Monster (10 page)

By now, investigators should have been taking careful note of the cluster of incidents that were taking place around the small area of the Seminole Indian Reservation area in the Ocala National Forest, but they did not. David Spears’s abandoned truck had been found close by. Peter Siems’s Pontiac Sunbird had crashed at Orange Springs. Troy Burress had failed to make his last delivery in the area; his van had been found abandoned along SR 17 and his body had been dumped in the forest.

However, if all these coincidences were not enough to galvanise the authorities into action, the discovery of yet another abandoned car at almost the very same spot along CR 484 where Lee had left Carskaddon’s vehicle should have been a loud wake-up call.

By now, a number of law-enforcement officers investigating the various murders were starting to collate their evidence. Marion and Citrus County detectives had compared notes on the Burress and Spears killings. Then they spoke to Detective Tom Muck in Pasco County after they read in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement
bulletin that Muck’s victim might be linked to Spears. That made three bodies, indicating that a serial killer was at large.

The crimes had a number of features in common, including the fact that the victims were all older men who had been robbed, and two of them had had their pockets turned inside out. All three killings had been carried out using a small-calibre weapon. Bullets recovered from the bodies were .22-calibre, copper-coated and hollow-nosed, with rifling marks made by a right-twist firearm.

Another link emerged when the police exchanged the composite sketches made by their individual witnesses. They bore significant similarities, suggesting they were looking for the same short, blonde woman. If she was a sole killer, and not working with a man, the officers reasoned, then she might well use a small handgun.

Captain Steve Binegar, commander of the Marion County Sheriff’s Criminal Investigation Division, knew about the Citrus and Pascoe Counties murders. He could not ignore the similarities between the murders, and had begun to formulate a theory.

Steve’s first job was to form a multi-agency task force with representatives from the counties where the bodies were found. ‘No one stopped to pick up hitchhikers in those days,’ he said, ‘so the perpetrator of those crimes had to be initially non-threatening to the victims. Specifically, when I learned that two women had walked away from Peter Siems’s car, I looked at the Trojan brand of prophylactics. Then came the composites and the
truck-stop 
clerk. Then I said to the other guys, “We’ve got to be looking for a highway hooker, period.”’

Steve Binegar decided to turn to the press for help. In late November, Reuters ran a story about the killings, reporting that the police were looking for two women. Newspapers throughout Florida picked up the story and ran it, along with the sketches of the women in question. In every respect they matched Aileen Wuornos and Tyria Moore –
both
women were now suspects in a
serial-homicide
case.

We can gain a tremendous amount of information from the men who met Lee and were lucky to escape with their lives.

In November 1990, and the date is uncertain, trucker Bobby Lee Copus was driving his car from his home at Lakeland along I-4 to Orlando to pay an insurance bill, a trip of about 45 miles. En route, the heavy-set man in blue jeans pulled into a truck stop near Haines City, some 24 miles south-west of Orlando. Here he met Lee who said that she needed a ride to Orlando. She told the trucker she needed to get to Daytona Beach by a certain time to pick up her two children at a day-care centre. Once in Orlando, she said, she would call her sister for a ride the rest of the way home.

Copus drove to his bank, withdrew approximately $4,000 for his insurance bill and tucked the money into his sun visor. He continued to Orlando along a country road. Lee was soon to proposition the man, asking for $100
with the promise of giving him the best blowjob he had ever had in his life. Copus, who was happily married, had no intentions of cheating on his wife so he declined. Twice more Lee propositioned him, insisting that he stop in an orange grove. Again he refused, and Lee became angry.

Speaking in a thick cowboy drawl as he gave evidence at Lee’s trial, Copus said, ‘When she propositioned me for the third time, she wasn’t the same person. She opened her purse for a comb. I’d seen what I thought was a
small-calibre
pistol in her purse. At this point I was really scared. I just wanted her out of my car in the presence of a lot of people.’

Copus was not as dumb as he may have appeared and he gambled on a trick which saved his life. He stopped at a truck-stop payphone and, after telling Lee he would drive her all the way to Daytona Beach, gave her $5 to call her ‘sister’. As soon as she climbed out of the car, he slammed the door closed and locked it. Lee flew into a rage. ‘What I saw was a woman in total frustration, mad as hell,’ Copus recalled.

As he sped off in a cloud of dust, she screamed after him, ‘Copus, I’ll get you, you son of a bitch! I’ll kill you like I did the other old fat sons of bitches!’

It is highly probable that the next man who stopped to give Lee a ride, more than likely the very same day, was Walter Gino Antonio.

Hailing from Merritt Island, Cocoa Beach – near Cape Canaveral, along the east coast of Florida – 60-year-old
Walter Gino Antonio was a trucker who doubled as a reserve police officer in Brevard County. On Saturday, 17 November, he was driving to Alabama in search of a job. Recently engaged, he wore a gold and silver diamond ring, a gift from his fiancée. It was a size 10 ¾, yellow gold with a diamond set in a field of white gold. When Tyria arrived back in Florida after Thanksgiving, Lee gave her this ring as a gift to prove how deeply she loved her.

Walter’s obvious route was more or less identical to that of the late Peter Siems. He would use the Florida Turnpike as far as Wildwood then head upstate along I-75, probably pulling into the Speedway truck stop before the long haul north.

On Sunday, 18 November, a police officer out hunting game found a man’s body, naked except for a pair of socks, near the intersection of US 19 and US 27 – 15 miles south of Wildwood. Walter Antonio had been shot four times, three times in the torso and once in the head, with a
.22-calibre
handgun.

After the murder, Lee drove the car back to the Fairview Motel where she asked the manager, Rose McNeill, if she could park her ‘boyfriend’s car’ behind the building. She was told that the boyfriend was married and he did not want to have his wife drive by and find his car parked at the motel. Mrs McNeill recalled that Lee left the car there for just a few days. The maroon Pontiac Grand Prix was found on Saturday, 24 November in a wooded area near I-95 and US 1 in northern Brevard County, 20 miles south from where he started his journey. The number plate and keys
were missing and a bumper sticker had been removed. A piece of paper had been crudely pasted over the vehicle identification number, and the doors were locked.

A number of empty Budweiser cans were found on the ground near the vehicle, which had been wiped clean of fingerprints.

Detectives learned that Antonio meticulously recorded every purchase he made of car fuel, retaining the
filling-station
receipts on which he noted his mileage. From this methodical behaviour, they were able to deduce that, in the week since his disappearance, his car had been driven over a thousand miles.

Walter’s fiancée gave the police a list of possessions that had been in his car, including handcuffs, a reserve-deputy badge, a police billy club, a flashlight, a Timex wristwatch, a suitcase, a toolbox and a baseball cap. All of these items were missing. Walter Antonio’s personal identification and clothing were discovered in a wooded area in Taylor County. The rest of his property has not been found.

Lee would later claim that she was out looking for custom as a hooker when Antonio pulled up. She asked if he wanted to help her make some money, but he pulled out his police badge and threatened to arrest her unless he got a ‘free piece of ass’.

Under interrogation by officers, she was asked how many times did she shoot Antonio.

‘Twice, I think.’

‘OK. Now how did you feel when you thought he was a cop?’

‘At first, I… because that one guy, that HRS guy telling me he was a cop, I said to myself, this… he’s a… that guy was an HRS guy. So this is another faker. He’s just trying to get a piece of free ass. And that’s all I thought. Yeah, it pissed me off.’

‘Well, when you shot him the first time, what did he do?’

‘Mmm, well, when we were struggling with the gun and everything else, again, he fell to the ground and he started to run back… run away. And I shot him in the back… right in the back.’

‘What did he do then after you shot him in the back?’

‘He just kind of looked at me for a second and he said… he said something like, uh… shit. What did he say? I think he said, “You cunt,” or something like that. And I said, “You bastard,” and I shot him again.’

In just over a year, Lee Wuornos had scattered a trail of middle-aged male corpses across the highways of central Florida.

Following Captain Steve Binegar’s appeal for information through the newspapers, calls began to pour in and, by mid-December 1990, detectives had a number of firm leads involving the two women suspects.

A man in Homosassa Springs, where Lee asked David Spears to drop her off, said that two women who fitted the composites had rented a recreational vehicle (RV) mobile home from him about a year earlier. After searching through his records, he came up with the names of ‘Tyria Moore’ and ‘Lee’.

A witness in Tampa said two women had worked at her
motel south of Ocala, close to where Troy Burress was murdered. Their names, she said, were Tyria Moore and Susan Blahovec, and they let it be known they had bought an RV in Homosassa Springs. The informant remembered that the blonde Blahovec was the dominant of the duo, and she believed she was a truck-stop prostitute. She also told the police that both were lesbians.

The information from these two callers rang immediate alarm bells with the task force. David Spears, Homosassa Springs, RV trailer, two women. Troy Burress, Ocala, RV trailer, the same two women. The investigation was starting to pay off as previously tenuous links started coming together.

Meanwhile, the composite sketches published by the media of the red-lipped blonde with the stringy hair and her dark-haired, moon-faced companion in the baseball cap had been haunting Tyria for weeks. On Friday, 23 November, the day after Thanksgiving, Tyria returned to Florida where the two women met at the airport. Lee was accompanied by a friend called Donald Willingham who had given her a lift. Don had met Lee in a bar the previous year. They had played pool, shared a few drinks and gone their separate ways.

The plane arrived just after noon. Lee presented Tyria with Walter Gino Antonio’s engagement ring as a token of her love, and Don gave the women a ride back to the Fairview Motel where Lee asked him if he could come back a few days later to help them move their belongings. They were being evicted again. Lee pleaded with Tyria not
to leave and, as another display of her love, the serial killer threw her nine-shot .22 into the brackish water of Rose Bay.

Upon his return on 3 December, Don asked the two women where they were going with their boxes and suitcase. ‘I guess we’ll have to put it in storage,’ said Lee, before explaining that her girlfriend was going back up north and they were splitting up.

Don took the women to the Greyhound bus station in Daytona where Tyria handed back the ring and they tearfully parted company. From there, he drove Lee to Jack’s Mini-Warehouse on Nova Road, where she deposited several cardboard boxes. The owners, Jack and Alice Colbert, rented the bin to Lee who was using the alias Cammie Greene. The cupboard, in building 43, hall number 1, bin G, was paid up until February.

From Jack’s Mini-Warehouse, they drove to Don’s house and had sex in bed.

‘In going to bed with her, did she charge you money?’ Willingham was asked during his deposition.

‘No. She didn’t charge me any money. I had been hauling her around. As a friend, really,’ he said.

Lee wheedled her way back into Rose McNeill’s affections and back into the Fairview Motel, asking to be moved into another room because number 8 held too many painful memories. Her possessions had now dwindled to a tan suitcase and the single key which opened the storage locker at Jack’s Mini-Warehouse.

At 12.05pm on Friday, 7 December, Lee, still using the
alias Cammie Marsh Greene, once again visited the OK pawn shop in Daytona Beach. Her ticket, number 7529, shows that she received a paltry $20 for Walter’s engagement ring.

Now aged 34, but looking considerably older, Lee was mentally and physically almost washed up. Pining for her lost lover, she spent days on end brooding in her room. Out of money and not tricking, she had to leave. She took to the streets, sleeping where she could. If she found a john, and business was good, she would have the money to get a motel room for the night. However, business was not always good and life for Lee Wuornos had reached rock bottom.

The breakthrough for the investigators came from Port Orange near Daytona. Local police had picked up the trail of the two women and were able to provide a detailed account of the couple’s movements from late September to mid-December.

They had stayed, primarily, at the Fairview Motel in Harbor Oaks near Ormond-by-the-Sea where Lee registered as Cammie Marsh Greene. They spent a short time in a small apartment behind the Belgrade restaurant near the Fairview, but returned later to the motel. Then Wuornos, aka Blahovec, aka Greene, returned alone and stayed until 10 December. A national police computer check gave driver’s-licence and criminal-record information on Tyria Moore, Susan Blahovec and Cammie Marsh Greene. Tyria Moore had no record worth considering, breaking-
and-entering
charges against her in 1983 having been dropped.
Blahovec had one trespassing arrest, while Greene had no record at all. Additionally, the photograph on Blahovec’s licence did not match the one for Greene.

The Greene ID was the one that finally paid off. Volusia officers checked pawn shops in the area and found that Cammie Marsh Greene had pawned the 35mm Minolta Freedom camera and a Micronta Road Patrol Radar Detector (both items owned by Richard Mallory). Few people even own a Radio Shack Radar Detector, so this combination sparked the detectives’ interest. In Ormond Beach, Lee had pawned a set of tools that matched the description of those taken from David Spears’s truck, although the police failed to recover these.

The thumbprint on pawn ticket number 3325 proved to be the key. Jenny Ahearn of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s Automated Fingerprint Identification System found nothing on her initial computer search, but not one to be put off, she visited Volusia County with colleagues where they began a hand search of
fingerprint
records.

Within an hour, the team struck gold. The print showed up on a weapons charge and outstanding warrant against a Lori K. Grody. Her fingerprints matched a bloody palm print found in Peter Siems’s Sunbird. All of this information was sent to the National Crime Information Center, and responses came from Michigan, Colorado and Florida confirming that Lori K. Grody, Susan Blahovec and Cammie Marsh Greene were all aliases for one person: Aileen Carol Wuornos.

By now, Tyria was keeping her head down and was back living with her parents in Ohio. Lee was living rough when, on Wednesday, 19 December, she met a paunchy
ex-marine
named Dixie Mills at Wet Willie’s Bar on US 1. Both were drunk, and they shared a common reason to get plastered: Lee was grieving over her loss of Tyria, while Dixie was shattered because his wife had left him after just a few months of marriage.

Mills would later recall that Lee was a very intelligent woman. ‘We talked about a lot of things – from art to parapsychology to ancient history. I couldn’t believe I’d met another human being that had such awesome comprehension and knowledge.’ He found Lee to be a ‘wild, savage party animal’ with an insatiable desire for sex and alcohol. ‘There’s only two people I’ve ever met who have met the devil and shaken his hand,’ boasted Mills. ‘The one is me and the other is her.’

The two hellraisers stayed together until Christmas Eve, when Mills left Lee to return to his wife. On parting, he gave her $50.

Almost a year later, Mills recounted an entirely different story to the
Globe
newspaper.

‘It all started so innocently. But it turned into a nightmare. If I’d known what I was getting myself into, I would have run for my life. But I didn’t have a clue. On that first day, I was trying to drown my sorrows in beer at Wet Willie’s in Daytona Beach, and I saw this woman doing exactly the same thing down at the other end of the bar … that night, her troubles made her all the more
appealing. We were both pretty down and out, and we desperately needed each other. Suddenly, she turned, looked deep into my eyes and said, “Dick, you and I are one – aren’t we.”’

Several days later, he said that Lee made him an offer. ‘Dick, I’ll be your wife if you pay me $500 a month.’

Mills went on to claim that he was ‘stunned’, and no way would he ever do such a thing. And, according to him, she revealed many of her secret fantasies, one of which entailed her being hooded while she was tied to a tree in a forest. Then ‘a guy would come up to her and rape her, and then shoot her in the head’. She told him that the killing would make her climax.

Apparently, and this is Mills’s side of the story, he took her to two family parties – one at Christmas and the other at his daughter’s house in Ohio. ‘On both occasions, she got blind drunk and insulted everybody. After that I offered her $500 if she stayed out of my life.’

Lee dismissed all of this to me, saying, ‘Yeah, I remember the guy. I stayed with him and he paid me for sex. He gave me $50 plus a few beers. I never went to no parties with him because he left me to get with his wife over Christmas. He was crying like a kid over his wife. Never met his daughter either. What man is going to introduce a hooker like me to his daughter when he is trying to get back with his wife? It is all bull.’