EVIL PSYCHOPATHS (True Crime) (32 page)

Velma Barfield

Poor Velma Barfield. She had endured more than her share of grief over the years. So many people in her life had died. The problem was, of course, that she had killed them all.

She had been born Margie Velma Bullard in rural Carolina in 1932, the second of the nine children of Murphy and Lillie Bullard. They were poor, living in a wooden house with no electricity or running water. The cramped house was shared with Murphy’s parents and his sister Susan Ella who had been disabled by polio. Murphy gradually improved his family’s situation, working as a logger and then finding work in a Fayetteville textile mill. He was a heavy drinker and a strict disciplinarian and did not hesitate to beat his children when he thought they had overstepped the mark. But Velma was adept at talking back to her father and along with her older brother, Olive, was the child who became most familiar with his belt or the back of his hand. Velma, meanwhile, became resentful of the way her mother sat back and submissively watched her husband beat both her and her children. Lillie Barfield, for her part, was also often on the receiving end of her husband’s bad temper and was well aware that he was a serial womaniser.

At least at school Velma could escape the tensions of the Barfield family home, but she was often picked on due to the second-hand clothes she wore and the simple food she had in her lunchbox every day. She began to steal money from her father to pay for sweets and then was caught stealing $80 from an elderly neighbour. Murphy used his belt to cure her of that habit.

Velma later claimed that her father raped her and had been touching her inappropriately for years. It was a claim disputed by other members of the family as an attempt to gain sympathy, and, of course, Velma was a practiced liar.

At high school she started going out with a boy named Thomas Burke who, at seventeen, proposed to her. She accepted but Murphy Bullard hit the roof. Nonetheless, they married and left school, living in a small house in Parkton, Thomas working in a number of different jobs – as a delivery driver, a farm labourer and in a cotton mill. Velma found work in a drugstore but Thomas did not like her working and she was persuaded to give up the job.

In December 1951, Velma gave birth to a son, Ronald, and two years later, a daughter, Kim, was born. She was a good mother, taking her children to the local Baptist church and becoming involved in school activities. She started to work again, working the night shift at a textile plant while Thomas worked as a delivery man for Pepsi Cola. They were making more money and moved to a better house, still in Parkton.

In 1963, Velma had to have a hysterectomy and it seemed to affect her badly. She became moody and was often depressed, especially when her husband went out at night. She resented his drinking, having had enough of drunken violence from her father. In 1965, when Thomas was involved in a car crash, she blamed it on drink, but he denied that he had been drinking. He suffered from concussion and endured painful headaches for the remainder of his life.

Her nagging about his drinking began to badly affect their relationship and arguments raged on a daily basis. However, Thomas never resorted to violence.

Eventually, he was arrested for drunk-driving in 1967 and lost his licence and his job. He became depressed and resorted to booze even more. Although he found work in a mill, the tension in the house was palpable. Velma was prescribed sedatives for her own depression and became addicted to Librium and Valium. She began using a number of doctors from whom she would be given prescriptions for her drugs, none of them knowing about the others. She was often groggy and dazed at home, behaving like the drunkard she accused her husband of being.

In April 1967 their house caught fire with only Thomas at home. He died of smoke inhalation. Then, shortly after her son had graduated from high school, the house caught fire again, being destroyed this time. She and her children moved in with her parents while they waited for the insurance company to pay out.

She began dating a widower, Jennings Barfield. Barfield had been forced to take early retirement due to ill health – he suffered from diabetes and emphysema and had a bad heart. They married in August 1970 and she and the kids moved into Barfield’s home in Fayetteville that he shared with his teenage daughter, Nancy.

It was not long, however, before Velma’s pill habit began to damage their relationship. They split up and then got back together again when she said she would stop taking the pills. The marriage, however, had been a mistake for both of them and looked like it was going to be short-lived.

Before things really came to a head, however, Jennings died, finally a victim, it appeared, of the heart trouble that had plagued him for years. Velma sunk into drug-enhanced oblivion and took to her bed. She was still using a number of doctors to keep up her pill intake but they did not prevent her from sinking into an even deeper depression.

She found work in a department store but became frantic when her son Ronnie enlisted in the army to go to fight in Vietnam. In the midst of this, the house caught fire again and she was forced to move back in with Murphy and Lillie. Then in quick succession, she lost her job and her father died of lung cancer aged sixty-one. She was thrown into an even blacker mood when Ronnie told her he was getting married. She became unnaturally jealous of her son’s new wife.

In March 1972, she was charged with forging a prescription but got away with a suspended sentence and a small fine. But things were looking up as Ronnie came home from Vietnam. At home, though, life was hard. Lillie and Velma argued constantly and Velma was irritated by the way her mother bossed her about. Lillie, meanwhile, gave her a hard time about the number of pills she was consuming.

In the summer of 1974, Lillie became very ill with severe stomach pains. She was vomiting and suffering from violent diarrhoea. In hospital, the doctors were puzzled but she recovered after a few days and was sent home.

Velma, meanwhile, came into some money - $5,000 from an insurance policy on a man she had been dating who was killed in a traffic accident.

Just after Christmas 1974, Lillie became ill again, vomiting and suffering from terrible pains in her stomach and back. She was rushed to hospital and died there a few hours later.

In 1975 Velma was jailed for six months for passing dud cheques and on her release, looked for work caring for the elderly. In 1976 she was looking after Montgomery and Dollie Edwards who were ninety-four and eighty-four, respectively. Velma moved into their well-appointed brick ranch-house and for a while all was well. As time wore on, however, Dollie began to scold Velma for the quality of her work. The two quarrelled regularly. Montgomery died in January 1977, but Velma continued to look after Dollie. In late February, Dollie became ill, vomiting and suffering from diarrhea. She thought she had flu, but her condition got worse and she was taken to hospital. She died a few days later.

She moved on to another elderly couple, eighty-year-old John Lee and his seventy-six-year-old wife, Record. Velma did not like Record much. She talked incessantly and often fought with her husband.

Record caused trouble over a cheque she was certain had been forged. Her name was signed on it but she could not remember signing it. The police were even called, but no one could think of how it had come to be forged and who would have done such a thing. A quick look at Velma’s criminal record might have clarified things, of course, but no one bothered.

Towards the end of April, John Lee became ill with the customary stomach pains and diarrhoea that seemed to follow Velma around. He went to hospital but recovered and was released. Doctors were puzzled and unable to find out what had caused the illness. They put it down to a virus.

At home, however, he continued to have relapses, getting better and then becoming ill again. It continued throughout May but everyone agreed that Velma was doing a wonderful job caring for him.

In early June, however, he was worse than ever and returned to hospital where he died on 4 June.

Now forty-six years old, Velma moved in with a farmer, fifty-six-year-old Stuart Taylor, shocking her children by living in sin. Taylor, however, had found out about her criminal record and, as a result, refused to marry her. One night they drove to a revival meeting in Fayetteville, featuring a famous preacher. As the service got under way, Stuart suddenly complained of feeling ill. He had awful stomach pains and felt sick. He left the hall and went outside to lie down in his truck, parked outside.

Back home, his pain and nausea continued into the night and Velma phoned his daughter to let her know her dad was ill. They agreed that it was probably just flu. When his condition had not improved next morning, she drove him to the hospital where doctors diagnosed his illness as gastritis. He was given some medicine and sent home where he gradually got better.

The next day, however, he took a turn for the worse and was taken by ambulance to hospital with sirens blaring. An hour after his arrival at the hospital,

he died.

The doctors were mystified by his illness and sudden death and an autopsy was called for. Stuart’s children agreed to it and everyone wondered how all these tragedies could keep happening to a devout, God-fearing woman like Velma Barfield.

That same day, Lumberton Police Detective Benson Philips received an incoherent anonymous phone call. A woman’s voice ranted on the other end of the line: ‘Murder! . . . I know who did it! . . .You’ve got to stop her! . . . You’ve got to stop her!’ He suggested she call him at the station, and when she did, she offered much more information, although she remained anonymous. She told him she was calling from South Carolina and that Velma Barfield had murdered her boyfriend, Stuart Taylor in the same way as she had killed her own mother. She intimated that they were not the only ones. People had a habit of dying around Velma Barfield.

The police began to check the death certificates of the people who had died when Velma was around. They found that no one had tested for poison in any of the cases, but that they had all died of gastroenteritis. It had happened too often to be a coincidence and they realised that they were looking at a serial killer, a psychopath who killed without remorse.

Velma was picked up, ostensibly for questioning about dud cheques, but they surprised her by telling her that Stuart had been killed by a dose of arsenic, as the autopsy had discovered. She denied any involvement, claiming that they had been in love and were planning to marry. She had nursed him when he became ill, she said. Why would she have wanted to kill him?

She went home, and the next day when it was inevitable that she was about to be arrested for murder, she confessed to Ronnie, telling him that she only intended to make him sick. She had never meant for him to die.

Soon, however, Ronnie learned the worst. She had also poisoned John Lee, Dottie Edwards and her own mother, he was told.

Velma was put on trial on one count of first-degree murder, that of Stuart Taylor. She was found guilty and sentenced to death.

While waiting for the sentence to be carried out, Velma seemed to really become a Christian. She had always gone to church but now claimed to have heard the voice of God. She was visited by the famous evangelist Billy Graham and was allowed to mix with other prisoners because she was such a positive influence on them.

Her appeals lasted six years, during which time she admitted that she had also been responsible for the deaths of both Thomas Burke and Jennings Barfield. Finally, they were exhausted and at 2.15 am on 2 November 1984, she lay down on a gurney and lethal poison was pumped into her veins.

Aileen Carol Wuornos

‘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 mothership and all. I’ll be back.’ Aileen Wuornos’s last words were certainly not a reflection of the terrible hand of cards she had been dealt by life. She died as she lived – alone and unloved.

She was born on the last day of February, 1956 as Aileen Carol Pittman. Her mother, Diane Wuornos, had married Leo Dale Pittman when she was fifteen and gave birth to a son, Keith, in 1955. A year later, Aileen was born, but by then the marriage was over and Diane had divorced Pittman who would go on to become a psychopathic child molester who hanged himself in prison in 1969. He was never any good. One story tells how, as a boy, he liked nothing better than to tie two cats together by the tail, hang them over a clothes-line and watch them fight.

In 1960, Diane handed her two children into the care of her parents, Lauri and Britta Wuornos, who adopted them and brought them up as their own in Troy, Michigan. Aileen would not discover until the age of twelve that they were not her real parents.

Life with the Wuornos’s was harsh and very strict and Aileen and Keith became increasingly hard to control. It was not helped by the fact that Lauri was a drinker with a terrible temper. He was not afraid to use a belt to discipline the kids and on many occasions Aileen would be bent over a wooden table in the kitchen or flat on her front on her bed to be whipped on her bare buttocks. It is unsurprising that with so little love at home, the teenage Aileen sought it elsewhere and she was sexually active from an early age. Inevitably, at the age of fourteen, she became pregnant and was sent to live in a home for unmarried mothers. Her son was adopted in 1971.

Britta Wuornos died of liver failure in July of that year, Diane contending that she was actually murdered by Lauri, but nothing was ever proved. For Aileen, however, it was a signal that it was time to leave to make her own way in life. Living with Lauri was unthinkable. So, she took to the road, hitchhiking and earning some money from prostitution.

The next few years seemed to bring nothing but bad news into her already miserable life. Keith, her beloved brother, cruelly died of throat cancer, aged just twenty-one and Lauri committed suicide. Then, she had one of the few good things in her life happen to her. She met a man called Lewis Fell. He was the sixty-nine-year-old president of a Florida yacht club and it was love at first sight for him when he picked her up as she was hitchhiking one day. They were married but Aileen could not change her ways. She hung out in the wrong places, stayed out late and got into drunken fights in bars, eventually being jailed for assault. Fell realised he had made a huge mistake and had the marriage annulled after just a few months.

It had probably been the only chance Aileen Wuornos would ever have and she blew it. The next ten years were spent in a series of doomed relationships, drug-taking and criminal activity – forgery, prostitution and even armed robbery. When it all became too much to bear, she tried to kill herself.

As she hit rock-bottom, along came Tyria Moore, a twenty-four-year-old motel chambermaid whom she fell in love with. The two moved in together and Aileen took care of her new love, funding their life together from her earnings as a prostitute. Aileen’s looks were fading, however, and it was getting harder to earn enough money. She had to find another way and seven dead men were going to provide her with the means of hanging on to her lover.

The first was middle-aged electronics repair business owner, Richard Mallory, who liked to party. He often disappeared for days on end, out on an alcohol and sex binge and, therefore, when clients found his door locked one day in December 1989, no one was particularly worried. He would be back as soon as his money ran out. A few days later, however, his 1977 Cadillac was located outside Daytona. Then his body was found on a back road not far from Interstate 95, wrapped in a carpet. Three bullets from a .22 calibre pistol had been fired into him.

Police dug into Mallory’s background of bars and strip-clubs, but they were unable to come up with anything that pointed to the killer.

Six months later, on 1 June 1990, another man was found shot dead. The naked body of forty-three-year-old David Spears turned up in woods forty miles north of Tampa. Spears, a heavy equipment operator, had last been heard of on 19 May when he let his boss know that he was on his way to Orlando. They found his truck with the doors unlocked on Interstate 75. There was a used condom close to his body and, once again, the weapon that had dispatched him was a .22.

Five days later, a third naked male body was found, also close to Interstate 75. The owner of the .22 had pumped nine bullets into Charles Carskaddon.

On 4 July, a car crashed off State Road 315, near Orange Springs, Florida and two women, later identified as Aileen and Tyria, were seen to clamber out, swearing at each other and obviously drunk. A by-stander asked if they needed help and the blonde, Aileen, begged her not to call the police. She told her that her father lived down the road and he would sort them out. They walked off.

When Marion County police officers later ran a check on the wrecked 1988 Pontiac Sunbird, they discovered that it was registered to sixty-five-year-old retired merchant seaman, Peter Siems, who had been missing from his home since 7 June. He had set out to visit family in Arkansas and had never turned up.

Troy Burress also failed to arrive at his destination on 30 July. A delivery man for a sausage manufacturer, he failed to make it back to his depot after his morning deliveries. They found his truck around dawn the next morning twenty miles east of the town of Ocala. It was unlocked and there was no trace of Burress. Five days later, however, a family picnicking in the Ocala National Forest stumbled on his badly decomposed body in a clearing just off Highway 19. He had been shot twice, once in the chest and once in the back. The bullets had come from a .22. Police were baffled. They picked up a drifter who had been seen hitchhiking on Highway 19 on the day in question, but he was quickly eliminated from their enquiries.

In the next two months she claimed her final two victims. Former police chief, Dick Humphries, now working for Florida’s Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services celebrated his thirty-fifth wedding anniversary on 10 September. The following day, he disappeared and on 12 September, they found him, shot seven times with a .22.

A month later, trucker and security guard, Walter Gino Antonio’s naked body was found on a logging road in Dixie County. He had died as a result of four shots from a .22.

Captain Steve Binnegar, commander of Marion County Sheriff’s Criminal Investigation Department suspected that the perpetrator of the murders was more than likely a woman. Only non-threatening females would have been picked up by these men, he reasoned. He particularly suspected the two women who had crashed Peter Siem’s car to be the killers. Sketches of them were circulated to the media and before too long they had names – Tyria Moore and a woman called Aileen. One lead, a motel owner in Tampa, named them as Tyria Moore and Susan Blahovec. Other pseudonyms for Aileen emerged – Lee Blahovec and Cammie Marsh Greene. The Greene identity led police to a pawnshop in Daytona where she had deposited a camera and radar detector belonging to Richard Mallory. Florida pawnshops require the person depositing items to provide a thumbprint. The thumbprint there plus another at a pawnshop in Ormand Beach, where she traded in a toolkit owned by David Spears, led investigators to fingerprints on an outstanding warrant against a woman named Lori Grody. Her prints had also been found in Peter Siems’ car. The Blahovec, Greene and Grody aliases all led to one original source – Aileen Carol Wuornos.

On the evening of 8 January 1991, two undercover police officers posing as drug dealers located Aileen at a bar in Port Orange. She was almost arrested by diligent Port Orange cops, but they wanted to make no mistake and the two officers warned the officers off. They got into a conversation with her before she left for a biker bar, the Last Resort. The two undercover cops joined her there, drinking some more beers with her before leaving her to sleep the night away in an old car seat at the bar.

Next day when they hooked up with her again, they offered her the opportunity to have a shower in their motel room. As she left the bar, she was arrested on the outstanding Lori Grody warrant. The murders were not mentioned.

A day later, Tyria Moore was found visiting her sister in Pennsylvania. She was not charged with anything but began talking about the killings in the statement she made. She told how Aileen had arrived home one night in Richard Mallory’s Cadillac, boasting that she had killed him. Moore claimed, however, that she had told her she did not want to know. If she did not know, she said, she would not have to report her lover to the police.

Back in Florida, they tried to trick Aileen into confessing in phone calls to Moore, reasoning that if Moore implied that they were trying to implicate her in the killings that Aileen would confess, rather than see Moore go to prison. Wuornos was no fool, however, and realised immediately what the police were trying to do. She was careful what she said.

Finally, however, on 16 January, she confessed, emphasising that Moore was in no way involved in the murders. She claimed they had all been carried out in self-defence, that all her victims had tried to rape her or had threatened her in some way. However, there was little consistency in her statements and she seemed to be embellishing them. She was convinced there was money to be made from the story of her life and a media frenzy had, indeed, broken out. Unfortunately, Florida does not allow felons to benefit financially from their crimes and she would not be getting rich quick.

Into the midst of all this emerged a born-again Christian, Arlene Pralle, who claimed that Jesus had instructed her to contact Wuornos. She became her defender on television and in magazines and newspapers and became very close to her. So close, in fact, that she and her husband legally adopted Aileen Wuornos, on the instructions of God, she claimed.

Wuornos received six death sentences and because of the cold-blooded nature of the way she killed and her cool, confident behaviour when interrogated, there was little doubt what the outcome would be. She herself said, ‘I took a life. I am willing to give up my life because I killed people. I deserve to die.’ Her reponse to the judge, prosecution and jury was less sanguine. When the jurors returned their verdict after only two hours, she screamed at them from the dock, ‘I'm innocent! I was raped! I hope you get raped! Scumbags of America!’ She later hissed at Ric Ridgeway, Assistant State Attorney, ‘I hope your wife and children get raped in the ass!’ She made an obscene gesture at the judge and shouted, ‘Motherfucker!’ at him.

Aileen Wuornos’s miserable life was brought to an end by lethal injection, which she had chosen over the electric chair, at 9.47 am on Wednesday 9 October 2002, more than ten years after her string of murders. Arguments still rage as to whether she was mad, as British broadcaster, Nick Bloomfield, who interviewed her, claimed, or whether, as the state claimed, she knew exactly what she was doing when she killed seven men.