Monster: Inside the Mind of Aileen Wuornos

‘While Lee was in your home, how did she act?’

‘Very difficult. When she wasn’t drinking, she was calm. But when she drank, she was loud and obnoxious.’

‘How often would she be drinking?’

‘During the time she stayed there that’s all she did, mostly.’

Alzada told the court that Busch and Budweiser seemed to be Lee’s favourite drinks, and that her drinking sessions were often followed by loud arguments with Tyria behind the closed bedroom door.

‘Can you estimate, when she was there drinking, how much she might drink in an evening or a day?’

‘Normally she would come in with a 12-pack and maybe drink two or three 12-packs in a night and in a day. She is a heavy drinker. They trashed the place.’

Lee often said she liked sex with men, and her sex life with Tyria waned enough for Tyria to complain to her best friend about it. Lee herself said that her ‘greater love’ for Tyria ‘wasn’t sexual’. The real driving force in Lee’s life wasn’t sex at all; it was a search for an emotional bond and love – love that she had never really had from her abandoning mother, her emotionally and physically abusive grandfather or, it seems, from the grandmother who failed to protect her from him, and certainly not from the callous young males who had sex with her while she was an adolescent. She was far more familiar with loss than with love, having lost her brother Keith to cancer, and having had her baby son snatched from her after she gave birth. Lee found the deep emotional bond she desperately craved with Tyria. Her borderline personality disorder carried with it an overwhelming fear of abandonment. She would do anything to keep her, even kill if needs be, and so deep-seated was her love for Tyria, she would even give up her life to protect her in the years to follow.

Lee’s market value as a hooker, never spectacular, fell even further. When Lee hit the road searching for johns, she would pose as a hitchhiker or a disabled motorist at highway on-and-off ramps – she became an ‘exit-to-exit prostitute’. Money was always tight and they were constantly moving from lodgings to lodgings because they failed to pay the rent. Their existence, meagre though it was, became more difficult to maintain. Clearly something had to change, but getting out of Daytona was not easy. There was never enough money to get to Miami, and the two women now realised that jobs were scarcer than they had first thought. They had blown all their money, and their dreams of good times had faded as quickly. Desperation crept in, and temptation was quick to follow. It is a formula that often leads to crime. In November 1988, Lee was causing problems once again. Using the alias Susan Blahovec, she launched a six-day campaign of threatening phone calls against a Zephyrhills supermarket following an altercation over lottery tickets.

Sometime during the Christmas of 1989 and New Year 1990 – the dates and details are sketchy at best – James Dalla Rosa picked up Lee who showed him a photo of two children and said that she was a high-class call girl who lived in a $125,000 home. She pulled from her bag a plastic case with various business cards – formerly the property of Lewis Gratz Fell. ‘These are some of my customers,’ she told James, who felt very uncomfortable with the situation and didn’t feel that everything was as advertised. Lee quoted $100 for sex in a motel, $75 for sex in the woods and $30 for oral in the car – rates that she was to keep until she was arrested. Sensing that the man had money, she said, ‘I prefer to go into the woods,’ Dalla Rosa later testified.

When he spurned her offer, she became agitated, ‘moving jerkily, bouncing in her seat, snatching at her purse’, as the driver described her behaviour. ‘She became angry after I was not receptive to her offer. Her demeanour changed tremendously.’

He dropped her off near an interstate where she slammed the door and stormed off.

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

MURDERED 1 DECEMBER 1989