The night before she went to jail, Aileen Wuornos trudged into the Last Resort toting the skimpy sum of her portable life. It amounted to a tan suitcase, a brown purse and a single silver key.
Wuornos didn`t seem to be going anywhere, or have anywhere to go. The woman she loved had left her. She had barely enough change for a few beers and the juke box. In fact, she sadly confided to a couple of sympathetic bar buddies, the only valuable thing she owned was the little key clipped to the belt on her blue jeans.
”It`s my whole life,” she reportedly said.
In the previous few months, Wuornos had taken to dropping by the Last Resort, a squat brick biker bar just up U.S. Highway 1 from the $15-a-night motel she lately had called home, on the nights she could afford a home.
She played a decent game of pool, except when she was drunk, which she often was. Sometimes, after several drinks, she pounded on the juke box and howled with the country songs. Nobody thought it strange that one of her favorites was Randy Travis` ”Digging Up Bones.”
Actually, nobody thought much about Lee Wuornos at all. She was stocky and sloppy, a tired blond with so much hard living worn into her face that at age 34 she looked a decade wearier. She was not a woman men noticed, except to mock.
On Jan. 8, the night before her arrest, unaware that the police had been watching her for hours, Wuornos downed a few Budweisers, smoked a few Marlboros and added her bra to the collection of underwear dangling from the ceiling. At closing time she curled up on a vinyl car seat on the Last Resort`s front porch.
About 6 p.m. the next day, Wuornos` two bar buddies offered to rent her a motel room for the night. She gratefully accepted. As it turned out, they were undercover cops. They walked her out of the bar and into the handcuffs of two uniformed sheriff`s officers who, frustrated that they didn`t yet have evidence that would give them a better reason, arrested her on an outstanding warrant for possessing a concealed weapon.
After she was booked, Wuornos had one urgent question: ”Where`s my key?”
The key, police soon would figure out, fit a storage bin at Jack`s Mini-Warehouses in nearby Daytona Beach. Among the locker`s contents were several men`s watches, an assortment of men`s clothes, a pair of cowboy boots, a Mexican blanket, tool boxes, a police billy club and several suitcases-all in all, according to the police, at least 45 items that belonged to men Wuornos is believed to have murdered.
On Jan. 17, Wuornos was charged with killing an electronics repairman from Clearwater, Fla., named Richard Mallory with a .22-caliber pistol that, thanks to a tip from Wuornos` former lesbian lover, police plucked from the muck in Rose Bay, just down the road from the Last Resort. Within weeks, she was charged with shooting to death three other middle-aged traveling men, and she is expected to be charged in the murders of three more.
When law enforcement officials began to suspect that a serial killer was stalking the highways of central Florida, no one at first imagined it was a woman. Women who kill usually stick close to home, prey on people they know and prefer poison to pistols. Serial killers, on the other hand, are typically transient loners whose targets are strangers and whose methods are brutal. All but 5 percent are men.
By late summer of 1990, the investigators knew only this much for sure:
Starting in December 1989, when two junkyard scavengers found Richard Mallory`s decomposed body, a series of men had been found shot to death in or around Marion County, a rapidly growing area of horse farms and retirement villages 70 miles north of Orlando. It is a region of highways, a junction of tourists and truckers, a place where strangers meet.
The victims had a few things in common. All were white, middle-aged and middle-class. Most were family men, traveling long distances on major roads, alone. They included a construction worker, a truck driver, a deliveryman, a rodeo worker. All were shot repeatedly with small-caliber bullets. Their cars had been stolen, then abandoned.
”We asked ourselves, what type of person could get close enough to our victims that the victim would let his guard down enough to be subdued?” said Capt. Steve Binegar, the lead investigator in the Marion County Sheriff`s Dept. ”What kind of person could get close to a man like Dick Humphreys, who`d spent 20 years in the military and who was a former small-town police chief?”
Slowly, the clues added up. Several of the bodies were found nude. In most of the abandoned cars, the driver`s seat had been pulled forward, as if someone short had been driving. Condoms were found on car seats and floor boards, along with long blond hairs.
On July 4, something particularly curious occurred, though it took investigators a while to make the connection.
That night, two women were spotted hiking along Marion County Road 315 after abandoning a damaged 1988 gray Pontiac Sunbird. The car turned out to belong to Peter Siems, a 65-year-old missionary who in June had left his home in Jupiter, Fla., on his way to Arkansas. The seat was stained with blood. Siems has not been found.
Near the end of November, police finally issued sketches of the two women to the news media. Of the more than 900 leads that poured in, leads No. 5, 243, 297 and 361 pointed in the same direction: to a short, hefty, 28-year-old former motel maid named Tyria J. Moore and her tough-talking blond companion, variously known as Lori Grody, Cammie Greene, Susan Blahovec and-her real name-Aileen Wuornos.
Wuornos already had spent three years in jail.
One May day in 1981, after a fight with the man she lived with in Daytona Beach, Wuornos drank several six-packs, bought a pistol at a pawn shop, dropped by a K mart for some bullets, washed down four Librium pills with a quarter-pint of Southern Comfort and headed toward Mosquito Lagoon ostensibly to shoot herself.
On the way, she pulled up to a Majik Market, thinking she might phone her boyfriend, Ray.
”I stepped out of the car pretty darn drunk now, and walked in,” she wrote in a neatly printed letter to the judge in the case. ”I then remembered I had the darn gun in my purse, and after I buy the potato chips (the clerk`s) going to possibly notice the pistol. Then out of the blue not thinking of the consequences I could face doing this, I thought what would Ray do if I was caught robbing a store. If he loved me enough and helped me out of the mess I`m about to get in, then I`d know he`d truly care.”
She was arrested on an armed-robbery charge several minutes later, after her $80 Ford station wagon broke down a few blocks away.
”She was screwed up, but very tender,” said Ray, a retired businessman in his 60s. ”I think the girl basically was clean until she hit that jiffy store. I think that`s when she went to pieces.”
When Wuornos was 6 months old, her teenage mother abandoned her and her brother to the care of their grandparents in Troy, Mich., where she grew up. At 14, she had her own baby but gave him up for adoption.
According to a psychiatrist`s report after her 1981 arrest, Wuornos had been drinking since she was 12 years old, using drugs since she was 13 and on her own since she was 15. She quit school in the 10th grade.
She worked as a waitress, cashier, cook, maid, prostitute and pool hustler. While hitchhiking around the country, she was raped and beaten a dozen times.
The psychiatrist judged her sane. A Florida probation officer seemed less sure. ”The defendant is very unstable,” he wrote, ”and could become a threat to the safety and well-being of others as well as to herself.”
In 1976, at the age of 20, Wuornos drifted to Daytona Beach, a mecca for Hell`s Angels, college kids and assorted ramblers, a town with a lawless streak as wide as its white sandy beaches.
It was a bad year for Wuornos. Her father, who was in prison for molesting a 7-year-old, committed suicide. Her 21-year-old brother died of cancer. In May, Wuornos married a man in his 70s-”for security,” she told an investigator in the 1981 case. She divorced him the following month because he beat her with his cane.
Two years later, distraught because she had broken up with a boyfriend, she shot herself in the stomach.
”Her life from the time she was a teenager up to the time she was convicted the first time was a nightmare,” said Russ Armstrong, her attorney in the Majik Market armed-robbery case. ”Over her life she`s been hit on by a lot of men-`hit on` as the kids say, and also hit on physically. I think after a while that may create the kind of personality we`re dealing with.”
Ty Moore met Aileen Wuornos in 1986 at the Zodiac Bar in South Daytona. They quickly became lovers, though apparently the passion subsided into sisterly companionship, with Wuornos in command.
From mid-October through mid-November 1990, the women rented a small room behind the Belgrade Restaurant, a Yugoslavian eatery a couple of blocks from the Last Resort. Vera Ivkovich, the owner, a wearily elegant gray-haired woman in her 60s, felt sorry for them and charged them only $50 a week.
Her sympathy soon dissolved into exasperation.
”The second week they`re here, Lee say she lost business, furniture, this and that baloney,” said Ivkovich. ”They come in for breakfast, lunch and dinner on credit. She say she going to get a job tomorrow. On a Thursday, she brings $20, say she`s got two jobs. Then she goes to sleep all day. On Friday, she goes to work, brings $10. She say she got a pressure-cleaning business. Now we know what kind of pressure cleaning.”
Wuornos also yelled at Ivkovich`s husband and occasionally threatened to kill him.
”Lee say she lesbian, don`t like men, she`d kill all men,” Ivkovich said.
Most nights, Wuornos and Moore drank a case or so of beer and stayed up late listening to Elvis Presley tapes and watching TV. Often Ivkovich could hear Wuornos yelling at Moore, though during the day, when they were sober, the women were laughing and affectionate.
”Lee said a couple times she`d give her life for Ty,” Ivkovich said.
Two days after Wuornos was arrested at the Last Resort, investigators tracked down Moore in Pennsylvania. She agreed to testify against Wuornos. In a signed affidavit, she told the following story:
Lee made her living as a prostitute, and from time to time came home with things she said her clients had given her instead of money. One day in December 1989, she showed up in a Cadillac with tinted windows and a Florida Gators plate on the front. It looked just like Richard Mallory`s car.
That night, Lee told Ty she had shot a man to death, dumped his body in the woods and covered it with a piece of carpet.
Over the next few months, Lee brought home several different cars. Once she appeared with a 1988 gray Pontiac Sunbird, $600 in cash and a couple of stories about where it had all come from. She splurged by taking Ty and Ty`s sister to Sea World.
In September 1990, Ty heard a news report about a man who had been shot to death. The report showed a picture of his automobile, a small blue four-door; it was Lee`s new car.
In late November, afraid for her life, Ty asked her mother to send her money to come home to Ohio. Before leaving, she returned the diamond ring Lee had given her, a ring that police say belonged to one of the dead men.
Shortly after she was charged with murdering Richard Mallory, police say, Wuornos confessed to all seven killings, though in court she has pleaded not guilty to the four in which she has been charged.
Investigators say she seemed to view killing as a form of self-protection.
”She told one investigator that she had a line no one could cross,”
said Cpl. Bob Kelley of the Sheriff`s Department in Volusia County, where Mallory`s body was found. ”If you crossed that line-and the line changed-if you crossed that line by something that you said or something nasty that you did, you weren`t leaving. She could do eight guys in one day and seven could get away, then one would do something that made her decide, well, he doesn`t need to live.”
Meanwhile, producers and scriptwriters are fighting over the movie rights to Wuornos` story. And down at the Last Resort, where the juke box still plays one of Wuornos` favorite songs, ”Leather and Lace,” women with shiny cars and fancy clothes wander in from time to time, clutching photographs of vanished husbands and lovers, hoping against reason that maybe Aileen Wuornos said something to somebody there that will help them figure out where their men have gone.
