Women Serial Killers of the 20th Century (23 page)

Aileen with her lawyer Raag Singhal

The Fort Lauderdale lawyer, Raag Singhal, appointed to represent Aileen in her abuse complaint told the court, "What she is saying is, `I'm a volunteer. I want to be executed. If you can't execute me today than ensure that I am treated fairly until I am put to death.'"

Raag Singhal said he was worried Aileen was volunteering for death just to escape the mistreatment.

Outside the court Raag Singhal, when asked by reporters if he thought Aileen was competent, suggested that Aileen’s competency might arise again if the judge rejected her claims of prison abuse.

"If the allegations don't have any truth to them, Aileen's clearly delusional," he said. "She believes what she's written."

He later wrote a letter to the Florida Supreme Court expressing "grave doubts" about Aileen’s mental condition. A member of a Florida Support Group, Dianne Abshire, which gives emotional support to death row inmates in Florida, said Aileen was clearly insane.

The then Governor of Florida
, Jeb Bush, issued a stay of execution and ordered another psychiatric evaluation of Aileen. He then lifted it after three psychiatrists concluded after interviewing Aileen for fifteen minutes that she was mentally competent enough to be executed.

In the final count down to Aileen’s execution, the biker bar the Last Resort, where Aileen spent her last night of freedom
, had tourists, news crews, and filmmakers visit from around the world. The bar sold black T-shirts with a photo of Aileen and the words, "On a Killing Day." The bar had also adopted a new logo, “Cold Beer and Killer Women."

Aileen, just days before her execution, gave her final media interview to British producer Nick Broomfield, to whom she appeared fond. In the interview, she claimed that her mind was being tortured, and her head crushed by "sonic pressure weapons", as well as other abuses that she said would progressively get worse each time she complained. She also said, “You sabotaged my ass! Society, and the cops, and the system! A raped woman got executed and was used for books and movies and shit!" Her final words in the on-camera interview were "Thanks a lot, society, for railroading my ass."

When Aileen thought the cameras were switched off, she told Nick Broomfield that the murders were, in fact, self-defense, but she could no longer tolerate being on death row.

Later outside the prison, Nick Broomfield said, "My conclusion from the interview is we are executing someone who is mad. Here is someone who has totally lost her mind. She trusts nobody and is stark raving mad. She is multiple people. Every time I met her, she was a different person."

Aileen a couple of day’s before her execution.

It is possible to watch the interview on YouTube and after watching it, virtually impossible to conclude that Aileen was sane. After viewing it, I wondered what one would have to do or say to be found insane!

Dawn Botkins was the last person to visit Aileen before her execution. On leaving her, as the guard opened the door, she said she could not look back as she heard Aileen call to her, “I love you Dawn. See you on the other side.”

Dawn Botkins

Stephen Glazer, who virtually propelled Aileen to her execution when asked by reporters if he was attending the execution, said he had to be in court that day. He then sung, “Oh-ba-di, Oh-ba-da, Oh-ba-ba-di, life goes on,” and chortled with laughter. Then, as an afterthought, told the journalists they could quote him.

Arlene Pralle, her adopted mother, didn’t even know her daughter
’s execution date.

For her execution, Aileen asked to be dressed in a black Harley Davidson T-shirt with wings on it
, as she believed she had earned her wings, a pair of jeans, boots, and a military belt.

On the day of the execution, she refused the BBQ dinner offered to her along with any religious counsel.

Death Row Chamber

Aileen was allowed to choose lethal injection over the electric chair and was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison near Starke, Florida on October 9
th
, 2002. Thirty-two witnesses watched as an executioner injected deadly chemicals into her body. Her last words to the world were; "Yes, 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."

Aftermath

Following her execution, Aileen’s body was cremated. Her ashes were taken by Dawn Botkins, her old school friend and closest friend in her final years and who had spent some of Aileen’s last hours with her on death row, to her native Michigan and spread her ashes beneath a Walnut tree that Dawn had planted in memory of Aileen. Thank God, for the likes of Dawn, who out of sheer humanity, reached out to Aileen in her years of isolation on Death Row.

Aileen’s life was made into a film
Monster
(2003) which starred Charlize Thereon and Christina Ricci. The film grossed over $30 million in its first year.

In researching Aileen’s life, I found it impossible not to feel sorry for her. She had been let down by her mother, her grandparents, social services, and virtually everyone she had ever come into contact with. I do not believe she was given a fair trial and that the legal system and society in general completely let her down. I believe that it is highly likely that Aileen, certainly in Richard Mallory’s case, killed in self-defense and that the United States government unjustly murdered an ill, vulnerable, innocent woman.

Aileen was clearly a highly unbalanced character, yet even when she was imprisoned, people continued to abuse her by trying to profit from her disturbed life. To my mind, Aileen’s case demonstrates serious flaws in the criminal justice system, the inhumanity of the death penalty, and the lack of protection for vulnerable members of society.

May Aileen, and the men she shot rest in peace
.

DANA SUE GRAY

WHEN GREED TURNS TO MURDER

Dana Sue Gray is an anomaly in the women serial killers I have
previously written about
.

Female serial killers normally kill their partners, children
, or people at a physical distance with poison or guns. Poison, history has shown, has been the favorite choice of the majority of most women serial killers.

Dana is a rarity in her choice of victim and her hands
-on method of using her hands, a cord or rope, and an object in which to bludgeon her victim. She would also use more force than was required to kill them. Some people have speculated that Dana liked the excitement and thrill of the physical struggle, much as she loved other thrill sports such as sky-diving and wind-surfing. The spending sprees that she indulged in after her murder jaunts, they have said, were her way of celebrating a successful killing.

Two of Dana’s victims were women who she had a remote family history with and the other two were complete strangers.

Dana Sue Armbrust was born on December 6th, 1957 in California to Russell and Beverly Armbrust. Russell was a hairstylist and Beverly, his fourth wife, a former beauty queen. Beverly was a vain, angry woman and a shopaholic who would often over-spend on her husband’s credit cards. Russell and Beverly divorced when Dana was two-years-old. He’d had enough when he caught his wife having a physical fight with an older woman who’d annoyed her. Dana saw remarkably little of him after that until she was fourteen-years-old.

Dana was not a happy child. At school, she had few friends and would show on occasions an aggressive streak. Her schoolwork was poor, and she was repeatedly suspended for truancy.

Dana was fourteen when her mother, after a long illness, died of breast cancer. She then went to live in affluent Newport with her father, stepmother Geri, Geri's ex-mother-in-law, Norma Davis, and her half-brother’s. She attended Newport Harbor High School.

Geri, before she married Russell Armbrust in 1988, had been married to Bill Davis, Norma’s son who had died. However, Geri had continued to care for her elderly mother-in-law. Dana
, living with her father, enjoyed a far more affluent lifestyle than she had with her mother. She also developed an interest in athletics. In 1976, she graduated from high school and started nursing school. Ever since she had seen the way the nurses had cared for her mother during her illness, she’d had a desire to become a nurse.

Dana, at the age of eighteen
, was small, just five-foot-two, with long blonde hair, fit, beautiful, and always immaculately groomed. She took up sky diving, which she became accomplished at and began living with her coach Rob, when her step-mother Geri kicked her out after Norma Davis found marijuana in her bedroom. She graduated in 1981 from nursing school and got a job working as a delivery and labor nurse at the Inland Valley Regional Medical Center. By this time, she had split up with Rob and was seeing Chris Dodson, one of her wind-surfing friends. Both Dana and Chris were intense wind-surfers and golfers and would frequently fly to Hawaii where they would take part in tournaments. They dated on and off for several years until Dana took up with a former high school friend and fellow sports devotee Bill Gray, who’d had a crush on Dana since high school. He was a budding business man and musician that owned a variety of businesses under the name of “Graymatter”. Dana and Bill married at a fashionable, up-market winery in Temecula, California in October of 1987, followed by a three-week honeymoon in Hawaii.

Bill and Dana bought a house in Canyon Lake, a gated community that had 12-foot
-high walls and 24-hour security on its three entrances. Her father also now lived here as did Norma Davis, who now had her own home in a condominium within the gated community. All the homeowners had a choice between the lake front and the golf course.

Canyon Lake is built around a meandering 18-hole golf course complete with a Country Club Restaurant, bar
, and an artificial lake carved from the desert of Riverside County, complete with fjords. All of the homeowners within Canyon Lake had rights and access to the lake for recreational use. There were swimming areas, fishing holes, and beaches. The community also had lighted tennis courts, riding stables, and many other amenities. Luxury cars sat outside the homes while most residents made their way around the community in their golf carts. It was a place for the wealthy to feel safe, pampered, and protected in the desert temperatures of Riverside County just seventy-five miles from the LA metropolis.

Dana had inherited from her mother her shopaholic traits and enjoyment of lavish spending sprees
and indulgence in drinking. Soon, Bill and Dana began to argue about money and Dana’s spending. Friends later said that her passion for money was "nuts ... not even normally greedy. Crazy”.

Bill would pull his hair out in exasperation as he pleaded with his wife, to cut back on her spending.
However, as another friend later said of her "You could not tell her what to do.... Dana is extremely hyperactive and opinionated”.

When Dana inherited an unexpected legacy of $7,500 from an aunt instead of helping with the mounting debts
, she took off on a trip to Europe, leaving Bill behind.

Bill’s father helped the couple out with multiple loans. However, with ever-increasing credit card debts, the couple was forced to take out a second mortgage on the house in Canyon Lake. The quarrels over money between Bill and Dana increased in intensity. Dana began drinking and suffered a miscarriage, her fourth. In early 1993, Dana began an affair with a friend of theirs,
Jim Wilkins. She moved out of the Canyon Lake house and moved into Jim’s house on Mission Trail in the area of Wildomar where he lived with Jason, his young son. Dana then filed for a divorce from Bill in June of 1993. In September of 1993, Dana and Bill decided to file for bankruptcy in an attempt to put off foreclosure on their home in Canyon Lake. Meanwhile, unknown to Bill, Dana had taken out a life-insurance policy on him. If Bill died, the amount of the insurance payoff would more than adequately pay off all of the debts.

Dana
was fired from the Medical Center on November 24th, 1993 as she was unable to explain missing doses of opiate painkillers and Demerol. Dana consulted a doctor for depression who prescribed her anti-depressants. Dana’s life had begun to spin into a free fall.

In February
of 1994, shock and fear ran through the residents of the Canyon Lake community. Elderly eighty-seven-year-old Norma Davis was discovered by her neighbor Alice Williams brutally murdered in her condominium. A fillet knife was stuck in her chest, and a wooden handled utility knife protruded out of her neck.

Norma had been repeatedly stabbed, as if in anger. She had also been strangled with a phone cord with such massive force
that she was almost beheaded. A valuable ring was still on her finger.

Detective Joseph Greco was put in charge of the murder investigation of Norma Davis. It was only his second murder investigation.

The detectives investigating the murder found no signs of forced entry into the condominium and were told by neighbors that Norma always kept her door locked. It appeared to the detectives that the murderer knew how to get into the security tight community and into the condominium. This made detectives suspect that it was someone Norma had allowed into her home. No valuable items of any kind were found to be missing.
Norma's relatives and friends were questioned at length. No one could think of any enemies Norma might have had. The police had no leads.

To the community residents it reminded them of the 1969 Manson murders
: a seemingly random, though bloody, attack.

On February 28th, just two weeks later, sixty-six-year-old June Roberts was found murdered in her Canyon Lake property. It was her birthday. June was found lying on her back on the floor of the den. A heavy, crystal glass, wine decanter had been used to beat her and a telephone wire was used to strangle her. A large diamond ring remained on her finger. As in the
case of Norma, there was no evidence of a break-in, neither woman had shown signs of a struggle, neither (as far as could be ascertained) had been significantly robbed, and both women lived alone. Both murders appeared to be motiveless. Detective Joseph Greco suspected that the Roberts’ and Davis’ cases were connected.

The Canyon Lake community was terrified,
especially the older women who lived alone. One of the most disturbing thoughts for women living on their own is the idea that someone might break into their homes and rob, hurt, or even kill them.

Russell and Geri Armbrust were also shocked and terrified. They had known both the victims well. Russell, like many of the other residents of the community, kept a loaded gun by him 24 hours a day. Many of the older residents moved in with each other or with relatives. The nearby locksmiths’ trade increased ten-fold.

The Canyon Lake City Council, in an emergency meeting, increased security and an additional police patrol car was added to the area.

The police asked for help
or information about anyone seen in the area. They did checks on gardeners, housekeepers, and service personnel working and having access to the community. The police were no nearer to finding a clue until June Roberts’s bank called her family to notify them of massive spending on her credit cards in the Temecula, California area.

The police detectives then began visiting all the establishments where the cards had been used
. These ranged from beauty parlors, spas, restaurants, and expensive clothes shops and jewelers. They quickly established that they were seeking a petite blond woman who had recently dyed her hair red and often had with her a five-year-old boy named Jason.

On the 10th
of March in 1994, Dorinda Hawkins at the age of fifty seven, was at work in a shop named The Main Street Trading Post in Lake Elsinore. It was a picture framing and antiques shop.

The Main Street Trading Post

In the afternoon, a small blonde woman about thirty-five-years-old entered the shop and began to browse around. As Dorinda stacked some frames away at the back end of the shop, she suddenly felt something around her throat and realized she was being strangled. She struggled and managed to turn around to see the blond woman with eyes of “penetrating, cold-blooded steel” tightening the yellow nylon rope around her neck. Dorinda continued struggling and kicking her attacker until she finally lost consciousness. When Dorinda came around, she called the police and was taken to the hospital for head and neck injuries. She realized that she was extremely lucky, as the attacker had obviously thought she was dead. About $25 was missing from the cash register as well as Dorinda's purse and credit cards.