Divorce and suicide
But by the time the divorce had come through she was financially secure again for her brother Keith had left her ten thousand dollars from a life insurance policy. Again, a more stable young woman would have spent it on a second hand mobile home - but Aileen spent it on a car and duly wrecked it. She spent the rest on drink and drugs and remained homeless, living in abandoned cars or sleeping on the beach.
Sometimes she got work in motels and at other times she waitressed. She kept on drinking with the guys at the biker bars, dressing in leather like they did so that she fitted in. When she couldn’t make enough money from soliciting truck drivers she took to petty crime.
Aileen forged cheques and was arrested. She drunkenly breached the peace and was arrested. Then she upped the ante by hitching to Florida and holding up a convenience store. Caught again, she served just over a year in jail for armed robbery. When she was released she tried to commit suicide. A year after leaving prison she was arrested again for cheque forgery.
Various arrests followed over the ensuing months as she stole a car, stole a gun and was stopped for speeding. Officials found her loud and angry and determined to do exactly as she pleased. One man accused her of pointing her gun at him and demanding money, but she denied it and the case apparently didn’t go to court.
Aileen acted as if she didn’t give a damn about anyone - just as she’d ultimately tried not to show pain as her grandfather beat her. But deep down she wanted to be loved, to have a special person in her life.
The love object
In the summer of 1986, she went to a gay bar in Daytona and met Tyria Moore, who worked as a motel maid. Tyria was an athletic looking twenty-two-year old dressed in shorts and a baseball cap. Aileen was twenty-seven and taller, and was looking impressive in one of her leather outfits. Both women had enjoyed previous lesbian relationships.
Tyria - soon shortened to Ty - was a religious woman who wasn’t always comfortable with her own sexuality. Her mother had died when she was a toddler so she and Aileen each had lack of maternal love as an added bond. The two blondes talked and drank and had sex that first night. Soon they declared their undying love.
Within days they had rented an apartment together and repainted it. They hung around pool clubs and played the arcades and danced the night away. They drank in the Daytona bars and Aileen often did a few shifts there to bring in some more money. For the first year - as it is with most couples - the sex was particularly intense.
Tyria quit her job for a while. Some sources say this was because she preferred not to work whilst other criminologists suggest that it was at Aileen’s insistence because she was jealous of Tyria having fun with her work colleagues. Whatever the reason, Ty stayed home and watched TV and the couple lived off Aileen’s prostitution money for a while. She would go to truck stops or hitchhike and spin hard luck stories in order to get a few beers and much-needed dollars. Tyria would cook simple fried meals for them both when Aileen got home.
But the drink and hard life was taking its toll on Aileen - now shortened to Lee - and during the next four years she put on weight, her hair went lank and she became less and less attractive to the punters. The money she could bring in wasn’t enough to feed one, far less two of them, so the couple often couldn’t afford to rent a room in even the cheapest motel. Tyria was friendly and good at motel work so could have kept employment, but Aileen was sullen and jealous so the pair were often asked to move on.
In some ways this nomadic life suited Aileen as she wanted Tyria to be as rootless as she was. (Tyria had a sister and a father who she kept in touch with.) But at the same time she didn’t want to lose her long-term relationship - and it was clear that Tyria wasn’t coping well with sleeping in farm outbuildings or in the open air.
The couple constantly fought, sometimes coming to blows that again made them unpopular with motel keepers. Their sex life was over though they still cared deeply for each other. If only they could find enough cash to put a roof over their heads and keep them in much-craved beer.
Aileen began to look at the men she pleasured in a different way, noticing their watches and cars and radios. She was only making a few dollars from having sex with them but if she stole everything they had…
The first victim
At the end of November 1989 she got into conversation with Richard Mallory, a fifty one-year-old electrician who ran a Florida repair shop. He was a secretive man who had had numerous failed relationships. He had also served time for rape. He often took off on jaunts in which he visited porn theatres and topless bars so he wasn’t reported missing when he didn’t return from this latest trip. Mallory was a heavy drinker who was forever sacking his staff so he had many enemies.
He and Aileen drank and talked and drove the highways together for a few hours, then parked in the Daytona Beach woods for a sex party. But whilst they were sitting in the car drinking a bottle of vodka, Aileen shot him three times in the chest and once in the side with her .22 calibre pistol. She pulled him out of the vehicle and went through his pockets, soon emptying his wallet. Finally she covered his body with an old piece of rubber-backed carpet remnant that was conveniently lying on the ground.
She wouldn’t have to do any more hooking or hitchhiking again tonight. Aileen swiftly drove away in Richard Mallory’s beige Cadillac, taking his watch and camera and other goods with her. The next day she abandoned the vehicle in Volusia County, having wiped away any prints.
Aileen went home and told Tyria what she’d done. The new killer didn’t seem upset and even hinted that she’d like to kill another man. Tyria apparently said she didn’t want to hear any more.
Richard Mallory’s body was found almost a fortnight later on Dec 13th 1989 still wrapped in the carpet. It was fully clothed.
The second victim
In May 1990 she was hitchhiking again when forty three-year old David Spears stopped his truck for her. The heavy equipment operator was heading towards Orlando to see his ex-wife and his daughter, a regular weekend trip. Aileen shot him six times with her .22 and left the body in the woods near Tampa. It wasn’t identified until early June. She stole his truck but abandoned it soon afterwards, having ripped the licence plate off.
The third victim
The following month - on 6th June - Aileen flagged down forty-year-old Charles Carskaddon as he drove to Tampa to meet his fiancee. The part time rodeo worker had just landed a new job and was feeling good. At some stage in the journey they stopped and Charles took all of his clothes off. Aileen promptly shot him nine times.
This time she stole his .45 automatic, his money and his jewellery. She also took his car and drove it back to the motel where she and Ty were staying. The next day she dumped the car and it was immediately recovered by the authorities. But by the time Charles’ body was found, close to Interstate 15 and just across the state line from Florida, it was badly decomposed.
The fourth victim
Peter Siems was driving towards New Jersey on 7th June to visit relatives. The sixty five year old was heavily involved in a religious organisation and had a stack of Bibles in the car. Aileen had also been interested in religion when she was younger (Britta had taken her to church when she was a child) and had sought out ministers to tell her life story to.
Peter stopped his Sunbird and picked the hitchhiker up. At some stage on the journey she shot him. His body has never been found but police believe it was most likely dumped in a swamp. Again, Aileen took his personal possessions and drove off in his car.
The car crash
On 4th July Aileen and Ty lost control of their vehicle - or, to be more precise, Ty lost control of the Pontiac Sunbird which Aileen had stolen from Peter Siems after shooting him. Both women staggered, bleeding, from the car and tried to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the wreck. A couple saw them running away but Aileen begged them not to call the police. She and Ty ran till they found a water spigot and used it to rinse the blood from thei
r clothes and hair.
When a volunteer fireman stopped them and asked if they had anything to do with the car crash they denied it and said they were going to a fireworks display. Aileen did most of the talking whilst Ty stood holding a cooler filled with beer. The women disappeared into the darkness and were long gone by the time the car was identified as belonging to the missing Peter Siems.
The fifth victim
Eugene Troy Burress, a meat delivery driver aged fifty, was driving towards Daytona when he stopped to pick Aileen up. She shot him once in the back and once in the chest, then covered his body with leaves and stole his cash. Then she drove his truck away, abandoning it shortly afterwards. It was found the next day and his decomposing body was found after five days.
The sixth victim
On 10th or 11th September Richard (Dick) Humphreys, a married child abuse investigator picked Aileen up. The fifty-six-year old was a former police chief. Aileen shot him seven times and stole his car, abandoning it the following week. She also stole several of his personal effects, abandoning others some miles from the murder scene.
The seventh victim
A month later Walter Gino Antonio, a sixty-year-old trucker, picked her up and they parked in a quiet area to have a sex session. Aileen shot him three times in the back and once in the head with her pistol. The former reserve policeman was found nude except for his socks. She had stolen numerous possessions from his body and his vehicle, including his police badge, handcuffs and gold ring. She also stole his car, leaving it in Brevard County, the next state.
The men who were found nude had apparently prepared for sex - but the bodies showed no sign of sexual activity. Aileen must have shot them all before the act took place. In more than one instance they had been shot in the back, her gender ensuring that even the men with police experience turned away from her, not viewing her as a homicidal threat.
The net closes
Police now went to the papers with sketches of two women seen running from the wrecked car. Over three hundred readers responded. Several phoned in the names of Tyria Moore and her lover Lee (Lee was Alieen’s nickname). People gave various surnames for Aileen Wuornos as she had used several aliases.
Meanwhile Aileen had started to pawn her victim’s possessions using a false name. In early December 1990 she got cash for Mallory’s radar detector and camera. In the same week, albeit in other pawn shops, she got money for Walter Antonio’s ring and David Spears tools.
Increasingly anxious about the net closing in, Tyria packed her bags and went to relatives in Ohio whilst Aileen was out buying alcohol. Aileen was desolate. She’d have been even more desolate if she’d known that Ty had phoned the Florida police and told them what her former lover had done.
The police now traced some possessions of the dead man that Aileen had pawned. She’d left her prints on one of the cars that she’d stolen and on a pawn shop receipt - Florida pawn shops insist that you leave your finger or thumb print when pawning possessions. Those prints matched those of Aileen that the police had on file due to her earlier theft-related crimes.
The police began to keep her under surveillance, following her from bar to bar. She bedded down for the night in an old car seat outside the last bar she visited, fittingly called The Last Resort.
The next afternoon two undercover cops who had pretended to befriend her asked if she wanted to come back to their motel and freshen up. She said yes, at which stage she was arrested for an earlier outstanding charge. They didn’t want to charge her with murder yet as they hadn’t got the weapon or Tyria Moore.
The confession
On 14th January Aileen and Ty spoke on the phone. Police were taping the call to Aileen in prison. Aileen told Ty that she was only in jail for a weapons violation. Ty, in turn, said what the police had told her to say - that she, Ty, was being considered as the killer of the seven men. Ty and Aileen talked again on the phone the next day and the next. ‘I’m not going to let you go to jail,’ Aileen said, adding ‘If I have to confess, I will.’ She did so on the 16th of that month.
She said that all of the killings were self-defence. She said this more than sixty times during her confession which was videotaped. ‘I just got sick of it,’ she said to the authorities, ‘If I didn’t kill all those guys I would have been raped a total of twenty times maybe. Or killed. You never know. But I got them first.’ (Seven years later she would admit that this self defence claim was a lie.)
The trial
On 14th January 1992 Aileen went on trial in Florida for the murder of Richard Mallory. The jury comprised five men and seven women. The doctor who had autopsied Mallory said that he had taken up to twenty minutes to die.
Tyria Moore testified that Aileen hadn’t seemed upset when she’d told her about killing the electrician. She also said that Aileen hadn’t mentioned being assaulted by the man.
The prosecution said that Aileen was a predatory prostitute and added ‘She killed out of greed. No longer satisfied with the ten, twenty, thirty dollars, she wanted it all. It wasn’t enough to control his body, she wanted the ultimate - his car, his property, his life.’
A week and a half into the trial, Aileen took the stand in her own defence, stating that Mallory had raped, sodomised and tortured her. This contrasted strongly with her earlier taped statement, but she became angry when inconsistencies in her story were pointed out. Occasionally she cried.
The defense said that she was mentally ill, that she had a borderline personality disorder. Borderline adults have invariably been sexually - and usually physically - abused throughout their childhoods and as adults are filled with anxiety, depression and rage. With her nervous energy, suicide attempt and violent outbursts, Aileen perfectly fitted the bill.
Two hours after the summaries, the jury returned to find her guilty of first degree murder. She shouted that she was innocent, adding ‘I hope you get raped, scumbags of America!’
The jury recommended that she be sentenced to die in the electric chair. Judge Blount accepted their recommendation on 31st January and she was put on Death Row in Broward County. As she was driven away in a police van, she called out that the cops were the guilty ones. It was a theme she would later return to again and again.
In April she was charged with killing Burress, Humphreys and Spears. The following month she was sentenced to death for those killings. This time she told the judge ‘I’ll go to heaven now and you will rot in hell.’
She offered to help police find Peter Siems body, but when they took her back to the area she was unable to do so. She has never been charged with his death.
Psychological profile
Aileen’s entire life story explains her hostile thinking - abandoned by her mother, brutalised by her grandfather, raped by her grandparent’s friend at thirteen and pregnant at fourteen, she had no reason to see the world as a benign place. Then her brother Keith died of throat cancer at a cruelly young age.
A prison psychologist who interviewed Aileen for several days described her as paranoid and said that she believed the world was out to get her. In truth, the little part of the world she knew as a child robbed her of love and trust and innocence - it was out to get her and it ruined her totally.
Her experiences of having sex for money for so many years must also have been incredibly destructive. Many men take all of their rage out on prostitutes and the words those girls hear most often are ‘Suck it, bitch.’
She clearly didn’t feel that she could elevate herself through work, marriage or education, and instead dreamed of becoming a singer or an actress - in other words she had fantasies rather than ambitions. Embryonic serial killers are big on fantasy but don’t put in the hard work that actually makes events take place. They’ve usually been so harshly criticised when they were growing up that they don’t feel, deep down, that they have the talent - or even the right - to succeed.
Yet Aileen could have made things happen with her voice, even if it was just as a nightclub singer. People who heard
her sing in the Daytona bars said that she sounded good. When drunk, she would tell other drinkers that they’d read of her life story one day. Ironically she would achieve cinematic infamy rather than fame.
Not the first
The TV networks were quick to put the story on celluloid and soon Jean Smart was brilliantly portraying the nervy, fast-drinking Wuornos in the film Overkill. Jean Smart is equally believable in portraying Aileen’s distress when her lover Ty leaves her. But she’s much less ravaged looking than Aileen - and the supposed flashbacks to her childhood show a beautifully dressed little girl with perfect hair and graceful movements, a far cry from the neglected, underfed child she actually was.
The back of the video describes Aileen Wuornos as ‘America’s first female serial killer’ - in truth, other American female serial killers that pre-date her include Amy Gilligan (who poisoned five husbands and several elderly patients) and Terri Rachels (who lethally injected nine patients) and Jane Toppan, who confessed to over thirty murders again using lethal injections. Some people believe Toppan may actually have caused over a hundred deaths.
Other US female serial killers who pre-date Aileen Wuornos are profiled in this book, namely Genene Jones, Martha Ann Johnson and Judith Neelley. And Carol Bundy (with Doug Clark) and Gwen Graham/Catherine Woods also qualify if you include female serial killers acting as part of a team.
Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers Page 20
