by Sue Russell
Aileen’s lawyer, Joseph Hobson, had Broomfield point out pages in his film’s transcript that illustrated the fact that the money discussions with Steve and Arlene began at their first meeting.
‘Arlene is talking, saying: “It’s a neat story, but I can’t tell you until you pay,”’ Broomfield recalled. ‘And Steve is asking for the $25,000 dollars. And they are basically trying to sell the story. That’s what the scene is about.’
Apparently, Glazer sought different fees if Broomfield wanted to film Aileen’s drawings or also use her poems.
‘Mr. Glazer is a very amusing and jokey guy,’ Broomfield told Hobson, recalling that he often sang songs.
‘Did he appear to approach his duties as Ms. Wuornos’s attorney in a serious manner?’ asked Hobson.
‘I think that Steve was … in essence, very concerned about the case. I think he felt, and I felt he seemed, very overwhelmed by the case, and it was quite apparent.’
Hobson then asked about Arlene Pralle’s conduct regarding requesting a fee for the interview.
‘Well, she—I felt she had a very strong mercenary interest, which I actually stated to her,’ said Broomfield. ‘I was surprised that with all the sort of love and devotion that she was talking about, that her main—I mean, all she was really talking about was the money involved.’
Did Glazer share that mercenary interest, Hobson asked?
‘I felt he was part and parcel of that,’ Broomfield replied.
Hobson successfully argued to be allowed to bring Mr. Glazer’s marijuana use into the record, ‘Because it goes to a possible habitual use that might have gone to the degree … of impairment that attended his representation of Ms. Wuornos.’
Broomfield had filmed Glazer smoking marijuana while driving with him to visit Lee down at Broward C.I., where Steve was scheduled to discuss the Carskaddon case with her.
‘I think he said it was a seven-joint ride,’ said Broomfield, who felt it was an inappropriate time for Glazer to be indulging in drugs.
On cross-examination, Jim McCune presented a photocopy of a bounced check that Broomfield had written out to Glazer. The judge cut the discussion short, but not before an impression was given: could Broomfield have purposely bounced a check so that he could hand cash to Steve and capture that damaging image on film?
Jim McCune pointed out that in two parts of the dope-smoking scene, Glazer was wearing different coloured shirts: one blue, one white. Might the footage have been cut and pasted to make it look like something that hadn’t happened? Broomfield countered by saying that Glazer might simply have wanted to change his shirt before the prison visit after a long drive in the Florida summer heat.
Although Glazer represented Aileen criminally pro bono, Broomfield’s film portrayed Aileen as the lamb sacrificed on the altar of his and Pralle’s greed. In truth, behind bars, it was Aileen calling the shots and designating who would get how much of each fee that came in.
‘I never took a penny from anyone but Aileen,’ Glazer testified. ‘Never. I think it came down to, I got $7,500 from her—three separate occasions of $2,500, and that was my total compensation for two or three years working with her.’
One $2,500 came from Broomfield’s ultimate payment of $10,000 to gain access to Aileen to interview her.
‘I think it’s ludicrous to think that I could have talked her into anything,’ Glazer said later. ‘Do you think anyone could talk her into anything? I did what she wanted me to do.’
All her life, Aileen had craved attention and even on Death Row, enjoyed being in demand and the feeling of power it gave her. Tellingly, early in 1992, she asked for permission to receive a book at Broward—Writing For Publication. Apparently, she was still bent on having a book about her life.
Ultimately, Steve Glazer would be delighted with Judge Musleh’s order after the hearing. ‘It finally vindicated me,’ he recalled late in 2001. ‘Because the nature of the hearing was an attack on me and he just exonerated me; sang my praises.’
Put in a more formal way: ‘The court finds counsel did not render ineffective assistance of counsel.’ And the ‘Order Denying Defendant’s Motion for Post-Conviction Relief’ issued by the Circuit Court, 5th Judicial Circuit, Marion County by Circuit Judge Victor Musleh on June 7th, 2001 found: ‘Counsel was competent to represent Wuornos and assist her in her decision as to whether to plead guilty, and to assist the Defendant in a determination of what matters should be presented in mitigation.’
Musleh noted that although Glazer was strongly opposed to the death penalty, he also believed that a competent client had the right to make the ultimate defence decisions. Even so, he noted, ‘Counsel was successful in presenting significant mitigation on behalf of a very difficult defendant who wanted no mitigation presented on her behalf at all.’ And, he went on: ‘Because of counsel’s strategic decisions, the trial court found evidence of remorse, found evidence of a religious conversion, and found the Defendant suffered a deprived childhood.’ Musleh also wrote: ‘The relationship between Glazer and Wuornos appears to have been one of benevolence and mutual respect.’
He again vindicated Glazer regarding his role as intermediary in Wuornos’s financial dealings with the media:
‘The fact of the matter is the Defendant fired a highly trained and dedicated team of public defenders in favor of private counsel who would handle matters according to her directions. There was no testimony trial counsel’s actions were unauthorized. The court finds Glazer acted on Wuornos’s requests and that there was no conflict of interest. The payment of $2,500 to Glazer is neither shocking, nor unreasonable, in light of the pro bono work he performed on Defendant’s behalf.’
Steve Glazer felt much, much better.
Arlene Pralle also rued the day she met Nick Broomfield. In his film, she came across as money-minded, with questionable motives for involving herself in Aileen’s life. Of course, her adoption of a confessed killer was always, to most people, mystifying.
A onetime secretary who took up horse breeding in 1986, Arlene married Robert Pralle in 1974 and they had no children … until Aileen. Although they’d thought about adopting a child back in the 1970s, Robert had backed out of the idea.
Arlene, who became a born-again Christian at age twenty, had only recently moved to Florida when she read about Aileen’s arrest and felt moved to write to her. Being deposed in January and June of 2000, Arlene was questioned by Joseph Hobson about the beginning of their relationship.
Her first letter to Aileen was about helping her save her soul, she recalled. ‘I told her about Jesus. I told her I could help her.’ Arlene admitted to Aileen that she felt scared to write to her, but was doing so because she’d been instructed to contact her by God: ‘I have to obey God and I am writing to you because, and solely because, I want you to have peace in your heart and accept Jesus.’
Apparently not realizing how curious it sounded, Arlene then testified that although her husband was ‘a Martian;’ Robert felt similarly moved to reach out to Aileen. To avoid confusion, Mr. McCune had her clarify that she was referring to the Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus variety of ‘Martian’, made famous by John Gray’s bestselling book.
The Pralles just saw something in Aileen’s eyes that was calling out for help, said Arlene, and her letters soon led to weekly visits. But at Volusia County Branch Jail, those visits could only be through glass. Aileen, said Arlene, ‘kept saying, “I wish I could be part of a family and see what it really feels like to be part of a family.”’ But the adoption was less about that than facilitating contact visits that only family members were allowed. Arlene said it was Steve Glazer’s idea that the adoption could be a solution.
Theoretically, Arlene had much to offer Joseph Hobson as he worked his way methodically through Aileen’s appeal topics. She had been close to Aileen during the Mallory trial, she’d had contact with Tricia Jenkins and the other lawyers, and she’d been enraged when they failed to present witnesses to Aileen’s abusive childhood.
In 2000, under Hobson’s questioning, a behind-the-scenes picture emerged of the Wuornos team during the Mallory trial when Hobson asked Pralle how involved she was and if she helped Aileen’s defence attorneys.
‘I tried to, but they told me to mind my own business, that they knew what they were doing and that I was being more of a hindrance,’ said Arlene, describing Aileen’s pretrial behaviour as erratic.
‘Some of the time she was right on target, and sometimes she would blow off just hysterical … either crying or using horrible, foul language. One end of the extreme to the other. There was one time where she threw a chair at Tricia.’
‘In the course of a visit?’ Hobson asked.
‘Yes,’ said Pralle, explaining her use to the defence team as a calming go-between. ‘Tricia said it was like I had Valium on my hands, because whenever I would go in and just hold on to her (Lee’s) hand and say, “Look, just talk to Tricia, she is trying to help you,” she would calm down. And if she was screaming, she would stop screaming. If she was crying, she’d stop crying.’
‘In your visits with Lee did it ever seem to you that she was losing contact with reality?’ Hobson asked.
‘No, not when we were alone. When Tricia would push her and the trial would come up and things like that, she would just go off. In her more recent letters from Death Row, yes, I would say she is losing perspective.’
Hobson tried to bring out whose idea it was that Aileen should switch from Tricia Jenkins to Steve Glazer.
‘I think it was Aileen’s, because she was very destroyed, as I was, with the entire team of Tricia, Nolas and Miller. And she asked me to find her another lawyer because she just thought they screwed up. I thought they screwed up, too.’
Pralle admitted that Glazer had expressed ‘great reservations’ about taking on the case but that she and Wuornos had pleaded with him. Back then, Arlene said she believed Lee’s claims of self-defence regarding Richard Mallory. Some victims, Pralle believed, had hurt Lee; others she questioned in her heart.
Hobson asked whether subsequent to the Mallory trial, as her mother, Pralle had felt it in Aileen’s best interests to plead ‘no contest’ in the Marion County cases rather than go through a trial. Yes, Pralle had encouraged that:
‘And all I was interested in was her salvation; going to heaven if she died. That she would make it to heaven. If she was lying on any of those cases just to, quote, escape, get out of jail, she would be in hell. To me, as a Christian, I thought she needed to tell the truth even if the truth meant she wound up in prison the rest of her life, or the death penalty. The truth was what needed to come out.’
And Arlene believed Aileen did tell the truth. She also confirmed that Aileen wanted to get the death penalty and to be done with it.
Questioning then switched to all the media interviews. Initially, it was, said Arlene, ‘Lee pushing, pushing, pushing, “Do it, do it, do it.” Tricia saying, “Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it.” And Lee wanting me to do it.’
No money changed hands before the Mallory trial—which, Arlene revealed, caused Aileen to have a fit. But once she was on Death Row, money was taken for interviews for shows like Montel Williams, which paid $10,000, and was split between her, Steve and Lee.
‘Steve got money. Lee got money. I got money. And this was where the mistakes started. I never, ever, ever should have taken ten cents for doing any of these interviews, but Lee was the one who pushed them. Steve Glazer said, “What is wrong with it? Your daughter wants you to do this, do it.”’
‘And that is where I feel the line was drawn. I crossed over. And if I could go back I would not have accepted ten cents from any of these, it was Montel Williams and that other creepy guy …’
‘Nicholas Broomfield?’
‘Broomfield. Those were the two.’
Broomfield’s $10,000 was split between Lee, herself, Steve and Dawn Botkins, she said.
‘There is a portion of the Nicholas Broomfield documentary, The Selling Of A Serial Killer, said Hobson, ‘in which it is depicted that you and Mr. Glazer and Aileen were requesting $10,000 to do any interviews. Is that inaccurate?’
‘Totally, one hundred per cent inaccurate. Aileen wanted $10,000 or, she said, “You will not talk to anybody. This is stupid.” And this was when she started losing reality. She was the one that was pushing.’
In the years since Aileen was first sentenced to death, the relationship between adoptive mother and daughter had gone through some rough patches. Late in 1993, Arlene’s six-month absence to go to Tennessee and aid a sick friend, for instance, upset Aileen. So, later, would the news of Arlene’s move to the Bahamas in 2000, prompted because her husband wanted to retire by the ocean.
‘It is not a thing like, “You are abandoning me,”’ said Arlene. ‘It’s … “they pirate the high seas, you’re going to get yourself killed.” My father says she has more sense than I do. I don’t know.’
Although Arlene couldn’t phone Death Row, she could visit, but no visits were imminent in 2000.
‘Right now, she is just angry,’ she said. ‘And until she gets over being angry, if I went down there, I am sure the only thing that she would do would be yell at me for the entire visit. So there is no sense spending several hundred dollars on airfare just to have her sit there and yell at me for a Saturday and Sunday. So I am letting her get over the anger phase of me moving, and then I will go see her. So our relationship is the same as it has been except she is just feeling angry that I am moving.’
Pralle admitted that there were times when she’d felt very isolated with no one to talk to about her relationship with Lee.
‘Tricia won’t even talk to me,’ she testified. ‘Because of convincing Lee to plead guilty, Tricia thinks I am the scum of the earth—and sending her to the electric chair—so that entire team absolutely will have nothing to do with me.’
On June 16, Arlene Pralle testified for a second time. Why? Upon reflection, she wasn’t happy with her January deposition and contacted Assistant State Attorney Jim McCune, to ask to speak again. ‘Because I felt in my heart that there were things that, although they weren’t blatant lies, they were withholding some truths I did not specifically bring out,’ she said. ‘My husband and I talked about it and I just felt that, as Christians, we had left the door open to Satan by not being completely, one hundred per cent honest.’
She was particularly keen to correct the record on her portrayal of Steve Glazer. Earlier, she’d testified that he had spent as much time brokering movie and book deals as working on the criminal case. This was unfair.
‘He did a wonderful job defending Aileen Wuornos,’ she said. ‘I feel he did a far better job than Tricia. That was proved by the fact that he got some of the jury members to vote for life in prison, not unanimous death sentence, which Tricia got.’
She didn’t believe that Steve had any conflict of interests as Joseph Hobson, in an effort to save Lee’s life, had been trying to show. Why this change of heart about her testimony? Besides the second thoughts about Glazer, she’d also received a letter from Lee:
‘She said, “I read the deposition. You led people to believe total untruths. I don’t know if you said it that way, or it was written that way.”’
Lee did not like Arlene suggesting that her husband Robert had promoted the adoption idea. In fact, Robert and Lee had only spoken by phone a couple of times in 1991.
‘But other than that, he’s not like, quote, a father, and he wanted all of this,’ Arlene admitted. ‘He just merely went along with it. It was one hundred per cent my idea, my prompting.’
Arlene said that Lee also was really bothered by her claim that they still had contact. Contact was very limited, she admitted, in response to Jim McCune’s questioning:
‘… before we were seeing each other a lot. We were writing back and forth every week. After Nick Broomfield, it really shattered the relationship.’
(Arlene alleged that Broomfield played a kind of divide and
conquer game with them, telling Lee things Arlene had supposedly said and vice versa.)
Finally, sometime the previous year, Lee wrote to Arlene seeking forgiveness. ‘She realized that Nick was quote, unquote, a jerk. She asked if we could start over. I very willingly agreed. I wrote to her. She wrote to me faithfully.’
However, Arlene testified that she’d told Lee, ‘I don’t want you to use me as a puppet. I am not doing any media things for you. I will be your friend, period … but I am not going to be manipulated. I am not going to jump, “Well, I want you to do this, I want you to do that, go talk to these people.” If you want only a friendship, this is fine. And I am glad you forgive me and you realize the Broomfield thing was not my fault.’
Arlene felt some guilt that the year she was busy selling her horse farm, she’d only visited Lee once:
‘And she wrote to me a lot. I was the one who failed to communicate back with her and she felt very abandoned. It had nothing to do with abandoning her, but that’s how she perceived it … she said, “You dropped me like a hot potato. And in the deposition you said we have contact all the time. That’s an out-and-out lie.” Lee is correct, our contact has been very limited; not her fault, my fault.’
When Arlene sent her birthday cards and Valentines, ‘She just was furious and said, “Why are you coming back now when I needed you before?” So that is the absolute truth.’
Summing up, she said, ‘I feel I did abandon her.’ And yes, she could and should have organized her time better, ‘because I promised I would be there for her and I was not.’
53
Lee was furious about the television movie, Overkill: The Aileen Wuornos Story, which fed right into her deep belief that others were getting rich off her story. The progress of Overkill also infuriated Jackelyn Giroux, who had signed up Lee’s life story rights in January 1991, just three weeks after her arrest.
The Hollywood grapevine being what it is, Giroux was tipped off very quickly that ‘the three cops,’ as Munster, Binegar and Henry came to be known, had been brokering a movie deal. To her mind, that was a real conflict of interest at a time when the officers should have been focused on protecting the case against Wuornos. Officers whose salaries were being paid by taxpayers, no less. She was also livid because another fast-moving Wuornos movie project, one with sources inside law enforcement, could thwart her own. In 2001, she testified that she had an unwritten deal with Lorimar Productions to make her movie which fell through when Lorimar couldn’t get the rights to the officers’ part of the story. Suddenly, everywhere she went in Hollywood, she was hearing about ‘the three cops’ project.