Lethal Intent

by Sue Russell

  Letha Prater, the sister, and Wanda Pouncey, the daughter, of Lee’s victim, Troy ‘Buddy’ Burress, were up even earlier, ready to drive north to Florida State Prison in Starke. Terri Griffith, victim Charles ‘Dick’ Humphreys’ daughter, also was on her way. Mr. Humphreys’ widow, Shirley, such a quietly dignified presence in court during Lee’s trial, had by then succumbed to the cancer she bravely fought for so long.

  The family of victim Charles Carskaddon stayed away, unwilling to give Lee an audience. Also noticeably absent: Arlene Pralle, the once-omnipresent Christian woman who legally adopted Lee after her arrest. The two were no longer in touch. ‘I didn’t realize Lee was so manipulative,’ she said during an October 2001 telephone call from her then-home in the Bahamas. It was news to her that an execution date had been set.

  Although Lee was ready to die, she was relieved not to have to do so in Florida’s infamous electric chair, ‘Old Sparky,’ which she considered “barbaric.” Lethal injection became an alternative for the state’s death row inmates in 2000. With a cocktail of heart-stopping chemicals, Lee would be the first female executed in Florida since Judy Buenoano was electrocuted in 1998 for poisoning her husband.

  Lee was moved to a cell near Starke’s execution chamber the previous Sunday. She left behind Florida’s death row for women, at Broward Correctional Institution, her home for a decade— its cell walls painted little-girl pink. The facility closed its doors in 2012.

  No one could have predicted her state of mind when her longtime wish to have her execution carried out became an imminent reality rather than an abstract topic of debate at tiresome court hearings. She spent three hours of her last evening on earth with her childhood friend Dawn Botkins, who told the Miami Herald that her friend Aileen was ‘extremely happy, ready to go. She has made her peace.’ There was laughter that night. No tears.

  The Associated Press reported that Botkins said: ‘[Aileen] was looking forward to being home with God and getting off this Earth. She prayed that the [souls of the] guys she killed are saved and that by her dying they will be saved. She was more than willing to go. It was what she wanted. Why would she want to fight and spend a life in prison?’

  Like Prater, Pouncey, and Griffith, Botkins, who was Lee’s staunch supporter, prolific pen pal, and devoted confidante, believed that justice was being served by the execution. She did not attend it. However, after Lee’s cremation, Botkins made sure her final place of rest was Michigan. Lee’s ashes were scattered on Dawn’s property, among the walnut and oak trees.

  In a statement to the press, prison spokesman Sterling Ivey explained that Lee declined her last meal and settled for a cup of coffee. ‘She requested a towel and washcloth to wash her face and freshen up,’ he said, describing her as calm, though less talkative than usual.

  Letha Prater had spent the previous week in turmoil. Her husband repeatedly wakened her from nightmares, which had her screaming in her sleep. She slept peacefully, however, on execution eve. The loss of Troy was still very painful for her, his wife, Sharon, and his daughters, Wanda and Vicky. Troy’s mother, Clara, had died, and Letha believed the murder of her son hastened Clara’s death.

  They arrived at Starke just after 7:00 A.M. to find a small gathering of peaceful pro-and antideath penalty protestors outside. Later the crowd grew, and TV satellite trucks and journalists descended.

  Since space inside the viewing chamber was very limited, Letha was elected to go inside and watch Lee die. With her father’s photograph pinned to her jacket, Wanda waited nearby with her husband, Gary, Letha’s husband, John (Letha divorced and remarried after Troy’s death), and Letha’s daughter, Deborah Floyd.

  Approximately thirty witnesses to the execution were escorted to a holding room, then to a chapel with stained-glass windows. ‘Someone suggested we say a prayer,’ Letha told me in a telephone interview later that afternoon, ‘so we just said the Lord’s Prayer. One girl said, “People are going to think we’re nuts, in here praying for her.” I said we weren’t praying for her. We were just saying a prayer.’

  Reportedly, the entire prison of some twelve hundred inmates was on lockdown. When the witnesses entered the viewing room at 9:10 A.M., the door was locked behind them. They sat before a large viewing window covered with opaque brown drapes. They were asked not to chat. The room was quiet; the mood was sombre.

  Witnesses included a dozen journalists and former state attorney John Tanner. Tanner, who led the prosecution team in the Mallory case, told the media present that ‘these men did not deserve to die and had not done anything to bring this about.’

  The curtains opened at 9:28 A.M. to reveal Lee already strapped onto a gurney and covered with a white sheet. Only her head and right arm—with two intravenous lines attached— were visible.

  ‘She raised herself up,’ Letha recounted, ‘and gave one of her wide-eyed looks and lay back down. She didn’t look at me or at any one person in particular.’

  Her lips moved, perhaps in prayer. Terri Griffith imagined that on seeing all the spectators, she appreciated the attention. The microphone hanging above her was switched on and, in a barely audible voice, she spoke her last words—words that left many scratching their heads.

  ‘I’d just like to say I’m sailing with the Rock,’ she said, making a biblical reference to Jesus, ‘and I’ll be back, like Independence Day, with Jesus—June sixth—like the movie— big mother ship and all. I’ll be back.’

  At 9:30 A.M., one of Florida’s anonymous executioners, who currently receive $150 for their services, let the drugs flow. Sodium Pentothal causes loss of consciousness, pancuronium bromide paralyzes the muscles, and potassium chloride stops the heart. Watching Lee’s eyes close, Letha noticed that ‘her body just had a little spasm or shudder from top to bottom. Then she changed colors and went a little gray. She had death on her face.’

  Two physicians checked and rechecked her vital signs. They pronounced her dead at 9:47 A.M. and the curtains closed. Twelve years after Letha’s brother fatally crossed paths with Lee on his Gilchrist Sausage Company delivery route, it was all over. Outside, Letha’s waiting family was more emotional than she was. ‘I could have got that way,’ she admitted, ‘but I wanted to stay in control.’ Wanda told her, ‘Now my father can rest in peace.’

  Letha immediately felt calm and somehow changed. ‘I didn’t hate her. I hated what she had done,’ she clarified during one of several telephone calls. ‘But I was ready for it. It was time for justice to be done. There was no doubt that she was guilty, no doubt she was a predator. I, for one, feel better today than I’ve felt in a long time. That’s crude to say, but it’s true. I had no misgivings. And I wanted to see it myself, to be absolutely sure she’s gone.

  ‘Justice has been served. I wanted that for Buddy and for all the other victims, and I have that now. Now I just have to put all this out of my mind. Not Buddy, but all this. The whole process is very hard on victims’ families. We thought we had justice when she got the death penalty, but then there were all the appeals. We thought they’d eventually run out, but they never seemed to. This was way overdue. Each time there was a hearing, you had this woman’s face on TV, laughing and carrying on, and your heart broke all over again.’

  Unlike the victims’ agonizing deaths, Lee’s seemed very peaceful. Perhaps a little too peaceful for Terri Griffith’s liking. ‘It was an easy death,’ she told reporters. ‘It was a little bit too easy. I think she should have suffered a little bit more.’

  Letha, however, was satisfied, telling me later, ‘It’s justice. Maybe not as much as we’d want, but I’m okay with this. She has paid for her crimes. I’m glad she’s gone, and I think I’ll feel some peace. You feel like you can finally just take a breath and let your heart expand.’

  Lee’s journey to what she nicknamed her ‘X’ was a long one. She spent ten years in a tiny cell, around seven feet by nine feet, in near isolation. It was long enough for plenty of fluctuations in her moods and changes in her stories and accounts of
the crimes. However, ever since she shared her wish in 1992 with Steven Glazer, her attorney, to have her death sentence carried out, she remained largely resolute on that.

  February 2001 found her battling to be allowed to fire her attorneys and to drop all further appeals. Still, she briefly stalled taking her last irreversible step onto the execution fast track. She had a competency assessment session with Dr. Michael Herkov, who made sure she understood that it meant no turning back: Exit roads closed forever. Lee subsequently dropped her appeal ‘without prejudice,’ which allowed her to retain the right to re-file. According to Dr. Herkov, she wanted to give herself some time to get right with God before her execution.

  Perhaps the finality of it all hit her. Perhaps she felt there was still a little earthly business left to attend to, given her belief that she had to tell the truth to get into heaven. Even in jail in 1991, she told Corrections Officer Marjorie Bertolani that she was a Christian. She wanted desperately to get to heaven, and she feared she wouldn’t if she didn’t come clean.

  Lee’s powerful belief came up, again, in a November 2001 letter that Arlene Pralle sent to this author so that her reflections could be included in this book:

  Initially, I saw her only through ‘Pollyanna eyes,’ Arlene wrote, and really thought she was telling the truth when she said she was innocent. When she, on Death Row, later confided in me that she was guilty and wanted ‘to get right with God,’ I honored her request by getting Steve Glazer to end further trials.

  Arlene supported Lee’s decision.

  Thomas D. Hall, clerk of the Florida Supreme Court, received a letter from Lee in April 2001 complaining that her appointed Capital Collateral Regional Counsel attorney Joseph Hobson was obstructing her wishes by trying to save her life. She wanted to ‘cut to the chase,’ saying that the victims’ families had suffered enough.

  Letha Prater was grateful in February when Lee finally admitted she did not kill the victims in self-defense: ‘I didn’t like it when she said bad things about Buddy, like that he tried to hurt her,’ she told me. ‘So it did help that she finally said, “No one tried to rape me. I robbed them and killed them so they couldn’t identify me.” There’s just no way Buddy would have tried to hurt Wuornos.’

  Lee admitted the killings ‘were in flat murder to rob’ and wrote that she had refuted every bit of self-defense—to Channel 7, Channel 10, Court TV … BBC and much more—of which I’ll continue, because it’s the right thing to do. She reiterated in a June interview: no self-defense, just robbery and hatred.

  Volunteering to proceed to execution put Lee in a tiny minority of inmates statistically. Between 1973 and 2003, fewer than 2 percent of those sentenced to death in the United States and 12 percent of the inmates executed by the state of Florida volunteered for execution. There were only 106 volunteers executed in the United States in that thirty-year period.

  John H. Blume, professor of law at Cornell Law School and director of the Cornell Death Penalty Project, published ‘Killing the Willing: “Volunteers,” Suicide and Competency’ in the Michigan Law Review in 2005. Examining the relationship between ‘volunteering’ and suicide, he found that almost 88 percent of ‘volunteers’ had a history of mental illness and/or substance abuse. My guess is that the overwhelming majority of volunteers are suicidal, he wrote in his article.

  Sure enough, Lee shot herself in the stomach over a failed romance in 1978. And she said she wanted to die (before drunkenly holding up a mini-mart with a gun) in 1981, when she thought her relationship with her then-boyfriend Jay Watts was over.

  We can only guess at the part Lee’s self-proclaimed religious conviction played in her decision to volunteer. She told her former longtime girlfriend Tyria Moore she would get into the Bible ‘real hard’ in prison and would die knowing that she’d see her mother in heaven. Dawn Botkins was certain that her friend’s belief in the afterlife was a major factor. ‘How could she walk to her death that way unless she believed in God?’ she asked Court TV. ‘She knew where she was going.’

  While there are no hard numbers, Professor Blume said in a telephone interview that religious belief is frequently seen in ‘volunteers’ and that a ‘significant percentage’ were encouraged by advisors (spiritual or otherwise) to believe that they would benefit spiritually from ‘admitting what they did— accepting responsibility and allowing the sentence to be carried out. There’s kind of like a blood atonement aspect to it in some way. Sometimes the advice they get or the conclusion they come to on their own is that dropping their appeals is an acceptance of responsibility for what they did, and that it’s somehow wrong to fight it.’

  For some, acceptance of the justness of a punishment coexists with suicidal desires. And that may well have been the case with Lee.

  ‘Motivations can be complex and intertwined,’ Professor Blume explained. ‘People are complicated, right? And a lot of things that people do does not necessarily, one hundred percent, spring from a single motivation.’

  Malingering is another factor and it works both ways. Some death row inmates who have nothing—or nothing substantive— wrong with them exaggerate psychological symptoms. Conversely, others minimize them—they ‘malinger well,’ as Professor Blume called it. A volunteer who doesn’t want to be thought of as crazy, he said, and who is sufficiently together to mask his or her symptoms, may also be savvy enough to figure out what pro-prosecution psychiatrists want to hear and then feed it right back to them. Also, it’s not uncommon to find mentally ill inmates who understand ‘that if they’re found incompetent, they’re not going to be allowed to do whatever they want to do.’

  With Lee’s prior history of mental illness, substance abuse, and attempted suicide, Professor Blume said, she would fit ‘the kind of profile of somebody who could have easily committed suicide in the free world, had they not been incarcerated.’ The kind of person ‘who would definitely be prone to waive their appeals and volunteer.’

  On 1 April, 2002, the Supreme Court of Florida finally found Lee competent to proceed and discharged her post-conviction counsel. That meant that all the remaining roadblocks to her execution over which she had any control were removed. No more attorneys. But like other volunteers before her, she learned that irrespective of her wishes, other parties would step in, un-invited, to try to derail her plans. Some were antideath penalty advocates; some disputed (much to her annoyance) that she was mentally fit to decide her own fate. At a court hearing that summer, she told the judge she was ‘sick of hearing this “she’s crazy” stuff. I’m competent, and I’m telling you the truth.’

  Doubtless, she would have been infuriated by documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield’s post-execution words. She granted him her final interview, but she stormed out after thirty-five minutes. Broomfield told reporters outside Starke: ‘My conclusion from the interview is, today we are executing someone who is mad. Here is someone who has totally lost her mind.’

  Lee repeatedly lodged official complaints of maltreatment during her time on death row, but these were not indicative of any backpedaling on her execution. In March 2002, in her neat cursive, she penned a very lengthy document entitled ‘Abuse of Authority.’ She offered a laundry list of problems, including reduced water pressure, staff complaining of overuse of toilet tissue, absence of tape over the shower window to afford privacy, and excessive cell checks or ‘shakedowns.’

  In June, attorney Raag Singhal was appointed to represent her interests in these matters. She offered to take a polygraph to support her allegations that the prison fare arrived ‘un-cooked,’ ‘spit in,’ and ‘tasting tainted with something.’ She also claimed she’d overheard talk in the nearby command center about raping her before her execution and had decided it was imperative to document it and have it ‘brought to the ears of “all higher-ups”!’

  In July, she amplified her allegations of physical and mental harassment before Judge Paul Backman. She named eight female sergeants and officers ‘causing problems with me here on death row.’ She c
omplained of being bruised where her wrists were cuffed too tightly on leaving her cell, of improper strip searches before a visit (‘By being disrespectful and acting as if a baton’s being put up you’), ‘inedible food trays,’ ‘repeatively [sic] kicking at my door whenever a window check’s made,’ and ‘excessive window checking.’ She also claimed to have overheard officers’ discussions of ‘trying to get me so pushed over the brink by them,’ she would commit suicide before her X, and of the need to ‘break her spirit’ in order to get her medicated:

  And I tell ya—I couldn’t believe my ears; since I’m one of the quietest gals on the floor, stick to myself and bother no one, she wrote. And get along with staff just fine except for these 4 Sargeants [sic] and Officers who obviously been briefed to hound me to death. So now we clash.

  A decade on death row: Research has shown extended isolation to be very detrimental to mental health. But, says retired forensic psychologist Dr. John Philpin, given her rootless, hand-to-mouth existence, ‘it also could have been in some strange way the most secure she had felt in her life for any extended period of time.’ Dr. Philpin, who did not examine Lee but agreed to discuss her case by telephone, was one of the first independent criminal profilers in the United States, an internationally recognized expert in violent behavior and the author of seven books.

  He imagined Lee was better able to control her behavior on death row. However, he maintained, ‘the one thing that she would always have had trouble doing is controlling her own thinking. That would have always been a problem for her, inside or outside. And that might explain some of the paranoid nature of what she’s saying. But I wouldn’t jump on that word too heavily—“paranoia.” And the reason is that I’ve been in a lot of prisons, and a lot of that stuff turns out to be true. Spitting into food is minor, relatively, compared with some of the things that they do.’