by Sue Russell
In 1993, the FDLE carried out a rather different investigation. Triggered by Bruce Munster’s deposition for a civil lawsuit between Aileen Wuornos and Jackelyn Giroux, it involved some odd telephone communications between Munster and Henry.
The background to the Wuornos/Giroux legal battle lay in a ‘declaratory judgment action’ that Steven Glazer filed on behalf of Wuornos in September 1992 against Jackelyn Giroux, Jackelyn Giroux Productions, and Russell Armstrong (the lawyer who had originally liaised between the two women.) Wuornos wanted to repudiate the January 1991 contract giving Giroux rights to her life story. Later, Giroux learned that Lee was angry when she filed her suit because she was under the erroneous impression that Giroux was cooperating with the Republic Pictures-CBS production of Overkill. Nothing could have been further from the truth, of course.
The Giroux defendants lodged a cross complaint against Wuornos for the right to continue to exclusively own her story as she had told it to Giroux. Then the Giroux team deposed various players including the three police officers because, Giroux said, ‘I believed they had intervened with my communication with Aileen Wuornos and additionally, I believed that the depositions would give me discovery—insight into what transpired between them and Republic/CBS.’
Ultimately, Wuornos and Giroux dropped their complaints against one another. Meanwhile, those were tense times for ‘the three cops’. Just before Bruce Munster was deposed, he received a curious voice mail message on his pager (possibly two, he couldn’t recall) that sent him straight into self-preservation mode. Major Henry’s voice was asking him to call back ‘Mr. Nobody’ at a different extension from his own in the sheriff’s office. So, Munster testified:
‘I recorded those (one or two voice mail) pages that made me suspicious and made me believe that I was going to be asked to do something, or say something, that wasn’t true. And it was just a feeling that I had.
‘And I called the office and I recorded that conversation in which Major Henry told me that this conversation that he and I were having never occurred; that he wanted to discuss the depositions. ’
Munster said that Henry told him that if he was asked if they’d discussed his deposition, he should say no.
‘Now Mr. Hobson, I don’t lie, period, and I’m not going to do it,’ Munster testified. ‘Even if it jeopardizes my job, I don’t lie.’
Munster turned over the tapes to a lawyer and ultimately they were given to Sheriff Don Moreland, leading to the FDLE’s investigation.
‘After the investigation, isn’t it true that Dan Henry resigned?’ asked Hobson.
‘That’s correct,’ said Munster.
(When Dan Henry testified about his 1993 resignation, he said, ‘I wasn’t being terminated but I felt like it was the best thing to do at the time.’ Five months after the FDLE investigation cleared him, however, then-sheriff Ken Ergle rehired him. And by 2001, like Binegar, Henry was a Chief of Staff in the Marion County Sheriff’s Office.)
‘Did Captain Binegar resign?’ Hobson asked Munster.
‘No, he did not,’ said Munster. ‘Captain Binegar hadn’t done anything.’
Munster also denied a common rumour that he himself had been demoted:
‘In June of 1992, I had given up my stripes and my position as a sergeant in the major crimes unit and had taken a position as a school resource officer,’ he explained. ‘So that happened in ’92. This happened in ’93.’
Speculating on what might have prompted Dan Henry to conjure up this fantasy character, ‘Mr. Nobody’, Munster could only guess that Henry was being overly cautious in a contentious climate. And the way he did it came back to bite him.
‘… it was just a knee-jerk reaction that there would be—he would be criticized in some way for the answers that he gave, or something,’ said Munster. ‘I don’t know. But there wasn’t anything to lie about. We didn’t do anything wrong.’
‘The only really questionable conduct he engaged in was trying to do something that might have been perjurious or less than truthful testimony?’ Hobson asked.
‘Well, this was the second most powerful man in this agency,’ said Munster. ‘He was right under the sheriff. And this man was telling me that this conversation never took place … and for me to go into a depo the next day and to say he and I never talked, I wasn’t going to do it. Not for anybody.’
Hobson then asked about the suggestion that Tyria was never charged with a crime because she was tantamount to the officers’ commercial colleage.
‘That’s ridiculous!’ said Munster, citing the fact that the investigators didn’t find a single witness who put Tyria and Aileen together on the highways. All evidence pointed to Aileen travelling alone while Ty had a job or stayed at home.
‘I don’t want to call her a wife, but that’s basically what she was,’ he explained.
Munster wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that a proposed contract for a movie existed, but he personally never signed anything and he strongly doubted that Binegar or Henry would have done so either:
‘I would find it very hard to believe that they did because that would be their careers.’
When it was Dan Henry’s turn to testify, Joseph Hobson asked: ‘Do you remember why you were so eager to talk to Deputy Munster about your testimony?’
‘I’ve been waiting ten years to say this,’ Henry replied. ‘If all my phone calls were recorded all my life, I probably wouldn’t be a policeman today. You know, people say pretty dumb things when they don’t realize they’re being recorded, and I said some pretty dumb things.’
‘But that conversation, you took efforts to conceal?’ said Hobson.
‘Excuse me?’ said Henry.
‘You identified yourself as “Mr. Nobody”?’ Hobson clarified.
‘I don’t recall that, but it wasn’t concealed. It was on the telephone. ’
Before releasing the witness, Scott Browne elicited Dan Henry’s testimony that he’d never received a single dollar in relation to a movie deal.
For Munster, what had begun as the most exciting case of his career, had turned so sour that later, he seriously considered leaving the department. ‘I was tired of all the stones that were being thrown and backstabbing,’ he said. Being deposed in 2000, and again in 2001, wasn’t pleasant either.
‘You know, the movie thing, it was so innocent,’ he said. ‘I mean, of course, today it doesn’t seem like that. But it was so innocent. There was nothing unscrupulous or anything going on.’
He wanted the story told right, he said, and making money was never his objective although, ‘No one is averse to making extra money.’
Well, apparently Tyria Moore was. For a while, anyway. Tyria, who worked as a forklift driver and by then had lived in Pennsylvania for eight years, said she knew only of the Richard Mallory murder and had no suspicions of any others. (This sounded at minimum disingenuous, and if Tyria thought that the dead men’s belongings she took to Pennsylvania were gifts from Aileen’s clients, what did she tell herself about the procession of strange cars that Aileen brought home? That question wasn’t asked.)
Tyria admitted to being ‘very scared’ when police first questioned her.
‘Did they give you the impression that you could be prosecuted? ’ Joseph Hobson asked.
‘Yeah. They never told me that I couldn’t be,’ she said. ‘There was no guarantee that I would ever not be charged.’
‘So in your mind, it was a real fear that you could be charged?’
‘Correct.’
The only thing she’d ever heard about any movie monies perhaps benefitting the victims’ families came from what she read in a newspaper. She recalled being contacted by Robbie Bradshaw and the suggestion that she, Munster and Henry, ‘Should stick together and have one attorney.’
Hobson questioned her more closely: ‘So you went from being a possible co-defendant, to a partner in a business enterprise? ’
Scott Browne objected so Hobson scratched the word partner.
‘So you went from being a defendant to someone who was going to go in on book deals with them?’
‘That was what they wanted. Yes.’
Tyria told Hobson she’d had no previous thoughts of book deals herself.
‘What did you think of the idea as they proposed it to you?’ he asked.
‘I didn’t want anything to do with it,’ she said firmly.
She responded to a letter from Mr. Bradshaw saying she wasn’t interested and at that time, didn’t entertain the idea at all.
‘At any time, did you?’
‘Later, yes.’
Hobson wanted to know why Munster would approach her and how he knew she was interested.
‘I don’t know,’ said Ty. ‘He didn’t know I was interested, because I wasn’t. I made it very clear that … I could not make money off of this. I just can’t see the fact of profiting when someone else lost their life. That’s just not me.’
A transient philosophy apparently. Later, Tyria was open to telling her story to Jackelyn Giroux … for a price. In May 1992, the two also joined forces in Giroux’s effort to have an injunction issued to stop Overkill from being aired. That month, Giroux hired lawyer Jonathan Lubell of Morrison, Cohen, Singer & Weinstein in New York City, impressed by his track record in cases against CBS. However, Giroux contends that to her horror, she discovered that Lubell did not immediately notify CBS or Republic Pictures of her grievance, as she’d requested—and didn’t do so until November. The month Overkill was due to air.
Lubell then told her the court venue was changed to Los Angeles and suddenly put another lawyer on the case. To Giroux’s dismay, the L.A. judge ruled that the complaint was filed too late and Overkill could air as planned. However, he did note that Tyria Moore and Giroux could try to claim damages afterwards, based upon their claim that the CBS/Republic movie invaded Tyria’s privacy rights—rights which Giroux obtained from Tyria in a September 1992 contract.
That summer, even State Attorney Brad King felt moved to write to Jeff Sagansky, then head of CBS, to lobby for CBS to drop Overkill. He urged him to reconsider: he’d read Fred Mills’ script and found it a ‘substantially inaccurate portrayal of the role of law enforcement in bringing Aileen Wuornos to justice for her crimes.’ He complained about Aileen being portrayed as a, ‘sociological victim instead of the cold-blooded killer of reality. ’ He asked that CBS not give Aileen Wuornos any more attention. But his pleas fell on deaf ears. Overkill aired on television in late November.
‘We had planned to continue fighting,’ Jackelyn Giroux recalled in 2001, but she received a massive lawyer’s bill and simply didn’t have the funds to continue. ‘Plus, I was advised that Tyria’s damages could never recover that enormous legal fee.’
Giroux felt that she got a raw deal whereas, in her opinion, Binegar, Munster and Henry got off very lightly for their little foray into the wilds of Hollywood during an ongoing case.
‘I think they were very, very lucky,’ she said. ‘And if it happened in a large city, they would have been dismissed in a heartbeat. We can all say we were naïve and we are sorry, after the fact. But they have never come clean. When you read their depositions and they cannot remember who sat next to Tyria Moore on a plane and Henry can’t remember who he gave information to while mowing his front lawn—well, why would you want them in law enforcement if their memories are that bad?’
54
Lee’s wish to die led to a competency hearing in Marion County preceding the February 2001 Evidentiary Hearing. It fell to Circuit Judge Victor Musleh to decide if she was competent to make the monumental decision to end all appeals of her six death sentences and proceed to execution.
Psychologist Bill Mosman thought she was not, testifying that Lee suffered from paranoid delusions and believed prison officials were trying to change her thought patterns via radio waves, and to poison her food.
Dr. Michael Herkov, a psychologist, associate professor at the University of Florida College of Medicine and consultant to the FBI, had a different take. He interviewed Lee in her room for a couple of hours, initially focusing on retroactively reviewing her competency back in 1992 when she decided to plead ‘no contest’ in the murders of Burress, Humphreys and Spears, then her current competence. Unlike Mosman, Herkov found her competent.
After hearing conflicting testimony on February 18, Judge Musleh ordered Herkov to re-evaluate Aileen. At 7 a.m. the next morning, the two talked for an hour in the jury room adjacent to the courtroom while Herkov took notes on his laptop computer.
There was no doubt in the doctor’s mind that Lee understood all that she needed to. At the time of her trial and convictions, she’d understood the nature of her crimes and the range of possible penalties. And now she knew what she was doing in wanting to hasten her journey to execution. She was a little confused regarding that step’s absolute finality. So Herkov explained to her that waiving her appeals would close the door on all further appeals. Understanding that, she chose to still leave that door open just a chink. She asked to be allowed to drop her appeals without prejudice … just in case she later wanted to re-file.
‘It is my professional opinion within a reasonable degree of psychological probability that Ms. Wuornos is competent to proceed today,’ Herkov told Judge Musleh. She had changed her mind on important issues but was not psychotic and her inconsistency was not evidence of incompetence.
One of Aileen’s defence lawyers, Mr. Reiter, pressed Herkov about Aileen’s mood swings: happy one minute, sad the next, friendly one minute, screaming outrageously the next.
‘That would tend to confirm a borderline or an antisocial (personality disorders),’ Herkov testified. ‘They tend to do that. But just because you become irate, just because you have poor control over your anger and then you have mood fluctuations, doesn’t make you psychotic.’
Yes, Aileen had in the past complained that someone had been ‘messing’ with her prison food, but given the prison environment with its pervasive culture of suspicion, that was not a delusion either. Food was a constant topic of discussion among inmates, and Aileen didn’t think she was being poisoned.
With her behavioural changes and mood instability, Herkov said, ‘I think that Ms. Wuornos is classic, and very much antisocial and borderline.’
Dr. Herkov agreed with Mr. Reiter: it was distinctly possible that Lee might blow up in court. ‘But,’ he added, ‘if you’re talking about a capacity to be able to control it, I think she has the capacity to do that.’
Someone with mood instability might be able to control their behaviour, he explained, ‘And may simply be so angry that they choose not to do it.’ That was the case with Aileen whom he believed could confer with her lawyers in a reasonable manner. He noted that personality disorders like Aileen’s are difficult to treat.
On February 20, Herkov took the witness stand again. Assistant Attorney General Scott Browne asked about Ms. Wuornos’s flip-flop decision first to waive, then not to waive, her appeals. Herkov explained that she wasn’t contesting her fate but wanted to keep the appeal process going a little longer to give her, ‘some time to get right with God before her execution.’
She did not like her lawyer, Joseph Hobson, apparently, because she felt he’d pushed her to keep trying for a new trial or even to perhaps get her sentence overturned.
‘But she did not believe that he was trying to cause her any harm,’ said Herkov. ‘She thought that he might be trying to enhance his own career, but she felt that he was working in her best interest from his point of view. She just did not agree with that and just did not want that.’
True, Aileen had waived her right to be present during the current important hearing but, ‘She gave a very cogent and plausible answer, that she doesn’t like it here because of the clothes, because of the shackles. They’re uncomfortable. Because of the belt (around her) that if she gets unruly … they can hit her with a jolt or something that she doesn’t relish very much. Also, the conditions here, I guess in this ja
il, at least in her opinion, are dirty and much less clean than her cell down at Broward C.I.’
Lee told Herkov that Jesus was influencing her mind, telling her to tell the truth. That did not amount to a delusion. And she’d denied hearing any voices.
True, Lee had thought she was being monitored via an old, disused P.A. system from which she’d occasionally hear crackles or whining noises. Again, Dr. Herkov didn’t feel this was delusional. The apparatus existed. Sound might have travelled along it in some fashion.
Herkov wasn’t remotely surprised that she didn’t trust the correctional officers because, ‘There is a culture of distrust of correctional officers in the prison, be it founded or unfounded.’ He explained the importance of context and the environment. For instance, if he thought his colleagues at the University of Florida were trying to poison him, that would be more likely to be delusional than the same assertion made by someone in the prison population where food might indeed be ‘messed with’.
Dr. Herkov defined a delusion as a fixed false belief that is contrary to observable reality. ‘The person is unable to accept that their opinion, belief, may in fact be wrong,’ he said. He said folks who believed the earth was flat were not delusional. They had false information and false information does not make something a delusion.
Dr. Herkov was aware that Dr. Mosman disagreed but in his professional opinion, as long as Lee could give plausible explanations for her beliefs—which she did—that, ‘does not border on psychotic and, therefore, does not meet the criteria for delusion. ’
Going back to the food, he noted, ‘If you look at the BCI (Broward C.I.) records, she refuses relatively few meals. You can count how many times she’s refused a meal, which may have some bearing on how strong her belief was that she was actually being poisoned.’ (‘If I thought I was being poisoned, I might eat less and certainly might refuse more meals!’ he said later.)
Joseph Hobson asked an intriguing question: is not wanting to fight being executed, or actually wanting to be executed, suicidal? Again, Dr. Herkov felt Aileen’s reasoning was sound.