Lethal Intent

by Sue Russell

  In writing this book, I came to believe that never, not even in the grip of her most negative moments, did Lee envisage herself landing on Death Row. I believe that in her mind she saw it differently. She would have respect. Power. Money. And then they would all look up to her. Death Row didn’t feature in her plans.

  Her ultimately fatal inability to foresee consequences, to grasp cause and effect, had effectively distanced her from the existence of any such ramifications. Speaking on the telephone the day before the verdict in the Richard Mallory trial, she left me in no doubt whatsoever that she was completely, frighteningly, unprepared for being found guilty. This despite the best and repeated efforts of her considerably more realistic counsel to prepare her for the worst.

  She was unequivocally convinced that the jury had believed all her cries of rape and self-defence. In her mind, it was simple. She’d said it, so it must be true. Those jurors would have to be crazy not to know that. Just as she could accuse Larry Horzepa of bullying her and expect the jury to believe her.

  As ever, she had no useful grasp on the effect she had on others. She’d been oblivious to the discreet squirming in the jury box, to the subtle flickers of horror and distaste that, despite their best efforts, crept periodically across the jurors’ generally expressionless faces.

  ‘It might be just that she was naïve enough to think that, indeed, the righteousness of her actions would somehow shine through and save her, spare her, and indeed glorify her,’ suggested Candice Skrapec.

  Had she deluded herself into thinking that she was on some kind of mission to save women, she might well have not even entertained the consequences of her actions. The psychiatrists did not find her delusional. Nevertheless, one cannot help feeling that, as in most things, it is a matter of degree, and in the months after her arrest, her grasp on the reality of her plight was decidedly shaky.

  ‘What I want to do when I get out is I want to help women,’ she said. ‘I’m going to go into the women’s liberation field, get a foundation going for the women, that will be hopefully under my name. Because they’ll understand who—knowing who I am and everything, they’ll understand. “Oh, go to Aileen Wuornos, she can help.” I want to help. And I’m going to try and glorify the Lord and try to get people saved and everything if I can. This world is evil and needs help. It really does.

  ‘I’m going to be like a trumpet for the women. I feel like I’m a martyr for the women.

  ‘And if they convict me, and send me away to prison for life, or the electric chair, or send me to prison for years and years, you know, I hope to God—and I’m sure that it will happen—that there is going to be one hundred jillion women out there, millions of women, that are really going to be pissed. Really. For sure.’

  Yet Aileen ‘Lee’ Wuornos had never been on a mission to save women. Her dream and ambition was to do something no woman had ever done before, and as a result, become famous and rich and respected. Looked up to. And thereby become a hero for women.

  A short in the wiring could allow the coexistence of two seemingly incompatible agendas. She craved fame, power, glory and recognition and she would earn them for herself with her outlaw life—or her outlaw life would earn them for her. She would have books written and films made about her, and the world would listen to her.

  Enter the short in the wiring. It would seem that there was a fatal flaw in this plan from the word go. If her recipe for this attention was to have murdered six men in self-defence, rousing the women of the world to seize upon her as a heroine and join her in her corner, there was also at least the possibility that she would at some point end up behind bars. She might be forced to pay a price (however minimal) for her crimes (however justifiable). Battered wives who have killed their husbands, for instance, regularly serve some time in prison, self-defence or no.

  Was that a price she’d recognised and was willing to pay? A necessary sacrifice for a greater goal? Or had she just not thought it through?

  Candice Skrapec floated this possibility: ‘Here’s this woman who’s really quite naïve and maybe is operating a few bricks short of a load, and maybe her IQ just doesn’t allow for a lot of creative thinking in terms of alternatives. Like, “What really could happen to me here?”’

  Just as the delusional thinker who kills is mystified when society snaps on the handcuffs—they’d been doing society a big favour, hadn’t anyone noticed?—Lee’s own perception was out of whack. What we would regard as highly irrational thinking was to her perfectly rational.

  A personal theory, which will likely never be anything more: I suspect that Lee may have killed before but that she confessed to a specific number of murders—six—that she felt befitting her role as heroine. Six put her in a league of her own but was perhaps also a number that seemed to her to work with self-defence.

  We can’t let the confessions lull us into thinking that she has revealed the full extent of her killing sprees. She lied and lies as easily as pouring a cup of coffee. The stories about her babies and dead husbands dropped from her lips on a daily basis. They were cons, pure and simple. People would repeat her rape/pregnancy claim without question, yet she herself contradicted it on many occasions. With her history of invention, who would relish trying to judge her murder accounts? The facts would have to speak, as they did in court, since the victims could not.

  She had a .22 back in 1986 when she was arrested. Carrying a gun was nothing new. Then there was the .38 she stole in 1985. Many experts in serial murder would agree that 33 (her age when she killed Richard Mallory) is a somewhat late start for a serial killer.

  When confessing to Larry Horzepa and Bruce Munster, she said she had killed six men, yet she spelled out the details of seven murders. Questioned by the investigators on this discrepancy, she still maintained there were six.

  We are not speaking here of cups of coffee, but the snuffing out of human lives.

  Her confusion on this crucial point could not be easily explained away. Even if never before, hadn’t she run through in her mind the list of men she’d murdered during those first days in jail when she feared she was a suspect?

  For a variety of reasons, some of those involved came strongly to suspect that Lee was killing before Richard Mallory.

  When Larry Horzepa questioned Lee about the things she’d pawned in December ’89 and asked if they belonged to Mallory, her answer was oddly revealing.

  ‘I would have to say so … ’cause if that’s what time it was, it was his stuff then. But I don’t remember. See, ’cause … all these vehicles these guys usually had, you know, some clothes and stuff and I just threw the stuff away, you know, and kept what would be worth money, you know, so I could get some money off it.’

  She pawned those items just a few days after what she claimed was her first killing. You’d think the whole incident would be hard, if not impossible, to forget. Serial killers often relive every detail of their crimes in their minds. What did it say if that killing, supposedly separated from the next by five and a half months, didn’t stand out in her mind as memorable? If that nightmare attack had blurred in with all the rest?

  If Lee had killed more and decided not to admit it even to Ty, she undoubtedly could have kept quiet. Some serial killers become competitive, statistically ambitious, about the number of people they’ve killed. Lee never wanted to be a serial killer. Ultimately, she confessed to seven murders, but we honestly don’t know that that wasn’t part of a manipulation, too. The BSU studies found that lying to investigators was another way for killers to have some form of control.

  Lee was good at keeping her own counsel. Always had been. Dawn reiterated this as the reason why she found it entirely believable that Ty didn’t know about the murders. Lori didn’t know about her young sister Aileen’s hooking. And nor did Dawn, her best buddy, ever hear it straight from the horse’s mouth.

  It is possible that another paradox was at work in Lee Wuornos. There was her silence on the murders, brought about because on some level she rec
ognised that what she had done was not acceptable. And, tugging against that, was a desire for recognition for her actions. Such a paradox can precipitate what might seem to the rest of us blatantly self-defeating behaviour.

  Keeping Peter Siems’s car for almost a month. Keeping the dead men’s possessions. Storing things for which she really had no use in a warehouse unit. Risk-taking. Stupid or careless? And if careless, was it deliberately so? Consciously, she did not want to get caught. But there may well have been, and frequently is in such cases, some subconscious need to take risks to ensure being caught and punished for bad deeds.

  Also at work with serial killers, Candice Skrapec had learned, could be a need to command our respect. In Lee’s case, was this the underlying message: ‘Come on! Look what I’ve done, and no one’s paying any attention to me!’?

  Indeed, Lee did speak of ‘showing off’ when revealing to Ty the death of Richard Mallory. She said, ‘She doesn’t know, basically, anything except for the fact that I could have murmured or mumbled or said something while I was drunk, which she would either believe or not believe or whatever … like be in awe.’

  It was also possible, Skrapec pointed out, that although she trusted that Ty would not go to the police, on another level she thought that she might. And that, too, would lead to her needs being met because it would mean she would be caught.

  Skrapec wasn’t fond of labels but had a name for the risk-taking behaviour she’d observed in serial killers: false bravado.

  ‘They have so much to lose, but they really feel invincible, like they’re almost invisible and can walk amongst us and we don’t see them. From that, they glean this bravado. They experience it in terms of “Well! You can’t catch me!” And really, of course, it’s false bravado in that it’s not grounded in anything.

  ‘In this case, she was driving the car around. It was perhaps only a matter of time before someone might have linked her to the car, but they crashed it anyway. But to take such a risk in light of what she stood to lose, is really kind of consistent, to my mind, with a false bravado type of behaviour.’

  The underlying desire to get caught is not inconsistent either with the desire for recognition from the world and for respect from the men who had otherwise used her.

  Another calculation on her part, misguided as ever, might have given rise to her having a clear picture of how she would be viewed by us. She wanted to control that, too. And she grew furious when the world began going its own merry way, making assumptions about her and labelling her a man-hating serial killer in a way that didn’t fit in with her vision.

  From Death Row, she told talk show host Montel Williams that when the press first labelled her a serial killer, she ‘almost passed out’. Unequivocally, I believe that.

  While she had no qualms about her adoptive mother hearing her shocking accounts of her murders on the videotape, she for a long time did not share with Arlene her sexual history. Jackelyn Giroux was the first to uncover just how young she’d been when the sex started, but Lee called Jackelyn a liar. What would Lee have to lose by admitting to that? Why would she expect to be rejected over childhood incidents over which she had far less control? If anything, it might engender sympathy. But that’s not the way her disjointed thought patterns operate.

  ‘Jackye Giroux was telling the truth about the abuse and the sex with the guys,’ she later admitted to Arlene Pralle. ‘I couldn’t tell you before because I was ashamed. I was afraid you wouldn’t like me anymore and you’d be disgusted if you heard that stuff.’

  Candice Skrapec suggested that it might be possible that other more calculating and practical motives were at work. If Lee had admitted to early sexual abuse, might the court system see her as a man-hater who’d gone out and hunted men? Not just the court system, perhaps, but the world. (It is interesting that Wuornos made a point of saying on the stand and to the psychiatrists that she liked guys and she liked the sex. Yet she also referred to men as maggots.)

  ‘She might have felt that at all costs she could not be perceived as a man-hater,’ said Skrapec. ‘In fact, she would have to project that she enjoyed sex with men. To portray to the world a non-man-hating female who did not have a vendetta, who did not have a mission to kill men, who really loved men, enjoyed sex with them. But these guys just were going to kill her and she had to protect herself.’

  It might all have been the product of the distorted thinking of a mind that while not legally insane, was hardly a model of health.

  The same kind of thinking that could have determined that six was the number of men to whose murders she would safely and gloriously confess.

  Aileen Wuornos, early school days in Troy, Michigan.

  Keith Wuornos, early school days in Troy, Michigan.

  The young Diane Wuornos, Aileen and Keith’s natural mother, before she married their father, Leo Pittman.

  Leo Pittman, Aileen’s natural father, eventually committed suicide in prison. Sentenced to life behind bars for raping a seven-year-old, his doomed existence eerily foreshadowed Aileen’s own.

  The two-tier family in June 1962: clockwise from top, Barry, Keith, Aileen, and Lori Wuornos. Aileen and Keith were raised as siblings of their Aunt Lori and Uncle Barry.

  Keith Wuornos with his father/grandfather, Lauri Wuornos, on a family trip.

  Aileen and Keith with Britta Wuornos, the grandmother who raised them as if they were her own children, on vacation two years before Britta’s death.

  Britta Wuornos, the same day.

  Aileen in July 1969. A happy moment during one of her family’s regular summer vacations.

  Aileen and Keith’s childhood friend Mark Fearn stands at the site where Aileen built the first of many forts in the woods close to her home.

  The Wuornos home, above. Nearby neighbors heard Aileen’s cries when her grandfather punished her.

  What was once the Wuornos home in Troy, Michigan. Above the front door is one of the two windows from which Aileen regularly made her late-night escapes.

  Aileen riding her bike in her Troy neighborhood shortly before she became pregnant. She gave up the baby for adoption immediately after his birth.

  Redheaded like Leo Pittman, the father Aileen never met, Tyria Jolene Moore became the big love of Aileen Wuornos’s life—and a fellow suspect in the string of Florida murders.

  Shirley Humphreys with her husband, Dick Humphreys. Aileen “Lee” Wuormos brutally murdered Dick the day after their 35th wedding anniversary.

  Troy “Buddy” Burress, the sausage-delivery truck driver Lee murdered, seen here with his sister, Letha Prater.

  Lee Wuornos stole the life of David Spears, seen here with Dee Spears, the mother of his three children. The Spearses divorced after twenty years, but were planning to remarry.

  The flat, deserted roads amidst the dense central Florida woods where Lee took her prostitution clients…and, on her killing days, her robbery and murder victims.

  One of the trailer homes that Lee and Ty lived in at Homossassa Springs, in 1989. Reminiscent of her childhood home, the trailer’s windows were kept covered by Lee. Lee and Ty practiced shooting at trees and beer cans in the barren park.

  Wet Willie’s Tavern in a seedy stretch of the Daytona, Florida, area. One of Lee’s many pool-playing and drinking hangouts.

  Aileen Carol Wuornos, aka Lori Grody, aka Susan Blahovec, aka Cammie Marsh Greene, shortly after her arrest in January 1991.

  The shrine that has been erected to Lee Wuornos outside the back of the Last Resort Bar where she was finally arrested by investigator, Larry Horzepa, on January 9, 1991.

  Former Marion County Sheriff’s Office investigator Brian Jarvis outside The Last Resort Bar in Port Orange, Florida, in 2008. Photograph by David Taylor.

  Former Marion County Sheriff’s Office investigator Brian Jarvis. Photograph by David Taylor.

  Former Marion County Sheriff’s Office investigator Tom Tittle talks about Aileen Wuornos for a crime show in 2008. Tittle is out behind The Last Resort Bar
. Photograph by David Taylor.

  Former Marion County Sheriff’s Office investigator David Taylor inside The Last Resort Bar. Photograph by David Taylor.

  The entrance to The Last Resort Bar, where Aileen was playing pool shortly before her arrest. Photograph by David Taylor.

  A heap of “dead motorcycles” outside The Last Resort Bar. Photograph by David Taylor.

  The Last Resort Bar advertises its proud slogan on its trailer/truck. Photograph by David Taylor.

  The intersection between Florida’s SR 90 and the I-75 highway. Desolate stretches of the I-75 highway were favorite hitchhiking spots for Aileen. Photograph by David Taylor.

  After murdering Charles Richard “Dick” Humphreys, Aileen Wuornos cleaned out his car at US 27 and Boggy Marsh Creek Road so she couldn’t be identified. Photograph by David Taylor.

  Victim Dick Humphreys’ car was found behind this abandoned gas station at the SR 90 and I-75 interchange in Suwannee County, Florida. Photograph by David Taylor.

  Look closely and you’ll see the spent .22 caliber shell casing in the soil that was positively linked to Aileen Wuornos’s gun. Photograph by David Taylor.

  Room 8 at the former Fairview Motel—now called The Scoot Inn—where Aileen Wuornos and Tyria Moore used to stay. Photograph by David Taylor.

  The former Fairview Motel. Photograph by David Taylor.

  The former Fairview Motel. Photograph by David Taylor.

  The old Fairview Motel sign lends a touch of nostalgia in 2013 to the motel once frequented by Aileen Wuornos and Tyria Moore. Photograph by Jackelyn Giroux.

  Movie producer Jackelyn Giroux signed up the rights to Aileen Wuornos’s life story soon after her arrest. In 2013, the filmmaker revisited Aileen’s old haunt The Fairview Motel in its new, spruced-up incarnation as The Scoot Inn. Photograph by Jackelyn Giroux.

  EPILOGUE UPDATE

  Los Angeles, April 2013

  On Wednesday, October 9, 2002, Aileen Carol Wuornos, aka Lee, was awakened at 5:30 A.M. for her date with the executioner. Four hours later, the forty-six-year-old highway prostitute turned serial killer would die by lethal injection for the 1989 murder of Richard Mallory, the first of six slayings for which she’d received death sentences. The body of part-time missionary Peter Siems, the seventh man she confessed to murdering, has never been found.