Monster: Inside the Mind of Aileen Wuornos

We know that by this time in Lee’s turbulent life she had a criminal record that included armed robbery – a trivial amount of money was stolen, but armed robbery is still a serious offence. She was a forger and a hooker who could be an honest, hardworking girl one moment, a spitting demon the next. Lee carried firearms and she was prepared to threaten people with them. She thought she was above the law.

When Lee met 24-year-old Tyria ‘Ty’ Jolene Moore at a Daytona gay bar in 1986, she was lonely, angry and ready for something new.

CHAPTER THREE TYRIA JOLENE MOORE

IT WAS LOVE BEYOND THE IMAGINABLE. EARTHLY WORDS CANNOT DESCRIBE HOW I FELT ABOUT TYRIA. I THOUGHT TYRIA MUST BE TAKEN CARE OF AS SHE, HERSELF, HAD NEVER BEEN. THE ONLY REASON I HUSTLED SO HARD ALL THOSE YEARS WAS TO SUPPORT HER. I DID WHAT I HAD TO DO TO PAY THE BILLS, BECAUSE I DIDN’T HAVE ANOTHER CHOICE. I HAD WARRANTS OUT FOR MY ARREST. I LOVED HER TOO MUCH. THEN THE FUCKING BITCH SOLD ME DOWN THE RIVER. I HATE THE BITCH.

Wearing the oldest non-American Indian place name in the United States, Florida, or ‘Place of Flowers’, was so dubbed by the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon when he became the first known European to set foot on what would eventually become US soil, on 2 April 1513. By all accounts Juan found much gold in the rivers of the ‘Island of Florida’ and, in doing so, upset a few of the natives. In July 1521 he was mortally wounded by an Indian arrow and returned to Havana, Cuba, where he gracefully expired.

We owe modern Florida, especially its seaside resorts, to one of the greatest go-getters of his age. Carl Graham Fisher was a wealthy magnate who designed and built most of America’s major highways. In the late 1910s, Fisher became seized with the idea that Miami Beach – or Lincoln, as he wished to call it – would make a splendid resort.

The costs and logistics of building a resort in a distant swamp proved formidable, but Fisher persevered and by 1926 had nearly finished his model community, complete with hotels, a casino, golf courses, a yacht basin and a lavish Roman swimming pavilion (which featured, a trifle incongruously, a Dutch windmill).

Then a hurricane blew it all down.

As if this was not enough, when the stock market crashed in 1929, the market for holiday homes disappeared. Fisher would not live to see the success that Miami Beach became.

Covering 55,560 square miles, Florida is now famous for its beaches which stretch along the entire eastern seaboard from Fernandina Beach in the north to Miami in the south. The Sunshine State has the air of being one large, glitzy holiday resort, with glamorous hotels lining its long coastline. But behind the style lies a seamier side. It is this same coast that has brought drug smugglers to the state. It is a favourite retirement area – its balmy climate appeals to the elderly – but it also attracts a large vagrant population who find the weather suits their pockets: sleeping outdoors is free. Florida is not only a tourist state, but also home to a large transient population. These wanderers pick up seasonal work on fruit farms where they are badly paid, or they fall in with the local drug trade. Many of them are women, so Lee, often dressed in black leather, was not conspicuous as a lone female hitching on her own.

Getting to Daytona Beach was easy for Lee. She had run away from home and run away from her marriage. She had crossed state line after state line with the law on her tail, hitched south on Interstate 95 and found what she thought was paradise: sunshine, jobs and cheap living.

According to those who knew Lee and middle-class, respectable Tyria, it had been love at first sight in June of 1986 when the two met at the now-defunct Zodiac Bar in South Daytona. Lee was still on the run after passing forged cheques; it is reported that Tyria had received an insurance payout resulting from a car accident and was well away from her home town of Cadiz, Ohio. She was working as a laundry maid at the El Caribe Motel at 2125 Atlantic Avenue and living on Halifax Drive with her friend, Cammie Greene, who had taken her in after she was evicted from her apartment.

Mr and Mrs Greene were good people. They were law-abiding, Sunday-barbeque folk who always went out of their way to help their neighbours, baked cakes and were well liked. ‘Tyria and we were good friends,’ Mrs Greene told reporters, ‘at least until we met Aileen. My husband and I finally asked them to leave because we didn’t want their lifestyle in our house.’