Lee knew that word travelled faster over backyard fences than by phone in hick Troy, so, to rub the citizens’ noses further in the seed, she highlighted the portion describing Fell as the president of nothing less than a yacht club, with nothing less than a private income derived from nothing less than railroad stocks and shares.
While perky Lee had hit pay dirt, geriatric Lewis had wandered into a very serious problem. His idyllic dream of settling down each night with a young piece of skirt to satisfy his sexual desires was about to become his worst nightmare, one that Stephen King would have been hard-pushed to better.
On Tuesday, 13 July, Lee, against her husband’s express wish, decided to go out on the town, while Lewis stayed at home to watch TV. After visiting a few bars she ended up at Bernie’s Club in Mancelona where she flaunted her body and started to hustle at the pool table. With a figure many women would die for, clad in an off-the-shoulder top, a micro-miniskirt and thigh-high boots, Lee was as hot as a kitchen stove.
Nevertheless, despite her physical attributes which had the locals drooling at the mouth, sometime after midnight the barman and manager Danny Moore decided he had seen enough of her. Lee was drunk, rowdy, shouting obscenities, uttering threats to other patrons and generally being objectionable. Danny casually walked over to the game and announced that the table was closing down. As he was gathering up the balls, he heard someone shout, ‘Duck!’ He turned just in time to see Lee aim a cue ball at his head. It missed him only by inches, but the missile had been hurled with such force that it became lodged in the wall.
When a smiling Deputy Jimmie Patrick of the Antrim County Sheriff’s Department arrived, Lee was arrested for assault and battery and hauled off to jail. She was also charged on fugitive warrants from the Troy Police Department who had requested that she be picked up on charges of drinking alcohol in a car, unlawful use of a driver’s licence and not having a Michigan driver’s licence. She was bailed when a friend turned up with her purse containing $1,450 – her husband’s money.
Three days later her brother Keith, aged 21, died of throat cancer. It had been in his body for ages and had finally eaten him up. Keith was cremated at the same funeral home as Britta and Lauri Wuornos. Lee arrived late for the service, but in time to place a rose in his hands.
Having rejected her son in life, but acknowledging him in death, Diane flew in from Texas for Keith’s funeral. Other mourners were surprised to see her apparently too distraught to sit through the service for the son she had abandoned.
The reader does not need to be a clairvoyant to predict that things did not bode well between Lee and Lewis, and that the marriage would be short-lived. Lee had been torn between her desire to get drunk and hang out in bars, and the less desirable option: long periods of abject boredom, sitting around at her aged husband’s feet in his plush, beachside condominium, their eyes glued to TV programmes about trains, boats and the stock market. With problems looming from every direction, Lewis tried the well-tested and universally approved ‘I am older than you, please respect your elders’ trick. Trained most comprehensively in this area by her late adoptive father, whose family communication skills were considerably less than poor, Lee responded by awarding her new husband a black eye.
Shaken, and very likely stirred, by this outburst from his sweet young wife, Lewis tried another idea. After all, it had worked with his late wife, and the other two before that, so why shouldn’t it work with his new one? He would cut Lee’s allowance, and, if that failed, he would not give her any money at all. After considering the plan overnight, breakfast came. Dressed in his gown, his feet warm in his furry slippers, he got as far as saying, ‘I will stop your allow–’ when she beat him up with his walking cane and pointed a meat skewer uncomfortably close to his throat.
Lewis Fell now saw the light. At the first opportunity he obtained a restraining order to prevent another battering, and sought an annulment of the marriage claiming she had squandered his money and given him several damned good thrashings into the bargain.
The divorce decree stated:
Respondent has a violent and ungovernable temper and has threatened to do bodily harm to the Petitioner and from her past actions will injure Petitioner and his property… unless the court enjoins and restrains said Respondent from assaulting… or interfering with Petitioner or his property.
Lee pawned the expensive diamond engagement ring he had given her. Lewis Fell, his bank account seriously depleted, vanished into obscurity a wiser man. Their marriage officially ended on Tuesday, 19 July 1977 with a divorce issued at the Volusia County courthouse in Florida.
On Thursday, 4 August 1976, Lee pleaded guilty to the assault-and-battery charge, paying a fine and costs of $105. Then came an unexpected windfall. Keith’s army life insurance paid up and, as next of kin, Lee received $10,000. The money was immediately put down as a deposit on a shiny black Pontiac (which was soon repossessed). She also bought a mixed bag of antiques and a massive stereo system, although she had no home in which to put them. Lee blew all the money within three months.
Adrift in the world once again, Lee embarked on a series of relationships which, as may have been expected, failed. From time to time she turned tricks, but, even as a prostitute working the interstate highway, she was not exactly sought after.
For a while in 1981, she lived in a mobile home with a retired businessman who was separated from his wife. ‘Lee was quick-tempered,’ he said, but he found her ‘warm, loving and resourceful’. She did all that she could to please him, and he recalled that, when the vacuum cleaner broke down, she replaced it with a new one the very same night – albeit stolen it from a nearby hotel.
Lee was deeply in love with him, but one night they quarrelled and Lee awoke in the morning still angry, feeling that this man might be just like all the others who had taken advantage of her over the years. On Wednesday, 20 May, she took the car, bought a six-pack of beer, then stopped at a pawn shop to buy a pistol and some bullets. She drove for hours, despondent and contemplating suicide, but, instead of turning the gun on herself, she held up the Majik Market in Edgewater, Florida, while dressed in shorts and a bikini top.
‘I was fed up with living,’ she said. ‘I had no car, no money, no family. I had nothing. Struggling seemed senseless. I even tried to join the service – the army, navy, air force – but you needed 42 points to pass, and I always missed by exactly five points. So I was going to kill myself.
‘I drank a case of beer and a quarter pint of whiskey. I also took four reds. Librium. I got my boyfriend’s car and went to this store. I grabbed a six-pack of beer and two Slim Jims. I had $118 on me.
‘I walked up to the counter and put my purse on it. The handle of my gun was sticking out, and the woman started screaming like hell about how I was going to rob the store. She freaked out, and I said, “What the hell, you want a robbery, then I’ll rob your store. Give me your money.”’
The clerk handed her $33 from the cash register.
‘I walked out of the store real slowly, because I was so drunk and I couldn’t find my keys. I sat in the car for three minutes looking for them. Then I drove away and started hauling ass down the highway. Then the radiator blew and I had to stop, and these kids helped me push it to a gas station. I was wearing one of those country hats, and I took that off, and the shorts, so I was just in my bikini. I was trying to alter my description and that’s when the fucking cops arrived.’