SURE, I THREATENED HIM WITH A MEAT SKEWER. SO FUCKING WHAT? HE LOOKED AT ME LIKE ALL MEN DID. RIGHT FROM THE OFF. DIRTY OLD FUCKER.
Lee Wuornos next comes to our attention in 1974 when, using the alias Sandra Kretsch, she was jailed in Jefferson County, Colorado for disorderly conduct, drunk driving and firing a .22-calibre pistol from a moving vehicle. Additional charges were filed when she skipped bail ahead of her trial.
In March 1976, Lee, now aged 20, married multi-millionaire Lewis Gratz Fell. By any measure, this was a curious match. Silver-haired Fell, with his reputable Philadelphia background, was 69 years old when he picked up Lee while she was hitchhiking. He was well connected and kept a plastic business card case containing all of his contacts which included judges, attorneys, state’s attorneys and police officers, among others. When Lee and Lewis parted company under somewhat acrimonious circumstances, this wallet went missing, the significance of which we shall soon discover.
Lee saw Fell coming from the word go and, as we now know, this young lady was not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. We have to give her credit for that. However, what we can see is that Lee’s first big hit, even if it was not a murderous act, was against an elderly man who was several years older than her grandfather.
Quite what was going through Lewis’s mind at that time can only be a matter for conjecture: perhaps he was thinking with the parts he hadn’t used for several decades. Nevertheless, he offered Lee his hand in marriage, which she accepted in a heartbeat and, after buying her a
The wedding took place less than two months after the death of Lee’s 65-year-old grandfather Lauri.
Most of those who knew Lee viewed her marriage cynically. They racked their brains and scratched their heads, finding it impossible to judge it as anything other than a purely mercenary move, which it certainly was. They knew that Lee was capable of just about anything.
The unwitting Lewis Fell had no idea what he was letting himself in for. He was clueless. Some on the fringes took the view that it was a mutually acceptable relationship, and they would be correct. Others thought he was stark raving bonkers. For his part, Lewis had a pretty young woman on his arm and in his bed, while Lee enjoyed the fruits of what his money could buy.
Early in July 1976, husband and wife rolled into Michigan in a brand-new, cream-coloured Cadillac and, while raising a few eyebrows, they checked into a motel. Now smiling all the way to the next bank, Lee stuck a finger up at small-city Troy by sending a few friends newspaper cuttings of their wedding announcement. Carefully clipped from the society pages of the Daytona press, they came complete with a photograph of a man who looked old enough to be her grandfather, knees buckling and leaning heavily on a stick.
Lee knew that word travelled faster over backyard fences than by phone in hick Troy, so, to rub the citizens’ noses further in the seed, she highlighted the portion describing Fell as the president of nothing less than a yacht club, with nothing less than a private income derived from nothing less than railroad stocks and shares.
While perky Lee had hit pay dirt, geriatric Lewis had wandered into a very serious problem. His idyllic dream of settling down each night with a young piece of skirt to satisfy his sexual desires was about to become his worst nightmare, one that Stephen King would have been hard-pushed to better.
On Tuesday, 13 July, Lee, against her husband’s express wish, decided to go out on the town, while Lewis stayed at home to watch TV. After visiting a few bars she ended up at Bernie’s Club in Mancelona where she flaunted her body and started to hustle at the pool table. With a figure many women would die for, clad in an off-the-shoulder top, a micro-miniskirt and thigh-high boots, Lee was as hot as a kitchen stove.
Nevertheless, despite her physical attributes which had the locals drooling at the mouth, sometime after midnight the barman and manager Danny Moore decided he had seen enough of her. Lee was drunk, rowdy, shouting obscenities, uttering threats to other patrons and generally being objectionable. Danny casually walked over to the game and announced that the table was closing down. As he was gathering up the balls, he heard someone shout, ‘Duck!’ He turned just in time to see Lee aim a cue ball at his head. It missed him only by inches, but the missile had been hurled with such force that it became lodged in the wall.