by Ray Black
Judi didn’t stay on her own for long, very quickly moving in with her new boyfriend Bobby Joe Morris who lived in Pensacola. Things appeared to be going well, but Judi’s son Michael was being a disruptive influence in the household and at school, and she decided to place him in residential foster care for a while.
In 1977, Bobby Joe moved to Colorado and Judi and her family, including Michael, joined him there after another fire at the family home. No prizes for guessing who claimed the insurance money. Bobby Joe became sick just a few weeks after Judi’s arrival in Colorado and once again the doctors were unable to give an accurate diagnosis and discharged him from hospital. He had only been home for two days when he went into a coma and had to be rushed back to hospital, where he died on January 21. Once again Judi had made sure that his life insurance policies were paid up to date. The pattern was now becoming all too familiar.
However, Judi was not to be so lucky this time as Bobby Joe’s family were highly suspicious about his death and, added to that, he was not the only victim. When Judy and Bobby Joe had been visiting his parents in Alabama in 1974, a man had been found dead in a hotel room. The local police received an anonymous phone call tipping them off and they found the victim who had had his throat cut and been shot in the chest. Allegedly Bobby Joe’s mother heard Judi telling someone, ‘The son-of-a-bitch shouldn’t have come up here in the first place. He knew if he came up here he was gonna die’. Athough Bobby Joe confessed to the crime shortly before he died, the police could not find enough evidence to bring charges and the case was dropped.
Meanwhile, Judi legally changed her name to Buenoano, which was the Spanish equivalent of Goodyear – the name of her first husband – and she moved back to Pensacola with her family.
Michael joined the army in June 1979 but started showing signs of paralysis to his upper and lower limbs. He was given heavy metal braces in the military hospital and was discharged, being deemed unfit for duty. He was sent home to the loving care of his mother! Unable to walk or use his hands, Michael was totally reliant on his mother, and thought nothing of it when she suggested a canoe trip down the East River on May 13, 1980. Sadly, the canoe capsized – Judi and James were able to swim to safety, but Michael, weighed down by his heavy braces, drowned before anyone could reach him.
The police accepted Judi’s version of events, but army investigators were not so easily convinced; after all, Judi had received $20,000 from her son’s military life insurance. When the sheriff’s office discovered that there were two other life insurance policies on Michael’s life, they decided to take an interest in the case and discovered that the signatures on the policies had been forged.
Judi’s next victim was a Pensacola businessman by the name of John Gentry II. It wasn’t long before she was up to her old tricks and convinced John that they should take out life insurance policies on each other to the tune of $500,000. Judi also talked John into taking vitamin pills to keep him in the peak of health – except they didn’t – and he started to complain of nausea and dizziness. Judy convinced him that he needed to take even more vitamins and doubled the dose.
Judi told John she was expecting their baby on June 25, 1983, and he said he would like to go out and get some champagne to celebrate the event. However, the celebrations never took place because, as he turned the key in the ignition, his car exploded causing him serious injury. He was taken to hospital where he recovered enough to answer some questions.
John told them that Judi had medical qualifications and yet when the police checked into her background this information proved to be false. It also turned out that Judi had been telling their friends that John had a terminal illness, which was also a lie, and when the vitamin pills were taken for forensic tests they found they had been laced with arsenic. Although the police did not really have enough evidence to charge Judi at this stage, when they found wire and tape in her bedroom which matched that found on the exploded car, they were able to take her into custody.
After exhuming the bodies of Michael, Bobby Joe Morris and James Goodyear, the coroner was able to confirm that their bodies all contained traces of arsenic.
Judi was tried separately for each of the murders and the attempted murder of John Gentry and was eventually found guilty and sentenced to death. It is believed that she collected as much as $240,000 in insurance money from the deaths of her husband, son and boyfriends.
Judi spent the next thirteen years on death row at the Broward Correctional Center at Pembroke Pines in Florida, passing her time by writing letters, crocheting blankets and baby clothes and, ironically, teaching Bible study to the other inmates. She continually appealed against her death sentence, but her last appeal on March 29, 1998, was turned down and her death warrant was signed.
Judi was finally executed at 7.02 a.m. on Monday, March 30, 1998 and when asked if she had a final statement, she simply replied, ‘No sir’. She has been described by the Pensacola detective who looked into her past, as ‘the coldest killer I ever knew’.
Aileen Wuornos
Just as Lizzie Borden was immortalised by the US media, so too was Aileen Wuornos, who became the subject of an Oscar-winning performance by Charlize Theron in the film Monster. The unusual thing about Wuornos is that she effectively cultivated her own image as a monster during her trial and while she waited for her eventual execution by lethal injection. In truth, Wuornos had led a life that took her to rock bottom in US society, so that she had lost all sense of dignity and moral code. In a way, she was a victim too, and her crimes were all about getting her own back on a world that she felt had dealt her a ‘bum deal’, as they say in the United States.
Aileen Wuornos’s killing spree lasted between November 1989 and November 1990. In a little under a year she had killed seven men. It seems that she turned to murder because her first victim, Richard Mallory, had raped her despite the fact that she was in his car to provide sex as a prostitute. She was tried for his murder in early 1992 and used the rape allegation as her defence, but the jury found her guilty and convicted her of murder.
To say that Aileen had a bad start to life would be a gross understatement. She was born on February 29, 1956, Aileen Carol Pittman. Her biological father, Leo Dale Pittman – whom she never knew – was a convicted psychopathic child molester, who hanged himself while in prison in 1969.
Her mother, Diane, had married Pittman when she was only fifteen, but the marriage was a failure as she lived in constant fear of her husband. Aileen had an older brother, Keith, and Diane abandoned her two children in 1960, leaving them in the care of their grandparents, Lauri and Britta Wuornos. They were legally adopted, but Aileen did not discover the truth about her upbringing until she was twelve years of age, always believing that Lauri and Britta were her biological parents. Life with her grandparents had been tough, as Lauri drank heavily and ruled the children with an iron rod, often beating them with a belt when they misbehaved. Aileen also claimed that she was sexually abused by her grandfather from an early age.
Aileen was sexually promiscuous from her early teens and became pregnant when she was just thirteen. It was a disgrace to the family and she was banished from the family home and also disowned by the community. She gave birth at a Detroit maternity home on March 23, 1971, but the baby was put up for adoption as soon as it was born. Aileen had nowhere to go and was forced to live out of an abandoned car in the woods.
In the same year, Britta Wuornos died of liver failure, although Diane, Aileen’s biological mother, accused Lauri of killing her. After their grandmother’s death, Aileen and Keith were made wards of court. Although still at school, Aileen started working as a prostitute using the assumed name of Sandra Kretsch. In May 1974 she was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol and firing a gun from a moving vehicle, and had to spend a period in Jefferson County jail.
In July 1976, she was arrested again for violent behaviour, when she threw a cue ball at a barman’s head. Four days after her arrest, her brother Keith died
of cancer and Aileen inherited $10,000 from his life insurance. She paid off her fine imposed by the court and then squandered the remainder of the money within a period of two months.
On the road and poor once again, Aileen hitched her way to Florida, where she met a wealthy but elderly president of a yacht club, Lewis Fell. He proposed to her and news of their wedding was listed in the society columns of the local newspaper. However, Aileen was still quick to lose her temper and she was sent to jail following a fight in a local bar. Her husband, who was unable to accept his wife’s behaviour, had the marriage annulled and would have nothing more to do with her.
For the next ten years Aileen went from one failed relationship to another, unable to control her inner turmoil. She earned money any way she could, by prostitution, forgery, theft and armed robbery. Always struggling with depression, and a physical and emotional wreck, Aileen attempted to commit suicide. She was like an unexploded bomb, loading her body with drink and drugs, searching for a way to alleviate her feelings of anger and loneliness.
When Aileen met Tyria Moore in a Daytona gay bar in 1986, she had hit rock bottom and was flattered by the girl’s attention. She decided to try something new and for a while everything was going well, for the first time in her life feeling that someone truly cared for her. There was no doubt that Tyria loved her and was prepared to follow Aileen wherever she went. Aileen supported their relationship with her prostitution earnings but little by little the magic went out of the relationship and they started to fight. They lived out of cheap motel rooms, struggling to survive on Aileen’s meagre earnings. Frightened that she would lose Tyria, Aileen knew she had to do something desperate and her career changed from one of prostitution and theft to murder.
Aileen’s first victim was a shop-owner by the name of Richard Mallory. Mallory was known to go off on drinking binges, so when he didn’t turn up to open his shop in December 1989, no one thought very much of it. It wasn’t until his Cadillac was found abandoned a few days later, that anyone knew that anything was wrong. Mallory’s body was discovered on December 13, by two men looking for scrap metal along a dirt road. The badly decomposed body was wrapped in a piece of carpet and an autopsy showed that he had been killed by three shots to the head by a .22-calibre gun. After following several leads, including a stripper who went by the name of Chastity, the police came up against a brick wall and the case went cold.
Another naked body was found on June 1 in a wooded area in Citrus County, Florida. The victim was forty-three-year-old David Spears of Sarasota. He was a lorry driver and his abandoned vehicle was found on Interstate 75 with the doors unlocked and the licence plates removed. Spears, like Mallory, had been shot several times with a .22 gun.
Five days later, another body turned up just a few miles further up the same Interstate. The body was so badly decomposed it was difficult for medical examiners to determine exactly when the man had died, but they were able to confirm that he had been shot by the same gun. The man was later identified as Charles Carskaddon.
On July 4, a woman was sitting on her front porch when she saw a car speed off the road and crash into some brush. Two women frantically climbed out of the car shouting abuse at one another. The taller, blonde woman had an injury to her arm and when the woman approached her, Aileen told her it wasn’t necessary to call the police as her father lived just up the road. They climbed back into the car which, although badly damaged, started and took them a little way down the road before finally giving up.
They started walking and were stopped by a member of the Orange Springs Volunteer Fire Department who had responded to a call about an accident. He asked the two girls whether they were the ones that had been involved in the accident, but Aileen told him they knew nothing about it and he left them alone.
When the police discovered the abandoned 1988 Pontiac Sunbird, a computer search showed that the car belonged to a Peter Siems, who had disappeared on June 7. The sheriff of Orange Springs sent a sketch of the two women whom he believed were involved, to the Florida Criminal Activity Bulletin, along with details of specific evidence they had found in the abandoned car.
At the beginning of August a family who were taking a picnic at a beauty spot in the Ocala National Forest, found a body in a clearing. The body, although badly decomposed, was identified by a gold wedding ring, and it turned out to be Troy Burress, a delivery man who had gone missing on the morning of July 30. Like the other victims he had been killed by shots from a .22-calibre gun.
Dick Humphreys, who specialised in investigating cases of abused children, never made it home on the evening of September 11. His body was found the following night in Marion County – he had been shot seven times.
Approximately one month later the naked body of Walter Gino Antonio was found on a remote road in Dixie County. His car was found five days later, with the number plates missing, across the state in Brevard County.
The police gradually started to build up a picture, suspecting that women might be involved. They pointed out that as no one picked up hitchhikers any more, it could be assumed that the assailant had to be non-threatening to the victims. The police used the sketches supplied by the sheriff at Orange Springs and the following morning the newspapers across Florida ran the story that the police were looking for two women.
The policeman’s hunch paid off and very soon they had numerous calls, all of them describing the same two women. One short with dark hair and the other, heavier built with long blonde hair. Two names kept cropping up, Tyria Moore and Lee Blahovec, both of whom were lesbians, and Lee a known prostitute.
Investigations led the police to a pawnshop in Daytona where a woman calling herself Cammie Marsh Greene had pawned a camera and a radar detector, leaving a nice thumbprint on the receipt. The two pawned items had belonged to one of the murdered men, Richard Mallory.
The fingerprint was the key to solving the case and within an hour records showed that there was an outstanding weapons charge against someone called Lori Grody. A bloody handprint found in the car of Peter Siems, also matched Grody’s print as well and the information was sent to the National Crime Information Center. It soon came to light that the names Lori Grody, Susan Blahovec and Cammie Marsh Greene were all aliases for a woman known as Aileen Wuornos.
Aileen was eventually arrested using a clever ruse and Tyria Moore was located on January 10, living with her sister in Pennsylvania. Aileen was only being held on a previous weapons charge and the police needed a confession from her to make their murder charges stick. Their plan was to use Tyria as bait and they put her in a motel room in Daytona and asked her to make contact with Aileen in jail. The conversations would be taped and Tyria was to tell Aileen that she was worried that the authorities would pin the murders on her. The police hoped that, out of loyalty to Tyria, Aileen would confess.
It took three days of phone calls for Tyria to convince Aileen that the police were closing in on her ex-lover and eventually the plan paid off.
‘I will cover for you, because you’re innocent,’ Aileen said down the phone. ‘I’m not going to let you go to jail. Listen, if I have to confess, I will.’ Aileen Wuornos confessed to murder on the morning of January 16.
At the trial Tyria testified against Aileen who was convicted of killing Richard Mallory, even though she claimed it was through self-defence. Ironically, it was later discovered that Mallory had in fact served ten years in jail for violent rape, but Aileen never got a retrial. Aileen eventually confessed to killing three other men and was given the death sentence. Unrepentant to the last, she was executed by lethal injection on October 9, 2002.
PART FOUR: Victims of Assassination
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln’s assassination was motivated by events relating to the American Civil War (1861—65). In fact, his death came only days after General Robert E. Lee had surrendered his Confederate force to General Ulysses S. Grant of the Union, although hostilities would continue for another few months. Lincoln’s assa
ssin was John Wilkes Booth, a well-known stage actor and Confederate, who saw his opportunity when Lincoln came to watch a performance at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC.
To get a deeper insight into why Booth wanted Lincoln out of the picture, we need to look at the type of man he was. In his diary, Booth wrote of Lincoln:
Our country owed all her troubles to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment.
John Wilkes Booth was born on May 10, 1838, on a farm near Bel Air in Maryland, one of ten children. His father, Junius Booth, was British but had moved to the United States in 1821 with his wife, Mary Ann Holmes. Junius was a famous actor, who had an alcohol problem and suffered from spells of madness.
As a young man, Booth became a member of the Know-Nothing political party, which was formed by American nativists who wanted to preserve the country for native-born white citizens.
When Junius died in 1852, Booth spent several years working on the farm, but his dreams went far beyond farming – he wanted to be a famous actor just like his father.
Booth made his stage debut in August 1855, when he was seventeen years old, playing the part of the Earl of Richmond in Shakespeare’s Richard III. By 1858 he was a member of the Richmond Theatre, but often missed cues and forgot his lines, and consequently never played any major roles.
In 1859, Booth was an eyewitness to the execution of John Brown, who was the abolitionist who had tried to start a slave uprising at Harpers Ferry. The following year his career as an actor took off and, taking many leading roles, his income escalated to an estimated $20,000 a year. Over the next few years he starred in Romeo and Juliet, The Apostate, The Marble Heart, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, Othello, The Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet and Macbeth, to mention just a few, travelling all over the United States.
