Dead Men Walking

by Bill Wallace

  On 25 June 1983, John Gentry left a dinner party early, going out to buy some champagne to drink later with Judi. They planned to celebrate as she had just told him she was going to have his child. He climbed into his car, turned the key in the ignition and the car exploded. He was pulled from the burning wreckage still alive, but only just. Surgeons succeeded in saving his life, however.

  Four days later Judi was brought in for questioning by the police. Immediately, they began to untangle ‘Dr’ Buenoano’s web of lies and to delve into her insurance situation. A distressed Gentry was told that she had lied about being pregnant. She had, after all, been sterilised in 1975. They also discovered that she had been telling friends for months that Gentry was dying of an incurable disease and that she had booked tickets for a world cruise. She had not booked one for him, not expecting him to be around long enough to enjoy it. Gentry passed some of the vitamin pills she had been giving him to police officers and they were found to contain paraformaldehyde, a poison with no medical applica-tion. The authorities still did not have enough evidence to prosecute her for attempted murder but a search of her home revealed wire and tape that was a match to materials found in the bombed car, and she was finally arrested and charged with attempted murder. They traced the dynamite used in the car bomb back to her.

  On 11 January 1984, they charged her with the murder of her son Michael and grand theft for the insurance fiddle. The bodies of Bobby Joe Morris and James Goodyear were exhumed and found to contain high levels of arsenic.

  On 6 June 1984, she was sentenced to life imprisonment with no parole for the first twenty-five years.

  On 15 October, she was given twelve years to run consecutively with her life term for the attempted murder of James Gentry. Then on 16 November she was sentenced to death for the murder of her first husband, James Goodyear.

  At 7 a.m. on 30 March 1998, aged fifty-four, she became the first woman to be executed in the state of Florida since 1848 and only the second, after Karla Faye Tucker, in the whole of the United States. She insisted she was innocent to the bitter end.

  Christina Marie Riggs

  She described it as ‘an act of love’. On the evening of 4 November 1997, at her small duplex home in Sherwood, Arkansas, Christina Riggs crushed a small quantity of the antidepressant Elavil into some water and called her kids, five-year-old son, Justin and two-year-old daughter, Shelby. She told them to drink the mixture. The drug did its job and the kids went to sleep. She placed them in their beds and at about 10 p.m., she injected a large dose of potassium chloride into Jason’s neck. Being a nurse, she was very aware that, taken in large doses, potasssium chloride causes cardiac arrest and rapid death. Ironically, it is the third drug to be delivered in the process of execution by lethal injection. Taken undiluted, potassium chloride can cause burning and pain and Justin woke up, writhing in agony and moaning with the pain. Christina quickly injected the boy with morphine to dull the pain, but it did not seem to work. She wrapped her arms around him and gently rocked him, desperately trying to soothe his pain. Eventually, tears rolling down her cheeks, she placed his head back on the bed, picked up a pillow and pushed it down on his face. She held it there until she was sure he was finally dead. She then lifted the pillow from the dead boy’s face and went over to Shelby. Not wanting to subject the toddler to the pain that Justin had suffered, she placed the pillow on her face and held it there. Within a few minutes, she was dead. She picked up Shelby’s tiny two-year-old body and carried it over to where Justin lay, placing her by his brother’s side. She pulled a blanket over them.

  Christine next composed a suicide note, trying to explain her dreadful actions. ‘I hope one day you will forgive me for taking my life and the life of my children,’ she wrote. ‘But I can’t live like this anymore, and I couldn't bear to leave my children behind to be a burden on you or to be separated and raised apart from their fathers and live knowing their mother killed herself.’

  She picked up the syringe, plunged its point into the top of the bottle of potassium chloride, got rid of the air bubbles it by flicking her fingers against it and then injected herself with a dose sufficient to kill five people. She took the bottle of Elavil and began swallowing the pills, washing them down frequently with gulps of water. By the time the bottle was empty, she had swallowed twenty-eight tablets, again more than enough to kill her. As she lay there, the undiluted potassium chloride burned a large hole in her arm.

  The following day, she did not arrive for work at the local hospital where she put in twelve-hour shifts for $17,000 a year. When she failed to call in to say there was a problem, her mother Carole Thomas was informed and she went round to the house to find out what was wrong. She walked in on a horrific scene. ‘My daughter and her babies are dead,’ she said when she called police in a distressed state. They were rushed to hospital where it was found that the children had been dead for between twelve and fourteen hours. Christina was barely alive when she arrived, but they managed to stabilise her and she was moved to intensive care where she was kept under police guard.

  They had kept her alive just so that they could kill her all over again.

  When she was well enough, she was interviewed by investigating police officers and made a full confession. She explained how her life seemed to be collapsing under financial pressures. She told them she was having difficulty obtaining the child support monies from her children’s fathers and even her long shifts at the hospital were not enough to cover daycare for the children while she was at work or her day-to-day expenses. She even told them how she had to pawn her television and VCR just to be able to throw a small birthday party for her son Justin. To make matters worse, she had recently been arrested for passing bad cheques and had the threat of going to jail hanging over her if she did it again. She was severely depressed and, at two hundred and eighty pounds, seriously overweight.

  Her childhood had been a car crash and as she got older, it did not really get any better.

  Born in Lawton, Oklahoma in 1971, she claimed that between the age of seven and thirteen she had been sexually abused by her stepbrother and at thirteen by a neighbour. By fourteen she was already drinking, smoking and indulging in marijuana. She was also grossly overweight, which depressed her and gave her low self-esteem. Convinced that because of her weight there was little chance of any boy liking her, she became sexually promiscuous. She hoped it might make boys like her, if she was easy. The inevitable happened, however; she was pregnant at the age of sixteen. In January 1988, the baby was born and given up for adoption.

  At least she graduated from high school and trained for a career, becoming a licensed practical nurse. She started to work part-time at a Veterans Administration hospital, dating several men, including a sailor and a man who worked as a bouncer at a bar. Then she met Timothy Thompson who was stationed at Tinker Air Force Base.

  In October 1991, she discovered she was pregnant again. She told Thompson the day before he was to be discharged from the Air Force but he would not accept that he was the father and moved back to his home in Minnesota, leaving Christina behind, devastated.

  She resumed her relationship with the sailor she had previously dated, Jon Riggs, and he said he would marry her and accept the baby as his. A boy, Justin was born in June 1992 and in July 1993, she and Riggs were married. On her wedding day, she was pregnant with Riggs’ baby, but tragedy struck that night when she suffered a miscarriage.

  The marriage was soon in trouble and Christina became depressed and even suicidal, partly, she claimed, because of the birth control medication she was using. She was put on the antidepressant Prozac, but when she began to feel better she stopped taking it. In December 1994, a daughter, Shelby, was born and the couple moved to Sherwood, Arkansas, to be closer to her mother who would be able to help with childcare while Christina and Jon were at work. The children were a handful, however; Shelby suffered from ear infections while Justin had attention deficit disorder and was hyperactive. The marriage was crumbling an
d was finally over when Jon Riggs punched Justin in the stomach so hard that the boy had to go to hospital. Riggs moved to Oklahoma and Christina filed for divorce.

  She was now left on her own to care for two small children on an inadequate income. Soon, it all became too much for her and she stole the potassium chloride, morphine and syringes from the hospital where she worked and planned to end it all.

  At her trial, she pleaded not-guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. The prosecution, however, tried to paint her as a self-centred, selfish, premeditated killer. There was a suggestion that the children were an encumbrance and were getting in the way of Christina having a good time. The prosecutor coldly opined, ‘I think the jury just saw her as the manipulative, self-centered person she really and truly is. She claims she was horribly depressed, she was overweight, she was a single mom, and she didn’t have enough money. My response to that is welcome to America. Plenty of folks are in far worst situations than she was.’ He even said that her desire to be executed so that she could be with her children in death at last, was no more than a sign of her capacity for manipulating people.

  The jury of seven women and five men took just fifty-five minutes to find her guilty of two counts of first-degree murder and as the verdict was read out, Christina collapsed.

  At the sentencing phase she delivered a short statement to the jury. ‘I want to die,’ she said. ‘I want to be with my babies. I want you to give me the death penalty.’

  They did.

  She waited for death at the McPherson Unit at Newport Prison, the only resident of the three-cell death row that was housed there. She said she was well looked after, complaining that the food was so good that she had put on thirty pounds since she had been there. She spent her time watching television and reading books and could exercise in an outdoor yard next to her cell. She looked forward to her execution. I’ll be with my children and with God, she said. ‘I’ll be where there’s no more pain. Maybe I’ll find some peace.’

  The date was set for Tuesday 3 May, to be carried out between the hours of 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. in the Cummins Unit, outside Pine Bluff, Arkansas where she was flown three days before. When they lay her down on the gurney on which she would receive the injection that would end her life, there was a delay. They were unable to find a vein to which to attach the catheters. She gave them permission to insert them in her wrists.

  Strapped to the gurney, her last words were as expected, ‘Now I can be with my babies, as I always intended. I love you, my babies.’

  Nine minutes later, Christine Marie Riggs was pronounced dead.

  Aileen Carol Wuornos

  It was an incongruous but powerful double act. Arlene Pralle, a born-again Christian who bred horses near Ocala in Marion County, Florida and the thirty-five-year-old serial-killer prostitute, Aileen Carol Wuornos, languishing in prison in Florida awaiting trial for the murder of seven men.

  Pralle had entered Wuornos’s life out of the blue, writing her a letter in which she said, ‘My name is Arlene Pralle. I’m born-again. You’re going to think I’m crazy, but Jesus told me to write you.’ Pralle would become her advisor and her defender, appearing on talk shows and giving interviews to newspapers throughout 1991, in all of which she talked about ‘the real Aileen Wuornos’ and what she perceived to be the goodness of the serial killer’s nature. Time and time again she rolled out the story of Wuornos’s horrific upbringing, a story of violence, incest, alcoholism and possibly murder.

  To cap it all, on 22 November she and her husband legally adopted Aileen Wuornos, claiming they did it on God’s instructions. They were thirty-five years too late to save her, however.

  She was born Aileen Carol Pittman on 29 February 1956, although she was always known as Lee. Her mother Diane Wuornos had married Leo Dale Pittman at the age of fifteen and had two children by him, Aileen and her brother Keith, born the year before her. Pittman was a psychopathic child molester and, fortunately, Aileen never met him – he was in prison when she was born, for the rape and the attempted murder of an eight-year-old boy. He hanged himself in prison in 1969.

  Bringing up two young children on her own proved too much for Lee’s mother. In 1960, she abandoned them and they were adopted by her parents, Lauri and Britta Wuornos who raised them as their own. In fact, it would not be until the age of twelve that Lee would learn that Lauri and Britta were actually her grandparents. Life was strict in the Wuornos household. Lauri dished out regular beatings to both kids, Lee sometimes receiving these lying face-down on the bed, spread-eagled and naked as he whipped her with a belt. Lee was sexually precocious and claims to have first had sex with her brother Keith at a young age. At fourteen she got pregnant and the Wuornoses sent her to a home for unmarried mothers. The child, a boy, was adopted.

  In July, 1970, Britta Wuornos died of liver failure. She had been drinking heavily under the stress of having a violent husband and kids who were clearly out of control. The family now went into meltdown and tragedy stalked them at every turn. Lauri committed suicide and Lee’s beloved brother Keith would die of throat cancer aged only twenty-one.

  Lee, meanwhile, hit the road, earning her keep through prostitution. She did have one unlikely chance at the good life which, of course, she characteristically blew. In 1976, she was hitch-hiking in Florida when she was picked up by sixty-nine-year-old Lewis Fell. Fell, a well-off yacht club president, fell in love with her almost at first sight and they married. Lee was unable to change, however. She abused Fell and went out drinking, getting into fights and generally causing trouble. A month or two of marriage was all Fell could take. He threw her out and had the marriage annulled.

  Lee returned to her old habits. She spent the next ten years in one failed relationship after another, taking drugs, drinking heavily and getting involved in forgery and even armed robbery. She could not get much lower and on one occasion attempted suicide. She could not even do that properly.

  In 1986, however, she fell head-over-heels in love with a twenty-four-year-old motel maid she met in a gay bar in Daytona. Tyria Moore seemed like the best thing that had ever happened to Lee. They moved in together and Moore quit her job, Lee supporting her from her earning as a prostitute. But these were rarely enough and they were sometimes reduced to sleeping rough. Lee’s looks were beginning to fade, making it increasingly difficult to earn enough and she was terrified of losing Moore. There had to be another way to get her hands on some money.

  Middle-aged owner of an electronics repair business, Richard Mallory, liked to party. He often disappeared for days at a time, engaged in a sex and booze binge and so no one was particularly concerned when the door to his shop was closed one day in early December 1989. They knew that as soon as he ran out of cash he would be back. When his car was found abandoned outside Daytona, however, people began to worry. A few days later, his naked body was found wrapped in a carpet on a back road not far from Interstate 95. He had been killed by three shots from a .22 calibre pistol.

  Six months later on 1 June 1990, they found another naked male corpse who had also been dispatched by shots from a .22. Forty-three-year-old David Spears, a heavy equipment operator, was found in a wooded area, 40 miles north of Tampa, a used condom next to his body. He had last made contact with his boss on 19 May telling him he was en route for Orlando. The truck was located on Interstate 75.

  Five days later, a third naked male body was found close to Interstate 75. Charles Carskaddon had been shot nine times with a .22.

  On 4 July, near Orange Springs in Florida, a 1988 Pontiac Sunbird crashed off State Road 315. Two women, later confirmed to have been Lee and Moore, clambered out of the vehicle, obviously drunk and swearing at each other. When someone asked if they needed any help, Lee begged him not to inform the police. She said her father lived nearby and would sort them out. They walked off.

  The Pontiac was discovered to belong to a sixty-five-year-old retired merchant seaman, Peter Siems who had not been seen since 7 June, having set out to visit family in
Arkansas but never having arrived. Delivery man Troy Burress also failed to arrive at his destination, the depot of a sausage manufacturer, on 30 July. Next morning, his truck was found twenty miles east of Ocala. Five days later his badly decomposed body was found by a family picnicking in the Ocala National Forest close to Highway 19. He had in him two slugs from a .22.

  Police were baffled. They picked up a drifter seen hitch-hiking on Highway 19 on the day that Burress had disappeared but he was soon eliminated from their enquiries. These appeared to be random killings carried out in different places. The only things in common were the fact that the victims were all men who had been driving and were likely to have picked up a hitch-hiker who was a murderer and of course, all the bullets came from a .22.

  On 11 September, a day after celebrating his thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, former police chief Dick Humphries disappeared. Next day he was found, shot seven times with a .22. A month later, trucker and security guard Walter Gino Antonio’s body was found on a logging road in Dixie County. He had been shot four times.

  It became obvious to investigators that the perpetrator was probably a woman and the two women who had crashed Peter Siems’ Pontiac Sunbird looked like the best prospects. Sketches were made from descriptions provided by witnesses to the crash and when these were circulated, the identities of the two women soon became known – Tyria Moore and a woman called Lee. Tracing some of the items taken from the victims and pawned, it soon emerged that Lee was Aileen Carol Wuornos.

  A couple of undercover officers found her in a bar at Port Orange on 8 January 1991 and arrested her on an outstanding warrant issued against one of her many aliases, Lori Grody. The murders were not mentioned. Next day, they picked up Tyria Moore who had been visiting her sister in Pennsylvania. She started to talk about the killings, describing how Lee had driven home one night in Richard Mallory’s Cadillac and bragged about killing him. Meanwhile, they tried to trick Lee into confessing in phone calls she made to Tyria from prison. They reasoned that if Moore told her that the police were trying to implicate her in the murders, Lee would confess to everything rather than see her lover go to jail. Wuornos realised what they were up to, however, and watched her words carefully.