Tender Murderers Read online

  You keep me in control by threatening me with banishment–an easy threat which you know I couldn't live with—and so I stay home while you make love to someone who has almost totally destroyed me. {Why couldn't she see that it was Hi who was destroying her?} I have been publicly humiliated again and again but not on the 19th of April. It is the apex of your career and I believe I have earned the right to watch it–if only from a dark corner near the kitchen.... She has you every single moment in March. For Christ sake give me April. T. S. Eliot said it's the cruelest month—don't let it be, Hi. I want to spend every minute of it with you on weekends. In all these years you never spent my birthday with me. There aren't a lot left—it goes so quickly. I give you my word if you just aren't cruel I won't make you feel wretched.

  Of course, she knew that her letter would have no effect on Hi. As far as he was concerned, she was yesterday's news. Jean had bought a .32-caliber revolver in 1978 for protection, although she never learned how to use it properly. Now she contemplated suicide. She felt that she just needed to talk to Hi once more before dying. She phoned and begged to see him. He wasn't interested, finally grudgingly muttering, “Suit yourself.”

  (At this point, dear reader, are you shouting, “Shoot him, shoot him!”? I am.)

  She made a will, and left a note for Alice Faulkner, president of the school board:

  I'm sorry. . . . Next time choose a head the board wants and supports. Don't let some poor fool work like hell for two years before she knows she wasn't ever wanted in the first place. There are so many enemies and so few friends.

  I was a person no one ever knew.

  The famed diet doctor. Was he worth it?

  Then she drove for five hours to Hi's Scarsdale home, with the gun in her purse and a bouquet of flowers on the seat next to her.

  What happened next is what the trial was all about. Both sides agree on one thing: Jean Harris did shoot and kill Dr. Herman Tarnower. The prosecution argued that she planned to kill him–if she couldn't have him, no one would–and then kill herself. Jean's version is different.

  Arriving at Hi's house at II P.M., seeing all the lights out, she let herself in through the garage and, carrying the flowers, climbed the stairs to Hi's bedroom, waking him up. He wasn't exactly welcoming, grumbling, “Jesus, Jean, it's the middle of the night!”

  Earlier that evening, Lynne had been one of his dinner guests.

  “I've brought you some flowers,” she said hopefully.

  But Hi didn't want to talk. He closed his eyes and muttered, “Jesus, Jean, shut up and go to bed.”

  Laying the flowers on the bed, Jean went into the bathroom. Turning on the light, she saw Lynne's things there—her nightgown and curlers–and the rage inside her exploded. She threw the nightgown on the floor, stomped back into the bedroom, and hurled the box of curlers through the window. Hi, who'd leaped out of bed by now, smacked her hard across the face–to snap her out of it, we assume. At any rate, he had never hit her before.

  The melodrama increased. Jean said, “Hit me again, Hi. Make it hard enough to kill.” When Hi didn't respond, Jean fished the gun out of her handbag, raised it to her head, and pulled the trigger. Hi tried to grab it from her, and the first shot got him in the hand. The gun dropped to the floor, Hi ran to the bathroom to doctor his badly bleeding hand, and Jean retrieved the gun. They wrestled for it again, and this time he received the shot that killed him. As he lay dying, Jean again tried to shoot herself, but the gun just clicked; she had used up the bullets. There were more bullets in her pocket, but Jean didn't know how to reload the gun. She banged it on the bathtub, trying to eject the spent shells, and succeeded in breaking it.

  Jean was no professional gunwoman.

  Panicked, she ran downstairs, shouted to the servants, “Somebody turn on the goddamn lights! I'm going for help!” she got in her car and headed for the nearest pay phone, only to turn right around again when she saw a police car headed for the house, and give herself up.

  Nobody really wanted to send Jean to prison. Members of the jury were crying when they announced that they had found her guilty of murder in the second degree. The judge's voice broke when he gave her the mandatory fifteen years to life sentence.

  Before her sentencing, Jean delivered a speech so stirring that it moved the courtroom to applause. But she had already summed it all up in the preliminary hearings, when she had said, “I loved him very much, he slept with every woman he could, and I had it.”

  Life after (Hi's) Death

  Years after she was pardoned by New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, Jean Harris said in a television interview, “What makes prison really horrible is the hours wasted there.” But Jean did not waste her time while in prison. In the New York Bedford Hills Correctional facility, Jean soon discovered that 80 percent of women in prison are mothers, and that less than 50 percent of them have completed high school. Their children are terribly at risk. In an article written by Sarah L. Rasmusson for the online magazine, Women's eNews, Jean is quoted as saying, “These kids are pushed through the foster care system, the worst schools, and they grow up in the poorest communities. The prison cycle just continues.”

  So Jean, whose answer to “How did you survive in prison?” was “Perhaps it's the old schoolteacher in me,” founded the Children of Bedford Fund, raising money to educate the children of the women with whom she shared a life behind bars for twelve years. She also found the time to write and publish three books while in prison.

  Today Jean lives quietly in a small house near the Connecticut River. When she isn't reading and gardening, she lectures on behalf of imprisoned women and their children, and continues to raise money for the Children of Bedford Fund. She says, “It is no coincidence that most people in jail and prison are poorly educated. Keeping kids in school is one of the easiest ways to keep them out of prison.”

  Ironically, that didn't work for Jean.

  Aileen Wuornos

  “I Would Kill Again”

  Aileen Wuornos is the poster girl for women who kill. With a father who was killed in prison, where he was serving time for child molestation, and a fifteen-year-old mother who dumped Aileen and her brother Keith, with their grandparents, she seemed headed from infancy for her final destination, Death Row in Florida's Broward County Correctional Institution. Wait, there's more! Until Aileen was twelve years old, she believed that her grandparents were actually her parents. She had a baby at the age of fourteen, gave it up for adoption, and, when her grandmother died, leaving Aileen and Keith alone with their hard-drinking, overly strict grandfather, she left home, taking to the road and a life of prostitution. Her brief marriage to a much older, well-off man ended when he took out a restraining order on her, accusing her of beating him and blowing his money. With the $10,000 she inherited in 1976, when brother Keith died of throat cancer, she bought a new car and promptly wrecked it. Then she was back on the road.

  She collected arrests for petty crimes–drunk driving, assault, disorderly conduct, passing bad checks–the way some women collect shoes. She also collected aliases: Sandra Kretsch, Lori Grody, Susan Blahovec, Cammie Marsh Green.

  Aileen's life couldn't have been harder. In a May 4, 2000, interview on the cable network Court TV, she spoke of being homeless from the time she was sixteen, of being raped, held hostage, kidnapped, and tied to beds. She described one man, whom she suspected of being an undercover cop, parking his truck in the woods and taking out a rifle, saying, “Let me screw you with this first.” Despite the spate of movies like Pretty Woman, which glamorize prostitution, Aileen's experiences were typical for women who sell their bodies. A study of one group of prostitutes showed that they had been raped about thirty-three times in a year.

  The situation brightened for a while in 1986 when Aileen met Tyria Moore at a gay bar in Daytona, Florida. The two became a couple; they moved in together, setting up housekeeping in a series of cheap motel rooms. Tyria quit her job as a motel maid and Aileen supported her by prostitution, hitching rides wit
h truck drivers on Florida's interstate highways, charging $30 to $40 for sex. It wasn't much of a life, but Aileen loved Tyria, and made what she considered decent money, at least for a while. But by the end of the 1980s, things headed downhill again. Aileen, never a raving beauty, wasn't doing too good. Fifteen years of hardscrabble existence was reflected on her face, and it wasn't easy supporting Tyria in the manner to which she was accustomed. To make matters worse, Tyria was blowing Aileen's hard-earned money on booze, spending over $100 a night in bars.

  Then, in early December 1989, along came fifty-one-year-old electrician Richard Mallory in his 1977 Cadillac. Mallory was bad news; he'd already served ten years for violent rape in Maryland. He picked up Aileen and started bragging, as she related in her television interview, that he wanted to “get some tittie [topless] dancers, get them on video doing some dirty stuff, and then kill them and sell the video.” It was the last straw for Aileen, who, for all her life, had been “so ripped apart.” She said, “I got so filthy sick of him talking like that, that's what snapped in my head.”

  Aileen had, understandably, been carrying a .22-caliber gun for self-defense. She shot him three times, and drove the Caddy home to Tyria, explaining where it came from. Tyria didn't want hear about it.

  Mallory's decomposed body was found on December 13 near Interstate 95. Soon the bodies of other men were turning up: David Spears, shot six times; Charles Carskaddon, with nine slugs in his body; Troy Burress, with two bullets from a .22; Dick Humphreys, shot seven times; Walter Antonio, with four bullets in his body. Meanwhile, Aileen was coming home with all sorts of tokens of affection for her sweetie–jewelry, cameras, wallets and Tyria made it clear that she didn't want to know where any of it had come from.

  A seventh man, Peter Siems, went missing on June 7, 1990. His body never did turn up, but his car did, with Aileen and Tyria in the front seats. They wrecked and abandoned it on the following July 4, and this time a witness was able to describe them to the law. Aileen had hurt herself in the crash and left a bloody palm print in the car.

  Florida newspapers carried police sketches of the two women, and soon Florida police were on the trail of Tyria and Susan Blahovec/Cammie Marsh Green/Lori Grody/Aileen Wuornos. They caught up with her at a Port Orange biker bar called, ironically, The Last Resort. Aileen was in a bad way. She and Tyria had split up, and Tyria had gone to stay with her sister in Pennsylvania. Aileen, broken-hearted, was drinking heavily, crashing for the night on an old car seat in back of the bar. The cops arrested her on outstanding warrants in the name of Lori Grody; they didn't have enough evidence yet to pin the murders on her. For that, they needed Tyria's help.

  They found Tyria at her sister's and convinced her to get Aileen to confess. They flew her back to Daytona, where they put her up in a motel. She phoned Aileen in prison–the calls were taped—saying that she was afraid the cops were about to pin the murders on her. At first, Aileen reassured her, “It isn't us, see? It's a case of mistaken identity.” But Tyria phoned back for three days in a row, each call more panicky. Finally, Aileen told her, “I'm not going to let you go to jail. Listen, if I have to confess, I will.”

  And confess she did, on January 16, 1991. But, she claimed, it was self-defense. In all seven cases. Richard Mallory had raped her, tortured her, sodomized her. Not so the others, though. They had not exactly raped her, she said, but “only began to start to.” A jury didn't believe her, and sentenced her to death. Richard Mallory's previous stint in prison for rape was never once brought up during the trial.

  TrueCrime comics incorrectly identifies Aileen Wuornos as “the first female serial killer.”

  It seems very possible, even probable, that Mallory did rape Aileen, or at least threaten her by the things he told her, to the point where she thought he might rape her. She'd been raped before. It also seems possible, even probable, that once she'd killed her first man, Aileen's dammed-up rage came pouring out, and she found it easy to kill the others. In her television interview, she said, “I know I'd kill again, because of the dirt I've been through.”

  During Aileen's trial, a born-again Christian named Arlene Pralle read about her in the newspaper and started corresponding with her. Jesus had told her to write, she said. Soon P ralle was defending Aileen on talk shows, testifying to the killer's true nature of goodness; she got Aileen interviews with sympathetic journalists, even legally adopted her.

  After ten years on Death Row, Aileen, converted by Pralle, changed her tune. She had lied about the self-defense. She'd accepted Jesus, she said, and now had to tell the truth. Newspaper headlines read, “Female Serial Killer Wants To Drop Appeals,” and “Prostitute Killed 6 Men Because She ‘Wanted To.’”

  Perhaps, though, Aileen, tired of ten years on Death Row, just wanted to end it all. Perhaps it wasn't as simple as black or white. Perhaps the truth was closer to what she'd said a year earlier, “When Richard Mallory told me he did time for rape, that made me snap.”

  When was Aileen lying, and when was she telling the truth? We may never know.

  Life after Death Row

  Aileen Wuornos is popularly known as America's first female serial killer, but if you read this book, you'll know that isn't true. From Kate Bender in the 1870s, and Belle Gunness in 1908, to Dorothea Puente only ten years before Aileen, women seem to have been quietly doing away with people–mostly men–and burying them in their gardens. What fascinates people about Aileen, though, is the particularly violent, almost male, way that she killed her victims. Perhaps it is this reason that she has inspired not only the usual made-for-TV movie and a well-regarded documentary, but a comic, a trading card, and even an opera. Wuornos, the opera, composed by Carla Lucero, one of the very few women who have ever written operas, opened San Francisco on June 22, 2001.

  In 1992, Aileen rated her own TrueCrime trading card.

  As of this writing, Wuornos, the woman, still waits on Death Row, planning her last meal. In Florida, condemned people are given a choice of the electric chair or lethal injection. Aileen chose the needle.

  Two

  They Did It for Money

  Belle Gunness

  Indiana Ogress

  Female serial killers are comparatively rare, and when they do kill, it's usually for very different reasons than do male mass murderers. Men seem to derive sexual pleasure from their deeds, often combining murder with rape of both sexes. Women, on the other hand, are practical. When they kill more than one person, they do it for money.

  Belle Gunness was very practical. Perhaps it was because she was born poor. Brynhild Paulsdatter Storset, born in 1859 in Norway, had to work for nearby farmers as a dairymaid while still a girl. Her big sister Nellie emigrated to America in search of a better life, found a husband in Chicago, and in 1883, sent for Brynhild. It was in Chicago that Brynhild met and married Mads Sorenson, a good, hardworking Scandinavian boy. Mads and Brynhild, who now Americanized her name to Belle, opened a confectioner's shop in 1896. The business didn't do too well, and a year later it burned down. Luckily, the couple had insurance. They bought several houses, each of which also burned down. Luckily, they were insured.

  Two of their babies died–of acute colitis, said the doctors. They had been insured. And then in 1900, Mads died from what the doctors decided was a heart attack. Belle collected on his two insurance policies totaling $8,000. Poor Belle, murmured her neighbors, she has such an unhappy life!

  Belle took the money and her remaining kids, including a foster daughter, Jennie Olson, and bought a two-story brick farmhouse in LaPorte, Indiana, a town with a large Scandinavian population. The house itself had already acquired a shady past; it had been a brothel until the madame died of old age. Belle's new neighbors were no doubt happy to see a respectable Norwegian widow take over the place. Belle put up white lace curtains and fenced in an area behind the building for a pigpen.

  By 1902, Belle was married again, to a farmer named Peter Gunness. Peter, a widower, brought along a baby who died a week after the wedding
. Belle seemed to lose children the way some of us lose car keys. Peter lasted about a year, before a heavy iron sausage grinder fell onto his head from a top shelf. Daughter Myrtle confided to a school chum that Mama had conk ed Papa on the noggin and killed him, but nobody paid any attention to what kids say. Belle collected on Peter's $3,000 insurance policy, and dressed herself in black.

  But not for long.

  Soon Belle was placing ads in Scandinavian newspapers across the Midwest, seeking a husband. “Widow with large farm looking for a helpmate,” the ads went, adding that it was important that the prospective groom produce money of his own, so that she would know he wasn't merely a cad after her fortune. She added, “Triflers need not apply.” Corresponding with hopeful suitors, she would ask them to bring with them a sum of at least $1,000, to prove their sincerity. In one letter she wrote,

  My dear, do not say anything about coming here. . . . Now sell all that you can get cash for, and if you have much left you can easily bring it with you whereas we will soon sell it here and get a good price for everything. Leave neither money or stock up there but make yourself practically free from Dakota so you will have nothing more to bother with up there.

  Standing five feet nine inches high and tipping the scales at 280 pounds, Belle was a true Valkyrie, fit to wear a horned helmet on her blonde head, and she attracted hearty Norse farmers who liked some meat on their women's bones. Ole Busberg of Iola, Wisconsin, traveled to LaPorte to woo her. So did Olaf Lindbloom, Herman Konitzer, Emil Tell, OlafJensen, Charles Nieberg, Tonnes Lien, and who knows how many other Olafs, Oles, and Erics. Trouble was, none of them stayed. Belle would be seen with them around town for a few days, hanging on their arm and adding their money to her bank account, then suddenly they'd be gone. Gone back to Minnesota, gone back to Sweden, Belle would say, plowing her fields while wearing the coat and hat they'd left behind, and bemoaning her lot: a poor widow, deserted by another scoundrel who loved her and dumped her. And another ad would appear in the Lonely Hearts section of the Skandinavian News.