Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers (26 page)

Aileen’s entire life story explains her hostile thinking - abandoned by her mother, brutalised by her grandfather, raped by her grandparent’s friend at thirteen and pregnant at fourteen, she had no reason to see the
world as a benign place. Then her brother Keith died of throat cancer at a cruelly young age.

A prison psychologist who interviewed Aileen for several days described her as paranoid and said that she believed the world was out to get her. In truth, the little part of the world she knew as a child robbed her of love and trust and innocence - it
was
out to get her and it ruined her totally.

Her experiences of having sex for money for so many years must also have been incredibly destructive. Many men take all of their rage out on prostitutes and the words those girls hear most often are ‘Suck it, bitch.’

She clearly didn’t feel that she could elevate herself through work, marriage or education, and instead dreamed of becoming a singer or an actress - in other words she had fantasies rather than ambitions. Embryonic serial killers are big on fantasy but don’t put in the hard work that actually makes events take place. They’ve usually been so harshly criticised when they were growing up that they don’t feel, deep down, that they have the talent - or even the right - to succeed.

Yet Aileen could have made things happen with her voice, even if it was just as a nightclub singer. People who heard her sing in the Daytona bars said that she sounded good. When drunk, she would tell other drinkers that they’d read of her life story one day. Ironically she would achieve cinematic infamy rather than fame.

The TV networks were quick to put the story on
celluloid
and soon Jean Smart was brilliantly portraying the nervy, fast-drinking Wuornos in the film
Overkill.
Jean Smart is equally believable in portraying Aileen’s
distress
when her lover Ty leaves her. But she’s much less ravaged looking than Aileen - and the supposed flashbacks to her childhood show a beautifully dressed little girl with perfect hair and graceful movements, a far cry from the neglected, underfed child she actually was.

The back of the video describes Aileen Wuornos as ‘America’s first female serial killer’ - in truth, other American female serial killers that pre-date her include Amy Gilligan (who poisoned five husbands and several elderly patients) and Terri Rachels (who lethally injected nine patients) and Jane Toppan, who confessed to over thirty murders again using lethal injections. Some people believe Toppan may actually have caused over a hundred deaths.

Other US female serial killers who pre-date Aileen Wuornos are profiled in this book, namely Genene Jones, Martha Ann Johnson and Judith Neelley. And Carol Bundy (with Doug Clark) and Gwen Graham/Catherine Woods also qualify if you include female serial killers acting as part of a team.

The
Overkill
video description also rewrites history
by saying that Aileen was ‘deceptive in her elegance’ - it seems that they’ve bought the classic femme fatale image. In reality, Aileen was a tall, tough-looking heavy drinker who hung out at Hell’s Angels bars and whose swearing could put a ship’s parrot to shame.

Despite this, one born again Christian decided that Aileen wasn’t capable of murder, that it was a set up. She came to this conclusion after seeing photos of the serial killer and allegedly reading her eyes. This woman said that she wished she could set the seven-times-killer free, but settled for formally adopting her.

At least one feminist writer suggested that Aileen was in jail for daring to be openly homosexual and said that she had only shot the seven men to defend herself. And an Aileen Wuornos Defense Group was formed, also claiming that she had been wrongly convicted, that each death she’d caused was indeed self-defence. Websites told surfers how they could write to her and support her. Presumably these parties were embarrassed when she ultimately told the truth…

Seven years after she was sentenced to death, Aileen Wuornos gave an interview from prison (broadcast on the internet via Court TV) in which she admitted that she’d made her self-defence claim up. She said that Mallory, the first victim, had started talking to her as if she was a guy. He’d told her that he’d served time for rape - and hearing this had made her decide to kill him. ‘It was situational insanity,’ she said to the interviewer. The words sound wrong for her, like textbook psychology that she’s read or been told by someone else.

She says, truthfully, ‘I have been so stepped on,’ and admits that she was a prostitute from the age of sixteen. She says that she went to churches for help but that they wouldn’t assist her because she wasn’t part of their congregation. She tried to become a police officer when she was twenty but they turned her down. The inference is that she had no option but to kill the seven men - but at one stage she’d had money from her brother’s estate and she’d had a wealthy husband. She hadn’t had many breaks, but she’d had some.

She says ‘you can’t rejuvenate me.’ She probably means can’t rehabilitate her. She alleges that at the time of the shootings she was drinking between six and twelve beers daily and that the victims ‘just fell like a sack of potatoes.’ At the time, she explains she was working eight to twelve hours a day on the highways,
soliciting five days a week. Ty, her lover, would have two days off and Aileen would take the same days off to be with her. By the end of 1989 she wasn’t making good money any more so shooting the victims gave her access to their belongings, which she pawned or sold.

‘I’m extremely sorry this happened’ she says rather than using the more direct and responsible ‘I’m extremely sorry I did this.’ But she doesn’t look sorry - its clear that her grandfather beat all normal feeling out of her years ago.

Throughout the interview, she frequently repeats her claim that the police were trailing her for five months but didn’t immediately arrest her because they were in the throes of organising a book and movie deal. She’s been told that certain film producers were only interested in a female serial killer - so Wuornos believes the police wanted to make sure she murdered several times.

There’s some truth in her story - Nick Broomfield, the documentary film maker produced a film on the subject called
The
Selling
Of
A
Serial
Killer.
(Not seen by this author.) He found that the police planned to sell Hollywood exclusive rights to their investigations and that talks on the subject were held a month before her arrest. He also alleges that anyone who wants to interview Aileen has to pay various people who know her and others within the judiciary.

‘You got some dangerous cops out there,’ Aileen
says in her Court TV interview. She also suggests, passing the buck, that ‘law enforcement let me become a serial killer’ and that ‘they need to care about God and righteousness.’

Her religious conversion runs through much of her speech. ‘I believe I’m totally saved and forgiven by Jesus Christ,’ and ‘I’m totally, totally into Jesus Christ.’ She adds that there are angels waiting for her on the other side.

Meanwhile, life on Death Row is far from heavenly. She claims she’s had ‘sonic pressure running through my cell for like three years’ and ‘4800 food trays tainted since 1994’ and that love drove her to crime. In truth, hate drove her to crime.

She does not come over as likeable - but in fairness she has not been raised to believe she is likeable. Her speech is drawling, simplistic and often repetitive. Her Defense Attorney claims that Aileen has the emotional level of a child aged two to three. She is currently
working
her way through the appeals process but if her appeals fail she will probably go to the electric chair by 2007.

13 Karma Chameleon

The public and private sides of Karla Leanne Homolka

Karla was born on the 4th May 1970 by Caesarean section, the first child of Karel and Dorothy Homolka. Karel was a Czech refugee who had been moved from school to school by his travelling farmworker father. His parents had fled from Czechoslovakia to Canada when he was seven to escape its communist regime. A handsome, small built man, he settled in Ontario with his wife Dorothy, a Canadian citizen. The couple - and many of their relatives - initially inhabited a trailer park.

The early years were financially uncertain ones as Mr Homolka originally ran a picture-framing business with his relatives. Dorothy had given up her secretarial job to be a full time mother to baby Karla. Dorothy was an excellent household manager as she had run her parent’s household as a child after her mother became seriously ill.

Now she found that her beautiful blonde-haired and blue-eyed daughter Karla had asthma which tended to come on when she got over excited. As a result, she was often hospitalised at Christmas and other special events.

Mr Homolka had very little formal education and even after many years residing in Canada his grasp of
spoken English remained volatile. His salary was equally variable so he and Dorothy had a financially unstable early marriage. But when he started selling velvet paintings and costume jewellery outside shopping malls his fortunes improved.

The increase in income allowed the couple to plan for another baby, so two years after Karla’s birth they had a second blonde-haired daughter whom they called Lori. And three years after that they had a third equally blonde baby girl, Tammy Lyn. Lori and Tammy also had asthma but it didn’t prevent them or their older sister Karla from taking part in numerous school activities. Tammy would eventually be one of three girls to die at Karla’s hand…  

When Karla was almost eight her parents moved the family to a small house with an outdoor pool in a nice area. She was given her own room to which she would occasionally bring a friend. The house and garden were often filled with the Homolka’s neighbours who they got on well with. An animal lover, Karla soon acquired two cats, two rabbits and various hamsters. From an early age she was interested in being a vet.

Her father had now taken a job with a lighting company and was often away on the road selling lighting fixtures. When he was home he sometimes withdrew into himself and his daughter Lori would later suggest that he needed help. Karla certainly saw her mother as the stronger and more energised character - Dorothy
arranged pool parties and cleaned and baked. Dorothy also confided to a friend that she was glad that her husband Karel was away a lot as he exhausted her with his frequent demands for sex.

Karla was quiet at junior school and considered something of a loner. She favoured pretty frilly dresses and her contemporaries thought she had a princess-like, Alice In Wonderland look. She excelled at English and got over eighty percent for many subjects. She loved to play at - and draw - houses and adored her dolls. She had a stay-at-home mother during these years so clearly saw the house as the woman’s domain.

Some of her peers remember her as being attention seeking, understandable in a family where all three daughters looked increasingly alike and had similar sporting interests. Several family photos show the blonde Homolka girls smiling for the camera but their faces look tense and Lori’s nails were bitten to the quick.

By senior school Karla enjoyed drama and skating, subjects which got her noticed. She also joined the French
club and did well at the language as her IQ of circa 130 put her in the top two percent of the populace. Yet when she tried out for the choir she was so shy - or so determined to be noticed as different - that she made all her classmates turn their chairs to face the other way. Teachers would remember her as bright, non-conformist and intense and her fellow students would concur that she was different and slightly weird.

After twelve years at home, Dorothy went back to work, taking a job as a hospital administrator, work which brought home a regular paycheck. Unfortunately Karel made it clear to some of her co-workers that he fancied them and suggested he’d be willing to leave his wife. And according to a source in Stephen William’s impressively detailed book on the case,
Invisible
Darkness,
Dorothy suggested that a threesome - herself, the woman that Karel fancied and Karel - might save the Homolkas rocky relationship.

By now Karel’s daughters were sometimes calling him names, perhaps safe in the knowledge that English wasn’t his first language. Karla herself would later hint to psychiatrists that her father wasn’t too bright - and in a letter she’d refer to both her parents as assholes. In general, she now talked too much and seemed even more obsessed with her appearance than other teenagers. She would spend hours talking dramatically on the telephone to her more conservative friends. The schoolgirl Karla’s punk-dyed hair, monochrome clothes and
multiple earrings gave the illusion of confidence - but there was increasing uncertainty at home.

Karla’s father had always enjoyed a drink so the house was full of alcohol and friends were offered it on every occasion. But he increasingly went on drinking binges, many of which would last all day. Karla’s schoolfriend Kevin would hear from Karla that the house was in a state of almost constant tension, with her father brooding or both parents arguing. Young Karla found the shouting matches distressing and often phoned Kevin in tears. She also told other friends that she wanted to leave home as soon as possible and spoke of university as a way out.

That said, Karla would go to her father if her mother refused her anything. But when he’d been drinking he’d misinterpret whatever she said and would become verbally abusive. At one stage she reported that he’d called her a whore - and his joking name for his own wife was ‘the old bitch.’ It’s not known if Karla was physically chastened by either parent but after one argument with her father she tearfully phoned a friend and admitted she’d locked herself in her room.