Monster (5 page)

Alzada told the court that Busch and Budweiser seemed to be Lee’s favourite drinks, and that her drinking sessions were often followed by loud arguments with Tyria behind the closed bedroom door.

‘Can you estimate, when she was there drinking, how much she might drink in an evening or a day?’

‘Normally she would come in with a 12-pack and maybe drink two or three 12-packs in a night and in a day. She is a heavy drinker. They trashed the place.’

Lee often said she liked sex with men, and her sex life with Tyria waned enough for Tyria to complain to her best friend about it. Lee herself said that her ‘greater love’ for Tyria ‘wasn’t sexual’. The real driving force in Lee’s life wasn’t sex at all; it was a search for an emotional bond and love – love that she had never really had from her abandoning mother, her emotionally and physically abusive grandfather or, it seems, from the grandmother who failed to protect her from him, and certainly not from
the callous young males who had sex with her while she was an adolescent. She was far more familiar with loss than with love, having lost her brother Keith to cancer, and having had her baby son snatched from her after she gave birth. Lee found the deep emotional bond she desperately craved with Tyria. Her borderline personality disorder carried with it an overwhelming fear of abandonment. She would do anything to keep her, even kill if needs be, and so deep-seated was her love for Tyria, she would even give up her life to protect her in the years to follow.

Lee’s market value as a hooker, never spectacular, fell even further. When Lee hit the road searching for johns, she would pose as a hitchhiker or a disabled motorist at highway on-and-off ramps – she became an ‘exit-to-exit prostitute’. Money was always tight and they were constantly moving from lodgings to lodgings because they failed to pay the rent. Their existence, meagre though it was, became more difficult to maintain. Clearly something had to change, but getting out of Daytona was not easy. There was never enough money to get to Miami, and the two women now realised that jobs were scarcer than they had first thought. They had blown all their money, and their dreams of good times had faded as quickly. Desperation crept in, and temptation was quick to follow. It is a formula that often leads to crime. In November 1988, Lee was causing problems once again. Using the alias Susan Blahovec, she launched a six-day campaign of threatening phone calls against a Zephyrhills
supermarket following an altercation over lottery tickets.

Sometime during the Christmas of 1989 and New Year 1990 – the dates and details are sketchy at best – James Dalla Rosa picked up Lee who showed him a photo of two children and said that she was a high-class call girl who lived in a $125,000 home. She pulled from her bag a plastic case with various business cards – formerly the property of Lewis Gratz Fell. ‘These are some of my customers,’ she told James, who felt very uncomfortable with the situation and didn’t feel that everything was as advertised. Lee quoted $100 for sex in a motel, $75 for sex in the woods and $30 for oral in the car – rates that she was to keep until she was arrested. Sensing that the man had money, she said, ‘I prefer to go into the woods,’ Dalla Rosa later testified.

When he spurned her offer, she became agitated, ‘moving jerkily, bouncing in her seat, snatching at her purse’, as the driver described her behaviour. ‘She became angry after I was not receptive to her offer. Her demeanour changed tremendously.’

He dropped her off near an interstate where she slammed the door and stormed off.

I will cut straight to the chase here. As Lee would suggest, ‘Cut the fucking crap.’ The police knew it, many potential witnesses knew it and the prosecutor knew it. The judge refused to admit it at trial, and the jury lived in sublime ignorance of the fact that Richard Charles Mallory was a sexual deviant.

‘He didn’t attempt to rape you,’ roared the judge. ‘You brutally shot Mr Mallory for his money.’

Lee’s sentiments: ‘Fuck you. I hope you, your wife and fucking kids die of cancer.’

The jury at Lee’s trial had no way of knowing this, but there is no doubting that Richard Charles Mallory liked to put himself about. The 51-year-old owner of a Clearwater electronics-repair business used to close up shop abruptly and disappear for a few days at a time on binges of heavy drinking and perverted sex. It was his secret life.

With no male friends, he was an extremely secretive,
paranoid loner. It has been claimed that Mallory changed the locks to his apartment many times in the three years before his death. It is also said that he had been involved with an ambassador’s wife; he certainly appeared paranoid whenever this woman was mentioned. He thought he was being followed and wanted to have plastic surgery to get his nose altered, presumably so he wouldn’t be recognised. He was a strange fellow indeed, this Richard Mallory.

He employed staff only long enough to clear the backlog of work that accrued during his disappearances, and let his workers go once his repair orders were up to date. Perhaps this was a prudent, financially astute move for a man whose credit cards were no longer valid, a man who needed every dime for something far more appealing…

Unbeknown to the jury, the only constants in Mallory’s life – apart from his unexplained absences from work – were heavy alcohol consumption and an insatiable desire for sex. He used the services of hookers, visited strip joints and was seriously into hardcore pornography. He also used drugs. Apart from a recent girlfriend, no one – including the jury at Lee’s trial – was aware that he had served the better part of ten years in the Maryland State Mental Institution for an attempted rape.

Mallory was a private man, and an enigma to everybody. Living alone in a multi-family apartment complex called The Oaks, few people came to know him on account of his erratic lifestyle; at his television-and video-repair shop, Mallory Electronics in Palm Harbour, his absences were frequent and unexplained.

With a population of just under 60,000, one might have thought that Mallory’s business would have done a roaring trade in the Clearwater area. He knew his stuff, turned out quality repairs and didn’t charge his customers a fortune. However, he had squandered all of his firm’s profits on deviant sex. He was in serious financial straits. Bankruptcy loomed over Richard Mallory and his company. To kick off with, he owed serious money. The sums included $4,000 in rent arrears for the business, and a small packet on his apartment. The credit card companies had closed his accounts. Business transactions were now all in cash. He was due to be swept up, closed down and evicted by his landlords. His business affairs were due to be audited by the Inland Revenue Service. He had stalled the inspectors for too long, and pressure was mounting. The result was that Mallory had a good many problems on his mind.

Some would say he was a good-looking man with his full head of dark hair combed back from a high forehead. Standing at just less than six feet tall, the neatly moustachioed Mallory surveyed the world through hazel eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. He cut a trim figure, tipping the scales at just less than 170 pounds, and he thought of himself as 51 years young. Five times divorced and recently separated from an entirely decent girlfriend called Jackie Davis, Mallory had always been drawn to the opposite sex and seedy exchanges. He loved to party in the debauched sense, and was a regular visitor to the kinds of adult-entertainment establishments dedicated to catering to pleasures of the flesh.

Mallory liked the way women looked, the way they smelled and moved. He liked the way he felt when he was with them – powerful, controlling, sensuous. He liked power over women; he liked to abuse them, to tie them up, handcuff them, bite them and knock them around. To him, street women and those who flaunted their bodies were up for ill treatment.

When Richard Mallory didn’t show up to open his shop on Monday, 3 December 1989, his staff and clients didn’t think much of it. As far as friends went, there was no one close enough to him to notice he was gone. Frankly, no one even cared. It wasn’t until the cops turned up at his business saying they had found his abandoned Cadillac outside Daytona that anyone knew anything was amiss. No one ‘gave a rat’s ass’, as one officer dryly observed.

‘The best beach in Florida! A perfect destination for honeymooners and couples! Vacation values that won’t bust your budget!’ So scream the tourist brochures. But Daytona is no different to many cities: along the
star-spangled
sidewalks, lined with laundromats, strip joints and seedy hotels, Joe Public can get his ‘round the world’ (everything) for 80 bucks, or a straight ‘ho’s strip’ (where the hooker strips for oral only) for 20. Richard was a sufficiently regular customer at the topless bars in the Tampa, Clearwater and Daytona areas that the strippers, go-go dancers and hookers mostly knew him by sight, if not by name. When he latched on to them, he was like a rigged fruit machine – guaranteed to pay out nearly every time.

The weather had closed in on Thursday, 30 November 1989. Rolling in from the Gulf of Mexico, the storm front had been snapping its leaden skies at Florida’s east coast for several hours. To the west, the palms from Cape Coral all the way north to Cedar Key were whistling; the rain, at first a heavy spatter, now became a thundering torrent. Flash floods were probable and gale warnings had sent sensible folk scurrying home.

Out on Interstate 4, Richard Mallory was cursing his bad luck – as if he didn’t have enough problems without his light-beige, two-door Cadillac Coupé de Ville with tinted windows being wedged in traffic. It would have been a long haul at the best of times. He had had a good run out of Pinellas County across Old Tampa Bay on I-275 along the glistening Howard Frankland Bridge, but now he was stuck like a belligerent cork in a bottleneck. Making Orlando would take him ages now, and on top of that it would be another 60 minutes before he hit Daytona Beach where his fun could start.

Above him, a Med Air chopper was fighting its way through the rain to a railroad trestle where a hobo had jumped the metals and been hit by a train. He has lost both legs: it’s terminal. Looking down from the chopper, the observer takes in the interstate, pumping from the heart of Tampa like a knotted artery twisting and turning 30 miles east to Brandon and on to Orlando in the grey distance. Just outside the city limits, the traffic has congealed into a solid mass as hundreds of vehicles, their tail lights glowing red, slither to a standstill along the highway.

Down there, on the eastbound lane, the observer sees the red and blue flashing strobes of light bars. Highway Patrol officers have lit flares and are busy with the wreck of an overturned truck. That’s what’s causing the snarl-up. The chopper banks sharply and clatters away into the night.

Among this traffic congestion, Mallory lights a reefer, takes another slug of Smirnoff vodka and taps his fingers impatiently on the wheel, cursing again and again…

The traffic edged forward at a snail’s pace, and his patience was now threadbare. He had closed up shop early, rushed home to change into jeans and a pullover, thrown a few things into a bag, then headed east for Daytona and a long weekend of drinking and pleasure. Mallory had chosen not to drive either of his white or maroon company vans: if he wanted a quick lay, the Cadillac, with its plush brown interior and tinted windows, was far better suited to the pursuit of pleasure.

Mallory’s mind was full of urgency now. Earlier in the week he had confided in a customer, somewhat boastfully, that he hated being around Clearwater with the people gossiping behind his back. The truth is that his criminal record meant it was a place where he had to keep his nose clean. He was always pushing his luck, but on his home patch he had to treat the hookers and bargirls right. They were all whores but, although Mallory had kept out of serious trouble for years, if he slipped up he would be back behind bars before he could blink. Out of town, away from Tampa, he could do more or less as he wished. He could
use and abuse women. He could, if the mood took him, treat them like shit.

Suddenly the long tail of red brake lights in front of him switched off. His time for brooding was over. He took another draw on his reefer and, with his windscreen wipers slapping back and forth, he pushed the car into gear and was on the move.

Now the rain was coming down in sheets. There was a slight wind, and the rush of heavy traffic was whipping the water up into a spray. He had driven a short distance when suddenly a figure thumbing for a lift appeared in his headlights. Mallory slowed down and took a sly look. It was a woman, aged around 30, of medium build and carelessly dressed in cut-off jeans, T-shirt and baseball cap. His pulse raced and he sucked in his breath. He felt the need of company – if it was a woman, so much the better. After stopping the car, he hooked his right arm over the back of the passenger seat, looked through the rear window and reversed to where she stood.

Fate keeps a close hand. There is a point along the road to a murder where things are set in motion: one life ends, the other is irrevocably changed. In this instance, a few minutes either way and the paths of victim and killer would not have crossed. Had Mary Christiansen missed the skidding truck, even by a millisecond, she would now be at home, fit and well. The road accident that caused the traffic jam that night would not have happened, and Mallory would have been long gone on his way to Florida’s east coast. The domino effect, however, had started: the first one had tipped
over near Tampa; the last one would fall along a dark, remote track in Volusia County near Daytona Beach.

If only he had not noticed Lee. Any one of a hundred or so drivers could have stopped for this lonely woman; indeed, many had already given her a ride that day and lived to tell the tale. After her arrest, for those men it would be a memory they would never forget. In their nightmares they would recall the hitchhiker chatting in their cars. Maybe they had sensed all was not good with her. Her manic little laugh; her hints at sex. But they had lived; Richard Mallory, on the other hand, had a rendezvous with death.