Monster: Inside the Mind of Aileen Wuornos

When a smiling Deputy Jimmie Patrick of the Antrim County Sheriff’s Department arrived, Lee was arrested for assault and battery and hauled off to jail. She was also charged on fugitive warrants from the Troy Police Department who had requested that she be picked up on charges of drinking alcohol in a car, unlawful use of a driver’s licence and not having a Michigan driver’s licence. She was bailed when a friend turned up with her purse containing $1,450 – her husband’s money.

Three days later her brother Keith, aged 21, died of throat cancer. It had been in his body for ages and had finally eaten him up. Keith was cremated at the same funeral home as Britta and Lauri Wuornos. Lee arrived late for the service, but in time to place a rose in his hands.

Having rejected her son in life, but acknowledging him in death, Diane flew in from Texas for Keith’s funeral. Other mourners were surprised to see her apparently too distraught to sit through the service for the son she had abandoned.

The reader does not need to be a clairvoyant to predict that things did not bode well between Lee and Lewis, and that the marriage would be short-lived. Lee had been torn between her desire to get drunk and hang out in bars, and the less desirable option: long periods of abject boredom, sitting around at her aged husband’s feet in his plush, beachside condominium, their eyes glued to TV programmes about trains, boats and the stock market. With problems looming from every direction, Lewis tried the well-tested and universally approved ‘I am older than you, please respect your elders’ trick. Trained most comprehensively in this area by her late adoptive father, whose family communication skills were considerably less than poor, Lee responded by awarding her new husband a black eye.

Shaken, and very likely stirred, by this outburst from his sweet young wife, Lewis tried another idea. After all, it had worked with his late wife, and the other two before that, so why shouldn’t it work with his new one? He would cut Lee’s allowance, and, if that failed, he would not give her any money at all. After considering the plan overnight, breakfast came. Dressed in his gown, his feet warm in his furry slippers, he got as far as saying, ‘I will stop your allow–’ when she beat him up with his walking cane and pointed a meat skewer uncomfortably close to his throat.

Lewis Fell now saw the light. At the first opportunity he obtained a restraining order to prevent another battering, and sought an annulment of the marriage claiming she had squandered his money and given him several damned good thrashings into the bargain.

The divorce decree stated:

Respondent has a violent and ungovernable temper and has threatened to do bodily harm to the Petitioner and from her past actions will injure Petitioner and his property… unless the court enjoins and restrains said Respondent from assaulting… or interfering with Petitioner or his property.

Lee pawned the expensive diamond engagement ring he had given her. Lewis Fell, his bank account seriously depleted, vanished into obscurity a wiser man. Their marriage officially ended on Tuesday, 19 July 1977 with a divorce issued at the Volusia County courthouse in Florida.

On Thursday, 4 August 1976, Lee pleaded guilty to the assault-and-battery charge, paying a fine and costs of $105. Then came an unexpected windfall. Keith’s army life insurance paid up and, as next of kin, Lee received $10,000. The money was immediately put down as a deposit on a shiny black Pontiac (which was soon repossessed). She also bought a mixed bag of antiques and a massive stereo system, although she had no home in which to put them. Lee blew all the money within three months.

Adrift in the world once again, Lee embarked on a series of relationships which, as may have been expected, failed. From time to time she turned tricks, but, even as a prostitute working the interstate highway, she was not exactly sought after.

For a while in 1981, she lived in a mobile home with a retired businessman who was separated from his wife. ‘Lee was quick-tempered,’ he said, but he found her ‘warm, loving and resourceful’. She did all that she could to please him, and he recalled that, when the vacuum cleaner broke down, she replaced it with a new one the very same night – albeit stolen it from a nearby hotel.