Aileen Wuornos: Hitch-Hiker from Hell
Richard Mallory cruised his Cadillac down Interstate 4 through the warm Florida night, on his way to Daytona from Tampa. He was in no real hurry; he felt too apathetic and depressed. His electronics business was going badly, he was heavily in debt, and he had just broken up with his girlfriend. He had been drinking, and was about to light up a 'reefer' of marijuana.
Suddenly, a figure appeared in his headlights, thumbing a lift. Mallory slowed down. He saw that it was a woman of medium build, carelessly dressed in cut-off jeans, T-shirt and baseball cap, and carrying a shoulder bag. Mallory felt the need of company. If it was a woman, so much the better.
Drinking and driving
The woman drawled that if he was on his way to Daytona, that was fine. As they moved off, Mallory asked her if she minded him smoking the reefer. She laughed and told him he could do what he liked. She accepted his offer of a drink of vodka and tonic he always kept in the car. They began to get friendly - and drunk.
With sidelong glances at his passenger, Mallory, who was not unused to paying for sex, weighed her up as a 'hooker' who had hit hard times. She he was not surprised when she asked him if he would like to "have some fun and help her make some money". He said he might be interested. They turned into a stopping area just off US Highway 1 and continued to drink and talk until nearly 5 a.m. Then they drove on towards Daytona, and Mallory asked the woman, who gave her name as 'Lee', if she wanted to make her money now. She said yes, and they swung off Interstate 95 up a track ending in deserted woodland.
Leaving his headlights on and switching on the cab light, Mallory and 'Lee' swung open their doors. Mallory gave her the money she wanted, and she began to strip off her few clothes. When she was naked, she asked him if he wasn't going to do the same. But Mallory had no intention of undressing. Merely unzipping his trousers, he rolled drunkenly on top of the woman, smothering her face in kisses. The woman struggled and pushed him away violently. Even though his alcoholic haze, Mallory could see that a sudden change had come over her. One minute she had been just another good-time girl, hoping to make a fast buck. Now she looked like an avenging fury, her face a distorted mask of hatred. "You son of a bitch," Mallory mumbled a denial and told her to get on and perform the service he had paid her for.
Armed and naked
They began to hurl abuse at each other, 'Lee' repeatedly accusing Mallory of attempted rape. Ignoring her, he rolled on top of her again, this time more forcefully. But 'Lee' succeeded in wriggling away from him and out of the car, taking her shoulder bag. When Mallory looked up, it was to see her standing naked with a small-calibre pistol trained on him.
Mallory sat up behind the steering wheel, asking warily, "What's goin' on?" "Get out the car," 'Lee' ordered. He hesitated, then began to slide over to the passenger seat. When he was in the passenger doorway, she backed away - and squeezed the trigger of the .22 pistol. The gun jumped and there was the crack of the report. Mallory moaned as the hollow point round struck him in the upper left arm and, passing right through it, lodged in his rib cage. Bewildered, he managed to stand up outside the car. 'Lee' backed still further away from him, pulling off two more rounds in quick succession.
The bullets tore into the right and left of Mallory's chest. As he jerked to his right under the impact of the second, 'Lee' frenziedly let off a series of rounds - one of which struck Mallory in the side of the neck above the collarbone. He fell to the ground, dying Both his lungs had collapsed; he wheezed asthmatically in a futile fight for air. Meanwhile his killer Cooley got dressed and chose what she liked among his belongings. After 10 minutes, Mallory's wheezing stopped.
Mallory never knew it, but he was only the first of seven men to fall victim to a psychotic man-hater. All the men would die in similar circumstances: first the fatal pick-up on the road, then the friendliness and the promise of sex. Lastly, the drive to some desolated wayside, and the brutal shooting. It was to be a case that shocked even the crime-weary state of Florida, inured to news of drugs-related murders and gang ‘hits’ in Miami and its environs. For this case involved that rarest of criminals, the female serial killer.
Decomposing body
Mallory’s body was found by two men on a scrapheap in woodland north of Daytona Beach, on 13 December 1989. There was no identification on the corpse, so investigator Larry Horzepa of Volusia County Sheriff’s Major Case Unit, who was to see the murder investigation through to the bitter end, left the body in the hands of a scene-of-crime specialist to try to establish the victim’s name.
Heat and insects had taken their toll on the body, and it was in an advanced state of decomposition. After the pathologist had conducted a full autopsy on the remains, removing the .22 bullets from the torso, the specialist had the hands cut off and floated in saline solution. This measure was necessary before taking the fingerprints, as it tightened up any flaccid skin. The severed hands were inked and rolled, and produced a set of clear prints. These were put through the crime records computer, and the name Richard Mallory came up. He had once been arrested for drunken driving.
On 11 December 1989, two days before Mallory’s body was found, his Cadillac had been retrieved by police from Ormond Beach, also north of Daytona Beach. Now that a homicide investigation had been insinuated, Horzepa and fellow Major Case Unit officers returned to question people in the neighbourhood more closely. One witness reported that the car had not been parked in John Anderson Drive early in the morning of 1 December; he had first seen it there that afternoon. The car had therefore been abandoned in broad daylight, but to that there were no witnesses. And the Cadillac’s interior had been wiped clean of prints.
Turning to Tampa, Mallory’s registered place of work, the Major Case Unit learned from an employee of the victim’s that he had seen him leave for Daytona on the evening of 30 November. Taking forensic estimates, the report on the abandoned car and this new evidence into account, police were able to conclude that Mallory had been killed some time during the small hours of 1 December, probably by someone he had picked up. The only leads they had to work on were numerous scraps of paper found in Mallory’s office. All had women’s names and phone numbers written on them.
But these leads proved fruitless. Horzepa found that Mallory had frequented prostitutes, and was well-known in the area’s topless bars; that he was always scattering money around from a big roll of notes he carried. He might have been killed for his money. But although, in the first half of 1990, the investigator conducted extensive interviews with the most likely suspect at this stage - a prostitute going by the unconvincing name of ‘Chastity’ - he could come up with no solid evidence to link her to the crime. Besides, she had an alibi. And there was another nagging worry at the back of his mind: could the money motive wholly account for the ferocity of the crime?
Roadside shooting
By June 1990, the trail of Richard Mallory’s killer had gone cold. The Major Case Unit did not pick his file up again until 21 September, by which time a series of extraordinary and seemingly unconnected events had taken place outside their jurisdiction in other counties.
On 4 June 1990, the body of a man, naked but for a baseball cap, was found in scrubland 40 miles north of Tampa. The body was badly decomposed. During the autopsy the Citrus County pathologist found that the chest and abdomen were scattered with six small-calibre projectiles: .22 bullets. To aid identification, she took a dental print. The print matched up with the dental records of a Bradenton man who had been missing since 19 May, and whose pick-up truck had been found of Interstate 75, 20 miles south of Gainesville. He was 43-year-old David Spears.
On 6 June, another naked corpse was found, also off Interstate 75 – but this time in Pasco County. Nine .22 calibre bullets were retrieved from the body. Identification however, was more difficult. Summer in Florida is very hot, and the body had been there for some time. So advanced was decomposition that pathologists could determine only that the body was that of a white male between the ages of 27 and 50. To find the victim's identity, a complete facial reconstruction would be required.
Pasco and Citrus Counties did not, it seems, consider at this stage that the killer of the two men might be one and the same person. Indeed, the strands of these separate investigations did not begin to come together until another man went missing in yet another county.
Peter Siems, a 65-year-old Christian missionary from Jupiter in Palm Beach County, had last been seen on 22 June, setting off to see relatives in Arkansas. He never arrived. His Pontiac was found abandoned in Marion County on 4 July, but the forensic evidence collected from it was inconclusive. Blood found on the upholstery of the front seats belonged to the missing man, but a bloody palm print on the car's boot was too smeared to be identifiable. However, there were two reliable witnesses to the dumping of the car.
On the afternoon of 4 July. Mrs Rhonda Bailey had been sitting on the porch of her house near Orange Springs, Marion County, when she heard the screech of tyres. She knew immediately that someone had come off the road – it was a particularly dangerous bend. When she and her husband ran up to the road, they saw two women struggling out of a half-wrecked Pontiac. “These women were screamin',” she told the investigators. “They were both out of the car and the blonde one had blood runnin' down her left arm. She must have been the passenger because she kept cussin' at the brown-haired one, sayin' 'I told you not to go so fast!' She was usin' real foul language.”
The pair of women refused any help from the Baileys and drove away again, abandoning the damaged car further down the road. As they walked away, they again refused the help of a passing motorist. The motorist phoned the local fire chief; with his arrival the blonde passenger worked herself into a state of near hysteria in her insistence that they needed no help. The pair “seemed like they were anxious to get on down the road”, the fire chief reported.
The Baileys and the fire chief were able to give Marion County police detailed descriptions of the women, and these were used by a forensic artist to make up composite sketches. The blonde woman was described as 5 feet 8 inches tall and 130 pounds in weight; she had been wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Her friend was “5 feet 4 to 5 feet 6 inches, very overweight and masculine-looking, with dark red hair.” Both descriptions and composite sketches were passed on to the central Florida Law Enforcement Agency.
Sex and the single driver
The killer (or killers) for whom the officers in the various jurisdictions were searching had, however, scant respect for the niceties of police procedure and the painstaking nature of inter-county link-ups. Did police but know it, every Florida man with a weakness for giving a ride to female hitch-hikers was at risk.
On 4 August, picnickers in the Ocala National Park stumbled across an insect-ridden corpse in the undergrowth. The man's body was more easily identified than many would have been in a comparable condition: he was still wearing his clothes his wife had described when she reported him missing on 30 July. To make sure of his identity, investigators showed her a wedding ring they had found on his finger. Sure enough, it had belonged to her husband, 46-year-old Troy Burress. Burress had been shot in the heart and in the back with a .22 pistol. His truck, found four days previously, had been wiped clean of prints.
Throughout the rest of August there were no more productive leads, a little response to the distribution of the composites. But Florida's separate jurisdictions had last begun comparing their findings and combining their efforts. On 17 September, a meeting was convened between investigators of Marion and Citrus Counties. Now the agenda were the murders not only of David Spears, of the unidentified man found in Pasco County, of (probably) Peter Siems, although his body had not been found, and of Tony Burress. A new name had been added to the list: Dick Humphreys. The body of Humphreys, a 56-year-old retired police chief, had been found on 12 September in scrubland in Marion County – just off Interstate 75. Like the other victims, he had received multiple bullet wounds from a .22 pistol.
Female serial killer
At last Marion and Citrus Counties seemed prepared to accept that, on the evidence as it now stood, there was a female serial killer, or pair of killers, at large. For although with the benefit of hindsight it seems natural to link the women seen in Siems's car with the murders in Marion, Pasco and Citrus Counties, at first the connection was made only tentatively. The blood in the Pontiac may have been Siems's, but his body, and any ballistic evidence it might contain, had not been found. What was more, police had spent possibly too much time frustrated searching for a pattern to the killings where there was little or none. The crimes were opportunistic, random. The only things the victims had in common were that they were middle-aged, had been found by the roadside shot with a .22 pistol, and had had their car stolen.
For investigators, what seemed to have linked the women in Siems's car with the murders was, oddly, more in the nature of a hunch. Psychologists claim that a woman using a gun tents to aim for the torso of her victim rather than the head – the chosen target of most gunmen. And all the victims had been shot repeatedly in the chest and stomach. When Larry Horsepa of Volusia County, on the investigation of Marion County Sheriff's Office, presented the Richard Mallory file to a second meeting of investigators on 21 September, this hunch hardened into a conclusion.
Yet it was not until the discovery of yet another victim that the search for the killer went public. The body of 60-year-old Walter Antonio, riddled with .22 hollow points, was found in Dixie County on 19 November. Like Spears and the Pasco County victim, now identified as Charles Carskaddon, Antonio was all but naked. Evidently he had undressed as a prelude to sex, or had been forced to undress at gunpoint as a form of humiliation.
Massacre of motorists
Fearing a general massacre of unwary motorists, Captain Steve Binegar of Marion County Sheriff's Office made the decision to contact the press with the news that the police were searching for a female serial killer. Possibly she resembled one of the composite sketches drawn up back in July. Binegar proceeded to issue the composite and descriptions to all the main TV stations.
In retrospect it must seem that going to the press earlier would have saved lives, for the investigation showing of the composite sketches soon elicited a response from the public. Three calls to Marion County Sheriff's Office, now the investigation's command post, provided the names Tyria Moor and Susan or 'Lee', Blahovec. One of the callers said the pair were “lesbians, were violent and had a hatred for men”. The woman called Blahovec, it was found, had once been arrested for trespassing.
Then came another twist to the investigation. Police of Port Orange, south of Daytona Beach, reported that they had already begun following the movements of someone who looked like the blonde woman in the composite sketch. She called herself Cammie Marsh Green, and she was often seen in the company of a heavily built woman named Tyria Moore. The pair had been living together at a motel in the area for the past month.
Investigators were dispatched immediately to the motel, taking with them a 'photo parade' of the blondes including Blahovec. The proprietress identified her as one of the women who had stayed in her establishment. The woman had called herself Cammie Marsh Green – 'Lee' for short – and had left the motel on 10 December On the off-chance, the investigators also showed her a photo of Antonio's car, which had been found abandoned in Brevard County on 24 November. The proprietress said she recognized it as a car she had seen 'Lee' drive.
Meanwhile, investigator Horzepa and his Volusia County colleagues were running checks on the pawn shops in the Daytona Beach area. Most of the victims, so relatives reported, and had belongings stolen; it was possible some of these had been pawned by the killer. And now police had a name to work with.
Tell-tale toolbox
Within an hour, Investigator Horzepa had made a breakthrough. Cammie Marsh Green had pawned a Minolta camera in a shop on Second Avenue on 6 December, while in Ormond Beach she had pawned a box of tools. The camera had belonged to Richard Mallory, the toolbox to David Spears. Even better, on the Second Avenue pawn ticket there was a clear thumbprint.
The thumbprint was rushed through a computer check. It matched the prints of one Lori Grody, wanted since 1986 on a concealed weapons charge. She had been stopped in a stolen car north of Daytona; underneath the front seat had been found a loaded pistol – of .22 calibre. Not surprisingly, she had not turned up in court. The photograph of Grody was compared to that of Susan Blahovec, alias Cammie Marsh Green: they were one and the same person. After another print search using the resources of the National Crime Information Centre, investigators came up with yet another name for Grody/Blahovec/Green: Aileen Wuornos. This at least appeared to be the real name of the person they were looking for.
Born in Rochester, Michigan, on 29 February 1956, Wuornos had apparently never been out of trouble. She had committed offenses of car theft, attempted forgery, making threatening phone calls, criminal mischief and assault. But the one thing most of her crimes had in common was violence, or the threat of violence. In the more recent records, the name of another woman persistently cropped up – Tyria Moore.
Horzepa Binegar and the 28 other officers now working on the case agreed on one thing: the quicker Wuornos and her partner were behind bars, the better. What they needed right now, with such evidence as they had amassed, was a lucky break. Wuornos could not be unaware of the media coverage of her case. Hopefully she was still in Florida, too complacent to believe she could ever be caught, or, if caught, that police would ever pin her to a murder charge. For the evidence of the thumbprint on the pawn ticket might indeed too flimsy to stand up in court – and Wuornos could not be relied upon to confess. To make a watertight case, police knew they must attempt to catch her in possession of the murder weapon.
Blonde stranger
On 8 January 1991, two undercover officers were patrolling the Port Orange area when they caught sight of a blonde standing in the doorway of a bar. She matched the description of Aileen Wuornos. Posing as drug dealers, the officers decided to go into the bar casually and buy her a drink. 'Lee', as she said she liked to be known, was not in the least suspicious. She and the officers began talking and drinking. But the next moment, the Wuornos operation seemed bound for disaster.
Two uniformed officers, who were not part of the Wuornos team and did not know the undercover men, entered the bar and, also recognising Wuornos from issued photographs, took her out into the car park to call in for instructions. But this was the very worst moment for an arrest. Some hurried phone calls were made by the undercover men to their controller. The uniformed officers, in turn, were radioed to release their suspect.
Getaway attempt
Wuornos went back into the bar and was greeted by the undercover men. She seemed none the worse for the 'rousting' and gave vent to a torrent of abuse against the police. She grabbed a suitcase she was carrying round with her and staggered out of the bar. A minute later the undercover men ran for their cars and began to follow her down the road at a safe distance. Her walk ended at another bar, named appropriately, as it turned out, 'The Last Resort'.
On the evening of 8 January the undercover men went to the bar and tried to get Wuornos to talk about herself and about her gun – but with no success. She was too drunk to string a sentence together. After the undercover men left, since she appeared to be homeless, the bar's proprietor allowed her to stay overnight. She could not know that her every move was being monitored by a score of policemen outside the bar.
The next morning it seemed Wuornos was settling in at the bar for at least another night. That afternoon, Investigator Horzepa and his colleagues lost patience: despite the absence of the gun, they could not allow Wuornos, very probably a psychopathic killer, to slip through their fingers. They went to the bar in a heavily armed group and arrested her on the concealed weapons charge, outstanding since 1986.
Although the circumstances of the arrest were in some respects unsatisfactory, with Wuornos off the streets officers were free to concentrate on tracking her partner, Tyria Moore. From descriptions of the pair's behaviour given by the motel owner in Port Orange, police had come to the conclusion that Moore formed the submissive side of the relationship. If she could be made to talk, a crushing blow would have been dealt to Wuornos's defence.
Lover betrayed
Twenty-four hours after her lover's arrest, Moore was located in Pennsylvania. To the surprise of the Florida officers who went to interview her, she began to talk immediately, emphasising that she had taken no part in 'Lee’s' crimes. Of the death of Richard Mallory, Moore said she and Wuornos were “were sittin” around talking and she just came right out of the blue and said she had somethin' to tell me, and she told me she had shot and killed a man that day.” Why, Moore asked, did she not go straight to the authorities? “I was just scared, that's all,” the dumpy redhead replied. “She always said she'd never hurt me, but then you can't believe her, so I don't know what she would've done ...” Moore agreed to return to Florida with the officers and assist them further in their investigations. In return, no charges would be pressed against her.
By 'assist them further in their investigations', detectives meant 'help us make Wuornos confess'. For although the material evidence against the killer was mounting, the process of gathering an irrefutable weight of it was painstaking and might take months. And they still did not have the murder weapon. They decided to put Moore in a motel and tap her phone, hoping that Wuornos would drop her guard during the phone conversations and say something that would incriminate her.
For the next three days’ police eavesdropped on their phone calls. But Wuornos's suspicions had been aroused by the sudden return of her lover, and by the ease with which she could make calls. She scrupulously avoided the subject of the murders. However, the phone-tapping exercises were far from futile. Police noticed that a curious change seemed to come over Wuornos. Her morale seemed to weaken with every call made to the woman she loved, especially when Moore told her that she would soon join her in prison unless she – Wuornos – confessed. In one of the last phone calls, Wuornos said that she realised at least that she would have “to die” for “something like this”.
Final confession
On 17 January1991, shortly after her last call to Moore's hotel, Aileen Wuornos confessed to the murders before Investigator Larry Horzepa and a video camera. The confessions were highly descriptive but often confused, and she admitted at fist to killing only six men. In each case she claimed that the men had intended to rape her – that was why she killed them. But to the question, why did she not simply threaten them with the gun, and leave it at that, her reply was: “Once I got my gun, I was like, hey man, I've gotta shoot you 'cause I think you're gonna kill me. See?” Any why not just shoot them once? “I was afraid,” she said, “that if I shot 'em one time and they survived, my face and all that description of me would be all over the place.” She had stolen their belongings, she added, “out of pure hatred”.
The defence counsel for Aileen Wuornos, who was charged with the first degree murder of Richard Mallory, faced an almost impossible task when her case finally came to trial in January 1992. On top of her confessions and Tyria Moore's testimony, police had dredged up a small mountain of material evidence against her. This now included the gun, recovered from a brackish inlet in the Daytona area, and matched by ballistics experts with the bullets found in the victims' bodies.
To save Wuornos from the electric chair, Florida's statutory punishment for premeditated murder, the defence concentrated on outlining to the jury her appalling early life and the brutalizing effect that it must have had on Wuornos. But the minds of the jury were fixed on the cold-bloodedness of Mallory's killings, not on the tragic life of the killer. On 27 January 1992 they found Wuornos guilty as charged. The next day, Judge Blount condemned her to the electric chair.
End
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