Monster: Inside the Mind of Aileen Wuornos

I will cut straight to the chase here. As Lee would suggest, ‘Cut the fucking crap.’ The police knew it, many potential witnesses knew it and the prosecutor knew it. The judge refused to admit it at trial, and the jury lived in sublime ignorance of the fact that Richard Charles Mallory was a sexual deviant.

‘He didn’t attempt to rape you,’ roared the judge. ‘You brutally shot Mr Mallory for his money.’

Lee’s sentiments: ‘Fuck you. I hope you, your wife and fucking kids die of cancer.’

The jury at Lee’s trial had no way of knowing this, but there is no doubting that Richard Charles Mallory liked to put himself about. The 51-year-old owner of a Clearwater electronics-repair business used to close up shop abruptly and disappear for a few days at a time on binges of heavy drinking and perverted sex. It was his secret life.

With no male friends, he was an extremely secretive, paranoid loner. It has been claimed that Mallory changed the locks to his apartment many times in the three years before his death. It is also said that he had been involved with an ambassador’s wife; he certainly appeared paranoid whenever this woman was mentioned. He thought he was being followed and wanted to have plastic surgery to get his nose altered, presumably so he wouldn’t be recognised. He was a strange fellow indeed, this Richard Mallory.

He employed staff only long enough to clear the backlog of work that accrued during his disappearances, and let his workers go once his repair orders were up to date. Perhaps this was a prudent, financially astute move for a man whose credit cards were no longer valid, a man who needed every dime for something far more appealing…

Unbeknown to the jury, the only constants in Mallory’s life – apart from his unexplained absences from work – were heavy alcohol consumption and an insatiable desire for sex. He used the services of hookers, visited strip joints and was seriously into hardcore pornography. He also used drugs. Apart from a recent girlfriend, no one – including the jury at Lee’s trial – was aware that he had served the better part of ten years in the Maryland State Mental Institution for an attempted rape.

Mallory was a private man, and an enigma to everybody. Living alone in a multi-family apartment complex called The Oaks, few people came to know him on account of his erratic lifestyle; at his television-and video-repair shop, Mallory Electronics in Palm Harbour, his absences were frequent and unexplained.

With a population of just under 60,000, one might have thought that Mallory’s business would have done a roaring trade in the Clearwater area. He knew his stuff, turned out quality repairs and didn’t charge his customers a fortune. However, he had squandered all of his firm’s profits on deviant sex. He was in serious financial straits. Bankruptcy loomed over Richard Mallory and his company. To kick off with, he owed serious money. The sums included $4,000 in rent arrears for the business, and a small packet on his apartment. The credit card companies had closed his accounts. Business transactions were now all in cash. He was due to be swept up, closed down and evicted by his landlords. His business affairs were due to be audited by the Inland Revenue Service. He had stalled the inspectors for too long, and pressure was mounting. The result was that Mallory had a good many problems on his mind.

Some would say he was a good-looking man with his full head of dark hair combed back from a high forehead. Standing at just less than six feet tall, the neatly moustachioed Mallory surveyed the world through hazel eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. He cut a trim figure, tipping the scales at just less than 170 pounds, and he thought of himself as 51 years young. Five times divorced and recently separated from an entirely decent girlfriend called Jackie Davis, Mallory had always been drawn to the opposite sex and seedy exchanges. He loved to party in the debauched sense, and was a regular visitor to the kinds of adult-entertainment establishments dedicated to catering to pleasures of the flesh.

Mallory liked the way women looked, the way they smelled and moved. He liked the way he felt when he was with them – powerful, controlling, sensuous. He liked power over women; he liked to abuse them, to tie them up, handcuff them, bite them and knock them around. To him, street women and those who flaunted their bodies were up for ill treatment.

When Richard Mallory didn’t show up to open his shop on Monday, 3 December 1989, his staff and clients didn’t think much of it. As far as friends went, there was no one close enough to him to notice he was gone. Frankly, no one even cared. It wasn’t until the cops turned up at his business saying they had found his abandoned Cadillac outside Daytona that anyone knew anything was amiss. No one ‘gave a rat’s ass’, as one officer dryly observed.