by Sue Russell
One significant contributor to the Hollywood-izing of Wuornos was the release of the movie Monster, which purported to be ‘based on a true story.’ For her portrayal of Lee, Charlize Theron won a well-deserved Oscar for Best Actress. But the script deviated from the case’s core facts. So why even call the character Aileen Wuornos? That’s Hollywood. But if we as a society are to understand Lee as she truly was, facts should overrule Tinseltown’s predilection for manufacturing a victim-as-heroine.
We don’t know everything, but we do know that Lee didn’t kill Mallory while fighting for her life. He was first shot while sitting in the driver’s seat of his car, fully clothed, pants zipped, belt buckled. Lee’s first shot flew from the passenger side; the bullet entered his right arm, then on into his side and chest. Her description of lying down on the seat, her hands tied to the steering wheel, simply wasn’t viable. But that scenario—or something close to it in terms of violence inflicted—does align with her drastically revised account of that night presented at trial being taken at face value and presented as fact in Monster.
In life, Lee was a victim. But in regard to the murders of seven men, transforming Lee into a blameless victim/heroine was not a harmless act. Should we label the men she killed as rapists if there is no evidence to show that any did anything to harm her and she shot several of them in the back? Should we lump the men together as her johns when only two crimes suggest any sexual acts? Monster perpetuates this demonizing of her victims.
Many likely prefer to believe what Monster dished up because it is far easier to accept a woman as a victim, even if it means disregarding the true victims and, worse, blackening their characters. However, on learning the facts of the case, some movie viewers who believed that in seeing Monster they were seeing the Aileen Wuornos story are angered by being misled.
Dr. Philpin believes (as does this author) that the license the film took does a disservice to our ability to understand women’s capacity for violence. (However, Dr. Philpin does so with a caveat: ‘I do like Charlize very much! I think she’s very talented! But I agree with you about the film.’)
Misconceptions about Lee started long before Monster, of course. Brian Jarvis, who was a major crimes investigator with the Marion County Sheriff’s Office in 1991, noted during a telephone interview that other TV shows and even news reports were ‘always pushing the angle that they picked her up for sex.’ Dick Humphreys was killed in Jarvis’s county. The major crimes investigator said, ‘There was absolutely no indication that he was undressed, redressed. Nothing at all. He was shot from several angles, several ways. This isn’t a guy that was being aggressive.’
Tom Tittle was a street crimes investigator in 1991 when Lee was arrested. ‘I was in the surveillance van when it all pretty much was rocking down,’ he recalled in a telephone interview. ‘And we had the wires—the body bugs—on the undercovers, Mike Joyner and Dick Martin. I was across the street, watching and listening and recording any activity on the wire itself.’ To Tittle, Richard Mallory’s being shot while fully clothed behind the wheel didn’t jibe with Aileen Wuornos being brutally raped or attacked at that moment. But he understood the manufactured story. ‘We all have to have some sort of defense when we go to court, and being raped and brutalized was hers,’ he said.
Some visitors to the Daytona Beach area stop in at the Last Resort Bar, the biker haunt in Port Orange, which has dubbed itself the ‘Home of Ice Cold Beer and Killer Women.’ Owner Al Bulling has capitalized on its connection to Wuornos, according to Tom Tittle, ‘from the hot sauce he sells to having the logo up there of the “killer women.” Absolutely, they have benefited from that. If there was a monument to Lee, people would just flock to it. And the Last Resort Bar is the monument. It’s the hub.’
Lee’s picture takes pride of place on the bar and her face scowls out from Last Resort T-shirts and Crazed Killer Hot Sauce labels, which read, WARNING! This Hot Sauce could drive you insane, or at least off on some murderous rampage. Aileen liked it and look what it did to her.
The ongoing interest in Lee prompted Tittle to joke that ‘she’s like a bad dream that keeps coming back.’
‘It’s just amazing that [her story has] had so much staying power,’ Brian Jarvis agreed. ‘So many years, and there’s always somebody with an interest in it.’
Tittle understands the fascination, though: ‘It’s the real novelty of this female serial killer. Yes, there are black widows and other types, but the violence that she instituted out there with firearms just sets her apart.’
When Lee was caught, many wondered if we would see more female serial killers, more women committing stranger homicides, or if she was an anomaly. To Dr. Philpin, Lee was less an anomaly, more a variation on a theme. Tittle believes that robbery was her prime motivator. But from his law enforcement perception, she started out as an anomaly, ‘but then I think she got to probably enjoy it.’
Tittle and Jarvis (who is the former police chief of Chester, a small town in New York State) and David Taylor, J.D., another investigator working the hunt for Wuornos, are all now retired from the force. But they still talk regularly about her case as national criminal-justice instructors. Typically, they analyze it at the end of weeklong courses they teach. One, for new detectives, covers initial crime scene investigation, working leads, gathering evidence, interviews, information gathering, and how to try to get a guilty party’s confession.
‘And the Wuornos case shows all of these things in a practical format,’ Jarvis explained. ‘So it’s really a good way to tie everything together at the end of the week. And we have a lot of fun doing it, too, because we had the fortunate opportunity to be a part of it.’
David Taylor, who earned his law degree after leaving Marion County Sheriff’s Office, once had ten judges take his class in Texas. Frequently his attendees include prosecutors, defense attorneys, and forensic pathologists, as well as detectives and others in law enforcement. Taylor, who now lives in West Virginia, features the Wuornos investigation in ‘Forensic Mondays,’ a popular fifteen-week course he teaches locally, attracting high-school students and older adults alike.
According to Tittle, the import of working a case like Wuornos’s doesn’t sink in immediately. ‘Honestly, I did not know the scope or the magnitude of what we really had,’ he said. ‘But you look back and … she didn’t just shoot people, she shot people. Boom! Boom! Boom!’
Lee’s arrest was a good day all around. ‘We were pretty darned happy all the hard work paid off,’ Taylor recalled by telephone. ‘We have to always remember to learn from the past and to not simply repeat bad history.’ So, he tells attendees, the temptations of potential movie deals, for example, never should cross paths with an ongoing investigation.
‘I share with them the types of “big bucks” seductions that can occur with a case of this magnitude,’ he explained, ‘and tell them never to sell their souls to the devil. I say that there will be more big cases like Wuornos’s that also will be around forever, and that we’ll stop talking about them at the exact same time we quit talking about Bonnie and Clyde and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.’
‘Why wasn’t Tyria Moore prosecuted?’ That’s the question Brian Jarvis always can count on being asked in classes. Back in 1991, he was shocked that she wasn’t. ‘The only thing I can tell them is it was a decision the prosecutor made.’ The question is unsurprising. After all, during their taped jail telephone conversations, Ty said to Lee: ‘I mean, I know of three, so … I mean, that’s bad enough right there.’ Even without the word ‘murder,’ her meaning was clear. If Ty had spoken up, she might have saved lives.
Jackelyn Giroux believed that in her relationship with Lee, ‘The excitement was the draw card for Ty. Ty said Lee always talked about a book and movie about her life, and she found it all exciting, waiting for Lee to come home with the money.’
But, Giroux told me, when Ty heard on the radio that they were releasing to television and newspapers a sketch of two females who had been s
een at the Siems car smash site, that was the wake-up call. ‘It dawned on her that she could go to jail. Up until that time, it was like playing in a sandbox. Someone else doing all the work while she reaped the rewards. She liked the excitement definitely, and she knew more than she admitted to, but who would want to be affiliated with Lee once she got caught?’
Aileen Wuornos is finally gone. Yes, she was damaged, but she also caused immeasurable damage. It only seems fair to acknowledge both. In her 2001 letter sharing some of her reflections, Arlene Pralle wrote: Tragedy and grief are universal. Though the circumstances for each of us are different, the feelings are the same. And those feelings have to be dealt with correctly or we will become the next victims, eaten alive by bitterness and hate.
Arlene suffered a heart attack, which along with selling the Pralles’ farm and being forced to move, really brought this home to her:
I had many issues to deal with in my own life, just as the victims’ family members had been doing. My prayer for them is they can find closure and peace.
We reached out to Aileen Wuornos as a result of what we still feel was a prompting of God. I am not sorry we did that, though at the moment I’m not at all sure what good came of it. We tried to be friends with Aileen and bring her to a knowledge of Jesus Christ as her personal saviour. That was the only motivation for writing that first letter.
The day before Troy Burress disappeared, he was at Letha Prater’s home with his grandson, picking pears from her tree for preserves. ‘He was doing me some favor,’ she said, ‘and my last words to him were “Thanks, Bud!” Besides loving my brother, I liked him a lot. We were confidantes.’
Letha has disliked the frequent description of Wuornos as being ‘sentenced to death for killing six men’—or, worse, ‘johns’—with no mention of Lee’s victims. She hopes readers will understand that they were individuals with families, lives, and loved ones.
‘Buddy wasn’t a group. He was a man,’ she said. ‘A little boy that had a beautiful smile and pretty blue eyes and I saw him grow up. He was a decent person. He loved to go home to his horses. This was his life, and it was taken by another person. If you’re going to give her a personality, give him a personality, too. Her childhood is not my concern. My brother is my concern. I hurt every day I don’t see him. And I’m not ever going to see him.’
By March 2013, Letha still had no regrets about the execution. As she hoped, she has felt more peace. Occasionally she is still surprised by Wuornos’s face popping up on television, but at least she knows she is gone.
Mindful of Aileen Wuornos’s warnings that if she got out, she would kill again, Letha Prater said, ‘That’s one person you didn’t have to worry about really changing and messing up someone’s life. I was sorry that she had a bad childhood. Yes, of course. But I wanted this execution. And it happened. And I’ve never regretted that. I would still today want the same thing. If there had been doubt [about her guilt], maybe I would have felt different. But I had no doubt.’
Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals connected to this story.
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Copyright © 2002 by Sue Russell
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