation and alienation. I could go into more detail, but that’s a thumbnail description.’

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bsp; Dr McMahon then explained that borderlines incite strong feelings in others and because of their intense emotions are difficult, unpredictable people to deal with, tending even to wear out their therapists. They’re unhappy people who project that unhappiness on the world.

  Nolas asked what precipitates a borderline? The doctor explained that there was often some cortical dysfunction and as a result they, among other things, are never able to assess what’s going on around them accurately. The second theory concerned very early abandonment. The third, that their family dynamics make the borderline susceptible to what’s called splitting.

  She then described Aileen’s history as she understood it, recapping on much of what had already been heard. Of Lauri, she said, ‘Miss Wuornos’s biological mother had described him as the meanest man in town, that he was verbally abusive to her growing up.’ She pointed up Lee’s descriptions of Britta, her grandmother, as being like an angel who could do no wrong, and who loved flowers and trees. Bad Lauri, good Britta. To Dr McMahon, Lee’s perception typified splitting. And she cited Diane’s description of Britta as not being that way at all. Britta had been verbally abusive to Diane. She obviously wasn’t a saint.

  McMahon reiterated Aileen’s difficulties in school, her vision problems and hearing loss in one ear, and her grandmother’s refusal to get her help. At fourteen, said Dr McMahon, Aileen was raped by ‘a gentleman who said he was a friend of her father’s, and offered her a ride home’.

  (The problem with all of this and with much more that Dr McMahon repeated, was very evident. It was based purely on Aileen’s version of truth. For instance, Aileen told Dr McMahon that she began prostitution at the age of fifteen when in fact she had been no more than twelve.)

  McMahon revealed more about the cortical dysfunction explaining the split between Aileen’s verbal IQ and performance IQ.

  ‘A split of that magnitude immediately tells us the brain is not working in concert. One of the things that is necessary for us to function in the world is for our brain to work in unison. It must work in concert. It must work as a whole. Either all the parts are in unison or they’re not. And if you’re going to be able to have a smooth, melodic effect, then it all has to be working together, and if it isn’t, you get sort of… lost.’

  In and of itself, that split alone would tell you there was something seriously wrong.

  ‘By the same token, the kind of cortical dysfunction that she has is not … I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with the structure of the brain. In other words, if she were to have an EEG or a Cat-scan or an MRI, she would show up fine. Everything is structurally intact, but it’s not functioning right.’

  Suddenly, she delivered an analogy that rendered the whole thing more comprehensible. She likened it to a car that is OK and has its motor: ‘But it’s as if you had sand in the gas line, let’s say. Then you go to drive your car, it’s going to splutter, it’s going to maybe cut out on you. It may not start. You drive it a little way, then it may stop, start, sputter. It is that way with Ms Wuornos’s brain.’

  Billy Nolas wanted the jury to know that all this was a physical problem and not a choice. It is not something anyone would choose, said McMahon, because borderlines are very, very unhappy, discontented individuals who cannot function in the world and cannot figure out how to get their needs met. ‘It’s like they go through life and they sort of have some sense that other people out there are getting it OK, and they’re not. They can’t figure out how to do it.’

  ‘A person like Miss Wuornos, is she mature?’ asked Nolas. ‘No. Ms Wuornos is probably one of the most primitive people I’ve seen outside an institution. By that I mean that she functions at a level of very basic—by basic, I mean, small child—needs. I’m talking about food, shelter, clothing, and an attempt at some sense of security. An attempt at some sense of OK-ness and contentment. ’

  Most people have gone way beyond that and are concerned from adolescence on with, for instance, making relationships. ‘You’re no longer at the level of basic trust and security needs. These are things that you provide for infants and small children. That’s the level at which Ms Wuornos operates.’

  Billy Nolas led Dr McMahon to Aileen’s self-destructiveness. There were the blatant acts, the suicide attempts, McMahon said, but in addition to that, her whole life was self-destructive. The drinking, the drugs (although she claimed to have stopped them at seventeen), the living on the edge, the living in a state of danger. McMahon said that Aileen today, although 35–40 pounds lighter, looked ‘immeasurably healthier in terms of her skin, her eyes, her hair, everything’ than when she first saw her a year before.

  Dr McMahon addressed the abandonment by both parents and the emotional abandonment by the grandfather, and the flaw in Aileen’s angelic portrait of her grandmother. The very fact that she was afraid to tell anyone she was pregnant for six months indicates she didn’t have anyone that was there for her. Aileen, she said, had poor judgement, poor insight, and if you asked her to reflect on her situation, to say how she thought she got there, she had no idea.

  There was a lot of what McMahon called ‘externalisation’. Everybody out there was responsible. Borderlines don’t see themselves as the actor, only the reactor. Everyone else is in control and making the decisions. They don’t understand how they get from A to B.

  Nolas asked how Lee viewed the world.

  ‘She’s a victim, her paranoia is frequently sky high. It’s an angry, unpleasant, out-to-get-her place.’

  Billy Nolas wanted to hear what the doctor thought regarding the Mallory incident. She prefaced her answer by saying that she was dealing with Ms Wuornos’s account, then said, ‘In my clinical opinion, Ms Wuornos saw herself as threatened, saw herself as in severe, imminent danger. Whether that was accurate or not, whether that was a distortion of what was going on, I don’t know.’

  Dr McMahon did not believe Lee was capable of conforming her conduct to the requirements of the law.

  ‘Could she distinguish right and wrong?’ asked Billy Nolas, tapping the core issue in this, the courtroom.

  Dr McMahon found that a complex question. She believed that if you removed Aileen from that place, that night, and asked her in a calm situation, sitting on the beach, if it was wrong to take somebody’s life, she’d say ‘yes’.

  ‘At that moment, feeling threatened, the question of whether it was right or wrong becomes irrelevant.’

  Dr McMahon believed that Lee felt she was in a life-threatening situation, that legality didn’t enter into it. She’d simply reacted and done so with less thought than the average individual, given her impairment.

  As Lee listened straight-faced, Dr McMahon pointed out that she didn’t see that she’d done anything other than defend herself. To her, shooting Mr Mallory was the only way she perceived of getting out of the situation. She didn’t see her responsibility for what happened. Her actions, like her lifestyle, showed poor judgement, impulsiveness, very poor skills. Given her history, dynamics, view of the world and cortical dysfunction, McMahon believed that Lee could see no alternative.

  Would it matter, Billy Nolas enquired, if Richard Mallory did none of the things she said he did?

  ‘It matters to the extent that if he did none of them and she is so firmly entrenched in her belief that he did, then I think my diagnosis would change and I’d say we’re dealing with a psychotic. But what generally occurs with folks like this is that there is some truth; it may not be all, but what truth there is gets distorted. ’

  She explained a psychotic as being someone who is out of touch with reality.

  ‘What if Mr Mallory did nothing, and she’s just lying about it?’ asked Nolas, obviously aware of the answer he’d get.

  That would be inconsistent with the material McMahon had seen and read. She, unlike those in the courtroom, said that her various encounters with Wuornos and the stories she’d heard had been fairly consistent. And the thread of self-defence had run through their conversations. Lee saw peop
le as angels, wizards, ghosts and evil spirits—her emotions overwhelmed her cognition.

  Enter David Damore, who had been itching for his turn at the witness. He rapidly established that Dr McMahon did not consider Lee legally insane, that most of the time she knew right from wrong, and that she understood the consequences of her actions.

  ‘She knew when she shot Mr Mallory over and over again, that what she was doing was wrong, legally?’ Damore asked.

  ‘At that moment, I do not think that that was a relevant … or even a consideration.’

  ‘So, then you say that Lee Wuornos is not responsible for her actions?’

  ‘I don’t say she’s not responsible. I think she’s responsible.’

  Damore pointed out that all of McMahon’s assessments were based on Lee Wuornos’s perception, that truth had nothing to do with it.

  ‘Now, the fact that someone has a borderline personality disorder doesn’t make someone a killer?’ Damore asked.

  ‘Does it make them a killer? Not in and of itself.’

  Damore got Dr McMahon to concede that Aileen had been similarly disordered since the age of fifteen but that those disorders had not driven her to kill then—according to her account. Damore seemed impatient. Under his probing, McMahon admitted that the prognosis was not good for helping Lee, that she would need intense therapy.

  ‘With somebody as primitive as Lee it would be very difficult. Is it possible? It’s possible.’

  Damore shot back: ‘It’s possible! It’s possible for me to be the next man on the moon but it’s not probable.’

  ‘Objection!’ said Billy Nolas, his voice audibly weary of Mr Damore’s sarcasm. The judge overruled Nolas, however, and Damore moved on to the defendant’s childhood, pointing out that the doctor had based her conclusions on information that either came from Lee or from other people who might not have been telling the truth. For instance, the account of Lee’s teenage rape came from Lori’s interview with the police.