Chesler reserved her contempt for one victim in particular—the first, Richard Mallory. In many ways, Richard Mallory is the Rosetta stone for understanding what might have triggered the one-year killing spree unleashed by Aileen Wuornos. According to Chesler, Mallory’s former girlfriend, Jackie Davis, gave a “grim” portrayal to the police of the victim
Mallory, Ms. Davis recounted, had served ten years in prison for burglary, suffered from severe mood swings, drank too much, was violent to women, enjoyed the strip bars, was “into” pornography, and had undergone therapy for some kind of sexual dysfunction. A search of Mallory’s business revealed that he was erratic in business, heavily in debt, in trouble with the IRS, and had received many hostile letters from angry customers.151
Chesler says that in a series of meetings with Wuornos’s public defender, Trish Jenkins, nearly seven months before the trial, “feminists, myself included, had asked Jenkins and her investigator, Don Sanchez, to look into Mallory’s past. They never did.”152
Moreover, according to Chesler’s account, the testimony of Jackie Davis about Mallory’s “past violence toward women” was not admitted into evidence by the judge. Chesler also claims that the defense’s request “for a continuance to allow the defense to find and question Davis anew” was also denied. Chesler concludes, “In my view, the absence of such corroborating evidence was absolutely damaging to Wuornos’s self-defense claim.”153
Sounds like a conspiracy between a phallocentric judge and an incompetent defense to railroad Wuornos into a death sentence because she dared to defend herself against a member of the patriarchy attempting to rape her. But Chesler does not tell us the full story of Jackie Davis’s statement to the police.
In fact, Davis never said that Mallory was abusive or violent with her. She actually stated that he was “kind and gentle but prone to mood swings. Sometimes he was sweet and easygoing, at others, he shrank back into his shell.”154 Chesler’s definition of “abusive treatment of women” consisted of Mallory’s propensity to hire strippers and prostitutes, two at a time, and watch them having simulated sex with each other.
For radical feminists like Chesler, there are no prostitutes—only “prostituted women.” That is almost the only term that Chesler uses in her article, implying that all prostitutes are forced into selling themselves, obviously by men. She consistently refers to Wuornos as a “prostituted woman” despite the fact that nobody forced Wuornos into prostitution, nobody “ran” Wuornos, she never had a pimp (at least not one who could survive her temper). Aileen sadly chose to prostitute herself instead of taking on menial work the way her lover, Tyria, did. Wuornos’s reluctance to work was even a source of conflict between her and Tyria.
(Not that Chesler has much respect for what Aileen told her either when they met. After being told by Aileen that she chose to be a prostitute and that some of her johns were her friends, Chesler said, “She’s as conventional as most (abused) women.”155 For creatures like Chesler it was never about Aileen anyway.)
Nor did the judge prevent Jackie Davis from testifying. It is true that the defense learned very late about Jackie Davis. But during the trial, Davis was brought into court and deposed by the defense to decide whether to put her on the stand in front of a jury. Her testimony, it turned out, consisted of inadmissible hearsay—gossip she had heard from other people. She personally had never been abused by Mallory nor did she herself have any direct knowledge at all of his abusing other women (as we on Earth understand the term “abuse” and not as Chesler defines it on her feminist Mars).
Not only did Jackie Davis have a date with Mallory the day he disappeared, but after his death she took the responsibility of arranging for his funeral. She was very fond of Mallory and reluctant to testify for the defense. At the end of her questioning, it was the defense lawyer who decided not to call Davis to the stand in front of a jury, not the judge.156
But one cannot write off Chesler as some kooky radical feminist that easily. Between the trial in 1992 and the appeals that would be lodged the next year, to her credit Chesler did what Wuornos’s defense team did not. She hired a private investigator, an ex-police officer who had initially worked on the Wuornos case, to investigate Mallory’s past. He discovered that Mallory had served four years (Chesler says ten) for housebreaking with the intent to commit rape! If Mallory was “abusive” because he liked to hire “prostituted women” then imagine what this made him now!
The only problem is that Mallory had committed this one offense thirty years ago when he was a pimple-faced 19-year-old on the eve of his induction into the army. Mallory broke into a home he was familiar with when he worked as a beverage delivery boy and he advanced on the woman who lived there but ran off the instant she resisted. Mallory did indeed undergo therapy and was confined in a psychiatric wing of a Maryland prison. He confessed that he had irresistible impulses to make sexual advances toward women—not quite the same as rape but still well on the way there. He was released after four years but was registered as a “defective delinquent” until 1968—for ten years. (Probably the source of Chesler’s error that he was imprisoned for ten years.)
Mallory was acutely aware of his problem early in his life and attempted to deal with it himself. He had actually quit his job as a delivery boy because he was concerned about his desires to make inappropriate sexual advances toward female customers. In the thirty years subsequent to his release, Mallory did not commit any other offense and seems to have redirected his sexual impulse toward his girlfriends and prostitutes. Mallory frequented prostitutes for over twenty years in the area where he lived and many knew him by name. Not one reported any abusive behavior by him, before or after his murder. Nothing in this makes him an upstanding citizen and decent human being, but neither is it evidence for the credibility of Wuornos’s claim of her brutal anal rape at the hands of Mallory.
A judge in Aileen Wuornos’s appeal ruled that this information would not have changed the validity of her defense claim of being raped, and would not have been admissible anyway, as Mallory’s offense had happened only once and so long ago that it could not have served as evidence for assessing his current conduct.
As Aileen Wuornos grew more menacing in court, yelling at a jury when convicted, “I hope you get raped. Scumbags of America!” her feminist defenders began to fade and fall by the wayside. In the end, Chesler concluded, “Her bullets shattered the silence about violence against prostituted women, about women fighting back: and about what happens to them when they do.”157 And then Chesler moved on to her next new soapbox.*
“On a Killing Day…”—What Triggered Aileen?
Something could have happened halfway between the prosecution’s scenario and Wuornos’s claim. It did not take much to set Wuornos off and Mallory was known to be paranoid, particularly after he drank. It could have even happened on an animallike level—when the scent of fear can spark aggression. Perhaps Mallory sent a fear signal to Wuornos, which made her afraid that he might attack her and she responded. Perhaps he just said something that triggered Wuornos’s legendary temper, like the hundreds of people in the past. Maybe there was a scuffle exactly as Wuornos described in her confession, and in the heat of the moment she shot Mallory dead. Or maybe he actually did rape her exactly as she testified a year later in her trial. It is possible. Mallory, at least at some point in his life, had that in him—maybe this was the night it flowered once more. It is possible.
Whether Mallory actually raped Aileen, attempted to, or whether she thought he did or whether both their damaged and twisted personalities came violently together in a lethal cocktail of rage and paranoia, the fact remains that Wuornos went on to murder another six middle-aged men in what appears to have been cold-blooded rage and profit killings. Did they all try to rape her? Rape indeed can seriously be an occupational hazard of a prostitute, but if so, to what extent? Is it conceivable that in a year a roadside prostitute like Aileen could get raped seven times? Nobody can definitively answer that ques
tion because there are no objective studies of the issue. One study that is commonly cited by feminists reported that 55 prostitutes in Oregon claimed to be raped an average of 33 times a year, but the study was conducted by the Council for Prostitution Alternatives, which had its own agenda, nor were the claims of the women documented in any way.
Police officers have a different take on it. As one officer explained, cops on a daily basis go out on the street looking for trouble yet some spend twenty years on patrol without ever needing to draw their weapon. It’s not quite the same thing, but it illustrates that the frequency with which bad things happen on the street is difficult to determine.
It becomes a little easier, if one considers the histories of the men Wuornos murdered. With the exception of one, none of the men Aileen accused of trying to rape her had any criminal records for sexual assault. Could Aileen have met six first-time rapists in the span of a year—six middle-aged and elderly men who, after a lifetime of never having committed (at least as far as we know) a sexual assault, chose so late in their life to do so for the first time with Aileen? Not likely.
Much was made of the fact that Aileen had picked up hundreds of men (she claimed 250,000—you do the math as to how impossible that is) without killing them. Aileen herself pointed out how many rides she had in men’s cars without killing them. It was only these seven rapists, she insists. And Chesler grabs on to this argument as well, citing a favorite film, the obscure Dutch A Question of Silence, in which, while shopping in a store, three women, each of whom “has had enough of being treated like a ‘woman’ by men…spontaneously stomp to death the 250,001st man who treats them with contempt; and they do so without exchanging a word.”158
But that is not how serial killers function. Once they start killing, they do not kill everybody they meet whenever they have an opportunity. Serial killers function in a cyclical pattern with peaks and valleys in their desire to kill. There is more to it than just opportunity. Wuornos not killing every man who came into contact with her does not make the ones she did kill rapists.
Many of the men who had come forward to say they had survived an encounter with Aileen Wuornos had some scary stories to tell. One described her akin to a werewolf, her personality suddenly changing to such a dark and menacing tone that he suddenly became so afraid that he had to trick her into getting out of his car and then suddenly drove off before she could get back in.
Most likely, Aileen went into one of her well-documented high rages—and perhaps her rages have always been driven by a history of sexual assault—and once she learned to kill, she would express her rage with the finality of murder and took cathartic satisfaction in the control she exercised over her victim’s body and property: murder as a calming cigarette.
Even if Mallory had really attempted to rape her and she really was defending herself, once she had killed she became addicted to it. There might have been a remnant of some moral compass still guiding Aileen; her assertions that she would never kill in cold blood ring true, even though she did precisely that. To overcome that paradox, she needed to convince herself that the men she was killing were really going to rape her and thus deserved to die. It is unlikely that she made up the motive as an afterthought—she was probably deluding herself as she went along—looking hopefully for some sign that the man whose car she had entered harbored some sinister intent and therefore deserved to die.
As Aileen said, “I had a lot of guys, maybe ten to twelve a day. I could have killed all of them, but I didn’t want to. I’m really just a nice person. I’m describing a normal day to you here, but a killing day would be just about the same. On a normal day we would just do it by the side of the road if they just wanted oral sex or behind a building or maybe just off the road in the woods if they wanted it all.
“On a killing day, those guys wanted to go way, way back in the woods. Now I know why they did it: They were gonna hurt me.”
Maybe that is all it took.
Her relationship with Tyria might have been critical to the killing as well. Not only was she in love with Tyria, but the love was reciprocated. After a lifetime of rejection, beginning with her own mother, mistreatment at the hands of her grandparents, rejection by her peers, by the boys she had sex with from the age of eleven, her infant child being taken away from her, her failed marriage, and all the other brief relationships that came apart, Tyria was the first to stay with Aileen. Tyria was Aileen’s first significant relationship that appeared to function on some level. But it might have also been the very “trigger” that finally turned her to serial murder.
Fantasies, facilitators, and triggers are the three pillars of serial murder. Aileen fantasized about revenge against the males who had sexually abused her throughout her life—even in the highly unlikely case that she had not been actually raped in the past, she certainly felt she had been. One does not need a psych degree to figure out what kind of fantasies a woman might have who was sexually used from age eleven the way Aileen was. Facilitators are the “lubricants”—pornography, drugs, or alcohol—which enhance the fantasy and lower the inhibitions to realize the fantasy. Aileen was almost always drinking when she killed (although Aileen was almost always drinking when she did anything). Finally, the trigger is usually a series or combination of pressures in daily life that law enforcement call “stressors,” which at some point drive the predisposed individual to crack and act upon their fantasy. When investigating a serial murder suspect, police will often attempt to seek out and identify a pattern of “stressors” in the suspect’s life—divorce, loss of a job, a death in the family, some kind of failure, a breakup with a girlfriend, parental conflict. In the FBI study of male serial killers, 59 percent reported conflict with a female occurring just prior to their killing for the first time, and sometimes before subsequent murders. Other stressors included: conflict with parents: 53 percent; financial: 48 percent; employment problems: 39 percent; marital problems: 21 percent; legal problems: 28 percent; conflict with a male: 11 percent; physical injury: 11 percent; death of a significant person: 8 percent; and birth of a child: 8 percent.159
Aileen’s relationship with Tyria could have easily served as the stressor for her murders. Aileen killed her first victim, Richard Mallory, just a few days after Ty brought home for a Thanksgiving meal, Sandy Russell, a pretty 29-year-old blonde. Aileen did not kill again until Tyria’s half-sister, Tracy Moore, came to stay with them during the summer and Ty was focusing all her attention on her. During Tracy’s stay, Aileen murdered David Spears, Charles Carskaddon, and Peter Siems. Just before Lee murdered Dick Humphreys, Ty had lost a job and was talking about leaving Florida and moving back to Ohio. When Aileen murdered Walter Jeno Antonio, Ty had gone off by herself to Ohio for the Thanksgiving holiday with her family, having told Lee that she needed a break from her. And as Aileen herself blurted out in those taped telephone conversations with Tyria, “Let me tell you why I did it, alright?…Because I’m so…so fuckin’ in love with you, that I was so worried about us not havin’ an apartment and shit, I was scared that we were gonna lose our place, believin’ that we wouldn’t be together.”
The Prostituted Serial Killer
Aileen Wuornos might not have been the “prostituted woman” that Chesler wanted her to be, but she was a prostituted serial killer. Everybody made money or mileage from the plight of Aileen Wuornos (including, I suppose, me with this writing). Three police officers and Tyria were negotiating Hollywood deals before Aileen even went to trial. Her attorney was charging the media $10,000 per interview, with Aileen deciding how the money would be dispersed among her hangers-on. (She herself could not retain the money under the Son of Sam Law, which prevents offenders from profiting from their notoriety.)
A born-again Christian legally adopted Aileen so that she could have access to her and then went on to support Aileen in her “no contest” pleas to hasten her execution so that “she could go home to Jesus.” Filmmaker Nick Broomfield made two films about Aileen, falling just short of follow
ing her with his cameras into the death chamber. And a few years after Aileen was dead, actress-model Charlize Theron put an Oscar statue on her shelf for her portrayal of Aileen in Monster. Everybody got a piece of Aileen—from the virgin boys who fucked her for a cigarette to the low-budget filmmakers, true crime hacks, documentary voyeurs, lawyers, TV producers, radical feminists, militant lesbians, born-again Bible thumpers, both pro-and anti-death activists, and the Florida justice system that let her sloppily put herself to death. During her last “no contest” trials, Aileen did not even bother attending, preferring to remain in her cell. She just wanted it all to be over. Her claims of being raped became muted and ambiguous and her final story was that the police deliberately allowed her to commit the series of murders so that they could enhance the value of the movie deal about her case.
Aileen Wuornos finally got her wish when she was executed by lethal injection at the age of 46 on October 9, 2002. She was the tenth woman in the U.S. to be executed since the reintroduction of the death penalty in 1976. Aileen’s last words were, “I’d just like to say I’m sailing with the Rock and I’ll be back like Independence Day with Jesus, June 6, like the movie, big mothership and all. I’ll be back.”
She was cremated and her ashes were sent back to Michigan where they were spread around a tree, at Aileen’s request, to the sound of Natalie Merchant’s song, “Carnival.” Aileen had listened to the song repeatedly while on death row.
In the Last Resort Bar in Daytona Beach where Aileen was arrested there is a portrait of her with the inscription: here lied aileen “lee” wuornos her last night of freedom january 9, 1991, at the last resort bar. The adult woman in the portrait is as shining, spirited, and beautiful as the little girl in the family photos of Aileen when she was a 6-year-old schoolgirl. Somebody once brought in an unflattering photo of Aileen clipped from a newspaper and attempted to place it over the face in the portrait because the woman in the painting looked too much better than Aileen really did.160 The artist objected, saying that she had painted Aileen that way deliberately because everybody deserves a break. If so, then it probably is the only break Aileen ever got in her sad and, as Natalie Merchant said of her, “tortured, torturing life.”
Female Serial Killers Page 20
