Читать книгу Monster - Aileen Wuornos & Christopher Berry-Dee - Страница 12

IT WAS LOVE BEYOND THE IMAGINABLE. EARTHLY WORDS CANNOT DESCRIBE HOW I FELT ABOUT TYRIA. I THOUGHT TYRIA MUST BE TAKEN CARE OF AS SHE, HERSELF, HAD NEVER BEEN. THE ONLY REASON I HUSTLED SO HARD ALL THOSE YEARS WAS TO SUPPORT HER. I DID WHAT I HAD TO DO TO PAY THE BILLS, BECAUSE I DIDN’T HAVE ANOTHER CHOICE. I HAD WARRANTS OUT FOR MY ARREST. I LOVED HER TOO MUCH. THEN THE FUCKING BITCH SOLD ME DOWN THE RIVER. I HATE THE BITCH.

Wearing the oldest non-American Indian place name in the United States, Florida, or ‘Place of Flowers’, was so dubbed by the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon when he became the first known European to set foot on what would eventually become US soil, on 2 April 1513. By all accounts Juan found much gold in the rivers of the ‘Island of Florida’ and, in doing so, upset a few of the natives. In July 1521 he was mortally wounded by an Indian arrow and returned to Havana, Cuba, where he gracefully expired.

We owe modern Florida, especially its seaside resorts, to one of the greatest go-getters of his age. Carl Graham Fisher was a wealthy magnate who designed and built most of America’s major highways. In the late 1910s, Fisher became seized with the idea that Miami Beach – or Lincoln, as he wished to call it – would make a splendid resort.

The costs and logistics of building a resort in a distant swamp proved formidable, but Fisher persevered and by 1926 had nearly finished his model community, complete with hotels, a casino, golf courses, a yacht basin and a lavish Roman swimming pavilion (which featured, a trifle incongruously, a Dutch windmill).

Then a hurricane blew it all down.

As if this was not enough, when the stock market crashed in 1929, the market for holiday homes disappeared. Fisher would not live to see the success that Miami Beach became.

Covering 55,560 square miles, Florida is now famous for its beaches which stretch along the entire eastern seaboard from Fernandina Beach in the north to Miami in the south. The Sunshine State has the air of being one large, glitzy holiday resort, with glamorous hotels lining its long coastline. But behind the style lies a seamier side. It is this same coast that has brought drug smugglers to the state. It is a favourite retirement area – its balmy climate appeals to the elderly – but it also attracts a large vagrant population who find the weather suits their pockets: sleeping outdoors is free. Florida is not only a tourist state, but also home to a large transient population. These wanderers pick up seasonal work on fruit farms where they are badly paid, or they fall in with the local drug trade. Many of them are women, so Lee, often dressed in black leather, was not conspicuous as a lone female hitching on her own.

Getting to Daytona Beach was easy for Lee. She had run away from home and run away from her marriage. She had crossed state line after state line with the law on her tail, hitched south on Interstate 95 and found what she thought was paradise: sunshine, jobs and cheap living.

According to those who knew Lee and middle-class, respectable Tyria, it had been love at first sight in June of 1986 when the two met at the now-defunct Zodiac Bar in South Daytona. Lee was still on the run after passing forged cheques; it is reported that Tyria had received an insurance payout resulting from a car accident and was well away from her home town of Cadiz, Ohio. She was working as a laundry maid at the El Caribe Motel at 2125 Atlantic Avenue and living on Halifax Drive with her friend, Cammie Greene, who had taken her in after she was evicted from her apartment.

Mr and Mrs Greene were good people. They were law-abiding, Sunday-barbeque folk who always went out of their way to help their neighbours, baked cakes and were well liked. ‘Tyria and we were good friends,’ Mrs Greene told reporters, ‘at least until we met Aileen. My husband and I finally asked them to leave because we didn’t want their lifestyle in our house.’

Lee had not only told Tyria that she had a steam-cleaning business, but also had told the same untruth to the Greenes. She would go off to ‘work’ carrying a briefcase. One day, Lee arrived home with a black eye, claiming she had been raped by a stranger for six hours. This made Cammie Greene suspicious. While the girls were out, she opened the briefcase and discovered it was full of condoms and men’s business cards. She tried to warn Tyria but the truth was Tyria already knew that Lee was a hooker, and she found it exciting.

On the day she left, and as repayment for the Greenes’ hospitality, Lee stole Cammie’s identification, including her driver’s licence: Cammie was about to become one of the aliases used by the emerging monster.

To keep Tyria’s love and companionship, Lee ploughed more and more hours into prostitution. She invested time in Tyria who was a born-again Baptist with close ties to the Calvary Baptist Church where she had been recently baptised. Tyria had attended Bible-study lessons and sometimes babysat for the Reverend David Laughner who had become her friend as well as her minister. Tyria met with limited success in sharing her religious beliefs with Lee who knew the Bible and could recite scripture, but whose actions were so often in conflict with Tyria’s more traditional background, even more so with the Bible itself.

Tyria became born-again in 1984, just two years before the two women met, but this lady from a God-fearing family had her own conflicts with scripture. She was now living in a lesbian relationship.

For a while, Lee and Tyria lived together at the El Caribe Motel. But money was scarce, and in the spring of 1987 Tyria approached a friend she had known from church and asked if she could rent a room on the understanding that Lee and Tyria slept in separate beds. The scriptures, the woman said sternly, explicitly forbade homosexual/lesbian relationships. ‘The Lord,’ she recited, ‘wants you to be with a man. That’s why they’re here.’

Lee had had her fill of Bible-thumping and of men. She flipped. ‘Don’t try to force me to be with a man,’ she hissed. ‘I was married to a man and he beat me! I can’t even talk about my father! That’s why I am this way – because of men!’ This outburst was something of a reversal of the truth. Lee had only been married once, to the luckless Fell, and she had beaten him, not vice versa.

Regretfully, the friend asked the two to leave her home at once. She liked Tyria, whom she recalled as being ‘all sweet, all smiles, real soft’, and wished she could help her. ‘I’m not holding Lee responsible for what happened to her,’ she confided to Tyria before they parted company, adding in a hushed tone, ‘but I think you should tell her to go her own way.’

For a while life was great. Tyria loved Lee and stayed close to her. Lee called Tyria her ‘wife’. Uncannily Tyria, with her strawberry-red hair, freckled face and stocky build, eerily resembled Leo Pittman, the father Lee never met. Tyria claims she quit her job as a motel maid for a while, which meant that Lee supported her with earnings from prostitution.

At first, this departure from regular employment was no major financial setback because Tyria only earned $150 a week while Lee could, if she worked hard enough, earn that much in a day. In due course, though, their ardour cooled and money began to run short. Still Tyria stayed with Lee, following her like a puppy from cheap motel to cheap motel, with stints in old barns, or in the woods, in between.

In March 1987, Tyria and Lee bought an old Corsair trailer. How they funded this purchase is a mystery: Lee said she financed it, but she earned a pittance from prostitution so Tyria’s account seems to be the honest one where she claims she borrowed the money from a friend. Their first and only stop in the trailer was the east-coast Ocean Village Camper Resort in Ormond-by-the-Sea, but once again their stay was short-lived. They had a constant stream of hippies and down-and-outs calling upon them, and they littered their surroundings with junk. Wearing little more than underwear on occasions, and exploiting their toughness, the two women became the talk of the park.

Billy and Cindy Copeland rented the space for the women’s trailer and lived next to them. Billy later somewhat dramatically said, ‘Lee had some cruel eyes – death-row eyes, I call them. I don’t know what that means – that’s just the way they make you feel. I know that girl could kill you in a heartbeat, but I always liked her.’

Things came to a head at the Ocean Village Camper Resort during the early hours of one morning when a volley of shots echoed around the site and the neighbours were subjected to very loud country-rock music emanating from Lee and Tyria’s trailer. They were ordered to leave immediately.

They returned to Daytona where, on Friday, 18 December 1987, a highway-patrol officer cited Lee, who was using the alias Susan Blahovec, for walking on the interstate and possessing a suspended driving licence. The citation noted ‘Attitude poor’, and ‘Susan’ proved it over the next few months by sending threatening letters to the circuit-court clerk on 11 January and 9 February 1988. As for what happened to the trailer, no one seems to know.

On the occasions when Lee could not hitch a ride, she would catch a bus. The anger of this woman was apparently well known among bus drivers who picked her up. Terry Adams, operations supervisor of Voltran, the Volusia Country Transit company, was ‘swamped’ with reports from his drivers that Lee was ‘nasty mostly and threatening them with bodily harm, cursing at them because of certain situations’.

On Saturday, 12 March 1988, using the alias of Cammie Marsh Greene, she accused Daytona bus driver Richard Loomis of assault, claiming that he had pushed her off a bus following an argument. Tyria Moore was listed as a witness to the incident which concerned the confrontation with the black bus driver, who said, ‘She started screaming and hollering, “I’m not going to tell you where I am going or my name or where I live or anything.” If she had her way, she would sit down and just ignore everybody. If for whatever reason she got on and started, which was frequent, it would be like she was trying to find a way to argue with you … she always mentioned men. I don’t know of a woman driver in the place that ever had trouble with her.’

Richard Loomis recalled that his bus picked Lee and Tyria up near I-4 and 92 and he commented to Tyria that she was ‘looking good’. ‘Well, Aileen didn’t care for this,’ Loomis told the court at Lee’s trial. ‘She punched me right in the mouth, and I knocked her through the door, I think.’

Driver Metcalf was another victim of Lee’s abusive behaviour. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘when she was at the bus stop, say when you pull up and the buses have kneelers on them. And she would say, “Kneel the fucking bus, you asshole” or “You nigger, you cocksucker” … She was just mean as a rattlesnake.’

On Saturday, 23 July 1988, Daytona landlord Alzada Sherman accused Tyria Moore and ‘Susan Blahovec’ of vandalising their apartment, ripping out carpets and painting over the walls in dark-brown paint without her approval. At this time, Tyria was back working as a maid at the Casa del Mar Motel, 621 South Atlantic Drive, Ormond Beach. Alzada Sherman, Tyria’s friend at the motel, was later questioned by both defence and prosecution counsel about that period. Once again, we can gain a valuable insight into the turbulent domestic affairs of this lesbian couple, and more importantly into the mind of Lee, who was now a troublesome, loud-mouthed, hard-drinking hooker.

‘Now, you indicated before you went on record that Lee and Tyria stayed with you for a month?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘And that is the address you gave at the beginning?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Did you live at the motel that you were working in?’

‘No.’

‘What was the name of the motel?’

‘Casa del Mar.’

‘But they stayed at your apartment?’

‘Yes. I have a two-bedroom apartment.’

‘They shared one of the bedrooms?’

‘One of the bedrooms. It wasn’t supposed to be that way.’

‘How was it supposed to be?’

‘It was told to me that Lee was going away for a year and a half and she wouldn’t be back. And Tyria needed a place to live. I liked Tyria. So I needed a roommate at the time to share the rent. So I offered her the room. To share the rent.’

‘Did she initially move in by herself?’

‘Yes.’

‘How long was it before Lee moved in there?’

‘Well, Ty moved in on the Friday. Lee moved in on the Sunday. She left and I thought she was gone, but she showed up again on the Wednesday.’

‘Was there any conversation between Friday and Sunday about her possibly moving in?’

‘No.’

‘What happened on that Sunday?’

‘I confronted Tyria about it. And she said, let her spend the night and she’ll be gone in the morning, which she was. But then she shows back up Wednesday. It was like every other day she would come back.’

‘And did that routine go on throughout the month?’

‘Yes. And I told them they had to move.’

‘What would be said to you, typically, each time she would come back to spend the night?’

‘She had no place to go.’

‘And did you ever ask them where she was during those days that she wasn’t there?’

‘Yes. Their answer was “working”.’

‘Did she say where she was working?’

‘Lee said she was working in Orlando. She did floors with those big machines.’

‘Pressure-cleaning-type things?’

‘Yes.’

‘So, she would be gone for a day or two and show back up?’

‘Then she showed back up. Sometimes she would come at night in a cab.’

‘During that time frame when Lee would come back in, would she ever have anything with her that she didn’t have when she left?’

‘No. She always took a bag, like a – when you go to the gym, you know, gym bags. That’s the kind of bags she would leave with. And she would come back with the same bag.’

‘While Lee was in your home, how did she act?’

‘Very difficult. When she wasn’t drinking, she was calm. But when she drank, she was loud and obnoxious.’

‘How often would she be drinking?’

‘During the time she stayed there that’s all she did, mostly.’

Alzada told the court that Busch and Budweiser seemed to be Lee’s favourite drinks, and that her drinking sessions were often followed by loud arguments with Tyria behind the closed bedroom door.

‘Can you estimate, when she was there drinking, how much she might drink in an evening or a day?’

‘Normally she would come in with a 12-pack and maybe drink two or three 12-packs in a night and in a day. She is a heavy drinker. They trashed the place.’

Lee often said she liked sex with men, and her sex life with Tyria waned enough for Tyria to complain to her best friend about it. Lee herself said that her ‘greater love’ for Tyria ‘wasn’t sexual’. The real driving force in Lee’s life wasn’t sex at all; it was a search for an emotional bond and love – love that she had never really had from her abandoning mother, her emotionally and physically abusive grandfather or, it seems, from the grandmother who failed to protect her from him, and certainly not from the callous young males who had sex with her while she was an adolescent. She was far more familiar with loss than with love, having lost her brother Keith to cancer, and having had her baby son snatched from her after she gave birth. Lee found the deep emotional bond she desperately craved with Tyria. Her borderline personality disorder carried with it an overwhelming fear of abandonment. She would do anything to keep her, even kill if needs be, and so deep-seated was her love for Tyria, she would even give up her life to protect her in the years to follow.

Lee’s market value as a hooker, never spectacular, fell even further. When Lee hit the road searching for johns, she would pose as a hitchhiker or a disabled motorist at highway on-and-off ramps – she became an ‘exit-to-exit prostitute’. Money was always tight and they were constantly moving from lodgings to lodgings because they failed to pay the rent. Their existence, meagre though it was, became more difficult to maintain. Clearly something had to change, but getting out of Daytona was not easy. There was never enough money to get to Miami, and the two women now realised that jobs were scarcer than they had first thought. They had blown all their money, and their dreams of good times had faded as quickly. Desperation crept in, and temptation was quick to follow. It is a formula that often leads to crime. In November 1988, Lee was causing problems once again. Using the alias Susan Blahovec, she launched a six-day campaign of threatening phone calls against a Zephyrhills supermarket following an altercation over lottery tickets.

Sometime during the Christmas of 1989 and New Year 1990 – the dates and details are sketchy at best – James Dalla Rosa picked up Lee who showed him a photo of two children and said that she was a high-class call girl who lived in a $125,000 home. She pulled from her bag a plastic case with various business cards – formerly the property of Lewis Gratz Fell. ‘These are some of my customers,’ she told James, who felt very uncomfortable with the situation and didn’t feel that everything was as advertised. Lee quoted $100 for sex in a motel, $75 for sex in the woods and $30 for oral in the car – rates that she was to keep until she was arrested. Sensing that the man had money, she said, ‘I prefer to go into the woods,’ Dalla Rosa later testified.

When he spurned her offer, she became agitated, ‘moving jerkily, bouncing in her seat, snatching at her purse’, as the driver described her behaviour. ‘She became angry after I was not receptive to her offer. Her demeanour changed tremendously.’

He dropped her off near an interstate where she slammed the door and stormed off.