Women Serial Killers of the 20th Century (19 page)

On May 27th, 1974, Aileen was
jailed in Jefferson County, Colorado for drunken driving, disorderly conduct, and firing a .22-caliber pistol from a vehicle.

Following her release from jail, Aileen, now twenty
, hitchhiked down to Florida, seeking some warmth. Here, she was picked up by sixty-nine-year-old Lewis Gratz Fell, a blue blood Philadelphian wealthy yacht club president. Lewis fell head over heels in love with the young, strawberry haired, brown-eyed, buxom, 5’4’’ Aileen and proposed to her. He placed an announcement of their nuptials in the local newspaper society pages. They married in March of 1976; the marriage did not last long as Aileen, unable to restrain her temper, continually got into drunken fights in Lewis’s local bar and demanded money off him. Aileen also hit Lewis with his walking stick, which led him to take out a restraining order against her and to have the marriage annulled on July 21
st
of 1976.

Aileen and Lewis

Aileen’s temper would be aroused even in supermarkets if she thought people were looking at her in a certain way. She would become extremely angry and start shouting, “What are you looking at me for?” Her irritability, sudden anger, and suspicion are typical symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia.

In Antrim County, on July 14, 1976, Aileen was arrested for disturbing the peace and assaulting a bartender by throwing a cue ball at his head. She was fined $105. Aileen’s brother Keith died of throat cancer on July 17
th
, 1976. Aileen hitchhiked back to Michigan for his funeral. Aileen received $10,000 from his life insurance policy and rapidly squandered the money; this included buying an expensive car that she trashed shortly after taking possession of it.

Aileen eventually returned to Florida continuing her life as a prostitute and petty criminal. At the age of twenty-two
, unable to endure her life anymore, she took a .22 caliber pistol and shot herself in the abdomen. She told doctors at the hospital that it was not the first time she had attempted suicide. She recovered from the gunshot wound but received minimal psychiatric counseling.

In May
of 1981 in Edgewater, Florida, she was arrested for armed robbery at a minimart, dressed only in a bikini. She was sentenced to three years in prison. She had stolen $35 and two packets of cigarettes. Aileen spent her time in jail reading the bible and complained of being locked up with lesbians. She was released in June of 1983 and made her way down to Key West, where she was arrested in a bank for trying to pass a forged check.

There followed a series of other offenses
; some committed in her name and some in the name of Lori Grody, her aunt, whose ID she had stolen. Some of these offenses involved firearms.

In Miami on January 4th, 1986 Aileen was arrested and charged in her own name for stealing a car and resisting arrest. In the car, the arresting officers found a box of ammunition and a .38-caliber
revolver. Aileen skipped bail, took on a new alias, Susan Blahovec, and moved to Daytona Beach, Florida an area popular with bikers, Hells Angels, holiday-makers, and the retired. It was here in a gay bar called Zodiac that she met 24-year-old lesbian motel maid Tyria Moore. After meeting, they left the bar together and spent the entire weekend in bed.

Tyria was a hefty,
big-bone
d
,
jovial, freckled faced
,
red head who was often mistaken for a man. She grew up in the smal
l
Christian town of Cadiz, Ohio. Her father was a well-respected brick mason and carpenter. She had three brothers and one sister. Her parents were far from happy with their daughter’s lesbianism, and she left the restraints of Cadiz and moved to Florida.

Tyria

Aileen and Tyria began an intense and volatile relationship. Tyria quit her job, and Aileen supported them both on her prostitution earnings. It was the anchor Aileen had been searching for all her life. Aileen and Tyria had a nomadic lifestyle. They moved from one dingy apartment or seedy motel to another and on occasion slept in an old disused barn. Aileen fell for Tyria hard, probably more than anyone else she had ever cared for in her miserable life. Although Tyria appeared tougher and more butch, Aileen referred to her as her wife.

In July of 1987, the Daytona Beach police held Aileen and Tyria for questioning about a bar brawl in which they were accused of assault for attacking a man with a beer bottle. In March
of 1988, Aileen, using the alias Cammie Greene, accused a bus driver in Daytona Beach of assault. Tyria was named as a witness in the police report.

In July
of 1988, in Daytona Beach, Aileen (under the "Susan Blahovec" alias) and Tyria were accused by their landlord of vandalizing their apartment. By 1989, Aileen, according to Tyria, rarely traveled without a loaded .22 caliber gun telling Tyria that she carried the gun for self-protection. In the United States gun culture, .22 caliber guns are not particularly powerful and are typically used for self-defense.

Her job was dangerous, she explained to Tyria, and in the past, she had been maced, beaten, and raped by customers. Prostitution was a dangerous profession. In the U
nited States, it’s estimated that the murder rate for female prostitutes is 204 per 100,000, making it the riskiest profession for women in the United States.

A recent study on 130 prostitutes in San Francisco found that 82% had been physically assaulted
, 83% had been threatened with a weapon, and 68% had been raped by clients.

Frequently, murdered bodies of prostitutes are found around the U
nited States without arousing serious attention.

Aileen’s earnings as a prostitute were never great and with the ravages of age, alcohol
, and drugs, they dwindled even further. The lack of funds began to put a strain on their relationship. Tyria occasionally took jobs as a motel cleaner but didn’t like working and would complain to Aileen. This would make Aileen constantly worried that Tyria would leave her if she was unable to support her financially. For the first time in her life, she had found love and did not want to lose it. Aileen mainly worked as a prostitute along the highways of Central Florida. In the first week of December, Aileen left Tyria for a few days to work. When she returned home, intoxicated with alcohol, to the motel in Volusia County in which they were presently living, she, according to Tyria, told her that she had shot a man dead earlier and robbed him blind. Tyria never reported this to the police but stayed with Aileen not caring where or how Aileen brought the money home.

On December 13th, 1989 two teenage boys out riding their bikes found a wrapped dead body along a dirt road close to Interstate 95
in Florida. Fingerprints identified him as fifty-one-year-old Richard Mallory, the owner of an electronics store in Clearwater, Florida. He had been murdered with three gunshots from a .22 pistol.

Richard Mallory

On June 1, 1990, a naked man’s body was found in the woods of Citrus County, Florida. A used condom was lying near his body. He was identified as David Spears, a forty-three-year-old construction worker. He had been shot six times with a .22 pistol.

David Spears

On June 6
th
, 1990, a badly decomposed naked man’s body was discovered lying near Interstate 75. Nine bullets were found in his body from a .22 pistol. He was later identified as Charles Carskaddon, age forty. 

Charles Carskaddon
,

On July 4
th
, 1990, a Pontiac Sunbird car belonging to a missing man, retired merchant seaman, Peter Siems, age sixty-five, was found crashed and abandoned near Orange Springs, Florida. An eyewitness had seen two drunken women abandoning it. When the police examined it, there were bloodstains in t he interior, the license plate was missing, and Aileen’s finger-prints were on a door-handle.