‘Several times she [Lee] tried to give me things,’ Vera recalled. Once it was an electric razor, and again a gold chain. Several days after they went, Velimir saw Lee in the gas station.
‘Just make joke, I say, “Hey, when you bring me my money?” because she now owed $30 or $40.
‘And, that time she say, “I’m sorry, you are son of a bitch, you are lucky you are still have life.”’
Shortly after this incident, Vera and her husband saw two photofits in the local paper and immediately recognised the faces as Tyria Moore and Aileen Wuornos. They called the cops.
By now, investigators should have been taking careful note of the cluster of incidents that were taking place around the small area of the Seminole Indian Reservation area in the Ocala National Forest, but they did not. David Spears’s abandoned truck had been found close by. Peter Siems’s Pontiac Sunbird had crashed at Orange Springs. Troy Burress had failed to make his last delivery in the area; his van had been found abandoned along SR 17 and his body had been dumped in the forest.
However, if all these coincidences were not enough to galvanise the authorities into action, the discovery of yet another abandoned car at almost the very same spot along CR 484 where Lee had left Carskaddon’s vehicle should have been a loud wake-up call.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WALTER GINO ANTONIO
WHEN WE WERE STRUGGLING WITH THE GUN AND EVERYTHING ELSE, AGAIN, HE FELL TO THE GROUND AND HE STARTED TO RUN BACK… RUN AWAY. AND I SHOT HIM IN THE BACK… RIGHT IN THE BACK. HE JUST KIND OF LOOKED AT ME FOR A SECOND AND HE SAID… HE SAID SOMETHING LIKE, UH… SHIT. WHAT DID HE SAY? I THINK HE SAID, ‘YOU CUNT,’ OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT. AND I SAID, ‘YOU BASTARD,’ AND I SHOT HIM AGAIN.
By now, a number of law-enforcement officers investigating the various murders were starting to collate their evidence. Marion and Citrus County detectives had compared notes on the Burress and Spears killings. Then they spoke to Detective Tom Muck in Pasco County after they read in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement bulletin that Muck’s victim might be linked to Spears. That made three bodies, indicating that a serial killer was at large.
The crimes had a number of features in common, including the fact that the victims were all older men who had been robbed, and two of them had had their pockets turned inside out. All three killings had been carried out using a small-calibre weapon. Bullets recovered from the bodies were .22-calibre, copper-coated and hollow-nosed, with rifling marks made by a right-twist firearm.
Another link emerged when the police exchanged the composite sketches made by their individual witnesses. They bore significant similarities, suggesting they were looking for the same short, blonde woman. If she was a sole killer, and not working with a man, the officers reasoned, then she might well use a small handgun.
Captain Steve Binegar, commander of the Marion County Sheriff’s Criminal Investigation Division, knew about the Citrus and Pascoe Counties murders. He could not ignore the similarities between the murders, and had begun to formulate a theory.
Steve’s first job was to form a multi-agency task force with representatives from the counties where the bodies were found. ‘No one stopped to pick up hitchhikers in those days,’ he said, ‘so the perpetrator of those crimes had to be initially non-threatening to the victims. Specifically, when I learned that two women had walked away from Peter Siems’s car, I looked at the Trojan brand of prophylactics. Then came the composites and the truck-stop clerk. Then I said to the other guys, “We’ve got to be looking for a highway hooker, period.”’
Steve Binegar decided to turn to the press for help. In late November, Reuters ran a story about the killings, reporting that the police were looking for two women. Newspapers throughout Florida picked up the story and ran it, along with the sketches of the women in question. In every respect they matched Aileen Wuornos and Tyria Moore – both women were now suspects in a serial-homicide case.
We can gain a tremendous amount of information from the men who met Lee and were lucky to escape with their lives.
In November 1990, and the date is uncertain, trucker Bobby Lee Copus was driving his car from his home at Lakeland along I-4 to Orlando to pay an insurance bill, a trip of about 45 miles. En route, the heavy-set man in blue jeans pulled into a truck stop near Haines City, some 24 miles south-west of Orlando. Here he met Lee who said that she needed a ride to Orlando. She told the trucker she needed to get to Daytona Beach by a certain time to pick up her two children at a day-care centre. Once in Orlando, she said, she would call her sister for a ride the rest of the way home.
Copus drove to his bank, withdrew approximately $4,000 for his insurance bill and tucked the money into his sun visor. He continued to Orlando along a country road. Lee was soon to proposition the man, asking for $100 with the promise of giving him the best blowjob he had ever had in his life. Copus, who was happily married, had no intentions of cheating on his wife so he declined. Twice more Lee propositioned him, insisting that he stop in an orange grove. Again he refused, and Lee became angry.
Speaking in a thick cowboy drawl as he gave evidence at Lee’s trial, Copus said, ‘When she propositioned me for the third time, she wasn’t the same person. She opened her purse for a comb. I’d seen what I thought was a small-calibre pistol in her purse. At this point I was really scared. I just wanted her out of my car in the presence of a lot of people.’
Copus was not as dumb as he may have appeared and he gambled on a trick which saved his life. He stopped at a truck-stop payphone and, after telling Lee he would drive her all the way to Daytona Beach, gave her $5 to call her ‘sister’. As soon as she climbed out of the car, he slammed the door closed and locked it. Lee flew into a rage. ‘What I saw was a woman in total frustration, mad as hell,’ Copus recalled.
As he sped off in a cloud of dust, she screamed after him, ‘Copus, I’ll get you, you son of a bitch! I’ll kill you like I did the other old fat sons of bitches!’
It is highly probable that the next man who stopped to give Lee a ride, more than likely the very same day, was Walter Gino Antonio.
Hailing from Merritt Island, Cocoa Beach – near Cape Canaveral, along the east coast of Florida – 60-year-old Walter Gino Antonio was a trucker who doubled as a reserve police officer in Brevard County. On Saturday, 17 November, he was driving to Alabama in search of a job. Recently engaged, he wore a gold and silver diamond ring, a gift from his fiancée. It was a size 10 ¾, yellow gold with a diamond set in a field of white gold. When Tyria arrived back in Florida after Thanksgiving, Lee gave her this ring as a gift to prove how deeply she loved her.
Walter’s obvious route was more or less identical to that of the late Peter Siems. He would use the Florida Turnpike as far as Wildwood then head upstate along I-75, probably pulling into the Speedway truck stop before the long haul north.
On Sunday, 18 November, a police officer out hunting game found a man’s body, naked except for a pair of socks, near the intersection of US 19 and US 27 – 15 miles south of Wildwood. Walter Antonio had been shot four times, three times in the torso and once in the head, with a .22-calibre handgun.
After the murder, Lee drove the car back to the Fairview Motel where she asked the manager, Rose McNeill, if she could park her ‘boyfriend’s car’ behind the building. She was told that the boyfriend was married and he did not want to have his wife drive by and find his car parked at the motel. Mrs McNeill recalled that Lee left the car there for just a few days. The maroon Pontiac Grand Prix was found on Saturday, 24 November in a wooded area near I-95 and US 1 in northern Brevard County, 20 miles south from where he started his journey. The number plate and keys were missing and a bumper sticker had been removed. A piece of paper had been crudely pasted over the vehicle identification number, and the doors were locked.