Monster: Inside the Mind of Aileen Wuornos

Now, however, we can learn the shocking truth. Tyria knew about the murder of Richard Mallory because Lee had told her. In fact, she told her the very same day Lee had killed the man. Lee gave Tyria a scarf and jacket belonging to Mallory – it had ‘Richard’ printed inside the jacket collar – and she showed her a camera, a radar detector and toolbox which had mysteriously come into her possession. And, if all of this was not sufficient to raise Tyria’s suspicions from non-belief to that of shock, she could have hardly failed to notice the blood-spattered car seat while she was driving round in Mallory’s car for an hour.

Tyria would later say:

She [Lee] came home early one day in December with a two-door Cadillac with tinted windows and a gator plate [a Florida number plate] on the front. We used this car to move from Ocean Shores Motel to [an apartment on] Burleigh Avenue. Later that night after I came home from work, Lee told me she had shot and killed a guy that day. She later told me she had covered his body with a piece of carpet… and left the car in some woods off John Anderson. And, when we moved in on Burleigh, she had gotten some things in which she showed me something with the name ‘Richard’ on it. She gave me a grey jacket and scarf, which I believe she had gotten from that car.

Richard Charles Mallory was shot to death very close to Ormond-by-the-Sea at around 5am on the morning of Friday, 1 December 1989, but now, for the first time, we can follow the sequence of events thereafter.

After blasting Mallory to death, Lee then drove his car to the Ocean Shores Motel in Holly Hill where she met up with Tyria. Using Mallory’s Cadillac, together they moved their possessions to a low-budget or ‘efficiency’ apartment on Burleigh Avenue. They went back to their old apartment in the car, collected up their two pets – a dog and a cat – and returned to the new apartment. Tyria rode off on her moped, while Lee threw a 12-speed cycle into the back of the car and dumped the vehicle within a short distance of Burleigh Avenue where it was later found by police. She cycled back to the new apartment where she gave Mallory’s grey jacket and scarf to Tyria, explaining in the same breath that she had ‘shot and killed a guy that day’.

At 2.25pm on Wednesday, 6 December, Lee, using the alias of Cammie Marsh Green of 1 High Ridge Road, strolled into OK Pawn and Jewelry Inc, 305 Dr Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard, Daytona Beach. She was about to pawn a Minolta Freedom camera and a Radio Shack Micronta Road Patrol Radar Detector, formerly the property of Richard Mallory. The ticket number 3325 recorded the transaction, and the manager, Linda Miller, handed over $35. Lee’s obligatory thumbprint on the document would later prove part of her undoing.

The murder weapon was found after Lee’s arrest. For four days police searched Rose Bay, and the rusty gun was located in the south-east corner between the sea wall and the first set of pilings supporting the bridge. Donald Champagne, ballistics expert and retired from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, identified it as a .22-calibre, nine-shot pistol with six grooves and a right-hand twist. ‘A popular weapon.’

There were no ballistic tests carried out on the weapon in an effort to match the casings and bullets with the revolver. The weapon was in such a bad state, the examiner would have risked serious injury had the gun been fired again.

Quite why police – in the full knowledge of Tyria’s conflicting statements and outright lies – chose not to prosecute her, at least as an accessory after the fact in the murder of Richard Mallory, we may only surmise. Had Tyria reported this murder to the police, at least seven other men would not have been shot to death. However, as later events will show, there was much more to this than meets the eye.

The jury did not know about Mallory and his predilections. Of course, the last thing an attorney needs when prosecuting a woman accused of brutal murder, who is claiming self-defence, is for the court to learn the cold fact that the victim was a brutal, hard-drinking sexual deviant. Nevertheless, the truth is that many years back, in Anne Arundel County, Mallory had been confined in the Maryland penitentiary on the not insignificant charge of housebreaking with intent to rape.