Days later, Squeaky's public defender would ask her why she did it. She answered, “For the trees.”
Ford's Problem
Poor Gerald Ford! An accidental president, he ascended to the highest office in America first because of the resignation of scandal-clouded Vice President Spiro Agnew, then the resignation of scandal-clouded Richard Nixon. Never universally hated the way Nixon and Lyndon Johnson had been, he was a comparatively bland president, as Republicans go, with a reputation for being intellectually challenged and even a trifle goofy. He had a habit of falling down, and it was said that he could not chew gum and walk at the same time.
So why did women keep trying to kill him? Not three weeks after Squeaky Fromme aimed her unloaded .45 at him, again in California—this time San Francisco—a dumpy middle-aged woman named Sarah Jane Moore tried it again, with a .38-caliber revolver. Sarah was a kind of flaky double agent, who hung with various radical groups and informed on them to the FBl. Then she informed on the FBI to her radical pals.
She managed to get off one shot before a bystander knocked the gun away, but missed the president by five feet. “I'm no Squeaky Fromme,” she insisted, as they dragged her off. The reason for her attempt, she said, was to “make a statement.”
Years later, Bill Clinton, jokingly complaining that no one had ever tried to shoot him, said, “Even Ford had Squeaky Fromme.”
Amy Fisher
The Long Island Lolita
There must be something you could say in Amy Fisher's defense. Like, didn't we all do really stupid things when we were seventeen years old that we're now sorry about? Well yeah, but most of us did not shoot the wife of the thirty-eight-year-old guy we were having sex with.
Little Amy was a Jewish American, Italian American princess. Her parents owned a prosperous upholstery business, and she grew up in a ranch-style Long Island house, filled with sunshine, pets, and all the toys she wanted. She had a dog named Muffin and her own phone. She was her parents' darling only child.
But life wasn't so perfect after all. It probably didnt make her life much happier when, at the age of twelve, she was raped by the man her father had hired to retile their bathroom. Amy never told anyone, least of all her father. Years later, she would say that her twice-divorced father was a violent man, and that prison was a welcome relief from home life. “People aren't hitting me here,” Amy said in her prison cell. “And I'm able to grow.”
For Amy's sixteenth birthday her doting parents bought her a used white Dodge, and she managed to total it in less than a year. Daddy took the car–and Amy–to Complete Auto Body and Fender Repair to see if it could be fixed, and that's wher e Amy met Joey Buttafuoco. Joey's dad owned the company and Joey supervised the mechanics.
He was married to Mary Jo Buttafuoco and had two kids. He was thirty-four years old. And before Amy had turned seventeen, he was in bed with her.
They had sex at motels, where Joey would rent a room by the hour, or in an upstairs room at Complete Auto, or even in Amy's bedroom, before her parents got home from the shop. Or they'd go off together on Joey's boat, aptly named Double Trouble. She was still attending high school.
Amy liked older guys; even in ninth grade, she'd ignored the boys in her class in favor of eleventh graders. Joey didn't worry about the fact that he was more than twice her age. He was having the time of his life with a hot teenager. What Amy saw in Joey is another matter. The guy is no Adonis. He's a big, beefy Italian auto repairman with a flattened nose and a heavy Long Island accent. Say! You don't suppose she was looking for a loving father, one who didn't hit her?
About six weeks after she started going to bed with Joey, Amy went to work for the ABBA escort service, a thinly veiled Nassau County prostitution ring, where she averaged $150 for forty-five minutes of sex. She later insisted that it was Joey who pimped her to ABBA. Whatever the truth, owners of another “escort service” would appear on television, along with a prostitute, to say that Joey had been selling cocaine to prostitutes and their pimps, and had been a driver for ABBA, driving the girls to and from their dates, often demanding sex from them in exchange. They called him “Joey Coco Pops.”
At ABBA, Amy said she was twenty-one and gave a phony last name. She got herself a steady clientele of rich businessmen, and after about six months, dumped ABBA, took her clients with her, and set herself up as a freelancer. She bragged about it to her friends at John F. Kennedy High School.
She also started having sex with Paul Makely, the twenty-nine-year-old owner of the gym where she and Joey worked out. Then she started having sex with Chris Drellos, an old boyfriend from her pre-Joey days. But she told them both that the only man she really loved was Joey. They didn't care. The sex was great.
Meanwhile, Amy was getting more and more impatient with Joey. It seemed that all he ever wanted was sex. He insisted he loved her, but he wouldn't leave his wife for her. They'd been childhood sweethearts, he told Amy, he could never hurt her. But what if something should happen to Mary Jo? Amy wondered.
She asked Chris to get her a gun; she wanted to shoot Mary Jo Buttafuoco. Chris couldn't believe it! He tried to stall her; he didn't want to lose the good sex. Anyway, he owed her money. But Amy wouldn't be put off, so in desperation, Chris introduced her to a friend, twenty-one-year-old Stephen Sleeman, who had a .22-caliber rifle. Amy asked him if he'd shoot Mary Jo for her. He said, “Sure.”
He just wanted to get laid.
Stephen led Amy on as long as he could, even sawing off the barrel of his shotgun for her when she asked him to and stalking Mary Jo. In return, she gave him blowjobs in his car. But when it became clear to her that Stephen had no intention of shooting anyone, he was yesterday's news. Amy finally got her gun from a Brooklyn College dropout named Peter Guagenti, paying him $800 for it. Oh yeah, and she promised him sex.
On May 19, 1992, Amy went to the high school nurse's office. She felt sick, she explained, she had cramps. She needed to go home early. The nurse excused her from school. Peter Guagenti picked her up in his maroon 1983 Thunderbird and handed her a .25-caliber gun. He drove her to the Buttafuoco house, parked, and waited for her.
Mary Jo was painting some lawn furniture. She came to the door when Amy rang the bell, and here, according to two books, three made-for-TV movies, and one Internet source, is the gist of their conversation:
AMY: Are you Mrs. Buttafuoco?
MARY JO: Yeah.
AMY: I want to talk to you about your husband, Joey.
MARY JO: What's this about?
AMY: It's not every day that I confront a wife, but your husband, Joey, is having an affair with my sixteen-year-old sister.
MARY JO: Really?
AMY: I think the idea of a forty-year-old man sleeping with a sixteen-year-old girl is disgusting.
MARY JO: Well, he's not forty yet. What's your name?
AMY: Anne Marie.
MARY JO: Where do you live, Anne?
AMY: Over there in Bar Harbor.
MARY JO: Honey, Bar Harbor is in the other direction.
Where do you really live?
AMY: On Dolphin Court.
MARY JO: Who's that with you in the car?
AMY: My boyfriend.
MARY JO: What are you trying to pull here?
AMY: Look, I have proof. (And she hands Mary Jo a T-shirt that says, “Complete Auto Body and Fender Repair.”)
MARY JO: This isn't even Joey's size. He gives those shirts to a lot of people. Listen, I'm going to go in and call Joey now. Thanks for coming by. (Mary Jo turns to go and Amy shoots her in the head.)
What was Amy thinking? Did she really intend to tell Joey, “I just killed your wife, so now we can live happily ever after?” Did she think he would be pleased?
The bullet severed Mary Jo's carotid artery, splintered her jaw, and stopped at the base of her brain, an inch away from her spinal column. Miraculously, she survived and was able to describe her assailant. It didn't take long after that, and Amy was picked up by the police on May 22.
>
By the time the trial started, everybody had changed their stories. Amy insisted that she had no intention of shooting Mary Jo, she just got mad and hit her on the head with the gun, and the gun went off. As for Joey, he swore that he had never been to bed with Amy at all. It was all, he said, a fantasy in her lovely teenage head.
Little Amy, free at last. After seven years in prison, Amy finally walks free.
I am shocked—shocked—to relate that in order to make her $2 million bail, poor Amy was forced to sell the rights to her life story. The result was two books, an off-Broadway play, various newspaper and magazine articles, and three made-for-TV movies, two of which aired opposite each other on the same night, same time slot.
Only Mary Jo, Saint Mary of this unholy trinity, comes off without a trace of sleaze. Despite constant pain and paralysis on the right side of her face, a permanently dislocated jaw and deafness in her right ear, she managed to forgive Amy, help reduce her sentence, and help win her an early parole in 1999. As for Joey, she always insisted that she believed he'd never touched the girl.
What about Joey?
Joey Buttafuoco did six months in jail for statutory rape and did his best to parlay his fifteen minutes of doubtful fame into a show-biz career. He managed to briefly serve as a cable TV talk show host, and he had a small role in a Sean Connery film. David Letterman discovered that he could get laughs just by saying the name “Buttafuoco” to his television audience. Before the case had even come to trial, and much to the dismay of his lawyer, who'd advised him to keep his lip zipped, Joey phoned in to Howard Stern's radio show and swore he had never had sex with Amy.
Joey Buttafuoco
Joey had as much trouble keeping his pants zipped. In 1995, he was busted and fined for soliciting an undercover policewoman.
As for Amy, you can find both an official and an unofficial Amy Fisher fan club on the Internet, and guess what? They both have the same address! The fan club's news from March 2001 was that Amy was now a mother. She had given birth to a boy, and the father was a fifty-one-year-old man whom Amy had met on the Internet.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Max Allan Collins for calling my attention to Kate Bender, to the LaPorte County Public Library and Historical Society Museum, to Frank Robinson for his great pulpy images of murderous women, to cat and Susie from Eclipse Comics for the True Crime comic and trading card, to Harley Yee for the wonderfully absurd cover of Crimes by Women, to M. Parfitt, intrepid girl journalistic photographer, for the pictures of the house on F Street, and to the guys and gals of Aardvark Books, always a great place to do research.
Recommended Reading
If you want to find out more about the women in this book, here's some reading, factual and fictional, trashy and literate. Some of these books are still in print; others may be found in your local used bookstore or on the Internet. And if you can find a copy of The Bonnie and Clyde Scrapbook, consider yourself the luckiest person on Earth. Happy hunting!
Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. New York: Doubleday, 1996. (Grace Marks)
Blackburn, Daniel J. Human Harvest: The Sacramento Murder Story. New York: Knightsbridge Publishing Company, 1990. (Dorothea Puente)
Bravin, Jess. Squeaky: The Life and Times ofLynette Alice Fromme. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997.
DeMille, Agnes. Lizzie Borden: A Dance of Death. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1968.
Eftimiades, Maria. Lethal Lolita: A True Story of Sex, Scandal and Deadly Obsession. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992. (Amy Fisher)
Fido, Martin. The Chronicle of Crime: The Infamous Felons of Modern History and Their Crimes. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1993.
Geary, Rick. The Borden Tragedy: A Memoir of the Infamous Double Murder at Fall River Mass, 1892. New York: NBM Publishing Inc., 1997.
Gelman, B. and Lackman, R. The Bonnie and Clyde Scrapbook. New York: Nostalgia Press, n.d. (probably circa 1967).
Hambleton, Ronald. A Master Killing. Toronto, Canada: Green Bushell, 1978. (Grace Marks)
Jones, Ann. Women Who Kill. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1980.
Kinney, Madeline G. (revised by Tyler, Gretchen). The Gunness Story. La Porte, Indiana: La Porte County Historical Society, 1964, 1984.
McCrumb, Sharyn. The Ballad of Frankie Silver. New York: Penguin USA, 1999.
Moodie, Susanna. Life in the Clearings. Toronto: The MacMillan Company of Canada Limited, 1959. (Grace Marks)
Norton, Carla. Disturbed Ground: The True Story of a Diabolical Female Serial Killer. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1994. (Dorothea Puente)
Radin, Edward D. Lizzie Borden: The Untold Story. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961.
Sams, Ed. Lizzie Borden Unlocked. Ben Lomond, California: Yellow Tulip Press, 2001.
Sheppard, Muriel Earley. Cabins in the Laurel. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935, 1991. (Frankie Silver)
Solanas, Valerie. SCUM Manifesto. London: Phoenix Press, 1991.
Symons, Julian. A Pictorial History of Crime. New York: Bonanza Books, 1966.
Time Life Books. Assassination. Alexandria, Virginia: Time-Warner, 1994.
Trilling, Diana. Mrs. Harris: The Death ofthe Scarsdale Diet Doctor. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981. (Jean Harris)
Vilar, Irene. A Message from God in the Atomic Age. New York: Pantheon Books, 1996. (Lolita Lebron)
Watkins, Maurine. Chicago. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997. (Beulah May Annan)
Young, Perry Deane. The Untold Story of Frankie Silver. Asheboro, North Carolina: Down Home Press, 1998.
And on the Internet:
The Crime Library (http://wvww.crimelibrary.com) features stories on some of the women in this book and other tender and not-so-tender murderers.
Permissions
Art permissions and credits: pg ii illustration ©1975, Becky Wilson; pg 14 Chicago Historical Society; pg 37 art ©1993, Mark Miraglia and Dan Schaefer; pg 39 art ©1992, Paul Lee; pg 47 The LaPorte Country Historical Society; pg 53 Collections of the New York Public Library; pg 62 Archive photos; pg 67 AP/ Wide World Photos; pg 79 Archive photos; pg 90 Archive photos; pg 114 photo courtesy of Penny Arcade; pg 119 James Smith Noel Collection at Louisiana State University; pg 148 courtesy of Rick Geary, ©1997; pg 151 AP/Wide World photos; pg 153 photo courtesy ofJose B. Riveran, East Harlem Online; pg 155 photo by Jose R. Bas, used by permission ofJose R. Bas; pg 164 Trina Robbins, ©1995; pg 169 photo courtesy of Sacramento Bee; pg 181 Archive photos; pg 182 Archive photos.
An exhaustive effort has been made to clear all photographic permissions for this book. If any required acknowledgments have been omitted, it is unintentional. If notified, the publishers will be pleased to rectify any omission in future editions.
About the Author
TRINA ROBBINS has already written about dark'n'nasty goddesses of the Kali and Lilith persuasion in Eternally Bad. She apologizes for her fascination with the dark side–a fascination she shares with countless other women–and promises that once she gets this book out of her system, she'll become nice and maybe even start growing roses.
BOOKS BY TRINA ROBBINS
Eternally Bad
From Girls to Grrrlz
Tomorrow's Heirlooms
The Great Women Superheroes
A Century of Women Cartoonists
Castswalk
Women and the Comics (with Catherine Yronwode)
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