Monster (9 page)

Curtis ‘Corky’ Reid’s name is not generally mentioned alongside the life and crimes of Aileen Wuornos, mainly because the police investigating Lee’s crimes were not in the least bit interested in his disappearance or subsequent death. Indeed, this is the one case where the police concerned with bringing Aileen Wuornos to justice should hang their heads in shame.

Corky had been a senior engineer at Cape Canaveral and had been through bad times. Twenty years before he vanished, he had plunged six storeys and survived, while others who had fallen from similar heights all died. Seriously injured, he had been cared for by his sister Deanie Stewart and her husband Jim who owned a car
dealership. When he eventually returned to work, his wife had left him and now he was alone, living a sedentary lifestyle which revolved around the TV, Deanie and Jim. Every Sunday, without fail, he would call in to see his mother.

It was Thursday, 6 September 1990. Corky had just cashed his pay cheque and he called in to say that he was off for a long weekend to visit his friend Ray who lived at Cocoa Beach. He would then continue on to Orlando for an appointment with his doctor. He had experienced a slight stroke several months previously and needed a check-up, after which he would see his mum.

Corky kissed Deanie goodbye; she never saw him again.

On Sunday, 9 September, Deanie was surprised to receive a call from her mother. Corky had not arrived. At first there seemed to be no immediate reason for concern, but all that changed when, on Monday, Deanie got a call from her brother’s secretary at the Cape. He had not turned up for work.

Deanie immediately visited Corky’s home. His clothes and his badge were there, but there was no sign of her brother and his car.

Deanie and Jim’s first port of call was the Titusville Police Department. The couple explained what was wrong and were advised to wait 72 hours before filing a
missing-person
report. This was the usual procedure in such circumstances, so the family took matters into their own hands. Within 48 hours, over 2,000 flyers were printed and sent out. Five hundred people went looking for the
missing man in Brevard and Volusia Counties, but there were no responses.

Unlike all of Lee’s other murder victims, whose trips had been lengthy, Corky’s drive that Thursday should have been short and sweet. After leaving home, the drive to Cocoa Beach would have taken him just 15 minutes at best, then he would have headed out west on the Bee Line Expressway towards Orlando, a mere 25 miles away.

On Tuesday, 11 September, Corky’s white two-door car was found, it is claimed, in a parking lot near the I-95. Deanie and her daughter Tina drove there immediately, expecting to find the Orlando Police at the scene. They were, in fact, met by the security guard for the parking lot. He explained that he was concerned because it had been there several days. He had called the police who, in turn, had called Tina.

So, there we have it. A man is reported missing, his car is found, and the police are informed yet they do nothing. With the great gift of hindsight, perhaps it would have been wiser to leave the car where it was until the police had given it the once-over. However, for reasons unknown, Deanie elected to drive the car back to their own parking lot, trying as hard as she could to preserve any fingerprint evidence en route.

When she arrived home, Deanie conducted a perfunctory search of the vehicle. Keys to the car and Cape Canaveral were on the floor, along with a torn Trojan condom pack and empty cartons of Marlborough and Camel cigarettes. The car, which Corky had regularly
maintained in good working order, showed that there was no oil in the sump and little petrol in the tank. The brakes had been worn down. Someone had thrashed the car very hard indeed. Of even more significance was the fact that the glove compartment had been emptied out, although the registration papers remained. Corky’s toolbox was missing and the driver’s seat had been pulled forward, which indicated that someone shorter than the owner had driven the car. The NASA emblem had been scraped off the rear window – all the hallmarks of a Wuornos killing.

Corky’s body has never been found.

Dan Carter of the Titusville Police Department took up the case but got nowhere despite it having all the signs of the serial-murder cases going on in the area. This lack of progress we cannot attribute to Dan Carter. He was told, in no uncertain terms, to back way off the case as soon as Lee and Tyria were located.

Totally frustrated, Deanie started calling the Marion County Sheriff’s Department, demanding to know if any action was being taken on her brother’s behalf. ‘No one returned my calls,’ she said. ‘No one. They were always out in the field.’

Not one to be thwarted, Deanie called the attorney general and reported the non-action of the Marion County investigators. Soon afterwards, principal investigator Bruce Munster called her back.

‘Does this call have anything to do with my call to the attorney general?’ she asked.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Munster admitted with some hesitation.

When she later learned that Lee had been arrested and Tyria had been brought back to Florida, Deanie asked Bruce Munster to show the women a photograph of her brother to see if they could identify him as a victim. Munster blatantly insisted that Curtis Reid was not one of Lee’s victims.

‘I didn’t buy it then and I don’t buy it now,’ Deanie says.

Deanie’s anger was further fuelled when she learned from one of Corky’s friends at the Cape that the Marion County investigators had not been cooperating with other members of the task force. ‘They told me that Dan Carter’s name was not even on the task-force list,’ she complained. She started to petition in an effort to force Munster to include Carter in the questioning of Aileen Wuornos:

‘Within two days, I had received a phone call from Dan Carter asking me to pull the petitions in or Marion County would not cooperate,’ she remembers.

To put a stop to all of this, Bruce Munster did have Corky’s photograph to show both Lee and Tyria. He and
his sidekick Larry Horzepa merely mentioned the missing man’s name as an aside and only to Lee – who denied it all. After that, Corky’s death was airbrushed into history. Or was it?

Shortly before Lee’s trial for the murder of Richard Mallory, Deanie and Jim were invited to look at some property which was held at the Marion County Sheriff’s Department. It had been confiscated from none other than Tyria Moore. ‘My father’s suitcase, which Corky had borrowed, was there. His Levi “Members Only” jacket was there. Sweatshirts like my brother wore – I recognised them all, but I couldn’t prove they were his,’ Deanie claimed. ‘There were no identifying marks, but I knew they belonged to my brother.’

Bruce Munster explained in front of Dan Carter that, if Deanie could not ‘positively identify the items’, there was no more he could do.

At this stage in the investigation, it is worth mentioning that Munster and two of his colleagues were negotiating a movie deal to the tune of $100,000 each. Tyria was to receive considerably more. Individually, the items were of little significance. Collectively, along with the suitcase, they were damning evidence against Lee, and Tyria had already confided in Munster that Lee had given them to her.

Indeed, Tyria was to become quite a collector of dead men’s property…

A thoroughly decent chap, Charles Humphreys lived in the east-coast city of Crystal River, which is located about seven miles north of Homosassa along US 19, and he never made it home from his last day of work at the Sumterville office of the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitation Services (HRS). Sumterville was right in the centre of Lee’s territory.

Aged 56 years, he was a man of some experience who had formerly served as a police chief in Alabama. Now an investigator specialising in protecting abused and injured children, he was about transfer to the department’s office at Ocala. He had three children, and his kindly nature made him an excellent choice to work with kids. He picked up his killer the day after his thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. His wife Shirley had been battling cancer for years.

‘He was always in the driveway ten minutes after six,’ Shirley recalled. ‘At six-thirty, I thought it was car trouble. At seven, maybe he stopped for a beer. At eight, I panicked. I got the Highway Patrol … The Wildwood Police Department started a search. The next day my son came. I sat and waited. I woke up at two-thirty the next night. I heard a knock on the door and knew right away what it was.’

It is claimed that on Tuesday, 11 September 1990 – the day Corky Reid’s car was found abandoned near Orlando – Humphreys disappeared after picking up a hitchhiker, or hitchhikers, and the following evening his body was found off CR 484 within a stone’s throw of where both Spears’s and Carskaddon’s vehicles had been found.

Charles had been shot seven times. Six .22-calibre bullets were recovered from his body, but the seventh copper-jacketed round had passed through his wrist and was never found. His money and wallet were missing. His trouser pockets had been turned inside out.

Humphreys’s blue four-door Firenza car was found on Wednesday, 19 September some 70 miles to the north. It had been backed into a space behind an abandoned Banner service station at the intersection of I-10 and SR 90, near Live Oak in Suwannee County, and some 15 miles south of the state line with Georgia.

The number plate, keys and a bright yellow Highway Patrol Association bumper sticker had been removed from the car. During an initial examination of the vehicle, it was noted that everything which told the world it had belonged to Humphreys was gone or trashed – just like his life. Little things like his ice-scrapers, his maps, his personal papers, business papers and warranties. His favourite pipe in the newly carved wooden tray up on the dashboard was also gone.

By way of compensation, the killer left one can of Budweiser beer under the passenger seat. The police never dusted the can for prints.

Back at the police pound, a closer examination of the car’s interior revealed a cash-register receipt for beer, or wine, from EMRO store number 8237, a Speedway truck stop and convenience store located at SR 44 and I-75 in Wildwood – the same store from which receipts were found in Peter Siems’s car. The receipt was time-stamped
4.19pm, 11 September 1990, the day that Humphreys had disappeared. The clerk who had been on duty at the time could not identify the man but did recognise the composite police sketches of Lee and Tyria. When they left the store, the clerk believed they drove away and therefore did not call the police, as she was obliged to, because prostitutes are banned from truck stops throughout Florida.

Most of the victim’s personal effects, including his pipe, pen and pencil, wedding ring and wristwatch – all covered with blood (Lee would claim that, after shooting him, she heard his gurgling moans and took pity on him by shooting him in the head to ‘put him out of his misery’) – were found a month later in a wooded field off Boggy Marsh Road, around 18 miles from where his body was found in southern Lake County near US 27. They were returned to his wife.

On the face of it, this murder seems much like the previous killings: a lone woman is picked up while hitchhiking; she kills the driver and robs him. However, on this occasion, all is not as it seems.

As an investigative criminologist, my work often demands that I look laterally at criminal investigations. Tyria Moore has always denied knowing anything about Lee’s crimes and the public have always believed this to be the case. But Tyria had been riding around with Lee in Peter Siems’s car, and we know this because she was driving the vehicle when it crashed near Orange Springs.
The girls had been drinking prior to the accident on the nearby Indian reservation. We also know all about Tyria riding around in Richard Mallory’s car and accepting his property; and the property of Corky Reid was found in her possession.

This brings us back to Charles Humphreys. It is known that he left his office in Sumterville on 11 September and was driving west towards his home in Crystal River, when he stopped to give a blonde woman a ride – Lee and Tyria were certainly at the EMRO store around the same time as Humphreys drove past. His obvious route was to leave his office, drive north to Wildwood, cross I-75 and head home along SR 44. What we now know is that at around 4pm he pulled into the EMRO store number 8237 in Wildwood.

On this occasion, the EMRO clerk recalled two women purchasing beer or wine – evidence found later showed it was cans of Budweiser and bottles of Miller Lite. The women bore striking similarities to Lee and Tyria. The clerk was unable to identify the male who had been driving the car, but he could only have been the
soon-to
-be deceased because the two women climbed into the car.

Police evidence reveals that this man’s body was found in one of Lee’s favourite dumping grounds, along CR 484, the day following his murder. The distance from the truck stop to where he was shot to death was about 20 miles – maybe 15 minutes’ driving time at best.

The scenario can only be that Lee and another woman,
who has never been positively identified, were hitching a ride and Humphreys stopped his car. Within a short distance after leaving work he picked up the two women then met his death.

Tyria denied any knowledge of being in the dead man’s car that day; she said she knew nothing of the murder until police later questioned her about Lee’s movements. She claimed never to have met anyone called Charles Humphreys, but she was unable to account for her movements during the time in question.

In an affidavit following Lee’s arrest, Tyria described what had happened during the last few months she was with Lee:

Tyria left her job at the Casa del Mar Motel, and in the fall of 1990 they moved into room number 8 at the Fairview Motel at Harbor Oaks on US 1 along Daytona Beach. Tyria was unemployed and the two women were living off Lee’s earnings.

The staff at the local convenience store got to know Lee and Tyria as regular, sometimes troublesome, customers. Brenda McGarry recalled that Lee would often approach men in the 50-to-60 age range while they topped up their cars with petrol. ‘She was very masculine and aggressive,’ she said. ‘Always flexing her muscles and talking about needing to get over to 92, which I thought was a bar or something. It never registered that it was a highway.’

The owners of the Fairview soon tired of them and once again they moved, this time to the nearby Belgrade, a
Yugoslavian restaurant owned by Velimir Isailovic and Vera Ivkovich. Vera allowed the women to rent a room at the rear of the premises for $50 a week. Then the problems started.

Contradicting Lee’s later statements to police that Tyria rarely drank and was as pure as the driven snow, Vera confirmed that, ‘Lee and Tyria were drunk most nights … they invaded the quiet dignity of the Belgrade restaurant, night after night singing and making a racket in their room, their loud music upsetting the customers.’

In his deposition, Velimir Isailovic recounted bad times: