by Sue Russell
‘… she felt that the evidence was so overwhelming in the Volusia case with the confession, that it really wasn’t surmountable. And as she has said many times: “How many times can you kill me?”’ There was also her faith—she was unafraid of dying, had made peace with God and was looking towards an afterlife. Herkov admitted that his ears perked up at first since religious delusions are common. But it wasn’t as if she was saying God had been telling her to lie in return for eternal bliss. What Aileen said was rational.
Persuaded, Judge Musleh ruled Aileen competent to make decisions about her case. She could have ended the appeals process right there, but she wasn’t quite ready to.
To the shock of many, Aileen Wuornos suddenly abandoned her decade-long claim to have killed in self-defence. On February 10, 2001, a Miami television station aired an interview in which she confessed she’d lied when she said that she shot her seven victims to save herself.
By April, she was ready to take another step towards death. She wrote to the Florida Supreme Court and to Assistant State Attorney Jim McCune, saying:
‘I’d kill again. So let’s cut with the chase and head for a hearing to get evaluated for, and proceed as sentenced.’
In June, Aileen again wrote to the Florida Supreme Court and to each county’s prosecutor asking that they end her appeals and carry out her execution. On June 13, the Florida Supreme Court referred the competency issue back for a hearing in the Daytona Beach Circuit Court.
‘There’s no question she did it, she’s confessed to it and she’s ready to pay the penalty—what’s the hold-up?’ asked Volusia State Attorney John Tanner.
One of Aileen’s CCRC lawyers, Richard Kiley, indicated that they’d make further attempts to have her declared incompetent. Lee, though, had no doubt that she was quite sane, very sensible and completely competent. She apologized to the victims’ families for her crimes and said that there was no point in more taxpayers’ money being spent on defending her:
‘There’s no sense in keeping me alive. This world doesn’t mean anything to me.’
Nothing if not consistent in her inconsistency, talking to Ocala Star-Banner reporter Rick Cundiff, late in June, she said, ‘I can’t really say I regret what I’ve done. It was an experience.’ So much for apologizing to victims’ families. She again said that none of the murders involved self-defence, just robbery and hatred. ‘I can’t say I have regrets for anything. I’m too cold, man, I’m too cold. I don’t care.’
It struck him, Cundiff wrote, that she seemed to think that telling the truth alone would be enough to secure divine forgiveness.
‘There’s no sense in dying in lies, man,’ she said. ‘I can only see going to hell for that.’
When Steve Glazer heard that Aileen had finally confessed to killing her victims in cold blood without provocation and was heading towards the fast-track to execution, he was not surprised. ‘She’s asking for the lethal injection as soon as possible,’ he said. ‘That’s the same thing she asked me to do for her nine years ago. Nothing’s changed.’
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And so the wheels of justice ground slowly on. In Daytona Beach on July 20, Circuit Judge R. Michael Hutcheson questioned Lee closely and at length. He wanted to be very, very sure that she understood the rights she’d be giving up by abandoning further appeals. A ruling from him that she was competent meant that the case would be returned to the Florida Supreme Court where Lee could ask for permission to fire her lawyers and ask for her execution to go forward. A death warrant could then come quite quickly.
Did she realize she could then be on what’s known as ‘a fast-track to execution?’ the judge asked her.
‘Yes, sir,’ she said. ‘I’m not scared by it. I know what the heck I’m doing.’
Aileen had arrived in court that day, all smiles. She laughed, and at times she cried hysterically. She spent around ninety minutes on the witness stand and when she described the murders, tears flowed. ‘This is harder than I thought it would be,’ she sniffed. But she also said something chilling:
‘I want to tell the world that I killed these men. I robbed them and I killed them as cold as ice, and I’d do it again too. I’d kill another person because I’ve hated humans for a long time.’
Again, the conflict, the contradictions. After all, she had also recently voiced regrets, saying, ‘After you’re done killing a person and you realize what you’ve done, it will haunt you the rest of your life.’
Calling for further psychiatric evaluation, and hoping to have her declared incompetent to fire them, her attorney Richard Kiley said, ‘Wuornos is using this court as merely a vehicle for state-assisted suicide.’
Under questioning by her own lawyers, Lee’s tone turned hostile.
‘I am a serial killer,’ she said. ‘I killed them in cold blood, real nasty. Right after they picked me up and we parked in the woods, I whipped out my gun and killed them.’
She said that her lawyers had lied when they said that she was raped by her father and that her mother was an alcoholic; lied to try to have her life spared. Clearly, she was still as horribly uncomfortable as ever about admitting anything negative happened in her childhood.
‘I am ready to die,’ she said.
The judge’s mind was made up but before ruling her competent, he wanted to know one more thing: would she like other lawyers to represent her?
‘No! Not even if they were [Robert] Shapiro and [Johnnie] Cochran!’
That day, Troy Burress’s sister, Letha Prater, wanted to thank Lee for finally admitting that there had been no rapes or abuse or brutality by her victims and for clearing her beloved brother’s reputation, but she was not allowed to speak to her directly for security reasons.
‘I don’t hate her. I hate what she did. Hatred is lost on her,’ said Prater. ‘She said she wanted to pay for the crime and that she wanted to die … and we want the same thing, so let’s get on with it.’
Wanda Pouncey, Troy’s daughter, agreed: ‘It’s time for all this to be done instead of dragging this on.’
Had Letha been granted her wish to speak to Troy’s killer, what would she have said?
‘I would say thank you for doing the right thing and stopping the appeals, because it will help,’ she explained. ‘I know it is not right to wish somebody dead. I know that in my heart. But I just don’t want to see her face anymore.’
To anyone who’d watched Letha Prater in court during Richard Mallory’s trial or spent time with her then, her strength and composure in 2001 was a relief. Nine years earlier, one could not help wondering if she would survive the loss of her brother, ‘Buddy’. A private nurse, Letha had also served as a deputy sheriff and had no problem getting tough when the job called for it. But that woman was gone in 1992, replaced by one so utterly devastated, that she seemed as if she might somehow simply dissolve.
‘It wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t a death by illness, his life was taken from him,’ she explained. ‘I can’t get past that. It was senseless. I hated her with a passion for a long time. I was very resentful. I had to mend.’
Now, it bothers her that Tyria Moore was able to walk away from her life with a serial killer without any repercussions. Whether or not she was present at any of the murders, Ty had Wuornos’s victims belongings and had been told point blank by Lee that she had murdered Richard Mallory. ‘And,’ said Letha, ‘I resent that she got off scot-free.’
She is not a bloodthirsty woman, but she still wants to see Aileen executed. She favours the death penalty because she doesn’t trust that a life sentence without possibility of parole will turn out to be that. After all, the death penalty was banned in 1972 after the case of Furman vs. Georgia was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, which held that capital punishment was unconstitutional and struck down death penalty laws across the nation. Ninety-five men and the one woman on Florida’s Death Row had their death sentences commuted to life in prison. That decision was eventually overturned when the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionali
ty of the death penalty in Gregg vs. Georgia. Executions resumed in Florida in 1979.
If Aileen was allowed to live, Letha would never be free of the fear that one day she might be back on the streets.
‘I feel she would do the same thing—and she said she would. You take a rabid dog and you put it asleep, then you don’t have to worry about it getting out. If they get out, they can do a lot of damage. And I feel that she could and would do the same thing.’
Troy Burress’s family was warned that the appeals process would take at least ten years, but still, it hadn’t been easy:
‘You have this woman’s face on T.V. and she is laughing and carrying on and it just kind of hits you It’s hard.’
Meanwhile, Letha’s life had changed a lot. Her fifteen-year marriage to Bob Prater ended in 1995, something she considered a casualty of the tragedy. ‘I tried to work through all of it, but I didn’t have the strength or energy to keep trying,’ she said. (She’s since remarried.)
‘Bob said when Buddy died, I died,’ she explained. ‘I didn’t but it changed me so drastically. I think he felt like I loved him much more than anyone else in the family. And I did. I was just devastated. I kind of got the wind knocked out of me when my Buddy died. I lost heart and I never could seem to get back to what I was before. I got a lot of it back, but I never will be the same.
‘Someone asked if I was surprised when Wuornos said that the men didn’t try to harm her? I don’t know the other men but I know my brother, and I knew that all along. I am surprised she admitted it, but I am glad.’
Revenge fantasies are common, and seeing Wuornos in court sometimes sparked enormous anger.
‘There has been a time or two I wanted to do something physical, ’ she admitted. ‘When I think: that is the last face he saw. I used to hate her with a passion. I used to think of things I would like to do to make life horrible for her. But that doesn’t help you. It just makes you bitter. And I got past that. I’m ready for her to get this sentence. But actually saying I hate her as a person? I hate what she did because she caused such a change in so many people’s lives.’
Letha will attend the execution.
‘Oh, definitely. I just want to be there. I want to see it. I know to some people it sounds cruel, but if it is, it is just cruel. That’s how I feel. I think a lot of it is loyalty. To his memory and maybe to myself, too. Then I know I won’t have to hear a lot more about her. Because each time there is a hearing and they bring all this stuff up, my heart breaks all over again.’
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‘This is where you get answers … ’ Billy Nolas had promised at Lee’s trial for the murder of Richard Mallory. If only that were so simple.
We are still in a bind. There is an ever-present conflict between our wish to understand and feel compassion for the influences and events and psychological hiccups that turned someone like Lee into a cold-blooded killer, and our reluctance to forgive the end product.
The prime flaw in any psychological defence, or defence based on childhood abuse and trauma, is the overwhelming amount of cases that can be cited in which heroic souls have triumphed over adversity and become the stronger for it. They have not turned around and slaughtered their fellow men. And often the abuse they have suffered is more horrific than that sustained by the thankfully few who mock the rules of society.
Billy Nolas was right. Aileen Wuornos did not drop from the sky. But while psychology and psychiatry set out to comprehend, understanding does not equal defence.
So it is that while we can feel compassion for the pain of a mistreated child we can also, without contradiction, expect, require—demand—that the adult that the child has become should set aside his or her handicaps and live up to the same standards and rules we set for ourselves and society.
And the courtroom is the ultimate province of those rules and standards.
By default, any psychological diagnosis—any listing of biological, genetic and environmental factors that may have contributed to make the murderer—may be affecting, but remains, for the most part, an ineffective teardrop in the bucket of blood.
Compounding the problem in the case of Aileen Wuornos was the diagnosis of her as a borderline personality. It is a diagnosis that even within the therapeutic professions has become tainted, however unfairly, as a kind of catch-all. Because it lacks the drama inherent in, say, a layperson’s perception of a multiple personality disorder or a psychotic, its effect on the jury in this case was probably tantamount to that of hearing that Aileen Wuornos was overstressed.
At the time of Aileen Wuornos’s trial, Robert Ressler described ‘borderline personality’ as a useful phrase for psychiatrists to employ when they were not sure what they were dealing with. One murderer Ressler interviewed in-depth was 6 foot 9, 295-pound Edmund Kemper who killed his grandparents when he was fourteen. After being released from a mental hospital at 21, he killed a further six young people, having sex with them after their deaths, then dismembering them. Finally, he murdered his mother and her best friend. He propped his mother’s severed head on the kitchen table, reporting that it was the first time she had actually shut up.
Kemper, Ressler found, was something of a psychology buff; an articulate, literate man with an IQ of 136. And when Ressler asked Kemper where he thought he fitted in the DSM-III, the psychiatric diagnostic manual then in its second edition, Kemper replied, ‘Somewhere in the seventh or eighth edition.’ Ressler likened it to medical science’s understanding of AIDS: We know a little bit about it, but can we cure it or stop it?
‘And I think it’s the same thing with Kemper. Psychiatry can’t deal with Kemper. They can’t deal with Dahmer. I sat in and listened to the psychiatrists testify on Dahmer, and he had six or seven psychiatrists, and they all had a different opinion.
‘If they understand it, they should all have the same diagnosis. Prosecution and defence, as well. And they don’t. One guy said that he was psychotic … most said that he wasn’t psychotic. One guy said he was not psychotic, but he was worse than a psychotic. It makes sense to me, but to the layperson? That’s saying it’s worse than the worst. More severe than the most severe mental illness. I mean, what does that mean?’
Ressler felt that just as Dahmer defied pigeonholing or categorising, so, too, did Lee. While the four experts in her first trial agreed she was a borderline personality, only the prosecution witness, Dr. Barnard, diagnosed her as an antisocial personality. The others said she didn’t meet more than three of the twelve criteria then required by the DSM-III by the age of fifteen. (Hearing that, Robert Ressler said, ‘My God! What do you consider her to be?’)
Those criteria for antisocial personality disorder were: frequent truancy; running away from home overnight at least twice (or once without returning) while living in parental home; initiating physical fights; using weapons more than once; forcing someone into sexual activity with him or her; physical cruelty to animals; physical cruelty to people; destroying others’ property (other than by fire-setting); deliberately engaging in fire-setting; frequent lying (other than to avoid physical or sexual abuse); stealing without confrontation of a victim on more than one occasion (including forgery); stealing with confrontation of a victim (i.e. mugging, purse-snatching, extortion, armed robbery).
A layperson with greater access to Lee’s childhood might have suggested that she met at least five of the criteria and that her antisocial behaviour was evident very early on.
Certainly, she did not exhibit the mask of charm so often present in sociopathic personalities. As psychologist Candice Skrapec noted in 1992 (although she didn’t personally examine Wuornos), where that charm is lacking, it’s often replaced with a superficial but convincing way of making you feel sorry for them.
In court, Lee did not exhibit judgement or discretion about how she was perceived. Ted Bundy would never have been caught cackling or grinning wildly when the jury was viewing photographs of a bloody victim. Lee was manipulative. But her manipulation had its limits. Skrapec sugges
ted that those limits may have been imposed by her IQ.
Borderlines have unstable relationships, are impulsive, anxious, prone to intense anger, and take desperate measures to avoid being abandoned. That shoe certainly fit, but away from the courtroom we cannot be too quick to label her. There is an enormous amount of overlap in the various types of behaviours with borderline, narcissism and antisocial personality disorder. And none of these disorders could specifically explain her compulsion to kill.
While psychological testimony has become a necessary part of the adversarial system, and is needed as we examine the issues of responsibility and culpability, it is also open to abuse. Outside a courtroom, why try to pigeonhole her? Candice Skrapec feared that if we did so, we would only close the door prematurely, and may lose a lot of what we might otherwise learn about her.
Labels aside, what is abundantly clear is that Lee lives her life governed and handicapped by an emotional language that blessedly few humans speak. And as in trying to comprehend any other foreign and unfamiliar language, we must seek to unlock the mysteries, taking the clues she has handed us and making stumbling attempts at translation.
What is Lee trying to say? What does her behaviour mean? Why does she think the way she does? What motivates her? And why did she do what she did?
Underlying any effort in this direction, however, is the difficulty in dealing with her over a period of time, the grating unpalatability of the borderline personality. We are talking now not of murder, but of the problems of basic social interaction.
Lee’s borderline world is stark black and white. Her inability to tolerate ambiguity does not allow for human shades of grey. People, to Lee, are either angels or demons. Britta was an angel. Lauri was a demon. Tyria was first an angel, then a demon. Dawn Botkins has been both. Jackelyn Giroux has been both, as has Lori Grody and Lee’s various lawyers. In time, Arlene Pralle met that same fate.