Monster: Inside the Mind of Aileen Wuornos

^{CHAPTER SEVENTEEN} DAMAGED BEYOND REPAIR

If there is one particular slice of the Wuornos story which is of value to society, it is her childhood. Lee’s dysfunctional formative years are typical of most, if not all, serial killers’ early days.

The structure and quality of family interaction is an important factor in a child’s development, especially in the way he or she perceives family members. Their interaction with the child, and with each other, is crucial. The FBI states: ‘For children growing up, the quality of their attachments to parents and to other members of the family is most important as to how these children, as adults, relate to and value other members of society. Essentially, these early life attachments (sometimes called bonding) translate into a map of how a child will perceive situations outside the family.’

Psychotherapist, neuropsychologist and neuroscientist Dr R. Joseph is highly recognised as a creative, insightful and profound theorist and scientist. He is one of a handful of experts on both the brain and the mind. In his The Right Brain and the Unconscious, he says that the inner core of a person, their essential character, remains largely the same. Yet the effects of a poor upbringing make an indelible mark on the young character: ‘What it was becomes the foundation for what it will be… Just as the living tree retains its early core, within the core of each of us is the Child that we once were.’

Through considerable research, the FBI has shown that over 70 per cent of serial killers suffer extreme psychological and physical abuse as children. In my book Talking with Serial Killers, we see this played out again and again: most have lost a parent, or both parents, during their early days. Many are unwanted kids and are adopted, as were Kenneth Bianchi and Ted Bundy. Interestingly, in the context of Lee, all three lost their natural fathers around the time of birth. I could cite dozens more.

These youngsters may suffer the social stigma of being labelled ‘bastards’. The more devastating effect of not being able to bond with their natural parents will wreak havoc with that all-important part of their lives as they struggle to develop into mentally healthy human beings; they will be seriously handicapped in not being able to match, on any level, the happiness and family security enjoyed by their peers.

Many, such as serial murderers Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole, were sexually abused. Others, like Michael Ross, were beaten by their parents. Some engage in early drinking sessions, find comfort in drug ingestion and are troublesome, disruptive pupils at school. A few become juvenile sadists. Arthur Shawcross, who also suffered from parental upheaval, held a grim fascination for torturing and killing small animals and birds. Most come to the attention of the welfare authorities at some time, and most parents of these children are advised to seek counselling for their offspring. Tragically, they rarely do.

More often than not, many of these youngsters grow up to harbour deep-seated grudges against either a male or a female in particular. ‘The trauma they suffer festers away and becomes a fantasy for getting revenge,’ says Ian Stephen, a forensic psychologist who works with the police and the prison service in Strathclyde. It could be the father or the mother, an aunt or an uncle, and they may well mirror this hatred in later life, their prey becoming the repository for their anger and their earlier mental and physical traumas. Simply put, it’s payback time.

Society ignores these issues at its great peril, for in doing so we are breeding evil. But, many will say, there are lots of kids out there who suffer abuse. They don’t all turn into serial killers, do they? That, I would agree, is a clear and concise observation. However, one only has to look at the escalating rates of serious juvenile crime, often linked to heavy drinking in today’s society, to realise that parents and society are failing. Our prisons are full of young criminals. Many will graduate into very serious crime – and the murder rates are rocketing.

However, one could never find a more apt example of this phenomenon than by looking at Aileen Wuornos – an innocent child who turned into a monster. In a nutshell, she copped the lot.

There are always two sides to a story. Lee has given her own account, one which was strongly contested by her adoptive brother. But, for all of Lee’s faults, we are unable to say that she was born evil, and she most certainly did not enter this world with a genetic flaw, or biochemical imbalance, although on her natural father’s side there was certainly bad blood.

The young Diane Wuornos was living a troubled life. She had gone with Leo against the express wishes of her parents. Lauri Wuornos, with good reason, detested him and had banned him from the house. With one unwanted child in Keith, Diane gave birth to another unwanted child with Aileen.

A naïve, well-intentioned girl, abandoned by a wayward husband who was a sexual pervert, Diane did all she could for her two children with the meagre tools at her disposal, but Troy, the twelfth largest city in Michigan, had no time for the likes of Diane and her kids. A friend of Lee’s, Michelle Shovan, would later say, ‘Troy was a community out of control, unsupervised by any social-welfare agencies, and there was no school liaison between schools, parents, the police and welfare officers. Nothing seems to have changed much since.’

In this uncaring community, Diane was unable to find work or get welfare. Faced with these circumstances, she felt she had only one option: to abandon her children and run away. During this formative period, Lee should have seen and felt her mother’s emotions. The negative mirroring had started.

Diane knew that her parents, especially her disciplinarian father, would never agree to take on Keith and Lee, so she asked them to babysit and never returned. It was emotional blackmail if you will, for who else would take on the kiddies other than their grandparents? They did the honourable thing in adopting them. Lauri held down a secure job with a stable income; but two additional children was undoubtedly a financial strain on the family budget.

By the age of six, it was becoming apparent to the Wuornoses that Lee was a problem child. When she caused a fire that nearly burned the house down, Lauri reacted in the only way he knew how: he gave the child a thrashing, and thereafter the beatings never stopped.

Lee would have been confused and disappointed. Her innermost thoughts would have told her that the mother she had known, the person who had held and loved her for four years, had suddenly vanished. The home that she had known for four years had gone. She had been thrust into a new, unfriendly, strange environment. There were new faces staring down at her. She was no longer the centre of attention, and Lee would be subconsciously vying for the attention she craved when it was being shared amongst three other young people.

Lee would not, or could not, have understood why this had happened to her. She was far too young to comprehend such matters. However, deep in her psyche, there was a void. Most psychiatrists will agree that to rip a child away from its mother after a bonding period of four years can cause levels of subconscious mental trauma we cannot even begin to calculate. To start with, this form of early upheaval breeds uncertainty and insecurity. When things go wrong, children often withdraw into a world of their own. They suffer from learning disabilities because they cannot focus on the tasks at hand, their thoughts being elsewhere. They find it difficult to mix freely with their own peer group, and appear as loners. In this isolated world their thoughts turn inward; they start to brood.

So many serial killers have suffered the same mental trauma as youngsters, and I cite Kenneth Bianchi as but one example. Born illegitimate, adopted by a neurotic woman whose husband was an inveterate gambler – his debtors were forever chasing him for money and threatening his life – the young Ken went through at least five schools, six different addresses and was of such concern to his teachers that they recommended him for psychiatric help on no fewer than four occasions. Frances, his adoptive mother, explained to me that Kenneth became a problem child, yet she absolutely failed to accept responsibility for her own shortcomings in not taking the advice offered by her young son’s tutors.

Aileen Wuornos was definitely suffering from serious psychological problems at a very early age. As the FBI will confirm, at least 70 per cent of serial killers have faced similar childhood traumas. Many of these people found an interest in playing with fire. Adding up all of Lee’s problems to date, she was on the road to disaster.

For those readers who have read my book Talking with Serial Killers, you will recall that the sexual sadist Michael Bruce Ross suffered from an identical form of physical and emotional abuse. Michael, who is now on Death Row in Connecticut, is the state’s only ever convicted serial murderer. As a kid, he was ordered by his brutal father to choose the tree limb he would be beaten with from the yard woodpile. He soon learned that the thicker the branch, the less painful it was. We see exactly the same thing with Lee, who was similarly forced to cut willow branches. Do we not find this young girl being laid naked over a table and whipped with a leather belt which she had to clean after its use? That child, already a loner at school and amongst her friends in the neighbourhood, would arrive home a little late in the sure-fire knowledge that a sick punishment awaited her at the hand of a brutal man.

We also know that Lee was having full sex from around the age of nine. We cannot even start to think that she was some kind of ‘slut’ at that age, as so many observers feel content to believe. She would watch all the other boys and girls engaging in healthy childhood relationships while she was ignored. Again, lost in a world of her own, any attention from older boys was welcome, even if it was for all the wrong reasons. Being bribed with cigarettes – a smoke in exchange for sex – may have partially satisfied the young Lee’s short-term needs for friendship and attention, but all of this was being built on shifting sands. Once the boys, including her own brother Keith, had had their fill, they would leave her alone once again. Her psychological problems became further enhanced by the fact that she was known as a slut, with the unwanted sobriquets of the Cigarette Pig and the Cigarette Bandit, all of which further alienated her from the few companions she had. In reality, Lee had already entered the seedy world of prostitution, being paid for sex in kind. Lauri Wuornos had much to answer for.

The study of many serial killers shows that, apart from being loners and having been physically and psychologically abused as children, they move into the early teens holding a deep-seated grudge against those who have hurt them the most.

Of some interest is the fact that these people, with a few exceptions, rarely hurt the abuser; instead they transfer and vent their frustrations and anger on others cast from a similar mould. Ted Bundy, for example, who never knew his natural father, had a disruptive childhood, and carried with him to the end of his days the social stigma of being illegitimate. As a young man, he was withdrawn and a loner, unable to find meaningful work or true love. When he found this love, the woman soon abandoned him and, although he didn’t lay a finger on her, he went on to slaughter up to 50 other women as punishment. This transference of frustration and hatred can be seen in many cases: Dennis Nilsen, Kenneth Bianchi, Henry Lee Lucas, Ottis Toole and Harvey Carignan are a few. Aileen Wuornos was to be no exception.

Aged 11, Lee’s world completely collapsed when Lauri Wuornos told her in the heat of the moment that he and Britta were not her real parents, and they wanted rid of her for good. Her heart must have been shattered. This news turned her mind completely. She hated her grandfather with a passion that knew no bounds.

We know that Lee’s teachers noted that something was seriously amiss with her for some time. Tutors of the young are, or at least should be, trained to flag up a child who has learning problems or poorly developing social skills. In Lee’s case, the school recommended counselling for the 14-year-old girl, but the Wuornoses were not interested. Had the young Lee received counselling at this stage in her life, had the Wuornoses paid heed to their adopted daughter’s tutors, there might have been a different outcome. But no help was forthcoming; instead, another shockwave hit home hard.

Lee learned, for the first time, the true identity of her natural father. He had been a sex pervert and rapist. Lauri Wuornos gloated when he told her that Leo Pittman had just hanged himself while serving a life sentence in a maximum-security mental institution.

Lee flipped, and sought the friendship of Mr Portlock, a man who lived in her neighbourhood. Now totally disowned by her adoptive parents, she gave birth in a home for single mothers. On her release, Lauri told her that if she came back he would kill her. The baby was adopted and the wheel that had become Lee’s first 15 years on this planet had turned a full circle. Then Britta died and Lauri died of carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage. Lee says she found the body.

Out of the 13 ‘family-background characteristics’ the FBI have found adversely affect a child’s later behaviour, among their study group of serial killers, Aileen experienced 11 of them: alcohol abuse, drug abuse, psychiatric history, criminal history, sexual problems, physical abuse, psychological abuse, dominant father figure, negative relationship with her male caretaker figures, negative relationships with both her natural mother and her adoptive mother, and she had been treated unfairly. A staggering 85 per cent. By FBI calculations, that would have placed her at the top of their high-risk register. When one considers that even Henry Lee Lucas, one of the most notorious serial murderers in criminal history, had a score of 77 per cent, with Ted Bundy further down the high-risk register at a mere 38 per cent, Lee was not off to a good start.

Towards the end of her days, and teetering on the black abyss of insanity, Lee would change her story, saying that she had come from a ‘clean and decent family’; her adoptive brother would have people believe that that is correct. However, there are too many witnesses who testified to the contrary, so there is no doubt that during her early years she was damaged beyond repair.

Lee’s early years are documented within these pages. However, all of her accounts are embroidered versions of her life mixed with impenetrable fantasies. To say that she was a pathological liar right to the very end would be an understatement. I will be emphatic in saying that getting to the truth is, and always was, an impossible task, even for Lee herself. She, like scores of other murderers, has cried wolf and lied so many times, we would not recognise the truth if it stared us straight in the face. Indeed, even Lee, herself a sociopath, would no longer know the truth if she were alive today. Such is the nature of a psychopathic personality.

We must ask ourselves why Lee killed for the first time. She had been with scores of men before she shot Richard Mallory. The truth of the matter – again whitewashed and glossed over by most writers, the media, the trial judge, the prosecutor, police and for the convenience of justice – is that Mr Mallory was an extremely dangerous and perverted individual indeed. One would have to stretch coincidence a very long way in thinking that this played no part in him becoming her first victim. Lee had taken many rides during the day prior to meeting Mallory. She had all the money she needed in her purse to pay the deposit on a new apartment for her and Tyria. The simple truth is that Mallory met his nemesis.

Billy Nolas, Lee’s attorney at her trial, tried to prepare the jury for the mitigating factors which the defence team planned to present, and he made a telling point. ‘You have observed Lee’s behaviour,’ he said. ‘Why is Lee the way she is… she did not simply fall out of the sky. There are things that she was born with and things that happened to her along the way… a world which has made her what she is.’

Three other defence psychologists claimed, using phrases that would enliven any Stephen King novel, that the world of Lee Wuornos is a ‘chilling place, a malevolent place, an angry, out-to-get-her place, a threatening place full of perceived terrors’. She perceived the world as having evil spirits, ghosts, things that are beyond our control. She distanced people by seeing them as angels or demons. And she functioned, they all agreed, on the level of a very small child.

Dr Elizabeth McMahon had performed the necessary neurological, psychological and intelligence tests on Lee. She examined her for a total of 22 hours. Dr McMahon testified that the structure of Lee’s brain was normal, ‘but it does not function properly, like sand in a gas tank… the condition is chronic, static, doesn’t change and interacts with other problems.’

Lee was a borderline personality, which is defined by eight classic symptoms. Dr McMahon claimed that Lee evidenced them all: a pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relations; impulsiveness; unstable moods; inappropriate, intense anger; recurrent suicidal threats; marked and present identity disturbance; feelings of emptiness or boredom; frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.

‘This, combined with the dysfunctional background, produced an unhappy, discontented woman who cannot cope with the world. Lee is always in a state of living on the edge. There is a sense of danger, striving just to get her physical needs met,’ said Dr McMahon. ‘She has some sense that other people are doing it OK, but she’s not… Miss Wuornos is probably one of the most primitive people I’ve seen out of the institution. By that I mean that she functions at the level of a very basic… a small child. Always making an attempt at some sense of security, some sense of contentment.’

When cross-examined, however, Dr McMahon was forced to agree that Lee was sane, and that she knew the difference between right and wrong. Any chance of rehabilitation was remote, if not impossible.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘monster’ as ‘an inhumanely cruel or wicked person’. Aileen Wuornos certainly had a dysfunctional start in life, and we cannot blame her for that. However, she became hooked on murder for murder’s sake. Aileen Wuornos chose her own fate. She knew that if she committed aggravated murder in Florida she could face the ultimate penalty. She decided to kill not once, not twice, but many times, and for this we are obliged to label her a monster.

Most of us have a conscience. Aileen Wuornos had a black void.