Criminal Minds (23 page)

A few days later, the authorities found yet another dead man, shot nine times with a .22. Eventually identified as Charles Carskaddon, he was a rodeo worker.

On July 4, 1990, a car with two women in it ran off the road near Orange Springs, Florida. A witness reported that the two women got out, screaming and cursing at each other, and asked the witness not to call the police. They tried to get the car going again, but the damage was considerable, and they soon abandoned it and set off on foot. The sheriff’s deputies were able to identify the car as belonging to Peter Siems, who had been missing since June 7. His body has never been found.

Troy Burress disappeared on July 30 and turned up five days later. He had been killed by two bullets from a .22.

Dick Humphreys, a retired air force officer and a onetime police chief, celebrated his thirty-fifth wedding anniversary on September 10, vanished on September 11, and was found on September 12. He had been shot seven times with a .22.

More than a month passed before the nude body of Walter Gino Antonio, a trucker and a reserve police officer, was found. He had been shot four times with a .22.

Although these murders took place in different jurisdictions over many months, the similarities did not go unnoticed. Steve Binegar of the Marion County Sheriff ’s Criminal Investigation Division figured that the men would not have picked up hitchhikers, so the killer had to be someone they would have seen as nonthreatening. He suspected the two women who had been driving Peter Siems’s stolen car, and he had the media run sketches of them.

By mid-December, many people had reported what appeared to be the same two women to police, although the names varied considerably. One of them was probably Tyria or Ty Moore; the other was Lee, or Lee Blahovec, or Susan Blahovec. They were a couple, and Lee, or Susan, was a prostitute. The authorities in Harbor Oaks, Florida, knew Blahovec as Cammie Marsh Green. She also used the aliases Sandra Kretsch and Lori Grody. Cammie Marsh Green had pawned items that had belonged to David Spears and Richard Mallory, and a palm print found in Peter Siems’s car matched Lori Grody. All of these names were aliases used by Aileen Wuornos.

Wuornos’s story had a hard beginning. Born Aileen Carol Pittman on February 29, 1956, she, like many serial killers, was given up by her birth mother. Her maternal grandparents, Lauri and Britta Wuornos, adopted Aileen and her older brother, Keith, in 1960. She never met her father, a psychopathic child molester who had spent time in mental hospitals and later hanged himself in prison. Wuornos said that her grandfather and adoptive father, Lauri, physically and sexually abused her from a young age and that her grandmother and adoptive mother, Britta, was an abusive alcoholic.

Wuornos didn’t know that they weren’t her birth parents until she was twelve. By the time she was fourteen, Wuornos had had multiple sexual partners, including her brother, according to her claims, and was pregnant. She went to a home for unwed mothers and gave birth to a boy, whom she put up for adoption.

That year, Britta Wuornos died. Within the next few years, Aileen ran away from home and took up prostitution to support herself. Soon her brother, Keith, died of throat cancer, and Lauri committed suicide. Wuornos’s life looked as if it might turn around when a wealthy sixty-nine-year-old man married her, but she was already out of control, and the marriage was quickly annulled.

In “Doubt,” after shutting down a college campus, the BAU team creates a detailed profile of their unsub, but when the killings on campus continue after they take a suspect into custody, the agents begin to doubt themselves.

With her face severely scarred from burns she had suffered in a childhood accident, Wuornos could never have been the kind of high-end call girl seen in “Pleasure Is My Business.” Instead, she plied her trade at cheap motels and low-end bars. She abused drugs and alcohol, and in addition to hooking, she relied on theft, forgery, and armed robbery to make ends meet. In 1986, she met Tyria Moore in a gay bar in Daytona, and they fell in love. Their relationship was troubled, but although the romance died off, they remained friends and traveling companions.

After Wuornos was arrested she confessed to the murders but insisted that Moore was innocent. Wuornos had killed the men, she said, because they had threatened her. She’d been raped several times on the job, and she’d gotten tired of it. After that, whenever a man started to rape or threaten her, she responded with violence. All of the killings had been done in self-defense, she insisted. But the more times she told the story, the more it changed; each time she cast herself in a better light, as the victim rather than the perpetrator of the crimes.

Wuornos was tried and convicted of Richard Mallory’s murder even though she continued to claim self-defense throughout the trial. She received her first death sentence for that one. To the charges of the murders of David Spears, Troy Burress, and Dick Humphreys, she pleaded no contest, and she pleaded guilty to the murders of Charles Carskaddon and Walter Gino Antonio, earning six death sentences altogether.

No charges were ever brought in the Peter Siems case. After the Mallory trial was over, evidence emerged that Mallory had served ten years in prison for violent sexual attacks. A new trial for Wuornos was denied, despite this new twist that might have convinced jurors that her first murder had, in fact, been self-defense. She had recanted her claims of self-defense in the other cases.

Eventually Wuornos chose to fire her attorneys and cease her appeals. “I’m one who seriously hates human life and would kill again,” she wrote to Florida’s Supreme Court. She was allowed to choose her method of execution and picked lethal injection over the electric chair. Her last words, on October 9, 2002, were, “I’d just like to say I’m sailing with the Rock and I’ll be back like Independence Day with Jesus, June 6, like the movie, big mother-ship and all. I’ll be back.”

 

 

MORE TYPICAL
of female serial killers was Dorothea Puente, who ran a boardinghouse in Sacramento, California—an occupation she took up after the law shut down her brothel. When the rent she collected wasn’t enough to maintain the lifestyle to which she aspired, she took to killing her boarders, many of whom were elderly and disabled, and then she continued to cash their Social Security checks.

Puente buried seven bodies in her yard, but officials believe that she killed at least nine people. Her crimes were revealed when an investigation into a missing tenant turned up bodies buried in the yard. She was sentenced to life in prison without parole on December 10, 1993, when she was sixty-four years old.

 

 

THE QUEEN
of female killers—and perhaps the most prolific serial killer in history, of either sex—was Countess Erzsébet Báthory of Transylvania. Known as Elizabeth Báthory in the United States, she is believed to have tortured and killed at least 650 girls and young women between 1585 and 1610, with the help of four servants.

Her victims were originally servant girls, but when that crop began to run out, she turned to lesser aristocrats. After the testimony of the participating servants and some survivors, Báthory was convicted of eighty murders and believed to be responsible for at least three hundred.

The figure of 650 comes from her own diaries, in which she kept track of her victims. She was imprisoned for life, walled up in her own rooms, where she died on an unknown date in 1613 or 1614. Given the nature of her crimes, Báthory was clearly a sexually sadistic serial killer of the highest order, and her station in life allowed her to live out her wildest fantasies.

 

 

FEMALE KILLER
Chloe Kelcher, in the episode “The Angel Maker” (402), is said to suffer from hybristophilia, a state in which one becomes sexually aroused by the knowledge that a partner has committed a violent act. Perhaps the most infamous hybristophiliac of modern times is Veronica Lynn Compton.

In June 1980, Veronica Compton, then twenty-three, was a writer and a would-be actress with a serial-killer obsession. She contacted Kenneth Bianchi while he was in prison awaiting trial as one of the Hillside Stranglers, and she described to him a play she was writing called
The Mutilated Cutter
, about a female serial killer. She wanted a real serial killer’s take on the material.

Their correspondence reveals that Compton had an unhealthy fascination with rape, mutilation, murder, and necrophilia—just Bianchi’s kind of pen pal. They rapidly developed a romantic relationship, and Bianchi suggested a desperate defense ploy to which Compton readily agreed. She visited him in prison, and he gave her a book with part of a rubber glove pressed between the pages. Inside the glove was some of his semen. She flew to Bellingham, Washington, where he had been arrested for a pair of murders, with the plan of murdering another woman and planting Bianchi’s semen on the corpse. This would, Bianchi hoped, make the police believe that they had the wrong man in custody and that the real rapist-murderer was still on the loose.

In a fictional variation on this idea, Anna Begley, a student in the episode “Doubt” (301), attacks and stabs a girl, copying the MO of the already-arrested Nathan Tubbs, in order to win Tubbs’s release.

Compton managed to lure a woman to a motel room, but when she tried to strangle her victim, the woman overpowered her and ran away, then reported the attack to the police. Compton escaped and returned to California, but she made a scene when she landed at the San Francisco airport that brought her to the attention of the authorities.

Although Compton had failed in her murder attempt, she wrote a letter to Bellingham officials anyway, claiming that the attack proved that the killer was still at large. With the victim’s description, the California postmark on the letter, and pictures from the airport scene, the police were able to quickly identify Compton and arrest her. In jail in Washington for attempted murder, she was no longer any use to Bianchi, but he continued writing to her until it was more than obvious that she had lost interest in him.