Whore Stories (26 page)

Aileen Wuornos (née Pittman) was born in 1956, raised in Troy, Michigan, and it just got worse from there. She never had the pleasure of meeting her father, a schizophrenic pederast serving a life sentence (until he hung himself in his cell) for the rape and attempted murder of an eight-year-old boy. When Aileen was six, her mother abandoned her and her brother, leaving the two shit-out-of-luck siblings with their grandmother, who died soon thereafter of liver failure, and their grandfather, who sexually abused and beat her.

According to numerous sources, around the time she turned eleven, Aileen began to prostitute herself for cigarettes and spare change, and she also began to have sex with her brother who was a year older. Even a dime-store psychologist can see that early on her concepts of sex and sexuality were outré, to put it mildly. Already Aileen’s life seemed to be testing the limits of crappy cosmic card dealing. Yet, killing folks is no way to behave; you can’t just go around shooting every asshole you meet. If you could, Karl Rove would probably not have lived long enough to go so bald.

Remember that breakfast cereal you invented called “Cereal Killers” that featured images of famous serial killers on the box? And did you receive a dismissive response from General Mills, too? Well, Aileen’s old watering hole, the Last Resort Bar, in Port Orange, Florida, actually did manage to capitalize on mealtime murderabilia, selling “Aileen Wuornos Crazed Killer Hot Sauce.” “Warning!” reads the label, “This Hot Sauce could drive you insane, or at least off on some murderous rampage. Aileen liked it and look what it did to her. . . . Not to be used by women with PMS.” I know, our idea was better, and it was not so sexist. I’ll let you know what the folk at Kellogg’s say, but it doesn’t look promising.

By 1989, Aileen the hooker had climbed the criminal ladder to Aileen the “Damsel of Death.” Aileen was a self-described “exit-to-exit” hooker who earned around $1,000/week working I-75 in Florida. Her average workweek consisted of fifty tricks, give or take a few. Who knows why or when she went completely bonkers, but by the time of her capture in 1991, Wuornos had killed seven men.

Initially Aileen claimed that her first “victim,” a man named Richard Mallory, had violently raped her, a mistake that prompted her to do him in. She claimed the same about the other six murders, although no indisputable proof could be found to substantiate her claims. When she was convicted at trial, she howled, “I’m innocent. I was raped! I hope you get raped! Scumbags of America!” a claim that might strike a more sympathetic nerve if she hadn’t stated quite cavalierly shortly before her execution, “I robbed [the men], and I killed them as cold as ice, and I would do it again.”

In 2002 when asked if she had any last words before her execution by lethal injection, Wuornos clarified everything: “I would 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 mother ship and all, I’ll be back, I’ll be back.” Mother ship? Where did she get that New Age bombast? Did Tom Cruise slip the prison chaplain a copy of
Dianetics
? It would be just Aileen’s luck.

AMANDA LOGUE AND JASON ANDREWS

PRO
FILE

DAY JOBS:
Modeling; acting in porn; Tweeting

CLAIM TO FAME:
Natural-born idiots

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Florida

How many times have you screwed yourself by thoughtlessly shooting off a text, talking about how you’re horny and about to murder somebody? If you’re anything like prostitutes/porn stars Amanda Logue and her boyfriend Jason Andrews, you are going to encounter real trouble.

Like many a doomed relationship, this one was about sex and greed. Jason was a Brit, an aspiring DJ with a penchant for techno and gay-for-pay. Amanda was a toothy fetish model, aspiring escort, and Southern belligerent. Together, they made porno movies, marketed themselves to both sexes and dreamed of a future together doing basically the same things, but with more money.

In 2010, a few weeks before they planned to commit the grisly murder of a tattoo artist who’d hired Amanda for a kinky sex party in St. Petersburg, Florida, the prosty pair posted pornographic videos of themselves grunting, shopping at a local flea market, and Tweeting bad puns about murder: “we’re killing time waiting for a party to find us”; and “something exciting surprises in store for here tonight.” One wonders, were they just trying to remove any lingering doubt about the depths of their stupidity? Regarding their deadly itinerary, the two went on to have a grammarian’s nightmare of an exchange on their Blackberries, illustrated by court transcripts released to the media:

• Andrews
  : I’m so glad you’re really commited to this take. Keep eyes for a knife, etc for me!”
  

• Logue
  : They are pakn up. I’m FUCKING exited. To fuck up someone God damnit I want to fiuck after we kill hum
  

• Andrews
  : Ok. Front door or bna9k? Front not yet though
  

• Logue
  : K I’m horny! 1’m getting him to play music be quit wen come im Sorry not ready. Fixing get on tablke
  

• Andrews
  : I will bring the bottle too! Oops, its empty! Yay sweating on a stakeout! . . . Shit. I OMG, I feel like I’m never gonna leave this bloody loo! You ok?”
  

Records from the court proceedings confirm that Andrews waited outside while the sex party was in full swing. After the guests left, Andrews apparently entered the victim’s home with a bottle of something and Amanda was, indeed, horny, although we are left to speculate on what kind of moral and/or physical evacuation of the bowels Andrews was referring to while in the loo.

If Jason and Amanda’s texts provide any insight as to their performance that night, we can probably use our imagination with some accuracy to reconstruct the scene and their tense conversation in the moments leading up to the murder.

A man lies naked on a massage table. Amanda dances around to something soulful and mellow to provide irony, probably Lionel Richie. Jason comes in complaining of cooties in his stomach and holds an empty bottle of Kaopectate.

• AMANDA
  : Ooh. U luuk lik shit. I’m not horny anymre.
  

• JASON
  : R U speekung Dutch? Srry. Had 2 pööp.
  

• AMANDA
  : Lts kill this guay and go shuppin’
  

• JASON
  : LOL cant’ understand a word ur saying! Jst txt me and tell, e what to do.
  

• AMANDA
  : K
  

• GREEK CHORUS:
  Euripides is rolling over in his fucking grave.
  

Returning to a more fact-checkable reality, the next day a relative found the victim’s body in a scene of absolute carnage, while Logue Tweeted that she and Jason were “laying around eating popcorn and watching movies.” You know, throw them off the scent. Jason (code name Addison) and Amanda (code name Sunny Dae) were soon caught and charged with murder, dizzying as that prospect may seem.

MARY “BRICKTOP” JACKSON

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Jacking you up (and off)

CLAIM TO FAME:
“The meanest woman in New Orleans”

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
The Big Easy, Louisiana

Mary Jane Jackson didn’t suffer fools—or anybody, really—and what’s more, she often kicked or stabbed the mortal shit out of anyone who got in her way. She was born in New Orleans in 1836, and at the age of thirteen she began a life of prostitution. By fourteen, she had established herself as the mistress of a local bartender. When the bartender decided that Mary, now seventeen years old, had become too much to handle, he locked her out of his establishment, leaving her to fend for herself alone in the Big Easy. Mistake. Mary, in a roaring fit of pique, rhino-charged back into the saloon and walloped the man, taking with her most of his nose and an ear in the fracas. The wrath of the redhead they called “Bricktop” was now a legitimate cause for concern.

Prosthetics have come a long way since John Miller fumbled around every morning, trying to attach his ball and chain arm, get breakfast ready, make the bed, and so on before doling out his daily ass whuppings. In fact, in 2011 a British man became the world’s first person to have a Smartphone docking system built into his prosthetic arm. But fear not. Even this incredible innovation will not be much help to Captain Hook. You get shit service on the high seas, and he probably doesn’t have many buccaneers with whom to play “Words with Friends,” anyway, considering his ornery disposition.

Bricktop soon moved on to a bordello on Dauphine St., where she was popular with the boys; she was beautiful, even glamorous, once you cleaned all the blood, nose parts, and other gory morsels off of her. Her presence made for a rambunctious house, however, and she was hard-pressed to find a respectable bagnio that would have her. Bricktop finally landed a steady gig at Archie’s Dance-House, and for the next year and a half, she terrorized the freak out of folks on Gallatin St. and surrounding areas.

While on the job, Bricktop committed two gruesome murders using her signature weapon: two five-inch blades attached by a center grip made of German silver. Talk about “a thing of beauty.” Imagine a perpetually agitated, prowling, hobgoblin-whore with long red hair and hands like the business end of a Cuisinart. As per usual, she was given the heave-ho from Archie’s, where they frowned on employees eviscerating their clientele.

Miss Jackson decided to go total freelance, and complete dementoid, eventually teaming up with Bridget Fury and one or two other Louisiana coquettes. The local papers had a ball. Here are some gems from an article describing Bricktop after another murder arrest in 1861:

In 1859, “Bricktop” and two other women knifed a man who objected to their foul language. In her short prison term for that offence, “Bricktop” encountered John Miller, temporarily serving as a jailer. Usually on the other side of the law, Miller had lost an arm and replaced it with an iron ball and chain attached to his stump; it constituted a horrifying weapon. The pair worked the old trick known as “buttock and twang.”

This year, Miller took a whip to “Bricktop” to give her a trashing. It was a mistake: “Bricktop” flogged him! She started by dragging him around the room by his own ball and chain. She bit his hand when he pulled a knife, then used the weapon to kill him.

Ah, the buttock and twang.
That
old gag. The buttock and twang would typically involve Bricktop removing a man’s pants, while Miller snatched the victim’s wallet and using his bowling ball hand smashed the guy’s head in. Bricktop was sentenced to ten years, but nine months into her sentence, the governor let loose most of the prison population, including Bricktop, who was never seen again. For this reason, some people in cineaste circles consider her the Keyser Söze of strumpets.

DELIA SWIFT (BRIDGET FURY)

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Mentee of Bricktop Jackson; pickpocket; thug

CLAIM TO FAME:
Being furious

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Late nineteenth-century New Orleans

Unlike her friend, mentor, and partner in crime, Mary Bricktop Jackson, Delia Swift wasn’t a local girl. She found her way to New Orleans via Ohio. But make no mistake about it, shortly after her arrival this violent vixen became a major figure in the seedy New Orleans underworld of gangs, brothels, and bedlam. Swift, like Bricktop, began her career as a prostitute around the age of twelve, selling her body while her father served as the whorehouse fiddler, until he killed a girl, leaving Delia with nothing.

Luckily, Delia was a skilled pickpocket, attractive, and completely demented, so she fared better on the street than most. Delia, who by now had been aptly renamed “Bridget Fury,” was also absolutely in love with knifing people. Convicted for shanking one fellow, the Fury escaped from a penitentiary in Cincinnati and made her way to New Orleans. Arrested in New Orleans, the state of Louisiana tried to send her back to Ohio, but the Ohio governor was no fool. He was content to let the New Orleans Police Department (an explosive oxymoron if there ever was one) deal with that troublesome redhead. Yes, along with a pair of sisters and sundry stragglers, one of the most feared gangs in all of New Orleans—a town known for ferocious gangs—was led by two wild and crazy hookers who looked a lot like a cross between Little Orphan Annie and early drafts of Botticelli’s Venus, where she was painted to look drunk and violent. It’s really not fair or accurate, though, to mention Annie in the same breath as Bricktop and Bridget Fury. Annie’s tween gaucheries look like child’s play next to those two.

The fuzz finally caught up with Bridget Fury and threw the book at her: life imprisonment. She had dozens of collars ranging from murder to throwing eggs at other hookers. An open and shut case? No. What followed is part of a continuing pattern to this day, but with somewhat less press coverage. It turned out that so many of the city’s top politicians, johns with political clout, were impressed by whatever Bridget Fury had going on that they granted her a general amnesty after she served just four years—a shady deal that was also afforded Mary Bricktop.