Lethal Intent

by Sue Russell

  Amidst the visible pain of the victims’ families, Pralle recounted her own tale of woe, from her mother’s death to her father’s massive heart attack, then, wisely urged by Glazer to move forward into her relationship with Lee, she quoted unquestioningly from Lee’s litany of stories: from being abandoned at six months old and discovered in an attic covered with flies, to a story the jury was in even less of a mood to hear. Lee’s least favourite food was baked potatoes and when Lauri once found she had dumped one in the trash, he made her retrieve it and eat it. The baked potato incident was Pralle’s anecdotal crescendo.

  Pralle said that since her adoption, Lee felt complete and total and now had a family and people who loved her.

  ‘Since she’s found Jesus Christ, I suppose she’s a perfect angel?’ asked Steve Glazer.

  ‘She’s not an angel,’ Pralle responded with a smile, but she had nevertheless seen lots of changes. Lee listened to her now, and followed the Bible. She had nightmares about what she had done and felt really bad. She had been treated terribly by her jailers, she said. Lee’s state of mind now was such that at times she was very depressed. She would never be able to drive a car again. And Arlene Pralle read the jury a letter from Dawn Botkins that said that Lee had had a rough deal in life and been treated terribly as a kid.

  Pralle’s earlier sob story about incurring over $5,000 worth of telephone bills while talking to Lee in prison was presumably meant to tug at the heartstrings of the jury. A jury she approached as if they would automatically sympathise with her higher calling and not question her sincerity.

  The sum total of Pralle’s plea for her daughter, her excuse for her behaviour, seemed to be that Lori was the favourite in the house.

  Pralle was right about one thing. Barry Wuornos was indeed absent during Aileen’s crucial adolescent years. But this nugget of truth was most probably lost on a jury floundering in a swamp of accusations.

  And of course Lee’s claim of her prayer that God send a Christian woman to befriend her sounded totally incongruous with telling the jailer who transported her that she’d kill him if it took her ten years. When Ric Ridgway questioned Lee’s adoptive mother he scored more points when he established that she could not really explain her converted Christian daughter’s outbursts against her jailers.

  Ridgway pounced on Pralle, cutting her pious certainty from under her, and some witnesses to his cross-examination, while mindful of the sobriety of the proceedings, had to stifle an impulse to cheer.

  Eventually, he cut straight to the exposed jugular. He had a revelation to make that would shake Lee’s oft-repeated bleating about cops’ movie and book dealings tainting her right to a fair trial. Pralle’s reputation as the probably well-meaning, Christian crazy lady also took a turn for the overtly mercenary as Ric Ridgway established that she had recently received $7,500 for a television interview. Ric Ridgway had pureéd Pralle’s already shredded credibility.

  After the jury was escorted from the courtroom on the afternoon of 6 May 1992, normally placid Judge Sawaya’s frustration with Arlene Pralle was apparent. She had already angered him by telling the press that the proceedings were a waste of time. Now, in the courtroom, she pleaded for mercy for Lee. Yet in the press, she espoused the desire to help Lee get what she wanted and therefore dispatch her as quickly as possible to meet her maker. Not the judge’s words, but his message was clear: she speaketh with forked tongue.

  Pralle offered him an extraordinary explanation for her apparent diversity of opinions. What she said to the jury came from her heart (i.e. her faith in Lee’s finer qualities and redemption); when she spoke to the press, she was speaking for Lee (i.e. her disgust at the system, lack of hope injustice being served, the proceedings wasting taxpayers’ money).

  Ric Ridgway stepped up to present his closing argument. He pointed the jury towards the physical evidence surrounding the death of David Spears, who may or may not have accepted Aileen Wuornos’s offer of prostitution.

  ‘Now why he came from his intended route of Ocoee near Orlando and drove all the way to a remote section of Citrus County to pick up a thirty-dollar hooker isn’t clear. There’s a lot about his death we will never know. But what is clear is that whatever David Spears had done or agreed to do … shot six times including at least twice in the back, is not self-defence. David Spears, whatever he agreed to do, whatever he was misled into doing, died as a result of a robbery.’

  From Bobby Copas (the witness who’d had a frightening encounter with Lee after picking her up and had also testified in DeLand), the jury could see, he said, ‘That you didn’t have to accept Aileen Wuornos’s offer of prostitution for her to turn violent. All you had to do was disappoint her. All you had to do was have something she wanted.’

  Her crimes were not spur-of-the-moment killings, he argued, but the killings of a woman who went out hunting men to kill and rob. Men she’d tricked into secluded areas. Hers were not the actions of someone who’d just been almost killed.

  ‘Common sense says that a person is not going to have to use deadly force to kill another human being in self-defence seven times in one year … a police officer on the street every day, dealing with criminals, doesn’t have to kill seven people in a year. Most of them don’t kill one in a lifetime. Yet they want you to believe that she ran into seven men within one year and had to kill them all.’

  Killing to avoid arrest, Ridgway pointed out, was an aggravated circumstance. After the men had been shot once or twice and it was no longer necessary to shoot them just to rob them, once they were obviously no longer in any condition to resist, she’d shot them again, and she’d kept on shooting.

  He pointed out to them the bruise on Dick Humphreys’s abdomen and the small bruises up near his armpit. ‘When you consider what you see on Mr. Humphreys’s body and what Mr. Copas told you happened, if you said ‘No’ to Aileen Wuornos, you were going anyway. But Copas had the presence of mind and pretended to go along until he could trick her out of his car. The physical evidence says that Humphreys couldn’t trick her out of his car. Saying ‘No’ to her only angered her. He wound up where he wound up, at the end of a gun, knowing that he was going to die.’

  Steve Glazer stood up and told the jury that he had to prove to them that Aileen Wuornos’s life was worth saving. He made a valiant try. The tack he took, arguing for a life sentence over death, was that ‘Aileen can never and will never repeat that past. She’ll never walk the streets again.’

  He believed she had now taken responsibility for her own actions and that she was sincere in her professed wish to get things right with God. She had found, her lawyer said, ‘a glorious new belief.’

  Steve Glazer took a reel of tape and while the courtroom waited, he eased his bulky body down to the floor and marked off a rectangle 6 feet by 8 feet. That, he said, was where she was living. Her plea of no contest had probably saved the state of Florida $20-$30 million, and she’d considered that as well in deciding to plead ‘no contest’.

  In the weeks preceding this hearing, investigator John Tilley, anxious to find Peter Siems’s body and hoping to give Siems’s family some peace of mind, had approached Lee for help regarding its possible location. Together, they had taken a trip to South Carolina, where she’d come to think she might have left him, but the trip drew a blank. Now Steve Glazer was citing that trip as evidence of the change in Lee.

  ‘Is this not an act of unselfishness?’ he asked the jury. ‘It may even somehow qualify as an act of kindness. An act of kindness from a killer.’

  He had not burdened the jury with psychiatric and psychological testimony or stories of her being dropped on her head as a baby. He did not even think his client killed in self-defence. He did believe, however, that she thought she acted in self-defence. Glazer continued: ‘I keep walking on the border of this taped-off area. This could be all the space left for her on this planet.’

  As he described the harsh reality of her life on Death Row and his intention to tell the judge that Lee should
be put away for a minimum of 75 years, Shirley Humphreys left the courtroom. She need not have worried. When the jury returned after less than four hours of deliberation, they had voted to recommend death, by ten votes to two. When Judge Sawaya confirmed the sentence, Lee was facing four death penalties. Dixie County and Pasco County, with their victims, Walter Gino Antonio and Charles Carskaddon were still waiting in the wings.

  The day after the Marion County jury’s verdict, Ric Ridgway admitted that when he’d learned at the eleventh hour of John Tilley’s proposed trip with Lee to South Carolina, ‘I went ballistic. ’ To Ridgway, the timing was awful and reeked of manipulation. And what a position to be in. If word leaked out that Lee was willing to help and they’d turned her down, that would have looked dreadful and deservedly so.

  ‘On the other hand, I see this freight train is going to run me over in the courtroom.’

  Ridgway had hoped the trip could be stalled until after the hearing, but in the end he told John Tilley that if it became now or never, he should go ahead. By then Ridgway had thought it through, and felt reasonably confident that he could impress upon the jury that it was a ploy on Lee’s part to make herself look better.

  Tilley had ended up in this slightly rocky position because he was the only officer from Marion County that Lee would deal with. And he was torn. He knew he was due to testify for the prosecution, but he was also supposed to be trying to find Siems’s body. By letting Lee help, he was certainly opening himself up to some potential problems. On the other hand, he and his fellow officers had travelled the interstate in Georgia and had got off at each and every exit as they headed north, to search in vain. He’d also been back through two whole years of records of unidentified bodies from the medical examiners’ offices for Florida, Georgia, South and North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee. None matched up to Peter Siems’s dental records. He was clean out of ideas.

  Ultimately, Lee and Tilley did take their little trip before the hearing, and, besides being unsuccessful, it was a security nightmare. Tilley had to consider that since Lee might well be about to receive her second, third and fourth death penalties, she didn’t have much to lose any more. Perhaps she saw this as her big chance to escape. It would not look good if he lost her somewhere. Tilley didn’t think escape was in her mind, but who knew?

  He’d returned from South Carolina without finding Mr. Siems but with added insight into the defendant. He viewed her as a totally callous woman who’d used self-defence as an excuse. In his opinion, she was meticulous, knowledgeable, and thorough in her killings. And he’d learned that a clever and manipulative serial killer can be very adaptable, and can sometimes adjust his or her crimes specifically to throw off investigators. She’d broken her pattern with the length of time she kept Peter Siems’s car.

  The thought had been, she might also have broken it in other ways with Corky Reid, who was still missing in May of ’92. Then, suddenly, in August, he turned up alive and living in Las Vegas. Lee had always maintained he wasn’t a victim and she was proved right when he was picked up during a routine traffic offence. Apparently he was one of the surprisingly large number of people who disappear each year, mysteriously walking away from their lives.

  Unhappy about being found, Reid declined to discuss with his relieved but pained family what had driven him away.

  51

  In June of 1992, Aileen pled guilty to the murder of Charles Carskaddon. At the penalty phase hearing, her lawyer presented a letter from Dr Harry Krop saying she was delusional and incompetent to stand trial. Based on that, she was sent for further evaluation by Drs Donald DeBeato and Joel Epstein. Those experts, however, found that while she suffered from a personality disorder, she was competent to proceed.

  There was one bright spot for Steve Glazer—in August, his wife gave birth to their son Kody. But the year was fraught with sleepless nights. When he says, as he is fond of doing, that, ‘I literally gave my heart to these cases,’ there is harsh truth behind the laughter and glib oneliner.

  In November, Steve suffered another heart attack and underwent double bypass surgery. While in the hospital, his mother died and he missed her funeral. And more work with Wuornos lay ahead. Weathering the criticism from fellow lawyers, many of whom treated him as a pariah for ‘helping’ a confessed killer die, working gruelling hours—the personal sacrifices involved were enormous.

  ‘If you asked me would I do it again,’ he reflected in 2001, ‘the answer would be “no,” just because I couldn’t put my family and my health through it again.’

  By February of 1993, however, he was back at Aileen’s side when she went before Judge Wayne Cobb in Pasco County for sentencing for Charles Carskaddon’s murder. Glazer’s legal representation of Aileen ended thirty days later and by then she had already received her fifth death sentence in Cross City for the murder of Walter Gino Antonio, with the jury voting 7 to 5 for death.

  At her sixth sentencing hearing, Lee waived her right to present mitigating evidence and Glazer went along with her wishes. She griped that she’d already received five death sentences, whereas male serial killers like Ted Bundy, usually only received a couple! On receiving her sixth death sentence, Lee launched into a by-then typical litany of complaints and profanity, causing Judge Cobb to threaten to bind and gag her unless she stayed quiet. Ultimately, he let her address the court. Again, she complained about her inability to receive a fair trial due to all the sensational publicity. Again, she said she’d acted in self-defence.

  With six death sentences on the books and still no sign of Peter Siems’s body, Lee settled into her cell at Broward Correctional Institute for the long haul. There was no air-conditioning in the Fort Lauderdale prison, which can be swelteringly hot in South Florida’s humid climate, and Death Row inmates, distinguished from other inmates by the orange t-shirts they wore with their prison-issue blue pants, could only shower every other day.

  They were allowed a radio and black and white television in their cells and could watch church services on closed circuit TV. They could receive letters during the week and have non-contact visits, but no phone calls whatsoever. Lee got three square meals a day, the first at 5 a.m., the last around four o’clock in the afternoon.

  At Broward C.I., which was originally intended for male prisoners but has only ever housed females, Death Row inmates were counted at least hourly and were moved around in handcuffs, which they had to wear at all times except in the shower, the exercise yard or their cells. And they were generally in their cells 23 hours a day.

  Among Aileen’s neighbours were Judias ‘Judy’ Buenoano—who became the first woman to die in Florida’s ‘Old Sparky’ on March 30, 1998—and murderess, Virginia Larzelere. But they were not allowed to socialize together in a common area.

  For better or worse, this was Aileen’s home. If she ever harboured hopes of a new trial or even release, nothing was happening soon. The gears of the judicial process grind very slowly and what lay ahead was a very long road, littered with appellate proceedings.

  Aileen had more cause to hope for a new trial than most Death Row inmates. While she was awaiting sentencing, NBC’s Dateline TV news show uncovered new evidence that she felt sure would help her. When they voted for the death penalty in the Richard Mallory case, had the DeLand jury unknowingly sentenced her to death for murdering a convicted sex offender and rapist? The flashiest issue her lawyers could raise on appeal to try to save her life would be a bonafide miscarriage of justice, if they could find one.

  On November 10, 1992, Dateline aired a segment in which reporter Michele Gillen revealed what Aileen’s defence team had not—the specifics of Mallory’s criminal history. On the face of it, it sounded like huge news. At her trial Aileen had accused Mallory of brutally raping and sodomizing her. If the jury had heard that this man spent years locked up for a sexual offence, wouldn’t they have given her the benefit of the doubt? Certainly her self-defence claims would have seemed more credible.

  So, when Aileen appealed
the Mallory death sentence, her team contended that she was not told that law enforcement had interviewed Jackie Davis, Mallory’s girlfriend. They claimed that Davis’s testimony would have established Mallory’s prior violent disposition toward women. However, the Justices disagreed, responding that Aileen’s defence team had been given details in a timely manner and had chosen not to present them, or Davis herself, to the jury. Davis’s problem as a witness was that other than hearsay, secondhand reports or gossip, her own experience was that Mallory had been gentle towards women.

  There were other problems with using Mallory’s record as a mitigating factor to somehow lessen the apparent cold-blooded-ness of Aileen’s crime, most notably its distance in time. His crime took place in 1958. Mallory was a married, acne-plagued, nineteen year old just a few days shy of induction into the army and very stressed out at the time. His crime was breaking into a woman’s home and trying to assault her. When she resisted, he fled immediately. He pled insanity and was convicted of housebreaking with intent to commit rape and assault, and sentenced to four years in a Maryland psychiatric facility.

  A doctor who examined him found Mallory immature, with feelings of inadequacy with women which he covered up with fantasies that he was irresistible. The doctor also found that he had poor control of his sexual impulses. Once, he even gave up a job as a beverage delivery boy because of his strong urges to have sexual relations with the different women to whom he delivered packages. Indeed, the woman whose house he broke into was on his route and he’d seen her once before, lying across the bed, sleeping. He’d wanted to have sex with her then, he admitted. But then, as at all previous times, he had been able to suppress his inappropriate sexual desires.