Lethal Intent

by Sue Russell

  Under no circumstances can it have been easy living Lee’s life—being in her skin. Like many serial killers of both sexes, she was used and abused growing up; and in her case, also while working as a prostitute. However, the apparent desire of many to view her as someone manipulated by others—more puppet than puppeteer—is off base. Even on death row, Lee exercised some control in her personal relationships.

  Her relationship with Arlene Pralle was incredibly intense and sometimes grueling for Arlene, who had put herself at Lee’s beck and call. But things were changing because Lee was becoming reacquainted with—and growing closer to—Dawn Botkins, her old childhood friend from Michigan.

  However, Arlene propped up Lee during some of her darkest days, put up with her sometimes ‘ugly’ (and very costly) reverse-charge phone calls, and laid out petrol money for the long drive to visit Lee at Broward, for example. Attorney Steven Glazer, likewise, had represented Lee pro bono. But when documentary-maker Nick Broomfield paid a $10,000 fee for an interview, Lee divvied it up and chose to give Dawn Botkins $4,000, but she gave her lawyer and Arlene Pralle only $2,500 apiece. The fact that Lee could not physically receive that money, or any other interview fees while in prison, did not stop her from deciding where and to whom the money went.

  During their phone calls about the movie Jackelyn Giroux was trying to get off the ground, Lee repeatedly prodded Giroux for money. In an e-mail exchange, Giroux recalled:

  She knew she could not receive the money herself, so she prodded me to give the money to whomever she designated as the flavor of the month. For the first time in Lee’s life, she had control over her “alleged” money, which she used to buy people with, rather than the other way around as it was in her old life as a prostitute.

  Giroux contended that Arlene Pralle pestered her for money, but at Lee’s prompting. Lee told Pralle that Giroux also should be paying Pralle additional money for Lee’s story.

  Then Lee told Tyria I should pay Ty additional money for Ty’s rights and Lee’s rights, too. Lee’s total control centered on money for “her” story. She was much like an Alzheimer’s “loved one” whose control is changing the will every fifteen seconds, Giroux wrote.

  Few knew that Lee and Tyria ‘Ty’ Moore had further contact after Lee was sentenced to death. But Dawn Botkins once told Court TV that she had all the letters Tyria wrote to Lee in prison, including one in which Tyria says, Thank you for the $1,000. So from death row, Lee arranged for Ty to receive money. Jackelyn Giroux, who held Tyria’s ‘life story’ rights for a period of time after 1993, told this author via e-mail that she helped Tyria set up a post office box so she and Lee could communicate.

  Arlene Pralle’s problems with Lee that involved finances were evident both in her 2001 telephone call and in the letter she subsequently wrote for inclusion in this book, hoping to set the record straight:

  Our relationship over the years has been rocky. The first couple of years I visited her faithfully on Death Row. Starting in October of 1993, I spent nearly a year in Tennessee. Needless to say, during that period, I was not able to visit Aileen. Our communication was only through letters. That put a wedge between Aileen and I. Nick Broomfield also added great stress to our relationship. We both became angry with one another and communication broke down for a while.

  My one and only regret is that I ever accepted money. I never wanted to—not once. Aileen pushed the issue relentlessly until I finally gave in. Ironically the same Aileen Wuornos, who pushed me to do interviews and accept money for them, is the one now falsely accusing me. She says the only reason we reached out to her was for financial gain. I only wish I had never taken a dime. But God knows our hearts and the truth. In that knowledge, we find peace.

  At one point, Jackelyn Giroux and Lee took, and then dropped, legal actions against one another. Giroux told me in 2001: ‘She apologized for mistrusting me. But it didn’t mean anything to me then, and means nothing to me now. In my opinion, Aileen Wuornos is a little girl who will do anything for attention, even murder. And I believe she would do everything all over again for the same attention and fame she has received.’

  Giroux considered the death penalty to be state-sanctioned murder, though, and did not favor Lee’s then-looming execution. ‘When I think of Aileen Wuornos,’ she said, ‘I think of a wounded animal. With each bullet, the animal gets weaker, yet fights more ferociously. With each year of abandonment, Aileen became just as ferocious and desperate.’

  Opinions of Lee ran—and run—the gamut. She’s strong. She’s weak. She’s intelligent. She’s slow. She’s realistic about going to her death. She’s out of touch with reality. She’s being abused behind bars. She’s paranoid. She’s the victim. She’s the aggressor.

  In truth, she was all that and more: a complex woman who defied superficial judgments. She was at times astute and could in her own ‘Lee way’ reason and speculate. She did see conspiracies around her. She was utterly convinced that ‘the cops’ knew who she was but conspired to delay her arrest so she would kill more men, which would, in turn, make for a better movie and make them more money.

  Lee was intensely curious about how she was finally caught, in spite of having taken the precautions she did, like wiping down victims’ cars and belongings to remove her fingerprints. She’d thought all that through: witness the window cleaner she stashed in her bag with her gun when traveling the highways. She strongly suspected that where she had slipped up was when she and Ty had to flee missing missionary Peter Siems’s car after they crashed it but before they’d had time to clean it up. And she was right.

  After Aileen ‘Lee’ Wuornos called her from jail, Lori Grody, the aunt/sister she grew up with whose identity Aileen often illegally utilised, felt as if Aileen simultaneously knew and didn’t know how much trouble she was in and what her fate would be. She thought her mind was so messed up that she was not dealing with reality. Lori thought a lot about the victims. To her lasting shame, Lori recalled what occurred after Aileen knocked down her husband, Lewis Fell, age sixty-nine. When she was interviewed by police, Lori was so embarrassed by Aileen’s actions—and to Lori, she would always be Aileen, never Lee—that she went along with Aileen’s lie that Fell had hurt her despite knowing full well that it was the other way around.

  There were some flashes of insight. Lee was not oblivious to the possibility that Tyria’s phone calls to her in jail were a setup. She repeatedly asked Ty if someone was in the room with her. And she was right about that, too.

  She killed to eliminate witnesses, she said; something else she’d thought through. But with obviously flawed logic, she went on to say, ‘If you’re gonna get fried for attempted murder, might as well get fried for murder.’ People aren’t sentenced to death for attempted murder. During one murder, she recalled telling a victim, ‘Hey, man, I gotta shoot you, ’cause I think you’re gonna kill me.’ But she told Investigator Larry Horzepa that she killed some of her victims without even knowing whether or not they were armed.

  What Lee went through developmentally, Dr. Philpin explained, would be enough to make her thinking distorted: ‘I’m not going to say “delusional,” because I don’t think she was. But “distorted thinking.” Ways of looking at situations in the world that were pretty much unique to her. And reasonably so.’

  Lee always denied being sexually abused by her grandfather, and there is no evidence that she was, despite some disturbing incidents involving this inappropriate behavior with Lee’s birth mother, Diane, and Diane’s friend. However, being paid for sex at age eleven or twelve, as Lee was, is a clear indicator of abuse—perpetrator or perpetrators unknown. She also claimed she was raped in adolescence, although she was never clear about the identity of the perpetrator(s).

  That she could more easily admit to murder than to being sexually abused, which she found intolerably shameful, ‘is pretty common,’ according to Dr. Philpin. He found with his interviewees facing homicide or multiple homicide charges, ‘there’s always something that they don�
�t want to talk about. And, typically, it is something sexual.’ It may involve being subjected to or witnessing extreme amounts of anger and violence, ‘but more typically it’s something sexual.’

  Had Lee received therapy or spoken to a mental-health professional for an extended period of time, Dr. Philpin believes we would know far more because ‘you’re eventually going to get into that material. And I don’t think that happened.’

  What a missed opportunity.

  Lee wanted to be famous, to be ‘like Bonnie and Clyde,’ and she told Tyria that if she wrote a book, she wanted Ty to have the money. In jail, before being charged with the homicides, she spoke grandly of suing for millions and having ‘one hell of a lawsuit.’

  ‘Just wait till Geraldo (Rivera) gets ahold of this,’ she told officers.

  ‘For a borderline,’ Dr. Philpin explained during our interview, ‘an event in her life is something that everyone should be paying attention to. That’s part of the pathology. While narcissists might say, “Here I am, the center of the universe,” for borderlines, it’s “Don’t you see? Don’t you understand?”’

  From an early age, Lee’s explosions were infamous. Lori never forgot her holding a knife to her neck, and the undercover cops tailing her also witnessed her volatility. One minute, Lee would be calm; and the next moment, she would appear ready to strike Detective Mike Joyner (working undercover as a biker) with her pool cue. Joyner and his partner, Dick Martin, had been instructed not to get into a vehicle with her. But Joyner’s self-preservation instincts needed no warning; they’d already signaled danger.

  Some aspects of Lee’s behavior were suggestive to Dr. Philpin of intermittent explosive disorder, which the American Psychiatric Association has defined as involving ‘several discrete episodes of failure to resist aggressive impulses that result in serious assaultive acts or destruction of property.’ The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders now also states that ‘serious assaultive acts include verbal threats of physical assault to another individual.’

  After Governor Jeb Bush signed Lee’s death warrant on September 5, Raag Singhal, her ‘prison complaints’ attorney, wrote to the Florida Supreme Court expressing grave doubts about her mental condition. Mindful of acting without his client’s permission, he, nevertheless, requested she be evaluated, informing the court that she had stopped answering his letters and would not talk to him.

  He cited the fact that in court and at the jail, she exhibited bizarre behavior, laughing and crying at inappropriate times and obsessing on points of no importance to her cases. He urged the Florida Supreme Court not to be eager to execute an individual, simply because she was a volunteer.

  On September 25, a temporary stay of execution went into effect to allow three psychiatrists to examine Lee. All three concurred that she had ‘no major psychiatric illness and understands the nature and effect of the death penalty and why it is being imposed upon her.’ She met the very low bar for being legally competent for execution, which is essentially only two things: understanding why she was being executed and understanding the effect of execution. During a thirty-minute interview, she was reportedly cognizant and lucid, though agitated about Singhal and Governor Bush putting her through yet another mental evaluation.

  Dr. Philpin, who is antideath penalty, doesn’t believe Lee should have been sentenced to death. But he tried to be objective. He pointed out that Lee had spent ten years ‘basically inside her head and has told this wide variety of tales about what happened and what didn’t happen… . Had I been one of the people to see her, I don’t think I could have found her competent to be executed.’ Philpin simply can’t imagine determining competence for a lethal injection based on a thirty-minute interview.

  Among the objectors who tried to step in were Glenn Ross Caddy, Ph.D., and Jethro W. Toomer, Ph.D., who signed affidavits on October 7 to their shared belief that Lee was not competent. Toomer first examined Lee in 1992. While she has an appreciation of the charges and the range and nature of possible penalties, he wrote, her ability to relate to her attorney in a meaningful manner and to testify relevantly, is compromised by her impaired emotional and psychological functioning… .

  While trying to fast-track her execution, she was not honest about her family background, he wrote, adding that the judge’s questions were not likely to reveal ‘such a delusional process’ and ‘they did not.’ He described her religious conversion as at odds with her ongoing claims that if free, she would kill again, noting the great paradox in it all.

  Then again, Lee was a walking paradox. She personified contradictions: angry, bitter, enraged, hair-trigger temper, preoccupied with her conspiracy theories, sometimes shouting crude threats. Concurrently, she was sweet, likeable, warm, and affectionate—her voice so soft, it was almost girlish. The only consensus: She had borderline personality disorder. Beyond that, the experts had different takes.

  To Dr. Caddy, her belief in 1992 that her lawyers were conspiring against her was evidence of a long history of delusional thinking. He lamented the lack of any exploration into the possibility her actions were impacted by a religiously based or other based delusional process operating to push Ms. Wuornos to encourage her own death. Failing to order more mental-health analysis of ‘such a severely pathological woman’ was not in sync with his view of ‘best practices for competency determination.’

  So why did she kill? What really triggered the murders of Richard Mallory, Charles ‘Dick’ Humphreys, David Spears, Troy Burress, Charles Carskaddon, Peter Siems, and Walter ‘Gino’ Antonio? Those taped phone calls with Ty held some telling information about her motives:

  ‘I just don’t understand why you did it,’ said Ty.

  ‘I don’t, either,’ said Lee. ‘I’m telling you, I don’t. Tyria, I’m so in love with you. I never wanted to leave you. You don’t know how much I love you.’

  Lee went on to say, ‘… Let me tell you why I did it, all right?’

  ‘Mmmm … mmm.’

  ‘Because I’m so … so fuckin’ in love with you that I was so worried about us not having an apartment and shit, and I was scared that we were gonna lose our place, believing that we wouldn’t be together. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s the truth.’

  Jackelyn Giroux observed in an e-mail, I think that her fear of Ty leaving did spur more of her killing days and that Lee thought the more she killed the more famous she would become, therefore making Ty return to her for another dose of excitement.

  With her borderline personality disorder, it’s hard to overestimate the impact on Lee of her fears of Ty leaving. Dr. Philpin can imagine Lee’s discomfort when pretty young Sandy Russell joined her and Ty for Thanksgiving Dinner in their trailer just days before she killed Richard Mallory. Likewise, her anxiety when Ty’s vacationing sister repeatedly tried to coax Ty to move back to Ohio—when in a staggering escalation, Lee killed three men in as many weeks.

  The looming threat of abandonment would, Dr. Philpin explained, ‘absolutely have tripped her, threatening her needs, her ability to function. Threatening her world as it existed then. That would be a horrible threat.’

  The FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit began its work by studying thirty-six male serial killers and learned that in forty-eight of eighty-one murder cases, what set the stage for murder involved conflict with a woman, although other stressors often were present, including financial problems. It’s not a great stretch to view Lee’s financial worries and her fears and anxiety about Ty leaving being precipitating stressors that could similarly trigger murder.

  Lee gave such wildly different accounts of why she killed Richard Mallory from her confession in 1991 to the horrific revision of history she presented at her trial a year later: a new tale of being sodomized, raped, and so brutally attacked that she was bleeding from her bodily orifices.

  What later emerged about Richard Mallory’s past was disturbing. In 1958, at age nineteen, he was convicted of housebreaking with intent to commit rape and assault and sentenced
to four years in a psychiatric facility. But there was no evidence whatsoever that Mallory’s past factored into what happened that night. Indeed, Dawn Botkins told Court TV that Lee had confided in her that she wasn’t sodomized by Mallory. She said that part of the story was something ‘that she kind of added.’

  According to Dr. Philpin, equally important, perhaps, is that someone who has endured all Lee did can suffer from something akin to post-traumatic stress disorder. And such a disorder can trigger responses—a complex chain of events—that are not dependent on any external event taking place at all; that, instead, are entirely internal.

  The important thing, he explained which seems especially critical when trying to understand Lee and what led to the murders is that ‘it doesn’t have to be an event in the environment. It can be intrapsychic—just something going on in the person’s head.’

  We are left with what is shaping up to be the legend of Aileen Wuornos. At one end of the spectrum, she is idealized as a poster child for victims of abuse. Few murderers who also have been abused like Lee, and who also suffer from severe mental issues like Lee, have engendered such empathy and compassion.

  Many express more empathy for Lee than for her victims. But viewing her rather than the people she killed as the victim comes at the expense of the innocent men she murdered, and at the expense of their families.

  As a prostitute, there’s no reason to doubt that she was likely raped multiple times over the years. That said, there was no evidence that she was hurt by the men she killed on the days that she killed them. And there’s no question she killed in cold blood. The evidence—and bullets—spoke clearly on that issue (as did the jury). In an age of CSI-style evidence, it seems that the evidence in Lee’s case is often ignored to allow her to be what people want her to be. The perception of her shifts from the robber who killed (which the evidence supported) to a rape victim who first killed to save her own life (which the evidence didn’t).