Monster: Inside the Mind of Aileen Wuornos

Now aged 34, but looking considerably older, Lee was mentally and physically almost washed up. Pining for her lost lover, she spent days on end brooding in her room. Out of money and not tricking, she had to leave. She took to the streets, sleeping where she could. If she found a john, and business was good, she would have the money to get a motel room for the night. However, business was not always good and life for Lee Wuornos had reached rock bottom.

The breakthrough for the investigators came from Port Orange near Daytona. Local police had picked up the trail of the two women and were able to provide a detailed account of the couple’s movements from late September to mid-December.

They had stayed, primarily, at the Fairview Motel in Harbor Oaks near Ormond-by-the-Sea where Lee registered as Cammie Marsh Greene. They spent a short time in a small apartment behind the Belgrade restaurant near the Fairview, but returned later to the motel. Then Wuornos, aka Blahovec, aka Greene, returned alone and stayed until 10 December. A national police computer check gave driver’s-licence and criminal-record information on Tyria Moore, Susan Blahovec and Cammie Marsh Greene. Tyria Moore had no record worth considering, breaking-and-entering charges against her in 1983 having been dropped. Blahovec had one trespassing arrest, while Greene had no record at all. Additionally, the photograph on Blahovec’s licence did not match the one for Greene.

The Greene ID was the one that finally paid off. Volusia officers checked pawn shops in the area and found that Cammie Marsh Greene had pawned the 35mm Minolta Freedom camera and a Micronta Road Patrol Radar Detector (both items owned by Richard Mallory). Few people even own a Radio Shack Radar Detector, so this combination sparked the detectives’ interest. In Ormond Beach, Lee had pawned a set of tools that matched the description of those taken from David Spears’s truck, although the police failed to recover these.

The thumbprint on pawn ticket number 3325 proved to be the key. Jenny Ahearn of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s Automated Fingerprint Identification System found nothing on her initial computer search, but not one to be put off, she visited Volusia County with colleagues where they began a hand search of fingerprint records.

Within an hour, the team struck gold. The print showed up on a weapons charge and outstanding warrant against a Lori K. Grody. Her fingerprints matched a bloody palm print found in Peter Siems’s Sunbird. All of this information was sent to the National Crime Information Center, and responses came from Michigan, Colorado and Florida confirming that Lori K. Grody, Susan Blahovec and Cammie Marsh Greene were all aliases for one person: Aileen Carol Wuornos.

By now, Tyria was keeping her head down and was back living with her parents in Ohio. Lee was living rough when, on Wednesday, 19 December, she met a paunchy ex-marine named Dixie Mills at Wet Willie’s Bar on US 1. Both were drunk, and they shared a common reason to get plastered: Lee was grieving over her loss of Tyria, while Dixie was shattered because his wife had left him after just a few months of marriage.

Mills would later recall that Lee was a very intelligent woman. ‘We talked about a lot of things – from art to parapsychology to ancient history. I couldn’t believe I’d met another human being that had such awesome comprehension and knowledge.’ He found Lee to be a ‘wild, savage party animal’ with an insatiable desire for sex and alcohol. ‘There’s only two people I’ve ever met who have met the devil and shaken his hand,’ boasted Mills. ‘The one is me and the other is her.’

The two hellraisers stayed together until Christmas Eve, when Mills left Lee to return to his wife. On parting, he gave her $50.

Almost a year later, Mills recounted an entirely different story to the Globe newspaper.

‘It all started so innocently. But it turned into a nightmare. If I’d known what I was getting myself into, I would have run for my life. But I didn’t have a clue. On that first day, I was trying to drown my sorrows in beer at Wet Willie’s in Daytona Beach, and I saw this woman doing exactly the same thing down at the other end of the bar… that night, her troubles made her all the more appealing. We were both pretty down and out, and we desperately needed each other. Suddenly, she turned, looked deep into my eyes and said, “Dick, you and I are one – aren’t we.”’

Several days later, he said that Lee made him an offer. ‘Dick, I’ll be your wife if you pay me $500 a month.’

Mills went on to claim that he was ‘stunned’, and no way would he ever do such a thing. And, according to him, she revealed many of her secret fantasies, one of which entailed her being hooded while she was tied to a tree in a forest. Then ‘a guy would come up to her and rape her, and then shoot her in the head’. She told him that the killing would make her climax.