Dead Men Walking

by Bill Wallace

  On 16 January, however, she confessed, emphasis-ing that Moore had nothing to do with the murders. She insisted that in each case she had killed in self defence, that all her victims had tried to rape her or were threatening violence to her. But every time she told her story she changed it, embellishing it and making it even more sensational than it already was. She was certain there was a lot of money to be made in book and movie deals and, indeed, there was a firestorm in the media as her story began to emerge. Even the investigating officers were being besieged in their homes by the media. However, she was to be frustrated in her efforts to at last earn some serious money. The state of Florida does not permit felons to profit from their crimes. Throughout 1991, Arlene Pralle worked her way around the media and Wuornos herself gave interviews to the media. Attorneys came up with a plea bargain, in which she would plead guilty to six charges and receive six consecutive life terms. One state attorney, however, was adamant that she should receive the death penalty and on 14 January 1992, she went to trial for the murder of Richard Mallory.

  There was little chance of any other verdict except guilty, especially after she took the stand. It took the jury only two hours on 27 January to reach a verdict of guilty of first-degree murder and as they filed out of the courtroom, Lee Wuornos exploded with rage, screaming, ‘I’m innocent! I was raped! I hope you get raped! Scumbags of America!’ On 31 January, she was sentenced to die in the electric chair.

  In March, she pleaded no contest to the murders of Dick Humphreys, Troy Burress and David Spears, claiming she wished to ‘get right with God’. She made a statement to the court in which she said, ‘I wanted to confess to you that Richard Mallory did violently rape me as I’ve told you. But these others did not. [They] only began to start to.’ She then turned to Assistant State Attorney Ric Ridgeway and snarled, ‘I hope your wife and children get raped in the ass!’ Another three death sentences were handed down.

  In the next year she received death sentences for the murders of Charles Carskaddon and Walter Antonio, but as Peter Siems’ body was never found, no charges were brought on that case.

  When it emerged that Richard Mallory had done time for sexual violence, it was thought that a retrial might be ordered but it failed to happen and all six death sentences were confirmed by the Florida Supreme Court. In April, she stopped all her appeals and also chose to die by lethal injection rather than in the electric chair.

  Aileen Carol Wuornos was executed on Wednesday 9 October 2002, a decade after she had terrorised the byways of Florida. She had more or less volunteered for execution as she could easily have continued to appeal for years to come. It was also a time when there were doubts about the ethics of capital punishment and Florida Governor, Jeb Bush, had issued stays on a number of executions. But she could not conceive of continuing to live in her six-by-nine foot prison cell, starved of human contact.

  By the end, the relationship with Arlene Pralle had soured and Pralle, her adoptive mother, did not even know the date of the execution.

  Aileen Wuornos died pretty much as she lived, alone and unloved. ‘I’d just like to say I’m sailing with the Rock,’ she said after they had strapped her into the electric chair, ‘and I’ll be back like Independence Day with Jesus, June 6, like the movie, big mothership and all. I’ll be back.’

  Lynda Cheryl Lyon Block

  In 1927, when Alabama legislators decided to switch from hanging to electrocution as their method of execution, there was only one thing missing – an electric chair. They turned for help to a man called Edward Mason, a British-born cabinet-maker in prison for a series of burglaries in Mobile, asking him to build the chair that would become famous as Yellow Mama. As Mason told a reporter at the time, he hoped to get a chance at parole in exchange for the chair. ‘Every stroke of the saw meant liberty to me,’ he said ‘and the fact that it would aid in bringing death to others just didn’t occur to me.’ Unfortunately for Mason, he did not get that parole. He completed his sentence and disappeared from history.

  The 178th and last person to experience Mason’s craftsmanship, Lynda Lyon Block, who was executed on 10 May 2002, the first woman to be executed in the state of Alabama since 1957. Her crime was the murder of a police officer, Sergeant Roger Motley on 4 October 1993.

  Born in Orlando, Florida in 1948, Lynda had always been a bit strange, even as a kid. She is remembered as being different to her peers, preferring to read a good book to watching television and opting for Ravel over rock. Her mother thinks that Lynda was badly affected by the death of her father when she was young and that she spent her life trying to replace him. With her first husband she certainly got the age right. Moving back to Orlando in 1983, at the age of thirty-five, she married Karl Block, a man twice her age.

  Undoubtedly, Block enjoyed the attention of a woman so much younger than him, but he was also desperate for a son, having lost his only son in a car accident in 1974. He wanted someone to carry on the family name and hoped that Lynda would provide that. His family was horrified, of course, especially his daughter, Marie, who had actually been in the same class at high school as her future stepmother. The Lynda Block she encountered now, a noisy woman with clattering jewellery, long, manicured fingernails and dyed black hair, was very different to the quiet, studious girl she remembered from twenty years previously. She thought that Lynda was a gold-digger and that the marriage would be over in a short time. Lynda surprised her, however, by hanging around for eight years and giving Karl Block the son he so badly wanted. She swapped her husband for politics, becoming interested in the Libertarian Party, a small patriotic militia group whose members believe that governmental functions and things such as driving licences, income tax and birth certificates are illegal. They argue that the government has been taken over by power-hungry bureaucracies that do not remain faithful to the Constitution of the United States of America and have betrayed the ideals of the founding fathers. The individuals holding these views have, as it were, seceded from the United States and in support of their extreme stance they cite obscure legal precedents, forgotten constitutional amendments and quote liberally from the founding fathers.

  Lynda Block attended rallies and lectures and began to publish a magazine, Liberatus for which she wrote articles with titles such as ‘The Day Our Country Was Stolen.’ Many in the movement took a huge interest in the 1993 siege at Waco, where Branch Davidian cult leader, David Koresh, engaged in a stand-off with government agents. When the compound was destroyed and Koresh and most of his group were killed, party members accepted it as proof that the federal government was out of control.

  By August 1993, there was a new love in Lynda Block’s life, George Sibley, also a member of the Libertarian Party. Block, however, was not yet free of Karl and their divorce was mired in disputes about money. One evening in the summer of 1993, she and Sibley visited his apartment to discuss the money, but there was an argument and then a scuffle in which Karl received a knife wound to the chest.

  Sibley and Lynda were charged with assault and battery but prosecution attorneys were keen not to waste too much time on what was merely a minor domestic dispute to their minds. They decided that they would be happy if the accused would accept six years’ probation. Lynda Block and George Sibley brought their Libertarian principles to the case, however. They saw the criminal justice system as an enemy and decided to take it on. Rejecting the plea bargain, they sacked the lawyer appointed for them by the court and put together their own defence, interlacing it with the paranoia of the outsider. Sibley, for instance, believed that the judge in the case was using hand gestures to transmit secret signals to the court reporter to omit from the court record certain statements that were being made.

  Eventually, they refused to appear at the final sentencing hearing, barricading themselves instead inside what they hoped would be their own version of Waco – Sibley’s Pine Hills home, complete with guns and a copious supply of ammunition. A dramatic fax was delivered to newspapers saying that they would ‘rathe
r die than live as slaves’. But the police ignored them, keeping the house under routine surveillance, but refusing to do much more. Finally, an officer arrived to serve them with some papers only to find they had loaded their arsenal – three handguns, two semi-automatic rifles and an M-14 rifle – and belongings, including Lynda’s nine-year-old son, into Sibley’s Ford Mustang and fled in the direction of Mobile, Alabama.

  At Opelika, just off Interstate 85 between Atlanta and Montgomery, they stopped in a Wal-Mart car park so that Lynda could make a phone call. That need to make a call led them to their own Waco at last, in the shape of a thirty-nine-year-old police sergeant, Roger Motley, who had never fired a shot in anger.

  Motley was shopping for supplies for the town jail which he was in charge of. He had just finished having lunch with his wife when a woman approached him. In a car in the car park she said she had seen a little boy who looked like he needed help. The car was filled with bedding and it looked like the family were actually living in it. She urged him to go and investigate. It was an act of kindness she and Roger Motley would live to regret. Motley climbed into his patrol car and started to cruise along the lines of cars, finally pulling up behind the Mustang the woman had described. Inside the car, Sibley was alone with the boy, Lynda having gone to the phone booth to make her call. The officer approached the car and asked Sibley to show him his driving licence. Sibley replied that he didn’t need one and began to explain why, citing his Libertarian beliefs, when he noticed Motley’s hand on his gun holster. Sibley reached down and pulled out a gun.

  Motley cursed but acted quickly on seeing the weapon, spinning away from the Mustang back to his car and crouching down behind it out of sight as Sibley fired his weapon. There were screams as people loading their shopping into their cars fell to the ground or ran back into the store. Motley failed to see Lynda Block who had dropped the phone on which she had been speaking to a friend and started to run toward the scene, a 9mm Glock pistol that she had pulled from her bag in her hand. She kept firing as Motley seemed to reach into his vehicle. She thought, she claimed later, that he was reaching for a shotgun, but he was actually reaching for his radio, calling in ‘Double zero’ which was the code for an officer in trouble. At that moment, a bullet from Lynda Block’s Glock thudded into his chest. He was not wearing a bulletproof vest because they were in short supply and he had loaned his to a rookie cop.

  He clambered into the patrol car and tried to get away but lost consciousness as it started to move. It crashed into a parked car. Sergeant Motley was rushed to hospital but died later that afternoon. Meanwhile, Sibley and Lynda tore out of the car park, trying to get out of town. They were stopped by a roadblock outside Opelika. Fearing that there would be another shoot-out, Lynda shouted to a negotiator, ‘Let’s not have another Waco happen here.’ The puzzled officer replied, ‘What’s Waco?’

  Lynda and Sibley were found guilty and sentenced to death. The murder of a police officer could bring nothing less.

  On 10 May 2002, Lynda Block, wearing prison whites with her head shaved and her face covered by a black veil, was strapped into Yellow Mama and at 12.01 a.m. 2,050 volts of electricity were deivered into her body for a period of 100 seconds. She had no last meal request and made no final statement.

  George Sibley followed her two years later. At last they had found their Waco.

  Betty Lou Beets

  She was a grandmother with five children, nine grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. She was also the murderer of three of her five husbands and the fourth woman to be executed in the United States since the Supreme Court had lifted its ban on capital punishment in 1976.

  On 6 August 1983, forty-six-year-old Betty Lou Beets reported her husband of just under a year, Jimmy Don Beets, a retired Dallas firefighter, was missing from their home near Cedar Creek Lake in Henderson County, Texas. Six days later, a couple of fishermen, fishing on Cedar Creek Reservoir just after dark discovered an empty fishing boat drifting near the Redwood Beach Marina. They dragged it ashore and examined it, finding a fishing licence belonging to Jimmy Don. Also in the boat were a life jacket and some nitroglycerine pills.

  The Coast Guard was contacted and they called Betty Lou to tell her they thought that the boat had finally been found. Betty Lou immediately drove over to the marina and identified it as her husband’s.

  It was too windy to start looking for Jimmy Don that night but the next morning an extensive search of the area, involving hundreds of people, began. For three weeks they looked for him but not a trace was found. It was surmised that he may have suffered a heart attack and fallen overboard. However, they were surprised that his spectacles were found in the bottom of the boat. As he wore them all the time, it might be imagined that they would have gone overboard with him.

  When the search began to wind down, Betty Lou enquired whether it would be alright to collect the insurance and retirement benefits that Jimmy Don had accrued during his years working for the Dallas Fire Department. Disappointingly for her, though, she was informed that she would be unable to pick up the $100,000 life insurance and $1,200 a month pension until he had been missing long enough to be declared legally dead – seven years.

  A year after he disappeared, the house in which she had lived with Jimmy Don and which she had been trying unsuccessfully to sell, burned down in a mysterious fire. When she tried to collect on the insurance policy, the insurance company refused to pay out because of the strange circumstances surrounding the fire.

  In 1985, Rick Rose a curious investigator with the Henderson County Sheriff’s Department received information from Betty Lou’s daughter-in-law that there might be some suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of Jimmy Don Beets. What he discovered was chilling. Betty Lou was a woman who, when she tired of a husband, or decided to collect on an insurance policy, had no compunction over resorting to murder.

  Robbie Branson was questioned and confessed that his mother had told him she was planning to kill Jimmy Don. She suggested that he go out for a while as she did not want him around when she shot him. Robbie jumped on his motorbike, returning two hours later to find his stepfather dead of two gunshot wounds. She had shot him while he slept. He helped her carry the body out into the front yard where his mother buried it under a wishing well. The next day, he said, she placed some of her husband’s medication in his fishing boat while he removed the propeller. He helped her get the boat out into the lake where they left it to be found.

  Detective Rose took out a search warrant and turned Betty Lou’s property upside-down, finding Jimmy Don’s body. Under the garage, they also found the remains of another of Betty Lou’s husbands, Doyle Wayne Barker. Two bullets were found in Jimmy Don’s body and five in Barker’s. All five were fired from a .38 calibre pistol. A .38 had been seized at the house during an earlier, unrelated incident. Betty Lou’s daughter, Shirley Stenger then came forward to say that she had actually helped her mother to bury Barker’s body in October 1981, after Betty Lou had shot and killed him.

  Betty Lou was arrested on 8 June 1985.

  They looked into her past and discovered that she had also shot her second husband, Bill Lane, in the side after they had separated. They had even remarried again for a while but it did not work out.

  Her trial for the murder for remuneration and the promise of remuneration opened on 11 July 1985 in Henderson County and she entered a plea of not- guilty, claiming that her two children had committed the murders. In October, the jury returned a verdict of guilty and Betty Lou was sentenced to die by lethal injection, but only once the appeals process had been exhausted.

  Much began to be made of Betty Lou’s abuse through the years and the desperate poverty of her childhood. She was born into a poor tobacco share-cropping family in North Carolina in 1937 and the poverty was abject. The family – her parents and a brother three-years older than her – lived in a windowless shack without water or electricity. They later moved to Virginia where her parents found work in a cotton mill. Not
long after, Betty Lou contracted measles which left her partially deaf which presented difficulties at school where she was diagnosed as having learning difficulties. Although she taught herself to lip-read, her deafness created huge problems for her.

  She believes she was first raped when she was five. She married for the first time at the age of fifteen and remained married for eighteen years, during which time she gave birth to six children. When she was thirty-one, however, her husband left her very suddenly leaving her to try to bring up her children alone.

  She was beaten and abused by most of her husbands and a coalition of death penalty opponents and battered women’s advocates took up her cause. They maintained that her abuse was never introduced at her trial as a mitigating factor. They said that she was convicted before ‘battered women’s syndrome’ began to be widely used by women as a defence in courtrooms and before states began commuting the sentences of victims of domestic violence, of which there have been more than one hundred instances since 1991. Betty Lou Beets, they claimed, was a victim of ineffective counsel.

  But Betty Lou never showed any remorse nor confessed and the Texas Board of Paroles and Pardons refused in 1991 to grant a reprieve or commute the sentence. Neither did she show enough evidence that domestic violence caused her to commit the crime. They still believed it was done for financial gain.