Lethal Intent
Page 51
Tricia was making a moving speech.
‘She’s always maintained a degree of hope. When she leaves this courtroom for the last time, she’ll have lost her hope. Please go back there and decide that this is punishment enough.’
Word came back after 108 minutes. The jury had reached its verdict. Lee was shepherded back into the courtroom, looking deathly pale but composed. She even managed a small smile. Jenkins put her arm around her client’s shoulders.
Ms Mills, the forewoman, was crying. The equestrienne, Ms Staten, looked terribly shaken, too. Yet their verdict was unanimous: 12 votes for death.
For a moment, Lee looked as if she might collapse, swaying visibly under the supporting arms of her counsel. William Miller took off his glasses and wiped his eyes, and Tricia Jenkins appeared just as upset. Nolas looked ashen.
Outside the courtroom he spoke of Lee’s mental state. She was very emotional, naturally.
‘She knows that there will be court tomorrow and when you’re dealing with somebody like Lee, that’s as good as you’re going to get.’
No one doubted for a moment that he would, and the next day, Friday 31 January, Judge Blount made it official. Before he did so, Lee stood and spoke.
‘First of all, I would like to say that I have been labelled a serial killer, and I’m no serial killer,’ she began.
She repeated all her familiar arguments, throwing in a few new accusations for good measure. John Tanner, she said, was part of a conspiracy, too. She’d been coerced into confessing. She alleged that Tyria knew it was self-defence but was lying through her teeth … Judge Blount listened patiently, but eventually it had to come: ‘It is the sentence of this court that you, Aileen Carol Wuornos, be delivered by the Sheriff of Volusia County to the proper officer of the Department of Corrections of the State of Florida and by him safely kept until by warrant of the Governor of the State of Florida, you, Aileen Carol Wuornos, be electrocuted until you are dead.’
Lee was fingerprinted and led away.
A crowd had gathered outside to see her depart. As she was ushered into a car behind the court building she had one last outburst for the gaggle of press microphones extended in her direction: ‘Bust these crooked cops and their conspiracy, please! I’m innocent!’
Arlene ran as close to the car as the deputies guarding the area would allow.
‘Bye, Lee. I love you!’ she called through the closed window.
While Lee was on her way to Broward County to take her place on Death Row, Billy Nolas’s mind was already looking ahead to the inevitable appeals.
But he reflected on the curious sight of jurors crying as they sentenced Lee to death. That had been a new experience for him. So, too, was seeing a defendant’s brother take the stand as Barry Wuornos did, trying to help seal his sister’s fate. ‘I have never in my life seen a family member testify for the state,’ he said later. ‘It was atrocious.’
His sadness was evident, and his feelings obviously went beyond the call of duty.
‘One of the tragedies of Lee’s life is that folks like her brother who should be supporting her just aren’t there. She had been basically abandoned by everyone.’
Barry’s act of unkindness did not go unrewarded. When, in March, Lee gave an interview to talk-show host Montel Williams, she had by then shifted the blame for her introduction to sex at age twelve, and laid it firmly at Barry’s door. ‘Sex was a new … well, we were finding a lot of dirty books from our brother Barry in the closets, and sex kinda started opening to us when we found those dirty books in the closets,’ she said.
Barry might well have belatedly wished he’d conceded the point on how well he knew Aileen. But while Aileen’s anger at Barry, the author of yet another betrayal, was understandable, what also came across was her readiness to re-fashion her tales at whim and to tailor them to serve her interests of the moment.
50
Arlene Pralle called him a ‘giver of great bear hugs’, but 38-year old Steve Glazer was also a man with a legal mission only marginally less challenging than Mount Everest. On May 4, 1992, he faced an unenviable, if voluntarily undertaken, task in Marion County.
Lee had pled ‘no contest’ to the murders of David Spears, Troy Burress and Dick Humphreys back on March 31, negating the need for a trial. So at the May penalty phase hearing a jury would decide if she would get life in prison or be sentenced to death for the three homicides. Utilising a format resembling a mini-trial, it gave both prosecution and defence a forum in which to lay out their cases to a jury unfamiliar with the details.
Chief Assistant State Attorney Ric Ridgway had been shocked back in March when Lee not only appointed Steve Glazer her defence attorney after dumping her three court-appointed public defenders from Volusia County, but also immediately entered three ‘no contest’ pleas.
He was also concerned. Glazer, a former public defender, had handled Arlene Pralle’s adoption of Wuornos, but Ridgway didn’t know if he had prior experience in capital cases or if he’d even attended the educational life or death seminars given to public defenders and was anxious to get the issue of Glazer’s competence addressed on the record. His main goal was to protect the case against later allegations of ineffective assistance of counsel.
“I was concerned with: could his competency be demonstrated, put on the record,” he explained, “and the defendant accepting his representation of her, in spite of the deficits or deficiencies that might exist in his experience.”
Ridgway was not alone in his concerns. He noticed that Judge Tom Sawaya also did, “vitually everything he could to talk Aileen Wuornos out of entering that plea.” But enter it she did.
So in May, Ridgway’s aim, along with his co-counsel, David Eddy, was to hammer home to the jurors the sheer heinousness and cold-blooded calculation of Lee’s crimes, urging them to recommend to the judge that the fitting punishment was death in the electric chair. The guilt-versus-innocence phase required a unanimous jury verdict to convict but the penalty phase required only a majority verdict to determine Lee’s fate.
Although Lee spoke of an urge to meet her maker, Glazer would do his best to convince the jury that spending the rest of her natural life on Death Row without possibility of parole for at least 25 years per sentence, would be punishment enough. Glazer, with his confessed multiple-murderer client, would attempt to prove that there were mitigating circumstances that went some way towards offsetting the brutality of her crimes, and would urge the jurors to show mercy.
Glazer was working pro bono for Lee. In return, his career would receive a desired infusion of publicity and notoriety. A burly figure in a navy-blue suit topped with a mass of fuzzy black hair, Glazer had suffered a major heart attack in December 1991 and had since lost 125 pounds. A high school dropout, New Yorker, and sometime musician, affable Glazer seemed to relish his renegade outsider role.
Indeed, his controversial tactics (underscored by his own Judeo-Buddhist—he called it Judhist—philosophies and approach to life on this planet) had earned him biting criticism from his peers. After the bombshell of Lee’s ‘no contest’ pleas, his crassly-commercial telephone number DRLEGAL, practically begged the nickname that sprang up: ‘Dr. Lethal’.
In court for the first day of the penalty phase, the defendant looked like some product of a less advanced nation, her uneven teeth veering off unchecked in conflicting directions, her skin rough and blotchy, her dishwater-blond hair in lacklustre condition.
Lee did two things. Fought for the right to sit out the remainder of the hearing in her Death Row cell. And made a rambling, self-serving speech that reeked of a persecution complex, reading from handwritten notes and unwittingly reading one page twice. The diatribe unwound painfully slowly and laboriously, until finally Judge Tom Sawaya could stand it no more and enquired how much longer it would take. Solicitous, Lee promised to speed it up.
She was supposedly admitting to her crimes and voicing her sorrow, yet the old blame and self-defence notes kept creeping in.
In fact, Lee’s desire not to be present played right into Steve Glazer’s hands. She could rant and rave out of the presence of the jury. Meanwhile he hoped with the help of Arlene Pralle to give an impression of a new, saved—or at least salvageable—woman.
Yet leaving court that first day, triumphant in some small way, Lee did not radiate the happiness that Pralle claimed she felt so much as outrage. That evening, she snarled and sneered out from TV sets on the nightly news.
Why so furious? Word was out that in Hollywood, actress Jean Smart, latterly of the TV show, Designing Women, had been cast to play Lee in the long-denied TV movie, Overkill. It was moving forward just as Jackelyn Giroux and Geraldo Rivera’s Now It Can Be Told had claimed all along, with CBS, Republic Pictures and CM2 (Chuck McLain’s production company) the players in the deal.
The cast of characters, detailed by Breakdown Services Ltd. to bring in submissions from actors hoping to audition, was also just as predicted by Giroux in February 1991, over a year earlier. The key characters whose real names remained in place were the three police officers, Munster, Binegar and Henry, and of course, Tyria Moore. Certainly, Lee’s belief that all those people (not least Ty) would be making money off her life story was enough to fuel her ire.
But seeping through again came the unmistakable impression that some plan had gone horribly awry and that the reality of her situation had begun to truly sink in.
In her contorted thinking, had Lee perhaps envisaged the scenario thus? That she would pay a price for her crimes (serve a sentence mitigated by a successful plea of self-defence), then reap handsome rewards from books and movies? Utterly convinced that her self-defence stories would be believed, had she thought she’d spend a limited time behind bars (nothing she hadn’t done before), then be liberated to capitalise on her unique place in history?
Serial killer is a factually accurate description of Lee, but the chord it strikes is worlds less sympathetic than that of a victimised woman, brutally and repeatedly raped, driven to exact the ultimate revenge. The portrait she tried to paint of herself.
It’s a fair bet that Aileen Wuornos did not anticipate being labelled the world’s first female serial killer (a term she disgustedly decried as just one more con on the part of authorities). Rather, she saw herself being viewed as some kind of trailblazing, suffering heroine. Someone who would command respect. And along the way (and no less importantly), she, like so many others before her in the time-honoured American tradition, would get rich selling her story.
Back in court, without Aileen, prospective jurors were quizzed as they’d been in Volusia County, on their ability to render the death penalty, their awareness of pretrial publicity, their open-mindedness.
‘Are you going to ask me to prove to you that she deserves to live?’ Glazer enquired of one potential juror, who was quickly dismissed after answering affirmatively. Another, who believed in an eye for an eye unless it was proved otherwise, quickly followed suit. A German-born woman was excused because, having grown up under the totalitarian Hitlerian regime, she could not help sentence a fellow human being to death. Reality setting in, many were simply afraid of making the weighty decision required of them.
One man admitted to having read the Sunday paper and, mindful of his upcoming jury service, to thinking, ‘Lord, let that not be my trial.’ ‘Well, your prayer was not answered,’ Judge Sawaya replied. ‘Is that going to bother you?’
With the Los Angeles riots of the previous week still tumbling indigestibly in everyone’s minds, Steve Glazer, in a clumsy attempt at levity, asked one citizen if ‘we shouldn’t change the venue to Simi Valley or anything like that?’ With no co-counsel at his side, Glazer received the occasional fold-up note from Arlene Pralle, giving her input as a kind of informal jury consultant.
Across the cramped, modern-looking, yet poorly designed courtroom (with its unavoidably creaky chairs and doors and resulting poor acoustics) sat a varying but solid contingent of victims’ family members.
When the jury was sworn in at 3:35 p.m. and the courtroom cleared of the remaining jury pool, a small press corps and a few interested court employees remained. Then there were two factions, glaringly disparate. Arlene Pralle, adoptive mother and curiousity, on the one side. And those who had lost their loved ones at the bloodied hands of her adoptive daughter, on the other.
After the judge instructed the jury, Ric Ridgway launched straight into his opening statement, outlining his evidence. Ridgway, a tall, bespectacled and (in this arena at least) rather serious 40-year-old in a pale beige suit, had graduated from the University of Miami Law School and had been with the 5th Judicial Circuit for ten years. As Chief Assistant State Attorney, he had tried around ten capital cases in Florida. With the help of David Eddy, Ridgway would show the jury that Dick Humphreys had died a cruel death:
‘Dick Humphreys had been beaten, and shot seven times. He had several bullet wounds in his chest, one in his right wrist, and several in his back.’
The jury listened intently as Ridgway explained that the decomposed condition of the bodies of David Spears and Troy Burress made it impossible to prove whether or not they too had been beaten or abused.
‘These murders were committed in a cold, calculated and premeditated fashion. These were not spur of the moment … they were carefully thought out, planned-in-advance murders.
‘Dick Humphreys was brutalised and abused before he was killed. And his murder was committed in a manner that is heinous, atrocious and cruel.’
Steve Glazer then stood up and argued that the facts would prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the jury could return with a verdict of life and would have done its job. He said they’d see the three-hour confession videotape and that they would hear Lee often mention self-defence, or answer, ‘I don’t remember.’ They would also hear Arlene Pralle testify that Ms. Wuornos’s life had changed.
Yes, he conceded, the state would prove aggravation, but the mitigation would outweigh that. But Steve Glazer did acknowledge his uphill battle, saying, ‘I don’t even want to use the word good … but there’s some spark of hope here that this person, Miss Wuornos, does not deserve death.’
The jury would have to make a life-or-death decision without the benefit of hearing all the evidence presented in a full-scale trial, and from the outset it was clear that Ric Ridgway would be the soul of level-headed, sound reasoning. When he called his first three witnesses, law enforcement investigators, he immediately began cleverly and economically to thread his miniature tapestry of evidence into a cohesive, digestible whole.
Amidst the expert witnesses and law enforcement officers, he came up with the perfect tool with which to show the fragility of the veneer of the much-advertised reform in Lee. Although part of her reason for pleading ‘no contest’ to these charges had supposedly been to avoid putting the victims’ families through the ordeal and to save the state money, when she thought she wasn’t going to get her own way about being in the jail she chose, she threatened to change that plea at the last moment and to have a trial after all.
And during the four and a half hour drive from Broward Correctional Institute to Marion County for the March 30 hearing, she’d threatened jail transporter, Paul Laxton. Ric Ridgway had him testify to their exchanges that took place just hours before she claimed to be a changed person.
‘She made a statement that she’d kill me if it took her ten years to do so,’ s
aid Laxton.
‘Anything else?’ enquired Ridgway.
‘She also made a statement, something about shooting me in the back of the head, and her words were, cutting off my dick and sticking it in my mouth.’
‘Did she make any statements referring to a change in society that she would like to see made?’ Ridgway probed.
‘She talked about creating … a society where … they would shoot police officers between the eyes, and the police would have to walk around with bullet-proof helmets.’
‘Did you respond?’
‘No.’
The jury also heard forensic pathologist Dr. Janet Pillow tell of the doughnut-shaped abrasion on the side of Dick Humphreys’s body, consistent with the shape of a gun barrel, and pushed there with enough force to scrape off the top layer of skin.
This jury, unlike the one in Volusia County, saw the videotape in its entirety on May 6. Journalists, a cynical bunch by definition, are not necessarily the ideal barometer by which to gauge the emotional temperature of juries, but it seemed to all present that the jury members shuffled in their seats with noticeable discomfort. They appeared mildly shell-shocked. And two men exchanged a fleeting glance of what looked like disbelief.
The videotape patently did not vindicate her, as Lee had imagined it would, by pointing out her painstakingly tallied number of self-defence pleas. It merely prolonged the horrific impact of her degree of denial of what she had done, her lies, and the sheer improbability of her story.
The victims were muddled in her mind, perhaps due to her inebriation at the time of the murders. Yet, curiously enough, some facts seemed to come easily. She’d asked the investigators if any prints had been found on the car she’d wrecked? She’d been worried that she hadn’t covered her tracks in her usual careful fashion in that instance, and she was right: both her and Ty’s prints were found.
Taking the stand immediately following the videotape could not have been worse timing for Arlene Pralle, who was primed to launch into her ‘Lee is a wonderful, compassionate human being’ speech. The jurors’ ears were still ringing and their minds reeling from the emotionless recounting of seven slayings. And they were in no mood for Pralle’s saccharine tale of first setting eyes on Wuornos and knowing in her heart that ‘this woman was no serial killer.’