Evil Psychopaths, page 32
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.
Ma Barker
The name Ma Barker is probably familiar to most people due to the Roger Corman movie Bloody Mama. Her villainous actions and those of her four equally violent sons, earn a place in the annals of evil psychopaths. Together, Ma Barker and her boys terrorised midwest America in the 1930s, robbing banks and taking lives at will. There is no doubt that she was the driving force in the family and the bond was so strong, her sons were happy to follow where mother led.
Ma Barker was born in Springfield in 1872 and she was no stranger to the crimes of the Wild West. Her childhood hero was the outlaw Jesse James and it hit her hard when he was shot and killed in 1882. Kate, as she was known, was not a pretty teenager, and struggled constantly with her weight. She was flattered when she received the attention of a local farm labourer, George Barker, and even more thrilled when he asked her to become his wife.
They had four boys – Herman, Lloyd, Arthur ‘Doc’ and Freddie, who was the youngest and most definitely Ma Barker’s favourite. The family lived in an impoverished state in a house which was little better than a shack. From an early age, Ma Barker started to hone her little criminals into shape. It wasn’t long before the Barker boys caught the attention of the police, and Ma would have to use her very best persuasive skills to get her boys out of jail.
There was no doubt who wore the trousers in the Barker household, and by 1927, a very downtrodden George decided he couldn’t take any more, and walked away from his family. Ma Barker decided she preferred the attention of women and it is rumoured that her boys all favoured homosexuality.
By the early 1930s, the Barker family had moved on to more serious crime, such as bank robberies. It wasn’t until a sixth member of the gang arrived, Alvin Karpis, that their escapades took on a more serious nature. Already a hardened criminal, Karpis met Freddie Barker when they were both serving time in the Kansas State Penitentiary. Freddie was in prison for killing a policeman during an attempted theft of a car and, sharing a cell with Karpis, initiated the young Barker boy into more lucrative criminal activities.
When the pair were released, together with the remainder of the Barker family, they formed one of the most notorious criminal gangs of the 1930s – the Karpis-Barker gang. Not only did they start robbing banks on a regular basis, they also started hijacking mail deliveries and also turned to the more profitable business of kidnapping. The gang would not hesitate to kill anyone who got in their way, even if they turned out to be an innocent bystander.
They carried out their first kidnap in 1933, asking for an astonishing ransom figure of $100,000 for their victim, wealthy Minnesota brewer William Hamm. Flush with success, the gang upped their stakes and demanded $200,000 for their next kidnap victim, a banker by the name of Edward Bremer Jr. Ma Barker was the mastermind behind the snatch, and spent several months planning each stage. She worked out every precise detail and gave each of her boys a specific task. On 17 January 1934, Bremer dropped his daughter off at school and then headed off towards his office. His car was ambushed by Arthur Barker who held a gun to his head when he was forced to stop by red traffic signals.
The gang forced Bremer to sign the ransom demand, but attempts to retrieve the cash were botched on more than one occasion. Arthur became really frustrated and came close to killing Bremer. It was only his brother Freddie that talked him out of killing their victim, pointing out that they wouldn’t receive any ransom if he was dead. The cash was eventually delivered on 17 February 1934 and Bremer was reunited with his family. He was one of the few men to escape from the clutches of Ma Barker and her gang.
This kidnap, however, turned out to be a big mistake, as Edward Bremer was a friend of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The president was keen to stamp out this type of crime and instructed the FBI to deal harshly with any offenders. In response, the FBI employed highly trained ‘flying squads’ who specialised in hunting down public enemies, including the infamous John Dillinger.
The big mistake Ma Barker and her boys made was when they decided to eliminate George Ziegler. Ziegler was one of the masterminds behind the kidnapping of Bremer, but had become a problem to the gang by bragging about his exploits and drawing attention to himself.
On 22 March 1934, Ziegler was brought down by the Barker boys as he walked out of his favourite restaurant in Cicero, Illinois. The assassins were not careful when disposing of the corpse, they forgot to check Ziegler’s pockets which contained valuable information about Ma Barker and her boys. This information was valuable to the FBI and they set about picking off each member of gang, one by one.
The first one of the gang to be apprehended was Arthur ‘Doc’, who was captured by the FBI on 8 January 1935. He was sent to Alcatraz where he was shot and killed when he attemped an escape.
The FBI managed to track down Ma and Freddie to a cottage they were renting in Lake Weir, Florida. Ma would not give up without a fight and managed to hold them off for four hours, using her favourite weapon, a machine gun. Ma Barker and her beloved Freddie were both killed, but they went out in a blaze of glory.
Lloyd served twenty-five years for murder but was freed in 1947. Shortly after his release he got married, but unfortunately for him his wife stabbed him to death in 1949.
Herman Barker was wounded in a gun battle with rival gang members, and rather than let them finish the job they started, he killed himself with his own gun.
Few people mourned the passing of Ma Barker and her boys. Many believed that she had given birth to sons of the Devil, but there is no doubt that she was an evil psychopath who passed on her love of killing and violence to her sons.
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© 2011 Omnipress Limited
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This 2011 edition published by Canary Press,
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ISBN: 978-1-907795-34-3
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Gordon Kerr, Evil Psychopaths
