Monster (8 page)

In Great Britain, less than 20 per cent of serious crime and less than 10 per cent of murders are committed by women, in a society where they outnumber men. In the USA, only 12 per cent of murders are committed by women.

Ninety per cent of the victims of women who kill are
men, a statistic which speaks volumes. The vast majority of murders committed by women are, for want of a better phrase, crimes of passion. They are instigated by abuse or jealousy. Women generally are not as violent or physically aggressive as men, who may kill in brawls or during the course of crime. Without doubt there are different social controls on women which offer them less opportunity to be placed in a position to kill. It is a sign of the times, for instance, that they are not as free to roam the streets and bars at night. As we can see, Lee was an exception. Sometimes society and circumstance throw up a female killer who, because of the nature of her crimes and, indeed, because she is a woman, stuns and sickens us all. Lee Wuornos was that very rare specimen.

During the third week of May 1990, 41-year-old Charles ‘Chuck’ Carskaddon, a former road digger and rodeo rider, was en route from his mother’s home in Boonville, Missouri, to Tampa to pick up Peggy, his fiancée. He had packed up the hard life and found less stressful employment as a press operator in his home state of Missouri. All he had to do was drive to Florida to collect Peggy, and his life would be complete. We may safely assume that he was driving south along the Dixie Highway when he spotted Lee thumbing a ride. In fact, chilling as it may seem, it is highly likely that, having dumped David Spears’s truck close to I-75, one of the next rides Lee took was with Mr Carskaddon.

After they stopped – for sex, Lee claimed – she removed her gun from her bag and discharged no fewer than seven
shots into the man’s upper body from the back seat, claiming that it was an act of self-defence. After reloading her .22 she shot two more bullets into the corpse. The reason she gave for this cold-blooded and dreadful act was that she had found his .45-calibre handgun on the hood – or bonnet – of the car and was enraged to further violence by the thought that he may have planned to kill her.

Of the murder itself, we only have Lee’s account above to inform us of the events that took place. At first she argued that the killing was in self-defence, then she changed her story, saying that she killed him just for the money. During the last few days of her life she told Nick Broomfield off-camera that she had, indeed, killed all of her victims in self-defence. Carskaddon’s naked body was found 23 miles short of his destination on Wednesday, 6 June. The corpse was covered with foliage and a green electric blanket. The autopsy showed that he had been shot nine times in the chest with a .22-calibre handgun.

The dead man’s brown 1975 Cadillac, a car he had lovingly restored, was discovered the next day around 45 miles north of where the body had been found, near I-75 and CR 484 in Marion County. Although the number plate had been ripped off, the vehicle identification number was still intact. A trace soon revealed the owner’s name.

Carskaddon’s mother, Florence, told police that when her only son left home he was carrying a blue-steel,
.45-calibre
pistol with a pearl handle, a Mexican blanket, a stun gun, a flip-top lighter, a watch and a tan suitcase. He was wearing a black T-shirt and grey snakeskin cowboy
boots. ‘He had removed the firing pin from the gun,’ she said, ‘because he was scared to use it.’

None of these items was found in his car, and Lee – minus a firing pin – was now packing more heat than ever before.

Deeply religious, easy-going and considered a real gentleman in every respect, Peter Siems was a 65-year-old retired merchant seaman living on Florida’s east coast near Jupiter, Martin County. He had found the Lord many years previously; soon he was to meet the Antichrist.

Early in the morning of Thursday, 7 June 1990 – the same day Carskaddon’s car was found – neighbours saw the part-time missionary placing luggage and a stack of bibles into his 1988 silver-grey Pontiac Sunbird. They assumed, correctly, that the balding, bespectacled man was off on another of his trips to spread the word. On his travels, he intended to visit relatives in Arkansas and then drive up to New Jersey to see his sister. He promised his
wife that he would phone later in the day – she never heard from him again.

The most direct route for such a mammoth drive would be to join the Florida Turnpike near his home then cut up through the centre of the state until he joined I-75 near Wildwood, which was Wuornos country.

After her arrest, Lee admitted that she was very drunk when Siems stopped on I-95, though it was more likely to have been along I-75 where it crosses the Florida Turnpike in Marion County. She vaguely recalled crossing a state line in his car, but could not remember if it was Georgia or South Carolina. It was Georgia. She claimed that Siems ‘became threatening during a sexual encounter in the woods, so I shot him’.

His body remains undiscovered. It lies rotting somewhere in the pinewoods of Georgia.

The mystery of the sudden disappearance of Mr Siems took a bizarre twist on Wednesday, 4 July when a
silver-grey
Pontiac Sunbird – not a red car as portrayed in the movie
Monster
– careered off CR 315 near Orange Springs, Florida, just ten miles east from where Lee dumped David Spears’s truck. The car shot round a bend, skidded sideways and smashed through a steel gate and a
barbed-wire
fence, shattering the windscreen before coming to rest in the undergrowth. For a brief second it appeared that it might roll over, but it soon righted itself. With steam hissing from the radiator, and a slowly deflating tyre, the car, like its late owner, was doomed.

Rhonda and Jim Bailey, who were sitting on their porch drinking lemonade and enjoying the sun, witnessed the spectacular accident. Somewhat bemused, the elderly couple observed two women clamber out of the car. Lee, whose arms were bleeding from the cuts sustained in the crash, started throwing beer cans into the woods and swearing at her fellow passenger, who said very little.

The Baileys noted that the women grabbed a red-
and-white
beer cooler from the back seat and, still arguing, staggered off along the road. At the approach of other cars, they would dash into the woods and hide, only to reappear after the vehicles had passed. When the coast was clear, they returned to the car.

When neighbourly Rhonda ambled over to offer what little assistance she could, the blonde begged her not to call the police, saying that her father lived just up the road. The two women climbed back in the car and, with some difficulty, managed to reverse it on to the road and drive off. Within moments a front tyre went flat and, with the car now disabled, Lee and Tyria had no option other than to abandon it. They pulled off the rear number plate – Lee had done the same thing with Carskaddon’s vehicle – and threw it, together with the car keys, into the woods before walking away.

A passing motorist, thinking that the women might need help, pulled over and offered assistance. He noticed that the blonde was not only bleeding but also very drunk. When she asked him for a lift, he thought better of it and refused, whereupon Lee became angry and abusive. The
man drove away, but he phoned the Orange Springs Fire Department and told them about the injured woman.

Two emergency vehicles were dispatched to the scene and, when they arrived, Lee denied that they had been in the car. ‘I don’t know anything about any accident,’ she snarled. ‘I want people to stop telling lies and leave us alone.’

At 9.44pm, Trooper Rickey responded to the emergency call and found the car. (It was not until almost two months later that homicide detectives learned exactly where the Sunbird had first crashed, or heard the account given by Rhonda and Jim Bailey.) Marion County’s Deputy Lawing was dispatched to investigate the abandoned, smashed-up vehicle. The vehicle identification number was checked, revealing that the missing Peter Siems was the owner. Bloody prints were found in the vehicle, and there were bloodstains on the fabric of the seats and on the door handles.

Items removed from the car by the police included Busch and Budweiser beer cans as well as Marlborough cigarettes and two beverage cosies. They were traceable to EMRO store number 8237, a Speedway truck stop and convenience store at SR 44 and I-75, close to the on-
and-off
ramps in Wildwood. The same EMRO store and truck stop would later feature in the murder of Charles Humphreys. Peter Siems and his wife were missionaries. They neither drank nor smoked, so the two beverage cosies did not belong to him. Underneath the front passenger seat lay a bottle of Windex window spray with
an Eckerd drug store price label attached to it. This ticket was easily traceable to a store on Gordon Street in Atlanta, Georgia. Relatives also stated that the couple had never travelled to Atlanta but that Peter would probably pass close to the city en route to Arkansas.

Peter Siems had borrowed his son Stefan’s suitcase for his trip. Stefan Siems later recognised it among the loot found in Lee’s storage lock-up.

By now a police artist had drawn composites of the two women based on descriptions given by witnesses of the incident with the Sunbird. Armed with these sketches and the bottle of Windex, the investigators travelled to Atlanta to question the manager of the Eckerd drug store. Viewing the pictures, he recalled two women – identical to Lee and Tyria – entering his store on a Friday night. ‘We are in a bad part of town in a predominantly black area, and white people do not venture into this area after dark,’ he said. The police learned that the two women also purchased cosmetics and a black box of Trojan condoms – the same brand as those found near the body of David Spears and inside his car.

Fridays for June 1990 following Siems’s murder fell on the 8th, 15th, 22nd and 29th respectively. On which of those days were the two women together in Siems’s car when they purchased the Windex window spray, condoms and cosmetics in Atlanta? As Lee confirmed, she only drove to Atlanta once, and that was with Siems. She also confirmed that he was shot dead there. For her part, Tyria has denied ever travelling to Atlanta with Lee.

By the time 55-year-old Siems had reached the truck stop at Wildwood, he would have been tired and in need of a fuel top-up and refreshments. It is while here, I suggest, that he was approached by Lee and Tyria who had just purchased beer and the two cosies. From Wildwood, I suggest that the threesome – Siems, Lee and Tyria – headed north up I-75, crossed the state line into Georgia and continued on to Atlanta where they stopped at the Eckerd store. We know that the two women were at the Eckerd store on a Friday night because the manager identified them from composite drawings. Whether Siems was still alive at this point, or was murdered shortly afterwards, we may never know.

John Wisnieski of the Jupiter Police had been working on the case since Siems was reported missing. He sent out a nationwide Teletype containing descriptions of the two women, and he also sent a synopsis of the case, containing descriptions of the two females together with the sketches, to the
Florida Criminal Activity Bulletin
. Then he waited. He was not optimistic about finding Siems alive. The man’s body had not been found, his credit cards had not been used and money had not been withdrawn from his bank account.

But what of the bloody fingerprints found in the wrecked Sunbird? The police knew that the owner of the car had vanished without trace – he had been reported as missing some three weeks
before
the crash on 4 July. A missing-person report had been circulated and a copy held on the Florida Department of Law Enforcement computer.
Now police had found the vehicle smashed up and two women had fled the scene in more-than-suspicious circumstances. But did the police run a fingerprint check through their own department at Orange Springs, or through the Florida Department of Law Enforcement? No, they did not.

Ever-smiling Eugene ‘Troy’ Burress celebrated his fiftieth birthday in January 1990. A short, slightly built,
blonde-haired
man with a natural gift for the gab, he was employed as a part-time salesman for the Gilchrist Sausage Company in Ocala, a resort town in northern Florida where he lived with his wife Rose. Ocala is just 15 miles from Orange Springs, close to where the two women crashed Peter Siems’s car.

Troy had formerly owned a pool-cleaning company, Troy’s Pools, in Boca Raton on the south-east coast between West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale, but it went bust and the couple had moved to Ocala in 1989. Everyone liked Troy, who was now resigned to his new life. He had only one gripe: the lack of air-conditioning in his truck.

On Monday, 30 July 1990, Burress set out on Gilchrist company business. He would be travelling the Daytona route, which took him to several customers throughout central Florida. His last planned stop was to have been Salt Springs in Marion County, part of the extensive Indian reservation area and within a spit of Orange Springs where Lee and Tyria crashed Siems’s Pontiac Sunbird, and close to where Lee dumped David Spears’s truck.

When he failed to report at his office after work, Gilchrist manager Mrs Jonnie Mae Thompson was concerned. She started calling around the various customers and discovered that Burress had failed to show up for his last delivery. He had made the drop at Seville along SR 17; after that he vanished. Now Jonnie knew that
something was very wrong. If he had broken down he would have phoned in, or used the American Automobile Association to help him out. He had done neither, so she immediately went out in search of him.

At 2am the following morning, Troy was reported missing by his wife. The police recorded her description of a slightly built man around five foot six inches in height and weighing about 155 pounds. He had blue eyes and blonde hair. This time there was a fast response with a quick, though tragic, outcome. At 4am Marion County deputies found the Gilchrist delivery van, distinctive with its black cab, white refrigerator back and company logo, on the shoulder of SR 19, 20 miles east of Ocala and within a few miles of Orange Springs. The vehicle was locked and the keys were missing, as was Troy Burress.

A family out for a picnic in the Ocala National Forest found Troy’s body five days later, on Saturday, 4 August. They chanced upon his remains in a clearing just off SR 19, about eight miles from his abandoned delivery van. Florida’s heat and humidity had hastened decomposition, precluding identification at the scene. However, he was confirmed as Troy Burress by his wife. She had given him the wedding ring he was still wearing.

Troy had been killed with two shots from a .22-calibre handgun, one to the chest and one to the back. A clipboard with delivery details and receipts, which had been removed from the van, was found near the body, but the company’s takings were missing.

Lee later said, ‘He took me to the woods and told me to
strip.’ Then he offered her $10, sneering, ‘That’s all you’re worth.’ She claimed that he had sexually assaulted her, so she shot him in the chest. As he turned to escape, Lee shot him in the back. She made no secret that the second shot was deliberate: she seemed to be under the mistaken impression that a rape victim was legally justified in shooting a fleeing attacker.