Monster (7 page)

At 2.25pm on Wednesday, 6 December, Lee, using the alias of Cammie Marsh Green of 1 High Ridge Road, strolled into OK Pawn and Jewelry Inc, 305 Dr Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard, Daytona Beach. She was about to pawn a Minolta Freedom camera and a Radio Shack Micronta Road Patrol Radar Detector, formerly the property of Richard Mallory. The ticket number 3325 recorded the transaction, and the manager, Linda Miller, handed over $35. Lee’s obligatory thumbprint on the document would later prove part of her undoing.

The murder weapon was found after Lee’s arrest. For four days police searched Rose Bay, and the rusty gun was located in the south-east corner between the sea wall and the first set of pilings supporting the bridge. Donald Champagne, ballistics expert and retired from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, identified it as a
.22-calibre
, nine-shot pistol with six grooves and a right-hand twist. ‘A popular weapon.’

There were no ballistic tests carried out on the weapon in an effort to match the casings and bullets with the revolver. The weapon was in such a bad state, the examiner would have risked serious injury had the gun been fired again.

Quite why police – in the full knowledge of Tyria’s
conflicting statements and outright lies – chose not to prosecute her, at least as an accessory after the fact in the murder of Richard Mallory, we may only surmise. Had Tyria reported this murder to the police, at least seven other men would not have been shot to death. However, as later events will show, there was much more to this than meets the eye.

The jury did not know about Mallory and his predilections Of course, the last thing an attorney needs when prosecuting a woman accused of brutal murder, who is claiming self-defence, is for the court to learn the cold fact that the victim was a brutal, hard-drinking sexual deviant. Nevertheless, the truth is that many years back, in Anne Arundel County, Mallory had been confined in the Maryland penitentiary on the not insignificant charge of housebreaking with intent to rape.

Literally caught with his trousers down, and with mitigation in mind, Mallory entered a plea of insanity at his trial on Monday, 2 December 1957. The court ordered that a Dr Harold M. Boselaw examine him and the results make for grim reading: ‘Mr Mallory possesses an extremely strong sexual urge along with a number of other neurotic manifestations with especially compulsive elements.’

Dr Boselaw’s diagnostic opinion of Mallory was that he had a ‘personality pattern disorder linked with a schizoid personality’. In layman’s terms, he was an out-of-control compulsive sexual predator and pervert. But there is more.
Dr Boselaw summed up Mallory by adding, ‘Because of his emotional disturbance and poor sexual impulses, he could present a danger to his environment in the future.’

In a nutshell, lady members of the jury, you would
not
want to hitch a ride with this guy, most certainly not without carrying a handgun – but the lady members of the jury knew nothing of this. However, this was not all the jury that held Lee’s life in their hands did not know.

On Monday, 21 July 1958, Mallory had been committed to the maximum-security Patuxent Institute in Maryland for sex offenders as a defective delinquent for an intermediate period of time ‘without maximum or minimum limit’. He would serve the best part of 11 years. Placing this punishment into a British perspective, a similar example would be one of confinement at Her Majesty’s pleasure at either Rampton, Ashworth or Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane – home to the likes of Peter Sutcliffe and sundry other sexual psychopaths.

Mallory’s file informs us that he ‘exhibited
argumentative
behavior and engaged in a number of fights before adjusting to institutional life’. Nevertheless, after settling down and pushing a mop for a year, he wheedled his way into the somewhat cushy post of hospital clerk. This employment had the additional fringe benefit of bringing him into contact with female nurses. He was thrown out of this position on Monday, 22 August 1960, shortly after his arrival, because of his having made ‘a molesting gesture towards the chart nurse with sexual intent’. He
grabbed the young woman, fondled her breasts and pushed his hand up between her legs.

The trial jury was also unaware that a determined Mallory had further expressed his dissatisfaction at being detained by escaping from this maximum-security mental asylum on Tuesday, 14 March 1961. After trying to abduct a young girl, he was recaptured while driving a stolen car, and examined by a psychiatrist again. ‘Mr Mallory is possessed with strong sociopathic trends, which are very close to his service, and his controls against them are weak and porous’ was the painfully astute diagnosis. Mallory’s custody file records that he remained quite successfully locked up until Tuesday, 16 April 1968, when he was released on licence. To his credit, he stayed well clear of the law thereafter.

Lee knew nothing of this when she accepted a ride in Mallory’s car, and she knew nothing, and nor did the jury, of what is to follow.

In statements filed by Lee’s attorneys at her appeal, it transpired that potential witnesses presented by her counsel were refused permission to testify as to Mallory’s background. That he liked beating women, trading sex for his clients’ electrical goods and generally being the best customer the sex bars had ever enjoyed cut no ice with the appellate judge at all. For example, Kimberly Guy had made a previous complaint to police that, in addition to having an affinity for prostitution and brutal sex, Mallory was equally interested in masochistic sex and that ‘he frequently travelled with a pair of handcuffs in his
briefcase’. In a nutshell, he had attacked her and all but strangled her to death. The officer who took her complaint knew that hookers were often on the receiving end of a john’s bad temper. It came with the territory, so the cops left it that.

If Kimberly had been allowed to give her evidence at Lee’s trial, the jury might have viewed him, and her claims of rape, in a different light. As Kimberly said, ‘The cops, and I am not naming names here, knew all about Mallory and his filthy mind. If I had been Lee Wuornos under those circumstances, I would have shot him too.’

Chastity Marcus also made statements to the police about Mallory’s crippling obsession with sex. She added, ‘He would frequently exchange sexual favours for electronic equipment back at his shop.’ Indeed, on one occasion both Chastity and Kimberly had three-way sex with Mallory. As payment for their services, Kim received a 19-inch colour television while Chastity took home a VCR – both items being the property of one of his trusting clients.

Of course, Lee knew none of this, and the jury, ignoring her desperate pleas that Mallory had raped her, lived in ignorance when they found her guilty of first-degree murder. But was Lee telling the truth? Did Mallory attempt to rape her that fateful night?

It was always claimed by the state’s attorney that Lee murdered her victims for their money, and certainly all of her victims were carrying around $100 – sometimes substantially more, sometimes considerably less – when
they were killed. To the often-penniless hooker, that was a lot of cash.

Lee has stated that she had been with more men than she could count – maybe more than 200 – although she once boasted to having laid 250,000 men (a preposterous exaggeration, for such a feat would require the bedding of 35 different males a day for about 20 years). More often than not, when down on her luck, she would charge less than the going rate to put a few dollars into her pocket. She has also made the point, not only to me but also to others, that when she was treated right, ‘with respect’, there was ‘never a problem’.

Mallory had served a lengthy prison term of almost 11 years for breaking into a house and attempting to rape a woman. There were other charges left on the file that concerned violent sexual activity with females. However, what we don’t know is how many other women, if any, failed to come forward and lay complaints against him. It has been claimed that, during the 21-year period since his release from Patuxent in 1968, Mallory had kept a clean sheet and had not come to the attention of the police for anything more than a few traffic violations. However, this good behaviour can be easily accounted for because he worked hard, and with cash in his wallet he satisfied his rabid sexual desires by using prostitutes, engaging in masochistic sex, using pornography, visiting strip clubs, drinking excessive amounts of alcohol and smoking drugs. In fact, the key to understanding Mallory’s insatiable sex drive can be found in the simple fact that
he had driven his business into bankruptcy through his headlong, uncontrollable pursuit of sex.

Mallory, a sexually aggressive loner, especially when fuelled by drink (and he drank to excess) was also excessively paranoid. He had a massive ego and considered himself a ladies’ man. With huge debts piling up, verging on financial ruin, he did what so many men do in similar circumstances: he entered the world of sexual fantasy and escapism again and again. The rented false adoration of women kept his ego inflated, albeit at a high cost, while his world slowly collapsed.

With Mallory’s temper still cooling from the long traffic delay, he saw Lee standing alone. The long, late-night drive, the booze, the intimacy of a warm car travelling the interstate, his financial worries forever creeping into his head, the conversation had to turn to sex once again. A deal was struck and then, with a flick of a switch, his alter ego came to the fore.

This time, however, he had chosen the wrong woman. This hooker was armed with a pistol, and she was prepared to use it. Sexually, mentally and physically abused from her formative years onwards, Lee was not the kind of woman to be hurt again, so she exploded into lethal violence.

‘I’ve got respect for myself. Always did have. Weird, right?’ she said to me.

It was a fatal mistake for Richard Mallory to treat her otherwise.

As ex-husbands go, 43-year-old David Spears was ideal. Practical, predictable, honest and hardworking, he was a man people counted on, the sort of guy you would want living next door to you. Earning his living as a construction worker, David lived in Winter Garden near Orlando, travelling south-west each day to Sarasota where he worked at Universal Concrete. A shy, softly spoken giant of a man, six foot four inches tall, bearded, greying and weather-lined from his outdoor lifestyle, he cared enough about his former wife, Dee, to give her a regular chunk of his monthly pay cheque. However, the thoughts going through David’s mind on the day he picked up Aileen Wuornos were probably not so charitable.

The story of David’s premature undoing begins just before lunchtime on Friday, 18 May 1990 when he called Dee and told her to expect him to call in some time between 2 and 2.30 the next day. On Saturday, he left work at about 2.10pm, a little later than planned, and started on his way in his old cream pickup north along I-75 to Tampa.
He headed north-east up I-4 and then hit US 27. He was not seen alive by anyone again – apart from his killer.

David spotted Lee somewhere near the point where US 27 intersects with I-4, about 26 miles south of Winter Garden, and offered her a ride. She explained that she needed to get to Homosassa Springs, which straddles US 19 on the state’s west coast. Lee’s destination was right out of David’s way; in fact, it was at least 75 miles in the opposite direction to which he was heading. This was a 150-mile round trip and, as we recall, he had promised to meet with Dee around 2.30. More perplexingly, he would have had to pass within three miles of Winter Garden on the outward leg. Nevertheless, for some inexplicable reason, he agreed to take Lee.

Lee explained that they drove along US 27, then west on Highway 50, crossed I-75 on to Highway 90 and ended up pulling off the road on US 19 close to Homosassa Springs where David drove so deep into the woods ‘he was worried that his truck would get stuck’. Whether we believe Lee’s account of the murder or not, the facts are these: David Spears’s truck was found abandoned ten miles west of Orange Springs near CR 318 and I-75 in Marion County on Sunday, 20 May; a blonde hair was found on the steering wheel and a ripped ‘Trojan’ condom packet was found on the floor of the vehicle; all his personal property, including tools, clothing and a one-of-a-kind ceramic statue of a panther which he had bought as a present for Dee, was missing. As in the previous killing of Richard Mallory, the driver’s seat was pulled too close to the steering wheel for a man of his height, indicating to the police that someone
else had driven the truck after the owner had been killed.

On Friday, 1 June, a man found the body of a male lying in a clearing amidst pine trees and palmettos. Mathew Cocking had just walked past an illegal dumping site on Fling Lane, a dirt road south of Chassahowitzka and running adjacent to US 19 in Citrus County, when he spotted the corpse. Mathew ran to the nearest payphone where he called 911.

When the police arrived, they found a badly decomposing body, nude except for a camouflage baseball cap which sat jauntily atop a ravaged head. On the ground near the body was a used Trojan condom, its torn black packet and several empty cans of Busch and Budweiser beer.

At first, because of the state of the body, the police were unable to determine the sex, age or likely cause of death. The corpse lay on its back, legs apart, arms outstretched, palms facing skywards. Lee had stolen her victim’s wages, his daughter’s graduation money and a quantity of cash he had hidden in his truck for emergencies amounting to about $600. She had hit pay dirt.

Dr Janet Pillow carried out the autopsy on Monday, 4 June. The man who weighed around 195 pounds in life had been reduced to 40 pounds by the time his body was discovered. Six .22-calibre bullets were recovered from the remains. Dental impressions identified the victim.

Everyone who knew Spears claimed that he could not and would not hurt a fly; he was incapable of the violent attack which his murderer would allege she had to defend herself against.

Five days later, another body was found.