Monster: Inside the Mind of Aileen Wuornos

^{CHAPTER ONE} THE CIGARETTE BANDIT

The twenty-ninth of February is a unique day. It was created artificially to try to make up for the fact that our year is really a few hours longer than 365 days. Aileen Carol Pittman was a Piscean leap-year child. She entered this world, a happy, healthy tot, on Wednesday, 29 February 1956, wrapped up in the warm and secure environment of Clinton Hospital, Detroit, Rochester, Michigan. Her parents were 14-year-old (some say 16-year-old) Diane Wuornos and 19-year-old handyman, sexual pervert and child molester Leo Dale Pittman. Many claim that Leo was a highly sexed, dictatorial figure who carried guns, but we know that they were married with the blessing of his grandmother who lied about their ages. So, one might say, Aileen was born – a dangerous breach birth – with both small feet on the wrong side of the tracks in small-town America.

The marriage between Diane and Leo proved to be tumultuous and, as is all too common in the western world’s throwaway society, destined for failure. Indeed, it ended a few months before Lee was born: Leo left the young Diane to raise the new baby and her older brother Keith, a product of the same coupling.

Lee never knew her genetic father, who was soon jailed on the capital charges of kidnapping and raping a seven-year-old girl and taking her across state lines. There is some evidence to suggest that he had also killed a young girl. Leo was to spend some time in two secure mental hospitals. In 1971, while he was in a Michigan prison, this singularly nasty piece of work conveniently fashioned a noose from a bed sheet then hanged himself.

With small-city people living from hand to mouth, it is not surprising that Diane soon found the responsibilities of single motherhood unbearable. Welfare would not help her, and she sought what seemed to her to be the only way out. In 1960, when Lee was four years old, she asked her parents to babysit her kids, then in tears she phoned to say that she would never return.

Lauri Wuornos, a worker in the Ford factory, and his wife, Eileen Britta Wuornos (whom I shall refer to as Britta), already had three youngsters of their own: Barry, Lori and of course Diane, who had become pregnant by the worthless Leo who was now in jail for sex offences. Nevertheless, with the best will in the world, the couple officially adopted both of Diane’s children on Friday, 18 March 1960.

Their home, with its sad, yellow-painted wood cladding, was an unprepossessing one-storey ranch amidst a cluster of trees sited off Cadmus Street in Troy, Michigan. Troy sits on Interstate 75 – the Dixie Highway – which features prominently in Lee’s life history.

Innocent-looking and otherwise unremarkable, the house, according to Lee, was nevertheless a place of secrets in the rural, close-knit community consisting of dirt roads some 24 miles north of the bustling metropolis of Detroit. Near neighbours, who were never once invited to set foot inside, even for casual pleasantries, recall the curtains always being tightly drawn across the small windows of the Wuornos house. It was common knowledge that Lauri Wuornos and his wife kept the outside world very much at arm’s length. They minded their own business and expected everyone else to attend to theirs.

Aged six, Lee started causing problems at home when she started taking an unhealthy interest in matches. While trying to start a fire with lighter fluid, she suffered scarring facial burns – perhaps a portent for things to come.

Lauri and Britta raised Lee and Keith with their own children, Barry and Lori, but they did not reveal that they were, in fact, the adopted children’s grandparents, and, behind those shaded windows, frequent clashes of will took place between young Lee and her heavy-drinking, physically intimidating grandfather. The omnipresent third party was a wide, brown leather belt that he kept hanging on a peg behind his bedroom door. Lee later claimed that, at his bidding, this strap was cleaned almost ritualistically by her with saddle soap and conditioner which were kept in the dresser drawer.

She claimed she was forced to bend, stripped naked, over the kitchen table; the petrified child was beaten frequently with the doubled-over belt. Sometimes she lay face down, spread-eagled naked on her bed to receive her whippings, while all the while her drunken adoptive father screamed that she was worthless and should never have been born. ‘You ain’t even worthy of the air you breathe,’ he shouted, as the belt lashed down again and again.

Sydney Shovan, who grew up two blocks from Lee, rode the same bus to Troy High School on Livernois Road. Looking back on those days, he recalled with a sigh, ‘Lee always had bruises on her arms, cheeks and chin.’ He added that everyone knew she was sexually active with her brother Keith. In fact, Keith was teased by the local kids about having sex with Lee while they were both drunk. Lee admits that she was having sex with her brother at an early age – how early we do not know.

‘We all used to congregate at a place called The Pits,’ said Shovan’s sister Cynthia, who was a grade higher than Lee at Troy High. ‘One time she was dumped from a moving van, fell badly on her head and no one attended to help her. I guess no one liked her that much.’

In fact, Lee was very much a loner amongst her peers. While the other kids sat around kissing and cuddling, Lee would watch from the fringes. No boys wanted to kiss her, but they would buy sexual favours from her in exchange for cigarettes. Thereafter, Lee became known as the Cigarette Pig or the Cigarette Bandit.

During her ninth year, a chemical explosion which Lee and a friend accidentally set off resulted in her sustaining severe burns on her face and arms. She was hospitalised for several days and confined for months afterwards. The burns healed slowly, but Lee worried that she would be deformed and scarred for life. The faint scars on her forehead and her arms bore grim testimony to the accident until the end of her days.

Aged 11, Lee had the shock of her life when she learned that Lauri and Britta were indeed her grandparents. She was already incorrigible, with her fearsome trailer-trash defiance and socially unacceptable temper. But now the girl felt she had been completely deceived. She became uncontrollable and her volcanic verbal explosions, which were unpredictable and seemingly unprovoked, inevitably drove a further wedge between her and her adoptive parents. Her adoptive father, the man she says had so brutalised her as a helpless child, the man who had claimed to be her dad for all those years, was a twisted fraud. She would take out her hatred for him on many of the men she would meet in the future, and she had an excellent tool at her disposal: sex.

Thrashing Lee had never worked – it only served to harden her resolve – so one Christmas her grandfather threw her out into the snow. She lived rough in the woods with a lad for two days before she returned home. Then she was thrown out again and slept in abandoned cars. Following this, and tired of freezing and having nowhere to stay, she ran away for a period of time with a girlfriend called Dawn Botkins. They hitchhiked to California. Dawn would remain Lee’s closest friend until the day she was executed.

The two girls would sometimes hitchhike to Hawthorne Park in Detroit, visiting the extremely dangerous Seven Mile Road where they would buy drugs for Lee – she used them all, including downers.

A heavy drinker by the age of 12, on one occasion Lee awoke from a drunken stupor to find dried semen stains all over her clothing. On another occasion, at a party, other children watched as two boys took her while she lay drunk and curled up in the foetal position on the floor. Lee’s troubles had well and truly started; soon they would be set in stone.

At school, teachers found Lee to be a poor student with some artistic talent. She could not concentrate, her mind wandered and she seemed to have a convenient hearing problem. By the age of 14, staff were so concerned by her behaviour – in one instance she set fire to a roll of toilet paper in a school washroom – that a teacher wrote, ‘It is vital for this girl’s welfare that she seeks counselling immediately.’ No one took a blind bit of notice, especially her adoptive parents, a lapse which would cost them, eight men and their families dearly.

But she did have one other friend. A man with the Dickensian name of Mr Portlock, he was nicknamed ‘Chief’. Hookers would visit him frequently. A creepy guy, Portlock lived in a rundown house close by and he had a reputation as an unsavoury character. Toni Nazar, who was employed as a housekeeper, claimed Portlock was ‘a strange, weird man who had cancer’. Lee had no record player at home, so Portlock encouraged her to play her albums at his house while he would sit around leering as she danced. Then, with the young girl on his lap, he would fuss over her and give her money.

Lee became pregnant – some claim it was by her grandfather, or her brother Keith – and was sent to an unmarried mothers’ home to await the birth of her child. The staff found her hostile, uncooperative and unable to get along with the other girls in the same boat. Lee gave birth to a baby boy who was put up for adoption in January 1971; the child vanished into obscurity forever.

The stigma of having a pregnant teenage granddaughter proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Lauri Wuornos had had enough. He threatened to kill Lee and Keith if they did not leave his house forever. There were terrible arguments between the strict disciplinarian and the more understanding Britta. Then, on 7 July of the same year under somewhat sinister circumstances, Britta Wuornos died. For whatever reason, the man’s mind became unhinged. Bizarrely, he attempted suicide by trying to electrocute himself by flooding his basement and standing knee-deep in water with the power on. Shortly afterwards he moved home, and some years later he succeeded in taking his own life. Lauri gassed himself in his garage and Lee stumbled across the body. At his funeral, she turned up only to blow cigarette smoke into the corpse’s face.

Diane suspects that her father murdered her mother, although the official story was that she had died of liver failure.

Shortly before her execution, Lee Wuornos radically changed her sentiments about her grandparents; however, by now, as Nick Broomfield confirms, she was tottering on the edge of insanity: ‘My dad was so straight and clean… he wouldn’t even take his shirt off to mow the lawn. I came from a clean and decent family… my dad blamed me for killing his wife. It was all my fault that she died.’

At her murder trial, Barry Wuornos was called to the witness stand to be questioned by the counsel for the accused, and he faced several searching questions as to Lee’s early days. Barry started by stating that, ‘It was a normal lifestyle, a pretty straight and narrow family. Very little trouble in the family while Aileen was growing up. They picked her up when I would say she was two years old. Father was a kind of disciplinarian.’

‘What was your impression of your father?’

‘Well, he was a strong character… a gentle man… laid down strong rules.’

‘Did you ever see him beat her? Was he the kind of man who would beat a child.’

‘Absolutely not,’ came the emphatic answer.

Barry then went on to describe his father’s interaction with Lee from the time she arrived at the house until he went into the army.

‘Would you describe her grandfather as being abusive?’

‘Not at all. Normal spankings, but the general rule was grounding for two or three days.’

‘After you left for the service, did you stay in touch with Miss Wuornos?’

‘Well, I stayed in contact with my mom and dad.’

‘Did your mother and father provide her with a home, shelter, food and clothing?’

‘Oh, yes,’ came the solid reply.

He began to question the period during which Lee had been badly burned.

‘Was medical care denied to Miss Wuornos?’

‘She did go to the doctor for a period of eight months and received salves,’ Barry replied. ‘Mom took care of those things. She was a very quiet, studious, laid-back woman, very in the background. Much easier-going than my father, and no punishment of any kind came from her. My father worked at Ford and Chrysler as an engineer, was a janitor for a while and then worked in quality control… He was strong on school. He was disappointed because I started at the university and dropped out to go into the service.’

He was not getting the answers he wanted from Barry Wuornos, so he turned up the heat. ‘Was Aileen treated differently than any of the rest?’ he asked.

‘Not that I ever saw,’ replied Barry Wuornos. ‘One time she was going to be spanked and she brought up the fact that she was adopted and she said, “Don’t lay your hands on me. You’re not even my real dad.” From that time, I never saw any attempts on the part of my dad to physically spank her.’

At the defence table, Lee was visibly angry at her adoptive brother’s testimony and she started scribbling furiously on a legal pad.

‘When did she learn that she was adopted?’ the attorney continued.

‘She was ten or eleven at the time. How long before that she knew, I don’t know.’

The attorney now turned his focus towards Lee’s mother – Barry Wuornos’s sister.

‘Lee’s mother. What was she like?’

‘She was like a normal older sister. She had run-ins with her first husband, naturally. We picked up Aileen at the age of two. And she was in no trouble at that point, but before that she was a model student at Troy and she got mixed up with Leo Pittman… She was with Leo – an on-and-off marriage.’

‘What about Aileen’s father?’

‘I knew very little about Leo. I remember he was trying to date Diane. He was pretty abusive. I remember one day he threw me down and threatened to choke me if I didn’t give a message to Diane. He was generally a criminal type… He was sent to prison and later killed himself.’

The attorney elicited from the witness that Diane had married around the age of 15 or 16 and that it had been a sore point in the family at the time.

‘Did Lee do well at school?’ asked the lawyer.

‘Yeah, I think she did well in school until she reached the ninth grade. She had great artistic ability… through letters in the service I heard that she was getting into trouble.’

The court learned that Lauri Wuornos drank around a bottle of wine a day, and finally that Barry came home one day and found his father dead in the garage. Lee claims she found her father and her brother was not around.

On hearing the sad news about Lauri, Diane Wuornos invited Lee and Keith to stay with her in Texas, but they declined. Lee, although now a ward of the court, dropped out of school, left home and took up a feral existence, a life of hitchhiking and prostitution, drifting across the country as her spirit moved her.

So, much to the relief of Troy, Lee was leaving on her right thumb. Taking little more than the clothes she wore and carrying a few possessions in a bag, she hit the road, seemingly ill-equipped to start a new life down south. In truth, Lee had all the necessary skills required of the profession that was beckoning. She had good looks, a tough spirit, a neat figure, a cheeky smile, the morals of an alley cat and a strong right hook. She knew what men wanted from her and she would do well out of any gullible guy who crossed her path. Her mind, however, was brooding and silent, a dormant volcano building up to an eruption.

^{CHAPTER TWO} THE ODD COUPLE

Lee Wuornos next comes to our attention in 1974 when, using the alias Sandra Kretsch, she was jailed in Jefferson County, Colorado for disorderly conduct, drunk driving and firing a .22-calibre pistol from a moving vehicle. Additional charges were filed when she skipped bail ahead of her trial.

In March 1976, Lee, now aged 20, married multi-millionaire Lewis Gratz Fell. By any measure, this was a curious match. Silver-haired Fell, with his reputable Philadelphia background, was 69 years old when he picked up Lee while she was hitchhiking. He was well connected and kept a plastic business card case containing all of his contacts which included judges, attorneys, state’s attorneys and police officers, among others. When Lee and Lewis parted company under somewhat acrimonious circumstances, this wallet went missing, the significance of which we shall soon discover.

Lee saw Fell coming from the word go and, as we now know, this young lady was not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. We have to give her credit for that. However, what we can see is that Lee’s first big hit, even if it was not a murderous act, was against an elderly man who was several years older than her grandfather.

Quite what was going through Lewis’s mind at that time can only be a matter for conjecture: perhaps he was thinking with the parts he hadn’t used for several decades. Nevertheless, he offered Lee his hand in marriage, which she accepted in a heartbeat and, after buying her a very expensive engagement ring, they married in Kingsley, Georgia.

The wedding took place less than two months after the death of Lee’s 65-year-old grandfather Lauri.

Most of those who knew Lee viewed her marriage cynically. They racked their brains and scratched their heads, finding it impossible to judge it as anything other than a purely mercenary move, which it certainly was. They knew that Lee was capable of just about anything.

The unwitting Lewis Fell had no idea what he was letting himself in for. He was clueless. Some on the fringes took the view that it was a mutually acceptable relationship, and they would be correct. Others thought he was stark raving bonkers. For his part, Lewis had a pretty young woman on his arm and in his bed, while Lee enjoyed the fruits of what his money could buy.

Early in July 1976, husband and wife rolled into Michigan in a brand-new, cream-coloured Cadillac and, while raising a few eyebrows, they checked into a motel. Now smiling all the way to the next bank, Lee stuck a finger up at small-city Troy by sending a few friends newspaper cuttings of their wedding announcement. Carefully clipped from the society pages of the Daytona press, they came complete with a photograph of a man who looked old enough to be her grandfather, knees buckling and leaning heavily on a stick.

Lee knew that word travelled faster over backyard fences than by phone in hick Troy, so, to rub the citizens’ noses further in the seed, she highlighted the portion describing Fell as the president of nothing less than a yacht club, with nothing less than a private income derived from nothing less than railroad stocks and shares.

While perky Lee had hit pay dirt, geriatric Lewis had wandered into a very serious problem. His idyllic dream of settling down each night with a young piece of skirt to satisfy his sexual desires was about to become his worst nightmare, one that Stephen King would have been hard-pushed to better.

On Tuesday, 13 July, Lee, against her husband’s express wish, decided to go out on the town, while Lewis stayed at home to watch TV. After visiting a few bars she ended up at Bernie’s Club in Mancelona where she flaunted her body and started to hustle at the pool table. With a figure many women would die for, clad in an off-the-shoulder top, a micro-miniskirt and thigh-high boots, Lee was as hot as a kitchen stove.

Nevertheless, despite her physical attributes which had the locals drooling at the mouth, sometime after midnight the barman and manager Danny Moore decided he had seen enough of her. Lee was drunk, rowdy, shouting obscenities, uttering threats to other patrons and generally being objectionable. Danny casually walked over to the game and announced that the table was closing down. As he was gathering up the balls, he heard someone shout, ‘Duck!’ He turned just in time to see Lee aim a cue ball at his head. It missed him only by inches, but the missile had been hurled with such force that it became lodged in the wall.

When a smiling Deputy Jimmie Patrick of the Antrim County Sheriff’s Department arrived, Lee was arrested for assault and battery and hauled off to jail. She was also charged on fugitive warrants from the Troy Police Department who had requested that she be picked up on charges of drinking alcohol in a car, unlawful use of a driver’s licence and not having a Michigan driver’s licence. She was bailed when a friend turned up with her purse containing $1,450 – her husband’s money.

Three days later her brother Keith, aged 21, died of throat cancer. It had been in his body for ages and had finally eaten him up. Keith was cremated at the same funeral home as Britta and Lauri Wuornos. Lee arrived late for the service, but in time to place a rose in his hands.

Having rejected her son in life, but acknowledging him in death, Diane flew in from Texas for Keith’s funeral. Other mourners were surprised to see her apparently too distraught to sit through the service for the son she had abandoned.

The reader does not need to be a clairvoyant to predict that things did not bode well between Lee and Lewis, and that the marriage would be short-lived. Lee had been torn between her desire to get drunk and hang out in bars, and the less desirable option: long periods of abject boredom, sitting around at her aged husband’s feet in his plush, beachside condominium, their eyes glued to TV programmes about trains, boats and the stock market. With problems looming from every direction, Lewis tried the well-tested and universally approved ‘I am older than you, please respect your elders’ trick. Trained most comprehensively in this area by her late adoptive father, whose family communication skills were considerably less than poor, Lee responded by awarding her new husband a black eye.

Shaken, and very likely stirred, by this outburst from his sweet young wife, Lewis tried another idea. After all, it had worked with his late wife, and the other two before that, so why shouldn’t it work with his new one? He would cut Lee’s allowance, and, if that failed, he would not give her any money at all. After considering the plan overnight, breakfast came. Dressed in his gown, his feet warm in his furry slippers, he got as far as saying, ‘I will stop your allow–’ when she beat him up with his walking cane and pointed a meat skewer uncomfortably close to his throat.

Lewis Fell now saw the light. At the first opportunity he obtained a restraining order to prevent another battering, and sought an annulment of the marriage claiming she had squandered his money and given him several damned good thrashings into the bargain.

The divorce decree stated:

Lee pawned the expensive diamond engagement ring he had given her. Lewis Fell, his bank account seriously depleted, vanished into obscurity a wiser man. Their marriage officially ended on Tuesday, 19 July 1977 with a divorce issued at the Volusia County courthouse in Florida.

On Thursday, 4 August 1976, Lee pleaded guilty to the assault-and-battery charge, paying a fine and costs of $105. Then came an unexpected windfall. Keith’s army life insurance paid up and, as next of kin, Lee received $10,000. The money was immediately put down as a deposit on a shiny black Pontiac (which was soon repossessed). She also bought a mixed bag of antiques and a massive stereo system, although she had no home in which to put them. Lee blew all the money within three months.

Adrift in the world once again, Lee embarked on a series of relationships which, as may have been expected, failed. From time to time she turned tricks, but, even as a prostitute working the interstate highway, she was not exactly sought after.

For a while in 1981, she lived in a mobile home with a retired businessman who was separated from his wife. ‘Lee was quick-tempered,’ he said, but he found her ‘warm, loving and resourceful’. She did all that she could to please him, and he recalled that, when the vacuum cleaner broke down, she replaced it with a new one the very same night – albeit stolen it from a nearby hotel.

Lee was deeply in love with him, but one night they quarrelled and Lee awoke in the morning still angry, feeling that this man might be just like all the others who had taken advantage of her over the years. On Wednesday, 20 May, she took the car, bought a six-pack of beer, then stopped at a pawn shop to buy a pistol and some bullets. She drove for hours, despondent and contemplating suicide, but, instead of turning the gun on herself, she held up the Majik Market in Edgewater, Florida, while dressed in shorts and a bikini top.

‘I was fed up with living,’ she said. ‘I had no car, no money, no family. I had nothing. Struggling seemed senseless. I even tried to join the service – the army, navy, air force – but you needed 42 points to pass, and I always missed by exactly five points. So I was going to kill myself.

‘I drank a case of beer and a quarter pint of whiskey. I also took four reds. Librium. I got my boyfriend’s car and went to this store. I grabbed a six-pack of beer and two Slim Jims. I had $118 on me.

‘I walked up to the counter and put my purse on it. The handle of my gun was sticking out, and the woman started screaming like hell about how I was going to rob the store. She freaked out, and I said, “What the hell, you want a robbery, then I’ll rob your store. Give me your money.”’

The clerk handed her $33 from the cash register.

‘I walked out of the store real slowly, because I was so drunk and I couldn’t find my keys. I sat in the car for three minutes looking for them. Then I drove away and started hauling ass down the highway. Then the radiator blew and I had to stop, and these kids helped me push it to a gas station. I was wearing one of those country hats, and I took that off, and the shorts, so I was just in my bikini. I was trying to alter my description and that’s when the fucking cops arrived.’

She would later add, ‘In order to test his love for me, I held up a convenience store. If he loved me, he would have gotten me out of that fix. I didn’t give a fuck.’

Russell Armstrong was the criminal defence attorney who represented Lee on the charges of armed robbery in 1981. He found 25-year-old Lee bright but suicidal, and asked the judge, Kim C. Hammond, to order a psychiatric evaluation prior to trial. Dr George W. Barnard examined Lee and arrived at the following conclusion:

Lee was sent to the Florida Correctional Center in Lowell on Thursday, 4 May 1982 where she was disciplined six times for fighting and disobeying orders. Released on Thursday, 30 June 1983, she went to live with middle-aged Thomas Sheldon, one of several prison pen pals. Tom immediately realised that she had problems. He tried to get psychiatric help for her, but the clinic he contacted refused to admit her for treatment when she claimed, quite wrongly, that her problems were all his fault. After a few months he sent her back to Florida. Her previous boyfriend would not take her back. Rejection was following Lee like a ghost, haunting her every relationship.

In January 1984, Lee drifted into New Smyrna Beach, just south of Daytona Beach, where she moved in with a retired truck driver for a few months. ‘Two men came and dropped her off one day,’ he would later tell reporters. ‘She needed a quiet place to stay. She cleaned and cooked. I wanted somebody quiet, because it’s a quiet neighbourhood. She seemed bitter somehow, but she always put herself together. She could have taken advantage of me if she had wanted. She did have a temper, but was a pretty girl.’

On Tuesday, 1 May 1984, Lee was arrested for attempting to pass a forged cheque at the Barnett Bank in Key West, Florida. She had foolishly forged her employer’s signature on two cheques – one for $5,000 and the other for $595. She was bailed, and two years later she pleaded guilty to forgery after the prosecution agreed to drop related charges. Sentencing was set for 30 April 1986. She did not show up and a warrant was issued for her arrest.

On Saturday, 30 November 1985, she was named as a suspect in the theft of a pistol and ammunition in Pasco County. The victim was a man who had given her a few nights’ board and lodgings in return for sex. During this year she had her first recorded lesbian affair with an Italian woman called Toni in Florida Keys. The relationship was passionate, enlivened by frequent jealousies and physical violence. Toni and Lee had travelled to Orlando and purchased equipment to start a steam-cleaning firm, and Lee said that it was her own earnings that had paid for it.

‘Toni, she was like a really good friend,’ Lee recalled. ‘I wasn’t alone any more. I wanted to stay with her.’

After several months, Lee says she came home to find Toni, the cleaning equipment and all of her possessions gone. ‘The only items left behind,’ she said, ‘were a fan and a phone bill for $485. She was using me. I was so upset about losing a business that I’d have had for the rest of my life.’

Shortly after this bust-up, Lee borrowed the alias of Lori Grody from an aunt in Michigan and, 11 days later, the Florida Highway Patrol cited Grody for driving with a suspended licence. On Saturday, 4 January 1986, her rap sheet shows she was arrested in Miami under her own name and charged with auto theft, resisting arrest and obstruction by giving false information. Police found a .30-calibre revolver and a box of ammunition in the stolen car. She was bailed and vanished.

On Monday, 2 June 1986, Volusia County deputies questioned Lee after a male companion accused her of pulling a gun on him and demanding $200. In spite of her denials, Lee was carrying spare ammunition in her pockets and a .22-calibre pistol was found underneath the passenger seat she had occupied. She was charged with grand theft and carrying a concealed firearm. Again she failed to appear in court and another bench warrant became outstanding.

A week later, using the new alias of Susan Blahovec, she was ticketed for speeding in Jefferson County, Florida. The citation included a telling observation: ‘Attitude poor. She thinks she is above the law.’

Later that year she was arrested in Dade County for grand larceny and resisting arrest. Eventually the charges were dropped.

At this point in the life of Lee Wuornos, it is perhaps of value to take a brief look back and refresh our minds. Lee has said that she suffered an abusive childhood, contradicting the evidence given in court by her adoptive brother Barry. Indeed, Lee would apportion all of the blame for her failings, and later crimes, on the way she was raised by her grandparents, only then to say, when she was on the verge of insanity, that she came from a clean and decent family.

After leaving home, there is no doubt that Lee was exploited by men; but she also used men, and her own words prove that she had no real concerns or morals about this. However, what does shine through is her need to be wanted and loved.

Throughout the many years during which I have studied the psychopathic personality, I have noted in more cases than I can even recall that these offenders blame their antisocial behaviour for the most part on the alleged treatment meted out to them by others. More often than not these criminals are simply not mentally equipped to shoulder the blame for their crimes themselves. And Lee seems to be cast in the same mould. It was always others who failed her, but there is never a mention from Lee of her perhaps failing herself: it was her genetic mother and father; her adoptive parents; the alleged systematic abuse she suffered at their hands, and at the hands of her peers. She claimed Lewis Fell was at fault, as were several of her on-and-off-again boyfriends who failed to understand her needs, who were unable to make her happy and secure. She blamed Toni for stealing the cleaning equipment and her own belongings – all matters where Lee is the innocent, wide-eyed party. Surely we can see a pattern developing.

We know that by this time in Lee’s turbulent life she had a criminal record that included armed robbery – a trivial amount of money was stolen, but armed robbery is still a serious offence. She was a forger and a hooker who could be an honest, hardworking girl one moment, a spitting demon the next. Lee carried firearms and she was prepared to threaten people with them. She thought she was above the law.

When Lee met 24-year-old Tyria ‘Ty’ Jolene Moore at a Daytona gay bar in 1986, she was lonely, angry and ready for something new.

^{CHAPTER THREE} TYRIA JOLENE MOORE

Wearing the oldest non-American Indian place name in the United States, Florida, or ‘Place of Flowers’, was so dubbed by the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon when he became the first known European to set foot on what would eventually become US soil, on 2 April 1513. By all accounts Juan found much gold in the rivers of the ‘Island of Florida’ and, in doing so, upset a few of the natives. In July 1521 he was mortally wounded by an Indian arrow and returned to Havana, Cuba, where he gracefully expired.

We owe modern Florida, especially its seaside resorts, to one of the greatest go-getters of his age. Carl Graham Fisher was a wealthy magnate who designed and built most of America’s major highways. In the late 1910s, Fisher became seized with the idea that Miami Beach – or Lincoln, as he wished to call it – would make a splendid resort.

The costs and logistics of building a resort in a distant swamp proved formidable, but Fisher persevered and by 1926 had nearly finished his model community, complete with hotels, a casino, golf courses, a yacht basin and a lavish Roman swimming pavilion (which featured, a trifle incongruously, a Dutch windmill).

Then a hurricane blew it all down.

As if this was not enough, when the stock market crashed in 1929, the market for holiday homes disappeared. Fisher would not live to see the success that Miami Beach became.

Covering 55,560 square miles, Florida is now famous for its beaches which stretch along the entire eastern seaboard from Fernandina Beach in the north to Miami in the south. The Sunshine State has the air of being one large, glitzy holiday resort, with glamorous hotels lining its long coastline. But behind the style lies a seamier side. It is this same coast that has brought drug smugglers to the state. It is a favourite retirement area – its balmy climate appeals to the elderly – but it also attracts a large vagrant population who find the weather suits their pockets: sleeping outdoors is free. Florida is not only a tourist state, but also home to a large transient population. These wanderers pick up seasonal work on fruit farms where they are badly paid, or they fall in with the local drug trade. Many of them are women, so Lee, often dressed in black leather, was not conspicuous as a lone female hitching on her own.

Getting to Daytona Beach was easy for Lee. She had run away from home and run away from her marriage. She had crossed state line after state line with the law on her tail, hitched south on Interstate 95 and found what she thought was paradise: sunshine, jobs and cheap living.

According to those who knew Lee and middle-class, respectable Tyria, it had been love at first sight in June of 1986 when the two met at the now-defunct Zodiac Bar in South Daytona. Lee was still on the run after passing forged cheques; it is reported that Tyria had received an insurance payout resulting from a car accident and was well away from her home town of Cadiz, Ohio. She was working as a laundry maid at the El Caribe Motel at 2125 Atlantic Avenue and living on Halifax Drive with her friend, Cammie Greene, who had taken her in after she was evicted from her apartment.

Mr and Mrs Greene were good people. They were law-abiding, Sunday-barbeque folk who always went out of their way to help their neighbours, baked cakes and were well liked. ‘Tyria and we were good friends,’ Mrs Greene told reporters, ‘at least until we met Aileen. My husband and I finally asked them to leave because we didn’t want their lifestyle in our house.’

Lee had not only told Tyria that she had a steam-cleaning business, but also had told the same untruth to the Greenes. She would go off to ‘work’ carrying a briefcase. One day, Lee arrived home with a black eye, claiming she had been raped by a stranger for six hours. This made Cammie Greene suspicious. While the girls were out, she opened the briefcase and discovered it was full of condoms and men’s business cards. She tried to warn Tyria but the truth was Tyria already knew that Lee was a hooker, and she found it exciting.

On the day she left, and as repayment for the Greenes’ hospitality, Lee stole Cammie’s identification, including her driver’s licence: Cammie was about to become one of the aliases used by the emerging monster.

To keep Tyria’s love and companionship, Lee ploughed more and more hours into prostitution. She invested time in Tyria who was a born-again Baptist with close ties to the Calvary Baptist Church where she had been recently baptised. Tyria had attended Bible-study lessons and sometimes babysat for the Reverend David Laughner who had become her friend as well as her minister. Tyria met with limited success in sharing her religious beliefs with Lee who knew the Bible and could recite scripture, but whose actions were so often in conflict with Tyria’s more traditional background, even more so with the Bible itself.

Tyria became born-again in 1984, just two years before the two women met, but this lady from a God-fearing family had her own conflicts with scripture. She was now living in a lesbian relationship.

For a while, Lee and Tyria lived together at the El Caribe Motel. But money was scarce, and in the spring of 1987 Tyria approached a friend she had known from church and asked if she could rent a room on the understanding that Lee and Tyria slept in separate beds. The scriptures, the woman said sternly, explicitly forbade homosexual/lesbian relationships. ‘The Lord,’ she recited, ‘wants you to be with a man. That’s why they’re here.’

Lee had had her fill of Bible-thumping and of men. She flipped. ‘Don’t try to force me to be with a man,’ she hissed. ‘I was married to a man and he beat me! I can’t even talk about my father! That’s why I am this way – because of men!’ This outburst was something of a reversal of the truth. Lee had only been married once, to the luckless Fell, and she had beaten him, not vice versa.

Regretfully, the friend asked the two to leave her home at once. She liked Tyria, whom she recalled as being ‘all sweet, all smiles, real soft’, and wished she could help her. ‘I’m not holding Lee responsible for what happened to her,’ she confided to Tyria before they parted company, adding in a hushed tone, ‘but I think you should tell her to go her own way.’

For a while life was great. Tyria loved Lee and stayed close to her. Lee called Tyria her ‘wife’. Uncannily Tyria, with her strawberry-red hair, freckled face and stocky build, eerily resembled Leo Pittman, the father Lee never met. Tyria claims she quit her job as a motel maid for a while, which meant that Lee supported her with earnings from prostitution.

At first, this departure from regular employment was no major financial setback because Tyria only earned $150 a week while Lee could, if she worked hard enough, earn that much in a day. In due course, though, their ardour cooled and money began to run short. Still Tyria stayed with Lee, following her like a puppy from cheap motel to cheap motel, with stints in old barns, or in the woods, in between.

In March 1987, Tyria and Lee bought an old Corsair trailer. How they funded this purchase is a mystery: Lee said she financed it, but she earned a pittance from prostitution so Tyria’s account seems to be the honest one where she claims she borrowed the money from a friend. Their first and only stop in the trailer was the east-coast Ocean Village Camper Resort in Ormond-by-the-Sea, but once again their stay was short-lived. They had a constant stream of hippies and down-and-outs calling upon them, and they littered their surroundings with junk. Wearing little more than underwear on occasions, and exploiting their toughness, the two women became the talk of the park.

Billy and Cindy Copeland rented the space for the women’s trailer and lived next to them. Billy later somewhat dramatically said, ‘Lee had some cruel eyes – death-row eyes, I call them. I don’t know what that means – that’s just the way they make you feel. I know that girl could kill you in a heartbeat, but I always liked her.’

Things came to a head at the Ocean Village Camper Resort during the early hours of one morning when a volley of shots echoed around the site and the neighbours were subjected to very loud country-rock music emanating from Lee and Tyria’s trailer. They were ordered to leave immediately.

They returned to Daytona where, on Friday, 18 December 1987, a highway-patrol officer cited Lee, who was using the alias Susan Blahovec, for walking on the interstate and possessing a suspended driving licence. The citation noted ‘Attitude poor’, and ‘Susan’ proved it over the next few months by sending threatening letters to the circuit-court clerk on 11 January and 9 February 1988. As for what happened to the trailer, no one seems to know.

On the occasions when Lee could not hitch a ride, she would catch a bus. The anger of this woman was apparently well known among bus drivers who picked her up. Terry Adams, operations supervisor of Voltran, the Volusia Country Transit company, was ‘swamped’ with reports from his drivers that Lee was ‘nasty mostly and threatening them with bodily harm, cursing at them because of certain situations’.

On Saturday, 12 March 1988, using the alias of Cammie Marsh Greene, she accused Daytona bus driver Richard Loomis of assault, claiming that he had pushed her off a bus following an argument. Tyria Moore was listed as a witness to the incident which concerned the confrontation with the black bus driver, who said, ‘She started screaming and hollering, “I’m not going to tell you where I am going or my name or where I live or anything.” If she had her way, she would sit down and just ignore everybody. If for whatever reason she got on and started, which was frequent, it would be like she was trying to find a way to argue with you… she always mentioned men. I don’t know of a woman driver in the place that ever had trouble with her.’

Richard Loomis recalled that his bus picked Lee and Tyria up near I-4 and 92 and he commented to Tyria that she was ‘looking good’. ‘Well, Aileen didn’t care for this,’ Loomis told the court at Lee’s trial. ‘She punched me right in the mouth, and I knocked her through the door, I think.’

Driver Metcalf was another victim of Lee’s abusive behaviour. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘when she was at the bus stop, say when you pull up and the buses have kneelers on them. And she would say, “Kneel the fucking bus, you asshole” or “You nigger, you cocksucker”… She was just mean as a rattlesnake.’

On Saturday, 23 July 1988, Daytona landlord Alzada Sherman accused Tyria Moore and ‘Susan Blahovec’ of vandalising their apartment, ripping out carpets and painting over the walls in dark-brown paint without her approval. At this time, Tyria was back working as a maid at the Casa del Mar Motel, 621 South Atlantic Drive, Ormond Beach. Alzada Sherman, Tyria’s friend at the motel, was later questioned by both defence and prosecution counsel about that period. Once again, we can gain a valuable insight into the turbulent domestic affairs of this lesbian couple, and more importantly into the mind of Lee, who was now a troublesome, loud-mouthed, hard-drinking hooker.

‘Now, you indicated before you went on record that Lee and Tyria stayed with you for a month?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘And that is the address you gave at the beginning?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Did you live at the motel that you were working in?’

‘No.’

‘What was the name of the motel?’

‘Casa del Mar.’

‘But they stayed at your apartment?’

‘Yes. I have a two-bedroom apartment.’

‘They shared one of the bedrooms?’

‘One of the bedrooms. It wasn’t supposed to be that way.’

‘How was it supposed to be?’

‘It was told to me that Lee was going away for a year and a half and she wouldn’t be back. And Tyria needed a place to live. I liked Tyria. So I needed a roommate at the time to share the rent. So I offered her the room. To share the rent.’

‘Did she initially move in by herself?’

‘Yes.’

‘How long was it before Lee moved in there?’

‘Well, Ty moved in on the Friday. Lee moved in on the Sunday. She left and I thought she was gone, but she showed up again on the Wednesday.’

‘Was there any conversation between Friday and Sunday about her possibly moving in?’

‘No.’

‘What happened on that Sunday?’

‘I confronted Tyria about it. And she said, let her spend the night and she’ll be gone in the morning, which she was. But then she shows back up Wednesday. It was like every other day she would come back.’

‘And did that routine go on throughout the month?’

‘Yes. And I told them they had to move.’

‘What would be said to you, typically, each time she would come back to spend the night?’

‘She had no place to go.’

‘And did you ever ask them where she was during those days that she wasn’t there?’

‘Yes. Their answer was “working”.’

‘Did she say where she was working?’

‘Lee said she was working in Orlando. She did floors with those big machines.’

‘Pressure-cleaning-type things?’

‘Yes.’

‘So, she would be gone for a day or two and show back up?’

‘Then she showed back up. Sometimes she would come at night in a cab.’

‘During that time frame when Lee would come back in, would she ever have anything with her that she didn’t have when she left?’

‘No. She always took a bag, like a – when you go to the gym, you know, gym bags. That’s the kind of bags she would leave with. And she would come back with the same bag.’

‘While Lee was in your home, how did she act?’

‘Very difficult. When she wasn’t drinking, she was calm. But when she drank, she was loud and obnoxious.’

‘How often would she be drinking?’

‘During the time she stayed there that’s all she did, mostly.’

Alzada told the court that Busch and Budweiser seemed to be Lee’s favourite drinks, and that her drinking sessions were often followed by loud arguments with Tyria behind the closed bedroom door.

‘Can you estimate, when she was there drinking, how much she might drink in an evening or a day?’

‘Normally she would come in with a 12-pack and maybe drink two or three 12-packs in a night and in a day. She is a heavy drinker. They trashed the place.’

Lee often said she liked sex with men, and her sex life with Tyria waned enough for Tyria to complain to her best friend about it. Lee herself said that her ‘greater love’ for Tyria ‘wasn’t sexual’. The real driving force in Lee’s life wasn’t sex at all; it was a search for an emotional bond and love – love that she had never really had from her abandoning mother, her emotionally and physically abusive grandfather or, it seems, from the grandmother who failed to protect her from him, and certainly not from the callous young males who had sex with her while she was an adolescent. She was far more familiar with loss than with love, having lost her brother Keith to cancer, and having had her baby son snatched from her after she gave birth. Lee found the deep emotional bond she desperately craved with Tyria. Her borderline personality disorder carried with it an overwhelming fear of abandonment. She would do anything to keep her, even kill if needs be, and so deep-seated was her love for Tyria, she would even give up her life to protect her in the years to follow.

Lee’s market value as a hooker, never spectacular, fell even further. When Lee hit the road searching for johns, she would pose as a hitchhiker or a disabled motorist at highway on-and-off ramps – she became an ‘exit-to-exit prostitute’. Money was always tight and they were constantly moving from lodgings to lodgings because they failed to pay the rent. Their existence, meagre though it was, became more difficult to maintain. Clearly something had to change, but getting out of Daytona was not easy. There was never enough money to get to Miami, and the two women now realised that jobs were scarcer than they had first thought. They had blown all their money, and their dreams of good times had faded as quickly. Desperation crept in, and temptation was quick to follow. It is a formula that often leads to crime. In November 1988, Lee was causing problems once again. Using the alias Susan Blahovec, she launched a six-day campaign of threatening phone calls against a Zephyrhills supermarket following an altercation over lottery tickets.

Sometime during the Christmas of 1989 and New Year 1990 – the dates and details are sketchy at best – James Dalla Rosa picked up Lee who showed him a photo of two children and said that she was a high-class call girl who lived in a $125,000 home. She pulled from her bag a plastic case with various business cards – formerly the property of Lewis Gratz Fell. ‘These are some of my customers,’ she told James, who felt very uncomfortable with the situation and didn’t feel that everything was as advertised. Lee quoted $100 for sex in a motel, $75 for sex in the woods and $30 for oral in the car – rates that she was to keep until she was arrested. Sensing that the man had money, she said, ‘I prefer to go into the woods,’ Dalla Rosa later testified.

When he spurned her offer, she became agitated, ‘moving jerkily, bouncing in her seat, snatching at her purse’, as the driver described her behaviour. ‘She became angry after I was not receptive to her offer. Her demeanour changed tremendously.’

He dropped her off near an interstate where she slammed the door and stormed off.