Monster: Inside the Mind of Aileen Wuornos

Apparently, and this is Mills’s side of the story, he took her to two family parties – one at Christmas and the other at his daughter’s house in Ohio. ‘On both occasions, she got blind drunk and insulted everybody. After that I offered her $500 if she stayed out of my life.’

Lee dismissed all of this to me, saying, ‘Yeah, I remember the guy. I stayed with him and he paid me for sex. He gave me $50 plus a few beers. I never went to no parties with him because he left me to get with his wife over Christmas. He was crying like a kid over his wife. Never met his daughter either. What man is going to introduce a hooker like me to his daughter when he is trying to get back with his wife? It is all bull.’

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THE ARREST

Posing as leather-clad bikers, two under-cover detectives, Mike Joyner and Dick Martin, finally spotted Lee Wuornos at 9.19pm on Tuesday, 8 January 1991 and kept her under surveillance. A police report describes the events that led to her arrest.

A surveillance team was dispatched to the Daytona Beach area in search of Aileen Wuornos and Tyria Moore. On 01/08/91 a team of Officers inside the ‘Port Orange Pub’ on Ridgewood Avenue, Daytona, spotted Wuornos at that location. Undercover Officer Mick Joyner observed her with a tan suitcase which she carried from one location to another. Conversations with her and the observations of the undercover team were that she has mood swings from friendly and congenial to aggressive and abusive and is known to consume both Busch and Budweiser can beer and smoke Marlborough cigarettes. She told Mike Joyner that everything she had was in the suitcase and showed a key to him which she said was her life. (This was the key to her lock-up at the storage warehouse.) She then walked to the Last Resort Bar (where she had been sleeping rough on a yellow vinyl car seat outside of the premises). She spent the night in the bar with this suitcase. She hadn’t any place to stay and told Joyner that she had broken up with her girlfriend, Ty, and missed her. The surveillance continued until the evening hours of 01/09/91 at the Last Resort Bar. Intelligence revealed a large party was to occur at the bar that evening. Because of this, a decision was made that surveillance would be almost impossible.

So, the serial killer was drinking at the Port Orange Pub on Ridgewood Avenue in Harbor Oaks, about half a mile north of her favourite bar, The Last Resort, one of the many biker bars that line US 1. But the official police report does not indicate that their carefully planned operation to catch Aileen Wuornos almost went disastrously wrong.

While she was in the Port Orange Pub, two uniformed Port Orange police officers – to the dismay of the undercover cops – walked into the bar and took Lee outside. Joyner and Martin frantically telephoned their command post at the Pirate’s Cove Motel where authorities from six jurisdictions had gathered to bring the investigation to a head. They concluded that this development was not a leak but simply a case of alert police officers doing their jobs. Bob Kelly of the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office called the Port Orange police station and told them not to arrest Lee under any circumstances. The word was relayed to the officers, who suddenly had a more pressing engagement to attend to, and Lee was allowed to return to the bar.