Talking with Serial Killers

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  Stripped naked and forced to bend 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 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.

  During her ninth year, a chemical explosion, which Lee and a friend accidentally set off, resulted in her sustaining severe burns on the 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. Today, faint scars on her forehead and her arms still bear grim testimony to the accident.

  Around the age of 11, Lee learned that her parents were indeed her grandparents. She was already incorrigible, with a fearsome and socially unacceptable temper. Her volcanic explosions, which were unpredictable and seemingly unprovoked, inevitably drove a further wedge between her and her ‘parents’.

  When she was 14, she became pregnant and was sent to an unmarried mothers’ home to await the birth of her child. The staff found her hostile, unco-operative and unable to get along with her peers. She gave birth to a baby boy, who was put up for adoption in January 1971.

  In July of the same year, Britta Wuornos died. On hearing this news, Diane Wuornos invited Aileen and Keith to stay with her in Texas, but they declined. Lee then dropped out of school, left home, and took up hitch-hiking and prostitution.

  * * *

  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. He had picked up Lee when she was hitch-hiking. They married in Kingsley, Georgia, less than two months after the death of her grandfather, Laurie, who had committed suicide. Aged 65, he was younger than Lee’s new husband.

  Most of those who knew Lee viewed her marriage cynically, finding it impossible to judge it as anything other than a purely mercenary move. The unwitting Lewis Fell had no idea what he was letting himself in for, although some took the view that it was a mutually acceptable relationship. For his part, Fell had a pretty young woman on his arm, and Lee enjoyed the fruits of what his money could buy.

  Early in July, she and Lewis rolled into Michigan in a brand-new, cream-coloured Cadillac and checked into a motel. Lee had sent a few friends newspaper clippings of their wedding announcement from the society pages of the Daytona Press, complete with a photograph of a man who looked old enough to be her grandfather, describing Fell as the president of a yacht club, with a private income derived from railroad stocks and shares.

  On 13 July, Lee went out on the town and ended up at Bernie’s Club in Mancelona where she flaunted her body and started to hustle at the pool table. Some time after midnight, the barman and manager, Danny Moore, decided he had seen enough of her. She was drunk, rowdy, shouting obscenities, uttering threats to other patrons, and generally being objectionable. He casually walked over to the pool table 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 ball at his head. It missed him only by inches, but had been hurled with such force that the missile became lodged in the wall.

  When 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 for drinking alcohol in a car, unlawful use of a driver’s licence, and for not having a Michigan driver’s licence. She was bailed when a friend turned up with her purse containing $1,450. Three days later, her brother, Keith, aged 21, died of throat cancer.

  As might be expected, the marriage between Lee and Fell was short-lived. From the outset, she had been torn between her desire to get drunk and hang out in bars and the boredom of sitting around with her older husband in his plush, beachside condominium. When he refused to give her more money, she beat him up. He obtained a restraining order and an annulment of the marriage. He claimed she had squandered his money and beaten him with a walking cane.

  The divorce decree stated: ‘Respondent has a violent and ungovernable temper and has threatened to do bodily harm to the Petitioner and from her past actions will injure Petitioner and his property … unless the court enjoins and restrains said Respondent from assaulting … or interfering with Petitioner or his property.’

  Lee’s marriage officially ended on 19 July, with a divorce issued at the Volusia County courthouse in Florida. She pawned the expensive diamond engagement ring. Two days later, Keith was cremated at the same funeral home as Britta and Laurie Wuornos. Lee arrived late for the service.

  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 and who had not long joined the Army.

  On 4 August, Aileen pleaded guilty to the assault and battery charge, paying a fine and costs of $105. Then Keith’s army life insurance paid up and, as next of kin, she 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. The money was gone within three months.

  Adrift in the world once again, she embarked on a series of failed relationships and small-time forgery, theft and a rather ridiculous armed robbery that put her in prison for a spell. From time to time she turned tricks, but even as a prostitute working exit-to-exit on the interstate highway, she was not exactly sought-after. When she met 24-year-old Tyria ‘Ty’ Jolene Moore at a Daytona gay bar in 1986, Lee was lonely and angry. She was ready for something new.

  * * *

  Getting to Daytona Beach was easy for Aileen Wuornos. She had run away from home, and run away from her marriage. She had crossed State line after State line, hitched south on Interstate 95, and found what she thought was paradise. There was sunshine, jobs and cheap living. You could even drive your car on the firm white beach at Daytona. Sea, sex, prosperity and exhaust fumes. An American illusion served up on a beach so exploited it was more like a sandy parking lot.

  For a while, it was great. Ty loved Lee and stayed close to her. She even quit her job as a motel maid for a while and allowed her girlfriend to support her with earnings from prostitution. In due course, perhaps predictably, their ardour cooled and money began to run short. Yet, still Ty stayed with Lee, following her like a puppy, from cheap motel to cheap motel, with stints in old barns in between.

  Lee’s market value as a hooker, never spectacular, fell even further. 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 of their money, and their dreams of good times had faded as quickly. Desperation crept in, and temptation was quick to follow. It was a formula that often leads to crime and, in Lee’s case, it meant big-time crime.

  People get murdered in Daytona, as in any city, for the usual reasons – money, revenge, sex and business – but Daytona Beach seems to provoke a unique end-of-the-line dementia. Looking at what the city has to offer, who is buying and what is the main product, it is always sex. The gritty beach town lies about 60 miles east of Orlando. A good bet for a cheap, working man’s vacation. Redneck tourists from all over the south-east knew this, and so did 51-year-old Richard Mallory, from Clearwater, Florida, who disappeared on Thursday, 30 November 1989.

  Richard Mallory was a private man, not very communicative, a mystery even to those who should have known him best. He lived alone in a
multi-family apartment complex called ‘The Oaks’. Few people came to know him on account of his erratic lifestyle and, at his television and video repair shop, Mallory Electronics, in the strip shopping mall in Palm Harbour, his absences were frequent and unexplained.

  He was a good-looking man with a full head of dark hair combed back from a high forehead. Standing at just under 6ft tall, the neatly moustachioed Mallory surveyed the world through hazel eyes, behind wire-rimmed glasses. He cut a trim figure, tipping the scales at just less than 170 pounds, and he thought of himself as 51 years young.

  A long-time divorcee, and recently separated from a girlfriend called Jackie Davis, he had always been drawn to the opposite sex. He loved to party in the carnal sense, a regular visitor to the kinds of establishment dedicated to catering to pleasures of the flesh. He liked the way women looked, the way they smelled and moved. He liked the way he felt when he was with them – powerful, controlling, sensuous. He was a sufficiently regular customer at the topless bars in the Tampa and Clearwater area that the strippers, go-go dancers and hookers mostly knew him by sight, if not by name, although no one knew that he had spent ten years in prison for sexual violence. But now, Richard Mallory’s days, spent trawling for sex, were about to come to an abrupt end.

  Mallory was also in dire financial straits. He owed $4,000 in rent arrears and his affairs were due to be audited by the Inland Revenue Service. He owned two vans, one white and the other maroon. But the night he disappeared, heading for a weekend in Daytona, he was driving his light beige, two-door, 1977 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, with its brown interior and tinted windows. It was a vehicle more suited to the pursuit of hard drinking and pleasure-seeking. In the early evening of Thursday, 30 November, he closed up his TV repair shop, drove home, threw a few bags into the back of his car and headed for Daytona.

  A handful of northbound rides had deposited Lee Wuornos outside Tampa on Interstate Highway I-4, right at the point where it passes under I-17. It was raining heavily and she lingered under the overpass in order to avoid the downpour, until the weather improved. Mallory spotted her and slowed down, then reversed and offered her a lift. As they drove, they chatted amicably, and en route, stopped for a pack of beer. It was around 5.0am when Mallory broached the subject of sex. He pulled off the road and into nearby woods. Lee peeled off her clothes before he did, and they hugged and kissed for a while.

  Suddenly, and apparently without being provoked, she produced a .22-calibre pistol and began firing at her companion. The first bullet struck his right arm and entered his body. Desperately, he tried to crawl out of the car when another bullet slammed into his torso, quickly followed by a third and a fourth. Mallory did not die immediately. The copper-coated, hollow-nose bullet, which struck him in the right side of his chest, had penetrated his left lung, passing through the organ before coming to rest in the chest cavity. During its passage, the bullet caused a massive and fatal haemorrhage. He struggled to cling on to life for a further 15 minutes as Lee Wuornos stood by and watched him die.

  The following day, Mallory’s car was found abandoned near John Anderson Drive in Ormond Beach. Deputy Bonnevier was out on a routine patrol when he stopped to examine the vehicle. He noticed bloodstains on the front backrest, behind the steering wheel, but there were no signs of either the driver or any passengers. The car ignition keys were not in the switch, but numerous items were found a short distance from the car. Partially buried in the sandy soil was a blue nylon wallet, containing Richard Mallory’s Florida driving licence, miscellaneous papers, and two long-expired credit cards. There were also two plastic tumbler-type glasses and a half-empty bottle of vodka, along with several other items, suggesting that Mallory had not been alone. The driver’s seat had been pulled as far forward as it would go, in a driving position which would have been extremely uncomfortable for a man of Mallory’s size.

  Two young men, out scavenging for scrap metal on Wednesday, 13 December, found Richard Mallory’s corpse at a spot roughly five miles across the river from where his car had been found. Volusia County deputies, who answered the 911 call, saw a body which was skeletonised from the collarbone to the top of the head. It lay under a piece of cardboard with only the fingers showing. It was fully dressed in jeans and a pullover, the belt slightly askew. The pockets of the jeans had been turned inside out. The man’s dentures lay on the ground next to the body.

  Charles James Lau, an investigator with the Volusia County Sheriff’s Department, oversaw an immediate autopsy of the unidentified body and recovered four bullets from its torso. The hands of the victim were removed and transported to the crime laboratory for latent print examination because, as Lau explained, ‘When we have an unidentified body, you can’t roll the fingerprints because of the decomposition.’

  By the middle of May 1990, the murder of hapless Richard Mallory had been all but forgotten by the Volusia County Sheriff’s Department. There was, seemingly, no reason to believe it was anything other than an isolated homicide.

  * * *

  As ex-husbands go, 47-year-old David Spears was a dream come true. Predictable, honest and hardworking, he was a man people counted on. He earned his living as a construction worker and lived in Winter Garden, near Orlando, travelling each day to Saratosa to work at Universal Concrete. A shy, soft-spoken giant of a man, 6ft 4in tall, bearded, greying and weather-lined from his outdoor lifestyle, he cared enough about his former wife, Dee, to give her a regular portion of his monthly pay cheque.

  Just before lunchtime on Friday, 18 May 1990, David called Dee and told her to expect him to call in somewhere between 2–2.30pm the next day. On Saturday, he left work at about 2.10pm in his cream pickup and he was not seen alive again.

  He spotted Lee Wuornos, somewhere near the point where Route 27 intersects with I-4, about 36 miles from Winter Garden, and offered her a ride. She explained that she needed to get to Homosassa Springs. This was right out of his way; nevertheless, he agreed to take her, and they ended up pulling off the road on US 19, close to Homosassa Springs, and then drove so deep into the woods that Spears was worried that his truck would get stuck.

  David Spears’ truck was found abandoned near County Road 318 and I-75 in Marion County on 20 May. A blonde hair was found on the steering wheel and a ripped condom packet was found on the floor of the vehicle. All his personal property, including tools, clothing and a one-of-a-kind ceramic statue of a panther, which he had bought as a present for Dee, was missing. The driver’s seat was pulled too close to the steering wheel for a man of his height, indicating to the police that someone else had driven the truck after Spears had been killed.

  On 1 June, a man found the body of an unidentified male lying in a clearing amidst pine trees and palmettos. Mathew Cocking had just walked past an illegal dumping site on Fling Lane, a dirt road south of Chassahowitzka and running adjacent to US 19.

  When the police arrived, they found a badly decomposing body, naked except for a camouflage baseball cap which sat jauntily atop a ravaged head. On the ground near the body were a used Trojan condom, its torn black packet, and several empty cans of Busch and Budweiser beer. At first, because of the state of the body, the police were unable to determine the sex, age or likely cause of death. The corpse lay on its back, legs apart, arms outstretched, palms facing skywards. Lee Wuornos had stolen her victim’s wages, his daughter’s graduation money and a quantity of cash, which had been hidden in the truck for emergencies, amounting to about $600.

  Dr Janet Pillow carried out the autopsy on Monday, 4 June. The man, who weighed around 195lb in life, had been reduced to 40lb by the time his body was discovered. Six .22-calibre bullets were recovered from the remains. Two days later, another body was found in Marion County.

  * * *

  Forty-year-old Charles Carskaddon, a sometime road digger and rodeo rider, was on his way from his mother’s home in Prairie, Missouri, to Tampa to pick up Peggy, his fiancée. He never arrived. His naked body was found off State Route 52, and I-75 in Pascoe County
, on Wednesday, 6 June. The corpse was covered with grass and foliage and a green, electric blanket. He had been shot nine times in the chest with a .22-calibre handgun.

  Carskaddon’s brown 1975 Cadillac, a car he had lovingly restored, was found the next day near I-75 and County Road 484 in Marion County. Although the licence plate had been ripped off, the vehicle identification number (VIN) was still intact and revealed the owner’s name. Carskaddon’s mother, Florence, told police that when her only son left home he was carrying a blue steel .45-calibre pistol with a pearl handle, a Mexican blanket, stun gun, flip-top lighter, watch, tan suitcase, black T-shirt, and grey snakeskin cowboy boots. ‘He had removed the firing pin from the gun,’ she said, ‘because he was scared to use it.’ None of these items were found in his car.

  * * *

  Peter Siems was a 65-year-old retired merchant seaman, living near Jupiter, Florida. Early in the morning of 7 June, neighbours saw the part-time missionary placing luggage and a stack of bibles into his 1988 silver-grey Pontiac Sunbird. They assumed, correctly, that the balding, bespectacled man, was off on another of his ‘Word-spreading’ trips as a member of the ‘Christ Is the Answer’ Crusade. On his travels, he intended to visit relatives in Arkansas.

  On 4 July, a silver-grey Pontiac Sunbird careered off State Road 315 near Orange Springs, Florida. The car smashed through a steel gate and a barbed-wire fence, shattering the windscreen before coming to rest in the undergrowth. For a brief second, it appeared that it might roll over, but it righted itself, with steam hissing from the radiator.

  Rhonda and Jim Bailey, who were sitting on their porch enjoying the sun, saw the spectacular accident happen. They observed two women clamber out of the car, noting that one was a short, heavy blonde (Lee Wuornos) and the other, a tall brunette (Tyria Moore). The blonde, whose arms were bleeding from the cuts sustained in the crash, started throwing beer cans into the woods and swearing at her fellow passenger, who said very little.