Lethal Intent Read online

  By 6.30 p.m., Wednesday 12 September, the sun was slipping low in a vibrantly clear, panoramic Florida sky as teenagers Paul Babb and Michael Smith pedalled their bicycles aimlessly, casually exploring a largely undeveloped wasteland intercut with a patchwork maze of dirt trails and paved roads, each ending abruptly in a cul-de-sac just short of the bushes. Less than half a mile off CR 484, just west of I-75 and Marion Oaks (a luxurious, gated housing community with a waterfall at its entrance), they weren’t far from home, yet this was new territory to them. It was a somewhat desolate expanse of lowlying brushland behind a power station, unpopulated save for a sparse scattering of houses.

  Three-quarters of an inch of rain had fallen that day, barely cooling what had been a balmy 91 degrees. It was the prettiest, somehow laziest, time of day.

  Pulling down one paved strip of cul-de-sac abutting some farmland, Paul and Mike (seventeen and fifteen years old, respectively) idly observed what looked at first sight like a lumpy heap of clothing piled close to the edge of the grass, to the left of a concrete culvert. Drawing closer, Michael was in the lead when, wide-eyed with horror, he focused in on the clothes.

  ‘Come here quick!’ he yelled to Paul.

  ‘What? It’s just a pile of clothes,’ Paul retorted uninterestedly.

  Slowed by the sandy road, he had dismounted from his bicycle and casually wheeled it towards his friend. He was within a foot of the clothing before he saw just what it was that seemed to have rendered Mike speechless. What had appeared from afar a shapeless form came into focus as something horribly different.

  First Paul saw a man’s face, framed with grey hair, curled among the fabric. His bloody spectacles were raised up on his forehead. The man was wearing brown trousers and shoes and argyle socks, and was hunched forward in almost a sitting position, his torso curved over towards his knees. His white, short-sleeved shirt was heavily stained with blood both at the front and on the left shoulder. Protruding from his pocket was a Cross pen-and-pencil set. His left front trouser pocket had been turned inside out as if ransacked. He was still wearing his watch and his wedding ring. And he was obviously dead.

  The boys’ shock was followed rapidly by plain fear. Might whoever was responsible still be lurking nearby? Their systems pumping into high gear, they clambered aboard their bicycles and furiously rode the two and a half miles back to Paul’s house without exchanging a word. Their progress was slowed when a piece on Paul’s bicycle chain came adrift forcing him to push his bike, running to keep up with Mike.

  The exhausted boys could barely catch their breath but words spilling over, managed to tell their anxious mothers, Janet Babb and Carol Smith, why they were in such a state. Janet, a nurse at a Florida Correctional Institution, immediately notified the police, arranging to meet them out on the main road. Within minutes, an emergency vehicle bearing four rescue personnel pulled up, and the boys led the way to their gory discovery.

  As law enforcement officers converged on the scene and confirmed that they were dealing with a homicide brought about by multiple gunshot wounds, the sun finally sank out of sight.

  Separating Paul and Mike so that they could not confer or compare stories, the officers spoke into their radios, reporting the discovery of an unidentified male victim, then launched into a barrage of questions. Each boy was asked how he got to the site. Why he’d come. Whether he knew the victim. Whether he’d touched the body. Whether he’d rifled through the man’s pockets looking for valuables. Whether he’d taken anything. Thoroughly scared, they answered as best they could, as a growing assembly of police officers, detectives and technicians congregated for the slow and laborious task of processing the crime scene. The officers would work through the night hours, securing evidence and scouring the area for clues.

  When their questioning was over, Paul and Mike were told they were free to go home. But their ordeal wasn’t over; Paul, for one, didn’t sleep for three days. The nightmares lasted longer.

  Shirley Humphreys’ husband had been missing more than twelve hours when, at 7.15 that Wednesday morning, she called Ken Jones again to tell him there was no news.

  Hanging up the phone, she then sucked in a deep breath. There was no avoiding it any longer. She’d better call her son. ‘I’ll be right out!’ cried Mike, who was devoted to his dad and immediately sounded desperately worried. Mother and son sat together in the horribly empty house through the long hours of that day. Hours punctuated by seemingly non-stop phone calls from concerned friends to whom word had quickly spread.

  Thankfully, there were practical matters to occupy Shirley. Dick had never been fond of using their credit cards, most of which were usually left on his desk, but with the advice and help of friends, Shirley immediately cancelled them all, including her own, since those were jointly held. She had cashed a cheque for Dick on Monday for $110 but they had paid for their anniversary dinner from that. Shirley imagined he probably had about $45 left on him when he disappeared.

  Night fell and, eventually, knowing there was nothing more to be done but wait, Shirley and Mike went to their beds, finally overtaken by sheer exhaustion. Shirley must have drifted off because suddenly, she awoke with a start. Disoriented, she thought it was around 2.30 a.m. when she left the refuge of sleep to face again the terrible realisation that she was living, not dreaming, a nightmare.

  She slipped on her robe and walked slowly out into the living room, worn out and thoroughly drained but restless. Sitting on the couch with her feet up, she flicked a flame to a cigarette. Suddenly, the doorbell rang, rudely loud and jarring in the still of the night. Walking past the front door, Shirley reached for the light switch to throw on the porch light. As she did so, through the glass she could see the looming silhouettes of four large men. She had been a policeman’s wife long enough to know what it meant.

  ‘Oh no! Mike!’ she cried.

  And her scream shattered the silence.

  David Taylor of the Marion County SO had arrived at the undeveloped subdivision just before 10 p.m. in response to patrol officers requesting the presence of a major crimes investigator at a homicide scene. By 10.30, Sergeant Kerry Crawford had instigated a search of possible missing persons, which almost immediately turned up the report on Mr Humphreys. Phone calls flew between the various divisions working in concert, and CID Captain Steve Binegar announced that he was on his way. Painstakingly, photographs were taken, recording the details of the body and the crime scene.

  Meanwhile, just before midnight, Ken Jones was called out to the scene and given the grim task of identifying his colleague’s body. And it was he who, with Captain Jim Fussell and Chief Deputy Greg Matthews, stood on Mrs Humphreys’ doorstep, in fact sometime before 1 a.m.

  An autopsy the next day by Dr Janet Pillow, a forensic pathologist in the medical examiner’s office in Leesburg, would note the doughnut-shaped abrasion and bruising on the victim’s side, consistent with a gun barrel, and the other mysterious small bruises inside his upper right arm. Of the seven bullet wounds, her expert opinion was that the only shot to have completely incapacitated the victim was the one to the back of his head. Shattering as it entered, lead bullet fragments flew through his brain with enough force to bruise his left eyelid.

  Six hollow-point bullets were recovered, all told. The one that struck Dick Humphreys’ wrist was not. A toxicology examination of his blood came back negative as to alcohol and drugs and marijuana.

  Shirley Humphreys had buried her mother the past January, and her fatherin-law, to whom she was very close, in March. Now, she was burying her beloved husband.

  Thirty-five years and one day after they wed, Shirley was a widow.

  ‘How much more can I take?’

  She asked that question of God, more than once.

  Mike took the loss of his father very, very hard, losing the greatest friend he ever had; they had been very, very close. It was no easier for Dick’s daughters. As Terry firmly informed the assistant state attorneys: ‘My daddy was twenty-seven feet tall.’


  It was after her daughters had had to return to their own lives that the gaping emptiness of the house hit hardest. The Moose ladies rallied and did their best to busy her, but company alone was not enough. The months between Dick’s death and the arrest of a suspect were also very scary for Shirley Humphreys.

  Somebody, somewhere out there, had the keys to her house and her car. She had the locks on both changed, of course, but still, every little noise ‘created a big trauma’. Each night when she took out her hearing aids to go to bed, she felt even more defenceless. Mike, who was also frightened, had moved back into the house to keep her company and urged her to get a dog.

  ‘For twenty-eight years I’ve raised a dog along with my kids—I don’t need another dog! Dogs are too hairy,’ Shirley retorted.

  Trying to find reason in madness, every possible scenario floated through Shirley’s mind regarding the identity of Dick’s murderer. Given his professional history, the most likely seemed to be someone from one of his cases. ‘I went through beaucoup paperwork on some case he was involved with in Alabama involving drugs, and handed that to the Sheriff’s Department,’ Shirley recalls. And Ken Jones scoured the case files at the Sumter County HRS office, groping for any kind of clue or connection.

  On 19 September, Dick’s car was finally located in Live Oak, 125 miles north of the spot where his body was found. It was parked in a space behind an abandoned service station.

  Shirley Humphreys eventually received her late husband’s Cross pen, dented where a bullet had hit it. And when the sheriff handed over Dick’s gold wedding band and his spectacles, both mercilessly still bore her husband’s blood. Cruel mementoes. Chilling reminders of the brutality of her loss.

  Who could have done such a thing?

  2

  The Wuornos home, an unprepossessing one-storey ranch, its wood siding a sad, faded yellow, sat amidst a cluster of trees away from the roadside in suburban Troy, Michigan, just 16 miles north of Detroit. Benign-looking and otherwise unnoteworthy, it was nevertheless a house of secrets.

  Near neighbours who over the years were never once invited to set foot inside for even casual pleasantries, recall the curtains always being drawn tightly across its small windows, excluding the outside world.

  Behind those windows frequent clashes of will took place between young Aileen and her father, Lauri Wuornos. The omnipresent third party: a wide, brown leather belt with western-style tooling that Lauri kept hanging on a peg on his bedroom door, and which was cleaned almost ritualistically by Aileen at his bidding with saddle soap and conditioner kept in the dresser drawer.

  When she was made to pull down her shorts and bend over the wooden table in the middle of the kitchen, when the doubled-over belt flew down onto her bare buttocks, little Aileen railed against her father, petrified and crying noisily. Sometimes she lay face down, spread-eagled naked on the bed, for her whippings.

  Behind those windows she listened, a captive and impressionable audience, as her father repeatedly told her that she was evil. Wicked. Worthless. Should never have been born. She wasn’t worthy of the air she breathed. She already knew she was different. Born on 29 February 1956, she only celebrated a birthday every four years. When she was twelve, the other kids taunted her, saying she was three.

  Her blond brother Keith, sharing the same broad facial structure and wide-set eyes, was often taken for her twin but was eleven months older. Like Aileen, Keith clashed with Lauri’s discipline head on.

  There were others in this family, sharing the Wuornos name but with little else in common. Diane, an older daughter, had already left home. Nobody talked about her. But Barry Wuornos, twelve years older than Aileen, was Lauri’s blue-eyed boy, his golf buddy and his pal, and rarely put a foot wrong. When Barry joined the Air Force in 1967, Lauri was definitely sorry to see him go.

  Even Lori, who was just two and a half years older than Aileen and grew up alongside Aileen and Keith, was spared the abuse they suffered. True, her dad was strict, authoritarian, stubborn, and always right. ‘An ornery s.o.b.’, as one neighbour called him. Sure he drank; two, three, sometimes more bottles of wine a day. But only wine. Sure, he was intimidating if you crossed him. Lori never did. She didn’t dare. But she didn’t see him as the tyrant Aileen and Keith made him out to be. Aileen and Keith, they just couldn’t seem to stop themselves going up against him. It was as if they had the devil in them.

  By the time she was eleven, Aileen was already incorrigible, with a fearsome and socially unacceptable temper. Her volcanic explosions were unpredictable and seemingly unprovoked, and inevitably they drove a wedge between her and her peers. It was as if even those who wanted to like her somehow just couldn’t. Lori echoed that ambivalence herself. Jekyll and Hyde, everyone called Aileen.

  She had another life outside, and regularly made her escape through the window of the bedroom she shared with Lori, rebelling against being confined to the house as a punishment for one offence or another. An escape to her other world; a world in which she felt omnipotent.

  Across the street from Clark gas station, which sat part-way between the townships of Troy and Rochester, there was in those days a heavily wooded, ravine-like dip close to the side of Emerald Lakes. Houses have since sprung up changing the face of the landscape, but in 1967 the shallow ravine and the wooded pathway linking the two small towns was a well-trodden short cut for local youngsters, and a hangout. The terrain provided ample natural cover for their antics: from eight-year-olds burying a forbidden copy of Playboy under twigs and leaves, to teenagers playing hooky and drinking and making out.

  In a depression in this ravine, tucked at the foot of a huge spreading tree, sat one of a number of makeshift, fort-like constructions, patched together from logs, tree stumps, pieces of plasterboard, plywood and scraps. To prepubescent Aileen, this was no playhouse, however. It was a place of business; a hideaway where she calculatingly removed her clothes and performed sexual acts on boys for which they rewarded her with cigarettes or loose change. This little girl had learned at a frighteningly early age to disassociate herself from her body; to blank off her emotions.

  Small, fair-haired and slender, this child-woman was courted by the youth from Troy and Rochester, in so far as they enjoyed her unusual services. But more significantly she was constantly derided and denigrated by them, pummelling the shaky self-esteem that lay beneath her bravado. Sought after one moment, rejected the next. Used and cast aside.

  One not so unusual night, when Aileen was twelve, on the brink of thirteen, she slipped out from her room to keep a midnight rendezvous at the fort with a boy called Johnny, barely older than she. While they were coupled on the ground, a noise from above disturbed Aileen. Looking up, she caught sight of a trio of boys hiding in the branches of the tree spying on them, and doing a rather inferior job of keeping quiet. Realising that they had been spotted, they snickered out loud. The laughter’s volume built; infectious schoolboy stuff. But as it increased, so did Aileen’s fury. Close to tears, feeling humiliated and badly betrayed, she started pulling on her clothes and backing away from the fort, but, not yet content, the descending boys harassed her further. They even had the gall to shout at her, noisily demanding a refund on Johnny’s behalf as if he were a dissatisfied customer at Kmart. As she ran off into the woods, she could hear the sound of their laughter pealing out behind her.

  Playing hooky from school later, and still enraged by the incident, Aileen returned and scavenged bits and pieces with which to create her own fort.

  There seemed some kind of superficial acceptance of her outcast role. At her tender age she had already come to expect such treatment. But that didn’t mean she liked it.

  There was no shortage of testosterone-driven clientele for Aileen, who worked not just in the forts but in the backs of cars, or simply lay down in the dirt, stripping off her clothes without inhibition or emotion, sometimes taking on three boys at a time. Those boys are now men who today admit that she took no pleasure in it and there wa
s little if any conversation. Certainly no kissing. Just business. Aileen’s earnings went on cigarettes, beer, and, before long, on the drugs with which she became increasingly involved—mescaline, acid, and downers like pot and pills, were her preference.

  The money also went on trying to buy something that she wanted desperately but that continued to elude her: popularity and acceptance. With money, she felt empowered. It gave her status, and a means by which she could have people in her life.

  Frank Tremonti lost his virginity to Aileen when he was twelve or thirteen, which is reason enough for the sunny afternoon she followed him home to be indelibly etched in his mind, even if the date is not. Aileen, at eleven or twelve a slim, pretty, young creature in shorts, watched intently from across the street while he took out a gasoline-powered rotary lawn mower and began methodically mowing his parents’ lawn, one of his designated chores. Slowly, calculatedly, Aileen rode her bicycle back and forth along the path in front of his house so that Frank would have had to have been myopic not to notice. Watchfully assessing the situation, he soon found himself waiting keenly for each return pass. Eventually, Aileen made her move towards him, slipping him a folded-up note, then riding off. Frank, hormones raging, couldn’t believe his eyes: ‘Meet me at Clark station. For a pack of cigs I will suck and fuck.’

  Trembling with anticipation, he hurriedly returned the lawn mower to its place in the garage and rushed inside the house to scrabble for some change before racing down the street; a young man with an urgent purpose. Out of breath, he reached the gas station to find Aileen waiting, calmly sitting astride her bicycle, exuding a confidence beyond her years. Following her instructions, Frank went inside Clark’s and purchased her the requisite packet of Marlboros, then rode the bicycle, with Aileen perched on the handlebars, heading off the road and down among the trees to her fort.