Monster Read online

  Dedicated to

  Tatiana Dee nee Maksina

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction: ‘You want to know why I killed?’

  PART ONE

  ‘WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL, I ALWAYS WANTED TO BE A NUN.’

  Chapter One: The Cigarette Bandit

  Chapter Two: The Odd Couple

  Chapter Three: Tyria Jolene Moore

  PART TWO

  ‘OF COURSE I DIDN’T REALLY WANT TO KILL THEM IN MY HEART, BUT I KNEW I HAD TO.’

  Chapter Four: Richard Mallory

  Chapter Five: David Spears

  Chapter Six: Charles ‘Chuck’ Carskaddon

  Chapter Seven: Peter Siems

  Chapter Eight: Eugene ‘Troy’ Burress

  Chapter Nine: Curtis ‘Corky’ Reid

  Chapter Ten: Charles ‘Dick’ Humphreys

  Chapter Eleven: Walter Gino Antonio

  PART THREE

  ‘AND MAY GOD HAVE MERCY ON YOUR CORPSE.’

  Chapter Twelve: Parting Company

  Chapter Thirteen: The Arrest

  Chapter Fourteen: Aileen Wuornos’s Confession – In Her Own Words

  Chapter Fifteen: The Execution

  Chapter Sixteen: The Movie

  PART FOUR

  MAD OR BAD?

  Chapter Seventeen: Damaged Beyond Repair

  Chronology of events and dates

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY I KILLED?’

  YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY I KILLED? YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW IT HAPPENED? YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY I DID WHAT I DID?

  MALLORY WAS THE FIRST. HE WAS A MEAN MOTHERFUCKER. HE ASKED ME IF I WANTED TO SMOKE A JOINT. I TOLD HIM I DIDN’T REALLY SMOKE POT, BUT HE SHOULD DO WHAT HE FELT LIKE DOING – IT DIDN’T BOTHER ME. WE HAD SOME DRINK – I DON’T KNOW WHAT KIND OF LIQUOR IT WAS – AND THEN I ASKED HIM IF HE WANTED TO HELP ME MAKE SOME MONEY. HE WAS INTERESTED, SO WE GO AND WE STOP SOME PLACE OUT ON US 1. WE SPENT THE NIGHT DRINKING, AND THEN HE SAID, ‘DO YOU WANT TO MAKE YOUR MONEY NOW?’

  WE WERE IN THE FRONT SEAT. HE WAS HUGGING AND KISSING ME, THEN HE STARTED PUSHING ME DOWN. ‘WAIT A MINUTE,’ I TOLD HIM, ‘GET COOL. YOU DON’T HAVE TO GET ROUGH, YOU KNOW. LET’S HAVE FUN.’

  ‘I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS ALL NIGHT LONG.’

  ‘I ALWAYS TAKE MY MONEY FIRST.’

  ‘I WANT TO SEE HOW THE MERCHANDISE FITS.’ HE UNZIPS HIS PANTS.

  ‘WELL, WHY DON’T YOU DISROBE OR SOMETHING? WHY DO YOU STILL HAVE TO HAVE YOUR CLOTHES ON?’

  ‘FUCK YOU, BABY. I’M GOING TO SCREW YOU RIGHT HERE AND NOW.’

  ‘NO YOU’RE NOT. YOU’RE NOT GOING TO JUST FUCK ME.’

  HE STARTS TO GET VIOLENT. THE SON OF A BITCH. HE’S HOLDING ME DOWN. HE’S GOING TO TRY AND RAPE ME. MY BAG WAS UNZIPPED. I WANTED TO MAKE SURE THAT IF THINGS GOT UGLY I COULD USE MY GUN. HE WAS GOING TO RAPE ME, TAKE MY MONEY, BEAT ME UP, WHATEVER THE HECK HE WAS GOING TO DO.

  I JUMPED OUT OF THE CAR WITH MY BAG AND I GRABBED THE GUN. ‘GET OUT OF THE CAR!’

  ‘WHAT? WHAT’S GOING ON?’

  ‘YOU SON OF A BITCH, I KNEW YOU WERE GOING TO RAPE ME.’

  ‘NO I WASN’T… NO I WASN’T.’

  ‘YOU KNEW YOU WERE GOING TO TRY AND RAPE ME, MAN.’

  ‘YOU BITCH.’

  I SHOT HIM. I SHOT HIM IN THE RIGHT ARM AT FIRST. DIDN’T AIM.

  THEN I SHOT HIM ANOTHER THREE OR FOUR TIMES.

  HE BEGGED FOR HELP. I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TO DO. I FIGURED, IF I HELP THIS GUY AND HE LIVES, HE’S GOING TO TELL ON ME AND I’M GOING TO GET IT FOR ATTEMPTED MURDER. SO I THOUGHT THE BEST THING TO DO WAS JUST TO KEEP SHOOTING HIM. AND THEN I THOUGHT, HELL, HE DESERVES TO DIE. HE DESERVES TO DIE FOR WHAT HE TRIED TO DO TO ME. IF I DON’T KILL HIM, HE’LL TRY TO SHOOT ME, AND THEN MAYBE HE’LL GO ON TO TRY AND RAPE SOMEONE ELSE.

  I JUST WATCHED HIM DIE.

  THE SAME THOUGHTS WENT THROUGH MY HEAD EVERY TIME I KILLED SOMEONE. THE GUY WITH THE .45 I SHOT MORE THAN NINE TIMES. I WAS PISSED OFF WHEN I FOUND THE GUN ON TOP OF THE CAR. ‘YOU FUCKING BASTARD,’ I TOLD HIM, ‘YOU WERE GOING TO BLOW MY BRAINS OUT.’ HE CALLED ME A BITCH. HE STARTED GETTING PHYSICAL. I SHOT HIM IN THE BACK SEAT OF THE CAR. I RELOADED THE GUN AND SHOT HIM SOME MORE. THEN I DROVE OVER TO 52 AND DUMPED THE BODY.

  I KNOW… I’M PROBABLY LOOKING AT DEATH, BUT I JUST WANT TO GET RIGHT WITH GOD.

  I DON’T HAVE A FAMILY, SO I GUESS I DON’T UNDERSTAND THE PAIN I CAUSED THE FAMILY OF THOSE GUYS. WHEN MY STEPMOTHER [ACTUALLY GRANDMOTHER] DIED, MY STEPFATHER WOULDN’T LET ME STAY AT HOME. I WAS LIVING OUT ON THE STREET. I HAD LOTS OF GUYS – MAYBE TEN TO TWELVE A WEEK – AND ON A NORMAL DAY WE WOULD JUST DO IT BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD, OR BEHIND A BUILDING OR MAYBE JUST OFF THE ROAD IN THE WOODS IF THEY WANTED IT ALL. I WAS USED TO SEX. THE KIDS AT SCHOOL USED TO FUCK ME, AND SO DID MY OWN BROTHER.

  REALLY INSIDE, RIGHT INSIDE ME, I’M A GOOD PERSON. I’VE BEEN WITH LOADS OF MEN – I’VE GONE THROUGH AT LEAST 250,000 GUYS IN MY LIFE, AND I BECAME GOOD FRIENDS WITH SOME OF THEM. THEY REALLY LIKED ME, THEY ALWAYS WANTED TO SEE ME AGAIN. BUT, WHEN JOHNS STARTED MESSING WITH ME, I’D GET JUST AS VIOLENT AS THEY WOULD GET ON ME. I’D LOVE TO SAY THAT TO THEIR FAMILIES. I KNOW THEY MUST THINK I’M A STUPID BITCH, BUT WHAT THEY MUST REALISE IS THAT NO MATTER HOW MUCH THEY LOVED THE PEOPLE THAT DIED, NO MATTER HOW MUCH THEY LOVE THEM, THEY WERE BAD PEOPLE BECAUSE THEY WERE GOING TO HURT ME. SO THEY HAVE TO REALISE THE FACT THAT THIS PERSON, NO MATTER HOW MUCH THEY LOVED THEM OR HOW GOOD THEY FELT THEY WERE, THIS PERSON WAS EITHER GOING TO PHYSICALLY BEAT ME UP, RAPE ME OR KILL ME. I JUST TURNED AROUND AND DID MY FAIR PLAY BEFORE I GOT HURT, SEE? THEY STARTED GETTING RADICAL ON ME, AND I JUST DID WHAT I HAD TO DO…

  I WAS BETRAYED ALL MY FUCKING LIFE, YOU KNOW. MY PARENTS BETRAYED ME, MY GRANDPARENTS BETRAYED ME. MEN BETRAYED ME AND THE FUCKING COPS BETRAYED ME. FRIENDS BETRAYED ME. I’VE HAD ENOUGH SHIT IN MY LIFE. WHAT ABOUT THE COPS? LYING, CHEATING MOTHERFUCKERS. I WAS CLEANING THE STREETS FOR THEM.

  A RAPED WOMAN GETS EXECUTED. YOU ARE ALL AN INHUMAN BUNCH OF LYING MEN AND BITCHES. GO AHEAD AND PUT ME IN THE ELECTRIC CHAIR – YOU’LL ALL GET NUKED IN THE END…

  I spend my time trying to get into prisons when most are trying to get out.

  I study court transcripts, scene-of-crime photos, witness statements and any document relating to an offender that I can get my hands on. I make it my business to talk with the next of kin, the police, attorneys, schoolteachers and friends. I interview law-enforcement officers, correctional officers, psychiatrists, psychologists and all those who work with these offenders. I talk to the victims’ parents and, finally, I get to interview the serial killers or mass murderers themselves.

  From the USA to Russia to Singapore, San Quentin to Sablino to Changi, I visit these killers in the human warehouses they call correctional facilities, places where the stench of disinfectant and urine permeates every brick. I touch them and smell the same air they breathe. I sit with them, eat with them. Occasionally I witness their executions.

  Collectively, in one space, they are no threat. Just extremely dangerous dead men and women walking, talking – respectful, chatty and cool. Alone with them in their cells – ‘houses’, in prison parlance – they metamorphose into different beasts; their evil tentacles of thought squirm into your brain. They become controlling, manipulative, sick psycho-beasts. Men such as Kenneth Bianchi and Michael Bruce Ross masturbate every day to the memories of their perverted crimes. I try to communicate and get inside their heads; I try to find out what makes them tick, what makes them do what they do.

  My methods occasionally seem to bear fruit. Two homicides (Dzung Tu and Paula Perrera) were cleared up with Michael Ross on Death Row, Connecticut. One murder (Kimberly Logan) was cleared up, amongst oth
er offences, with Arthur John Shawcross, serving 250 years to life in New York.

  But I knew there were no crimes to clear up as I drove my rental car down the Dixie Highway to Sheridan Street West to meet Aileen Carol ‘Lee’ Wuornos at the Broward Correctional Institute, Pembroke Pines, Florida in May 1997. I had just spent time with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, based in the state capital of Tallahassee, and it was one of those days recently encapsulated by award-winning documentary-maker Nick Broomfield as having ‘… the promise of sunshine and good times. As the miles unwind, oranges appear on roadside trees and smiles become compulsory as the low-slung sun burns throughout the day.’

  Unlike Nick Broomfield, who had spent some time trying to negotiate a visit with Aileen for his acclaimed documentary The Selling of a Serial Killer, my opportunity to meet her was offered out of the blue, and I was to talk to a woman whom the media had dubbed the ‘Damsel of Death’.

  Thankfully I was only with Aileen Carol ‘Lee’ Wuornos a short while and, to be frank, that limited time in her company was more than enough for me. I guess it was enough for her too. However, I will say this: she was somehow different to any other cold-blooded serial killer, man or woman, I have met, with the exception of Douglas Clark, the Sunset Slayer, who is on Death Row at San Quentin State Prison, California. Both of them were foul-mouthed individuals, and there were certainly no crocodile tears from Aileen Wuornos. As with Doug, there were no mealy, whining, snivelling-laced-with-phoney apologies, no regrets from this brittle woman. Neither of these sociopaths tried the same, well-worn, sympathy-seeking manipulation process so often experienced by psychiatrists, psychologists, investigators and journalists who interview these killers. She looked as hard as granite and, using no fancy sound bites, she spoke her mind – fragmented as it may have been.

  What fascinated me above all of the other issues that interested me at the time was not so much why Wuornos had killed – by serial-murderer standards she was small fry with a mere seven, or as I believe eight, victims to her discredit – but why the world’s public and media had been whipped into such an all-consuming interest in this particular creature. There are scores of examples of this homicidal breed with higher body counts who are of far more interest in criminological terms, and who might be the focus of similar amounts of mass hysteria. What was the crowd pull for the Aileen Wuornos circus?

  Already motion pictures (such as Monster and Overkill) have been produced which purport to portray the more gruesome segments of her life and crimes. Many TV documentaries concerning Wuornos have been screened around the world. Apart from Jack the Ripper, it is possible that more books have been written about her than any other criminal, or serial killer, who has ever lived. Even police officers, bombarded and tempted by movie consultancy fees totalling $2.5 million, risked their careers in an effort to hike a ride on the Wuornos bandwagon; at least one top cop had to resign.

  In life, and even more so in death, Aileen Carol Wuornos has for some reason found herself elevated to cult status. However, no movie has yet dared touch on Wuornos’s abused childhood, other than a passing, off-the-cuff reference. Hundreds of ordinary law enforcers were involved with the hunt for Wuornos and Moore, yet they have received no mention for the sterling work they carried out. More importantly, no one has put the spotlight on the glaring inconsistencies in the case. Only one person, as far as I can judge, has been brave enough to name names, and that is Nick Broomfield. I take up the baton from him.

  If the story of Aileen Wuornos has any real value at all, it is not entertainment value. It is to expose a criminal justice system for what it was, and probably still is.

  Nick Broomfield is not a psychiatrist, as he will confirm, yet he observed that Wuornos was all but insane prior to her execution, and I agree. One does not need to be a shrink to work that one out. Nevertheless, the Florida Department of Corrections stated that she was sane enough to die. My views on capital punishment are just that – my own views. What shrieks out at me is the fact that Wuornos was certainly sane when she committed her horrific murders. She knew the rules. She knew that in committing aggravated murder she might face the ultimate penalty, but she chose to break the rules without a tear of remorse. However, there is not a shred of doubt that her mind disintegrated during her final years. Does this absolve her? Is it some form of mitigation? Too often we consider the killer’s human rights – we hear so little of the rights of the victims and the next of kin, their lives wrecked forever.

  This book tells Aileen Wuornos’s shocking story through her own eyes, and using her own words. These words have been taken from my interviews with her and from the extensive interview tapes taken at the time of her arrest. I have filled in the gaps with my reconstructions of how the events unfolded; I believe them to be as accurate as they can possibly be.

  When one sets out to investigate the road to murder, well signposted as it may be, one finds diversions, small, seemingly insignificant dirt roads that can lead to unexpected discoveries. Aileen Carol Wuornos led her eight victims into such diversions where they expected something less than being blasted to death. This book will take you down those roads to a place where you will never look back.

  PART ONE

  ‘WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL, I ALWAYS WANTED TO BE A NUN.’

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE CIGARETTE BANDIT

  MY MOTHER PLUCKED ME OUT OF HER BELLY AND LEFT ME WITH MY GRANDPARENTS. WE NEVER KNEW THE DAMNED WHORE. WE NEVER SAW HER AGAIN EXCEPT FOR FUNERALS. I SPIT ON HER. SHE CAN GO TO HELL.

  OUR MOTHER SHIT-CANNED US TWO KIDS. THE MOTHERFUCKING BITCH WHORE SENT US IN A HANDBASKET TO HELL.

  MY STEPFATHER WOULD BEAT ME OFTEN AFTER SCHOOL OR IF I CAME HOME LATE. HE’D MAKE ME CUT DOWN A WILLOW BRANCH AND HE’D USE THAT. I SOON LEARNED THAT THE THICKER THE BRANCH, THE LESS IT HURT. SOMETIMES HE USED TO BEAT ME WITH A BELT, THEN HE MADE ME CLEAN IT.

  The twenty-ninth of February is a unique day. It was created artificially to try to make up for the fact that our year is really a few hours longer than 365 days. Aileen Carol Pittman was a Piscean leap-year child. She entered this world, a happy, healthy tot, on Wednesday, 29 February 1956, wrapped up in the warm and secure environment of Clinton Hospital, Detroit, Rochester, Michigan. Her parents were 14-year-old (some say 16-year-old) Diane Wuornos and 19-year-old handyman, sexual pervert and child molester Leo Dale Pittman. Many claim that Leo was a highly sexed, dictatorial figure who carried guns, but we know that they were married with the blessing of his grandmother who lied about their ages. So, one might say, Aileen was born – a dangerous breach birth – with both small feet on the wrong side of the tracks in small-town America.

  The marriage between Diane and Leo proved to be tumultuous and, as is all too common in the western world’s throwaway society, destined for failure. Indeed, it ended a few months before Lee was born: Leo left the young Diane to raise the new baby and her older brother Keith, a product of the same coupling.

  Lee never knew her genetic father, who was soon jailed on the capital charges of kidnapping and raping a seven-year-old girl and taking her across state lines. There is some evidence to suggest that he had also killed a young girl. Leo was to spend some time in two secure mental hospitals. In 1971, while he was in a Michigan prison, this singularly nasty piece of work conveniently fashioned a noose from a bed sheet then hanged himself.

  With small-city people living from hand to mouth, it is not surprising that Diane soon found the responsibilities of single motherhood unbearable. Welfare would not help her, and she sought what seemed to her to be the only way out. In 1960, when Lee was four years old, she asked her parents to babysit her kids, then in tears she phoned to say that she would never return.

  Lauri Wuornos, a worker in the Ford factory, and his wife, Eileen Britta Wuornos (whom I shall refer to as Britta), already had three youngsters of their own: Barry, Lori and of course Diane, who had become pregnant by the worthless Leo who was now in jail for sex offences. Nevertheless, with the best will
in the world, the couple officially adopted both of Diane’s children on Friday, 18 March 1960.

  Their home, with its sad, yellow-painted wood cladding, was an unprepossessing one-storey ranch amidst a cluster of trees sited off Cadmus Street in Troy, Michigan. Troy sits on Interstate 75 – the Dixie Highway – which features prominently in Lee’s life history.

  Innocent-looking and otherwise unremarkable, the house, according to Lee, was nevertheless a place of secrets in the rural, close-knit community consisting of dirt roads some 24 miles north of the bustling metropolis of Detroit. Near neighbours, who were never once invited to set foot inside, even for casual pleasantries, recall the curtains always being tightly drawn across the small windows of the Wuornos house. It was common knowledge that Lauri Wuornos and his wife kept the outside world very much at arm’s length. They minded their own business and expected everyone else to attend to theirs.

  Aged six, Lee started causing problems at home when she started taking an unhealthy interest in matches. While trying to start a fire with lighter fluid, she suffered scarring facial burns – perhaps a portent for things to come.

  Lauri and Britta raised Lee and Keith with their own children, Barry and Lori, but they did not reveal that they were, in fact, the adopted children’s grandparents, and, behind those shaded windows, frequent clashes of will took place between young Lee and her heavy-drinking, physically intimidating grandfather. The omnipresent third party was a wide, brown leather belt that he kept hanging on a peg behind his bedroom door. Lee later claimed that, at his bidding, this strap was cleaned almost ritualistically by her with saddle soap and conditioner which were kept in the dresser drawer.