Lethal Intent Read online

  Some 23 years later, after Aileen Carol Wuornos’s arrest for the murders of six men and her confession to the murders of seven, Frank broke down and cried. The thought that tormented him?

  If he hadn’t had sex with her, would she have turned out the way she did?

  He was hardly alone, of course. When Aileen had barely reached puberty herself she claimed the virginities of a number of Troy and Rochester’s neighbourhood boys. Virginities they were anxious to dispose of. She allowed them to initiate themselves into the tantalising world of sex at an age where it seemed to them that so-called free love was only available elsewhere. Jerry Moss, Keith’s close friend, was among Aileen’s first lovers. At the time, he categorically believed he was the first.

  ‘I know damn well it was my first time. She said it was hers,’ he recalls with a hint of indignation. Later, the duplicate stories of other males cast serious doubt on her claim. Somehow, Aileen had managed to convince a not inconsiderable number of gullible boys that they were being given the gift of her virginity. As the years went by, however, local lore accorded Dean that honour.

  Jerry Moss and his clan lived on Cambria, separated only by Dean’s house from the Wuornoses’ home on Cadmus. When sex wasn’t involved, he and the other boys wanted little or nothing to do with Aileen. When Jerry and Keith went out walking, they’d often notice her sneaking around the bushes that edged the field, following them to see where they went. They lobbed rocks at her to try to scare her off, yelling: ‘Get your ass home!’

  ‘I’m telling Dad!’ Aileen retorted.

  ‘Tell whoever the hell you want,’ Keith shouted back, angrily. ‘Just get the hell outta here.’

  During ceasefires, a common topic was getting out of the neighbourhood, and ruminating on what their lives would be like when they did. Jerry, the son of a Marine, fancied going into the Navy; Keith was going to be an Army officer; Lori wanted to finish high school. Aileen? Aileen wanted to be a movie star. Everyone knew that.

  Jerry was fourteen and Aileen twelve in the summer of ’68 when they first began exploring each other’s bodies one day in Jerry’s parents’ upstairs bedroom. They were interrupted when the clunking sound of the garage door opening signalled his folks’ unexpected return, and as Aileen scurried to slip out of the house unnoticed, they paused long enough to make plans to finish what they’d started.

  Later that same day they sneaked up into the attic above Jerry’s garage, this time armed with a blanket and pillow. Their handful of sexual encounters began in an ‘I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours’ vein, and were tender enough with some gentle kissing. Aileen, who hadn’t yet developed breasts or body hair, evidently knew more than Jerry. The true source of her own sexual initiation by eleven was a mystery, but it was she who initiated taking things a step further.

  They were both a little tipsy from sipping some unpleasantly vinegary old apple cider that had turned potent enough to grease the wheels of inhibition. Aileen customarily conducted her sexual activities in her neighbourhood in secret, and suggested to Jerry that they keep what had happened between them to themselves. Jerry readily agreed, knowing discretion was in his best interests.

  Far from aching to rush off and brag about his lost virginity, he had already decided he wasn’t going to tell anyone, even his close friends. And that included Keith. He certainly had no intention of telling Keith that he’d lost his virginity to Aileen. And to have announced he’d ‘lost it’ at all would have meant revealing with whom. The prevailing sexual climate in their age group and the unavailability of sex would alone have been enough to point the finger at Aileen. So he kept quiet. Not until he was seventeen did he belatedly announce that he’d just lost his virginity—with his 14-year-old wife. He never told a soul the truth.

  ‘I wouldn’t want nobody in that neighbourhood knowing that I screwed the hell out of Aileen in my dad’s garage,’ he says emphatically. Then and now, Jerry never felt anything but ashamed of the liaison.

  At a shockingly young age, Aileen had become an object of ridicule, and no neighbourhood boy would have willingly admitted to being involved with her.

  ‘Everybody called her bitch, slut, whore, an ugly bitch, before she even was,’ Jerry recalls. ‘If I’d a went out and said, “Hey, I screwed the hell out of Aileen Wuornos,” everybody in the neighbourhood woulda went crazy and said, “What the fuck? That ugly bitch!” She was ridiculed or whatever … abused … I’m sure somebody slapped her around. I never hit the girl. I might have pushed her in an argument or something. Broke up a fight between her and her brother or Lori, something like that, but I never slapped that girl or did anything like that.’

  Since Jerry was such a close friend, Aileen didn’t ask for payment for her sexual favours, which was unusual in itself. He might have given her a couple of tabs of acid or PCP, or shared a couple of joints with her, but no money changed hands.

  Their secret encounters in the attic halted abruptly just a few weeks later. Aileen’s agenda had changed, or perhaps merely revealed itself. Unusually vulnerable, she had begun talking dreamily about how nice it would be to have a boyfriend and she had been trying to press Jerry into the role. ‘Not me!’ retorted Jerry, who didn’t even plan on being seen in public with her. He didn’t want to hurt her feelings but his bottom line was ‘No way!’

  Aileen didn’t shed a tear at this rejection. Instead she became angry, shouting, ‘Fuck off, Jerry!’

  Well, if Aileen chose to ignore him for the rest of the summer, so be it. Jerry’s mind was made up.

  After this rift, when Jerry knocked on the Wuornoses’ door looking for Keith, if he was unlucky enough to have Aileen answer, she greeted him with, ‘Fuck you! Keith isn’t here!’ even when Jerry could see his friend standing right there behind her.

  Gary Kopietz was also fourteen when he first had sex with Aileen. It was the summer of ’69 and she was then thirteen. Without Aileen, Gary surmised that he would probably have had to wait until he was sixteen to be relieved of his burdensome virginity. As it was, he’d heard about her services and Aileen, dressed tomboyishly in the hippie style of the sixties in jeans, a simple blouse and a beginner’s bra, looked quite appealing. Gary’s hormones were calling loudly and he wanted some action too.

  He soon got his chance the day a friend rode by on his bicycle, calling out, ‘Come on! We got Cigarette Pig! We’re gonna go down and fuck her! Get thirty-five cents.’

  Aileen first smoked when she was ten years old, sitting under the slide in the backyard with an older girlfriend, puffing away, and practising her newfound vocabulary of profanities.

  Cigarettes, and Aileen’s addiction to them, were her downfall, decided Gary, not that the thought deterred him. Since he didn’t have a bicycle, he ran to keep up with Frank who pedalled the mile or so to a spot Aileen had nominated behind the Wuornos house.

  Revisiting the spot in the fall, when the leaves had tumbled from the trees, although it was tucked at the foot of a three-foot slope, he was astonished to see how exposed it was, and how close to the cars on nearby South Boulevard. But shielded by summer’s greenery it had sufficed that day.

  The boys were gentle with Aileen and didn’t manhandle her. At her invitation, they peeled all her clothes off, then had an energetic discussion about who should be first in line. ‘I really put up a squawk,’ Gary recalls, ‘saying, “This is my first time, let me go first!” Finally the others agreed and went and sat maybe fifteen or twenty feet away and turned their backs.’

  Intercourse took place with the minimum of pleasantries. ‘There wasn’t like a big discussion. This was not boyfriend–girlfriend. She definitely wasn’t the type you’d want for a girlfriend at that point. She put it in, and I’m sitting there going for ten, fifteen minutes. And these guys are heckling me in the background after five minutes, saying, “Hurry up! Come on! We want our turn!” And nothing was happening. I’d never come before, and it didn’t happen. I finally just said, “Well, that’s it.”’

  He prompt
ly ran home and leapt in the bathtub. In his eyes, she was a whore, basically, and although he was pleased no longer to be a virgin, he also felt the urgent need to make contact with water.

  From that day on, Aileen initiated ten or so encounters with Gary. She offered ‘a fuck, a blow job, or whatever you want’ for a fee. ‘There was never a time when anybody said no. Not when you’re fourteen,’ Gary emphasises.

  ‘Cigarette Pig’ and the marginally less degrading and more romantic-sounding ‘Cigarette Bandit’ were the nicknames she earned for her trouble. Cruel words that with repeated use gnawed away at her.

  Clark gas station, which boasted two islands with two pumps apiece, was also the scene of many sexual encounters. When one of the local youngsters was working a shift running the place, sex took place behind the cooler, in the bathrooms, and in the small storage room out back. One of the Clark employees, who was around eighteen at the time, was also approached by Aileen and offered oral sex in the back room. When she needed cigarettes, it was a deal she often struck. She was a quick learner in the art of negotiation.

  Unaware of the Cigarette Pig reputation, the young man triumphantly announced that he’d kissed Aileen and made love to her in the back room. Gary and the others couldn’t resist spoiling his moment of glory by telling him that Aileen had given them all blow jobs earlier that afternoon. Besides, they felt they were doing him a service. Imagine if he’d blindly become her boyfriend? ‘Basically, all we did was tell him that she was a dog,’ Gary recalled.

  Keith’s best friend, Mark Fearn, who was a year younger than Aileen and had known her since they were toddlers, also lost his virginity to Aileen when he was ten or eleven. Before that, he once stumbled across Aileen and Dean copulating in the field over by the willow trees (Dean being the boy neighbourhood kids generally credited with having started Aileen off on sex).

  ‘I didn’t even know what I was doing,’ Mark says of his own first encounter. ‘I don’t even remember it being fun or anything. You did it, I guess, so you could brag, “I did it!”’

  On one occasion, Jerry Moss kept a lookout while Mark Fearn and Aileen had sex in a bedroom in his parents’ home. Aileen also told Mark that she’d had sex with her father, Lauri. (Everyone pronounced it ‘Larry’.) At the time, he didn’t believe her.

  With his dark good looks, Mark became a natural target for Aileen’s hunger for love. As with Jerry, she tried desperately through the device of sex to win Mark’s true affection—and failed. Mark didn’t want Aileen, of all people, for a girlfriend. He tried to let her down as gently as he could. But it was another rejection.

  Young Aileen’s sexual activities were not confined to friends and strangers. There was incest between Aileen and Keith, although with just eleven months between them in age and with Keith the virgin, it was by mutual consent.

  Aileen told Gary Kopietz yet another variation on the story of her deflowering, saying that the first time she had had sex was when she was eleven with her own brother. He was shocked, which is why it stuck in his mind. It was probably more common than he thought. It certainly didn’t seem like a big deal to her. But he knew it wasn’t right.

  All of Keith’s friends knew that shy Keith was deeply embarrassed by his sister’s reputation as the local ‘loose goose’, ‘the first one off with her shorts’. But many knew that Keith also took advantage of her promiscuity. Since she knew about sex, he urged her, please would she teach him so that girls wouldn’t laugh at him? Aileen agreed and there were a number of voluntary encounters between them, some of which took place in the presence of Mark Fearn.

  On one memorable occasion, Aileen and Keith were almost caught in the act. They were playing around in the little loft above the garage when Lauri suddenly came in and started up the makeshift ladder. Mark, Keith and Aileen lay frozen, scared to move a muscle, while Lauri, seemingly oblivious, reached up perilously close to them to retrieve his stash of cheap wine. Which is how Aileen and Keith first learned he had a hiding place up there. ‘Scared the hell out of us,’ Mark recalls.

  While outsiders noted such encounters and the bond between the siblings, their sister Lori would always find it hard to believe that Aileen and Keith had sex. Such intimacy didn’t gel with her memories of two adversaries who fought vigorously and constantly. They even sat at the breakfast table hiding their faces behind cereal boxes so that they wouldn’t have to look at one another.

  But this sexual aspect of Keith and Aileen’s relationship was no less mercurial than any other. Mark remembers Keith once, for a lark, a bit of boyish silliness, urinating on Aileen as she lay on the ground in the garage. He also remembers Aileen’s fury.

  3

  Aileen’s rampant promiscuity flew in the face of the firm discipline at home. The Wuornos household was nothing if not structured. Lori and Barry, whose opinions were generally in accord, would later recall their family life thus: if it wasn’t quite of the fairy-tale, white picket-fence variety, it was certainly normal, uneventful, and just like everyone else’s. They describe Lauri Wuornos as strict, firm, a disciplinarian, but in no way tyrannical or abusive. In Barry’s eyes his father was ‘someone you could look up to’.

  With his dark skin, high cheekbones, and Scandinavian facial structure, Lauri looked almost Native American. Despite a superficial resemblance to comedian Jackie Gleason, his stern demeanour and imposingly bushy eyebrows always scared and intimidated Lori’s friends, and Lori had to reassure them that he wasn’t as mean as he looked.

  Lauri Wuornos would be remembered in Troy as a man who put on a suit to go to work and comported himself with a superior attitude, as if designating himself as a cut above the rest. Bullishly opinionated, he was also a vehement anti-Republican. Just seeing a car with its headlights on early in the evening would prompt a snide remark about wastefulness. ‘That’s a Republican, ’ he’d say.

  He behaved as if he bore a grudge against the world. John Majestic, whose family moved into the house next door in 1956, quickly measured Lauri as an arrogant, pompous know-it-all, best taken in small doses. John, Barry’s peer, wore a path through the grass to Barry’s bedroom window where almost daily he’d crawl in for a chat. In summer, when they were in their teens and Aileen was a toddler, Barry joined John to camp out in the tent pitched in Barry’s backyard, or to spend the night in the back of an old Dodge station wagon that Lauri kept.

  Lauri always insisted that Barry do his chores, like tending their huge lawn. If John was around, he’d be corralled into them too. ‘You guys get out there and chop that wood!’ said Lauri, pointing them to the heap of kindling that had to be neatly split each week to fire up the sauna. Not one for idle pleasantries, he’d sometimes snap at John, ‘Go home!’ And John did. Instinctively, kids knew to give him a wide berth. ‘He was boisterous,’ John recalls. ‘He was like a walrus, a bull.’

  If neighbourhood kids stepped in his yard when it didn’t suit him, Lauri chewed them out without a second thought. Jerry Moss, for some reason he himself never understood, seemed especially to antagonise old man Wuornos. Lauri singled him out if he tried to take a short-cut through the Wuornos yard like the other kids, skipping along to catch the school bus.

  ‘Hey, you fuckin’ bum. Hey, what are you doing? You ain’t coming in my yard,’ Lauri growled.

  ‘Asshole,’ Jerry retorted, not exactly diplomatically. ‘Fuck you! I’m going through there, I’m gonna be late. My bus is out there right now!’

  Many more houses have since sprung up to plug in the neighbourhood’s vacant lots, but in those days Aileen’s home had a cyclone fence around the front and a huge backyard of close to two acres, planted with a weeping willow and an imposing maple tree. Out back lived the children’s menagerie—a changing cast of dogs, cats, pigeons, ducks, turtles, fish and birds. Aileen wasn’t as besotted with animals as Lori, but held a particularly soft spot in her heart for a mutt called Coco.

  The subdivision was cliquish but—with the exception of the almost reclusive Wuornoses—most of the inha
bitants got along reasonably well, and even socialised. At Christmas, things turned positively festive. The Moss home was strung with coloured lights and Mrs Moss made eggnog and baked fruit cakes for her neighbour friends, who all stopped by, again with the exception of the Wuornoses. Lauri let the kids go Christmas carolling, but that was the extent of their participation.

  None the less, Lori remembered merry family Christmases when the house was decorated and the family sang carols and played Christmas music. Lauri didn’t go to church, but Britta (whose full name was Aileen Britta) took the children to services regularly throughout the year.

  Since Aileen’s 29 February birthday fell only on leap years, another day was generally designated to celebrate it, with cake, candles, gifts and singing. Sometimes during the summer when there was a tent pitched in the backyard, friends like Lori’s pal, Janet Craig, were invited to spend the night out there with Aileen and Lori, just as Barry’s friends had done with him in the past.

  The childish pleasure of sleepovers, however, was interrupted by Aileen’s late-night forays out into the dark world of prostitution. She’d return after a couple of hours, clutching a fistful of dollars, plus alcohol or drugs.

  Incongruously, the days began in the Wuornos household with Britta rousing them by singing ‘Wake up little sleepyhead …’ If that sounds borderline Brady Bunch, a happy, normal, if strict, family is exactly what Lori believes she grew up in.

  Supper was always a family affair, but a subdued one. Talking was minimal because Keith and Aileen inevitably argued, which in turn meant Lauri got angry. It was easier just to keep quiet.

  The 5 p.m. meal was followed by chores and homework. Aileen showed considerable artistic promise, but her home environment was not conducive to maximising that potential or to putting her into any situations where she could shine, rather than being perennially the bad girl. Her negative behaviour drew attention, not her positive.