Manning recently told his story for the first time to The Palm Beach Post.

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1 THE PALM BEACH POST BRUSH WITH SUSPECTED SERIAL KILLER Date: Sunday, December 29, 1991 By SIOBHAN MORRISSEY Palm Beach Post Staff Writer DAYTONA BEACH Beyond the strip of pawn shops, cheap motels and fast-food joints along U.S. 1, beyond the Step `N Fetch It Grocery and Manny's alligator farm and souvenir shop, lies the tiny town of Mims. That's home for Wayne Manning, an unemployed carpenter. Manning, 26, is the one that got away. Five years ago he gave a ride to Aileen Wuornos. She pulled a gun on him, and he lived to tell about it. Seven other men, investigators say, did not escape. Wuornos is accused of murdering the seven men during a killing spree in north-central Florida two years ago. For this, Wuornos has attracted widespread attention as the first woman in the annals of U.S. crime believed to have committed classic serial killings. She is scheduled for trial Jan. 13 in Daytona Beach in connection with the shooting death of Richard Mallory, the owner of an electronics shop in Clearwater and the first known victim. The 35-year-old self-described highway hooker faces five first-degree murder charges in Citrus, Marion, Pasco and Volusia counties. If convicted of even one, Wuornos could face the electric chair. Investigators say Wuornos also is a suspect in the killing of a reserve deputy with the Brevard County Sheriff's Office and a missionary from Jupiter, whose body remains missing. In a taped confession to sheriff's deputies Bruce Munster of Marion County and Larry Horzepa of Volusia County, Wuornos admitted roaming the highways and killing middle-aged men during 13 months beginning in late Despite the confession, Wuornos pleaded not guilty. She told police she acted in self-defense to prevent the men from raping or killing her. Manning's story is the only known statement, from a victim's perspective, describing how Wuornos is believed to have operated. It buttresses police allegations that robbery was part of her motive. Manning recently told his story for the first time to The Palm Beach Post. On June 2, 1986, Wuornos was hitching a ride at an Interstate 95 on-ramp just outside Melbourne. She called herself Lori Grody that day -- her aunt's name and one of seven aliases police say she used.

2 Manning pulled over in the brown pickup that he was later convicted of stealing from his grandfather earlier that day. "I'm thinking, `Well, I'll pick her up to keep some maniac from picking her up,' " Manning said. "Little did I know." His passenger was a well-groomed blonde with a duffle bag, headed for Jacksonville. At 5- foot-4 and 115 pounds, she looked harmless -- nothing like the pictures he saw after her arrest in January. "I don't know what in the hell happened to her in the last five years," said Manning, who didn't make the connection until reporters started calling him after police released her aliases. "I didn't even know it was the same woman." Wuornos and Manning stopped at a beachfront bar in Daytona Beach to shoot some pool and drink beer. She mentioned getting a motel room in town, but Manning says he laughed it off. In the bar, Manning saw Wuornos pull out "a big old knot of money $600 or $800" from her back pocket. After they headed north again, Wuornos said her money was missing and implied Manning took it. They got as far as Bulow Creek State Park in Ormond Beach. There, on a remote road, Manning says he pulled over, got out and told Wuornos to search the truck for her missing money. "When I walked back up to get in the truck, she had a gun pulled and told me, `You're being robbed,' " Manning said. Manning ran to the road, where he flagged down a motorist. The driver sped away to get help. Then Wuornos shouted for Manning to come back, that she was just kidding. He persuaded her to hand him the gun. Volusia County Sheriff's deputy Richard Sykes arrived and arrested both of them-- Manning for driving a stolen vehicle and Wuornos for carrying a concealed firearm. Her weapon was a.22- caliber revolver she admitted stealing from a man in Texarkana, on the Texas-Arkansas border. Police confiscated the gun. Years later, when the middle-aged men started turning up dead along Florida highways, many of their bodies were riddled with.22-caliber bullets. After that meeting, Manning continued to pick up hitchhikers, and Wuornos continued to hitch and hook on the highways. THE EARLY YEARS Long before Wuornos became a highway hooker, she was a child of the streets. From the day she was born, the cards appeared stacked against Aileen Carol Wuornos. On Feb.

3 29, 1956, her mother gave birth in a Detroit hospital. Six months later, Aileen and her 15- month-old brother, Keith, were abandoned. Their maternal grandparents found them covered with flies in the attic of a house somewhere in Michigan, so the story goes. The grandparents brought them home to live with their other two children, Barry and Lori. Wuornos' father was in prison, convicted of sodomizing a child. He later hanged himself. Now, as an adult, Wuornos has a new family. Arlene Pralle, a horse breeder from outside Ocala, along with her husband, Robert, adopted Wuornos on Nov. 6. After seeing Wuornos' picture in a newspaper, the devoutly religious Pralle said she felt compelled to help this woman she had never met. In a whispery voice, Pralle told of the childhood Wuornos described to her during numerous telephone calls and jail visits. "She was abused by her grandfather-- not sexually, to her recollection," Pralle said. ' ' He would beat her with a belt.... Sometimes it was just because he came home drunk and was in a bad mood." When she was 9, Wuornos told Pralle, she was burned on her face, neck and arms in a disfiguring accident. That's when she says her Aunt Lori-- whom she idolized as an older sister- - abandoned her, siding with other children at school to ridicule her. From that point on, Wuornos' isolation and quiet desperation only worsened. Wuornos told Pralle she was raped at age 13 while she was hitchhiking to a friend's house. "She was a virgin," Pralle said. "A guy that looked a lot like Elvis Presley picked her up, and that was it." Afraid of her grandfather, she said nothing about the rape for six months, until her swollen belly revealed her secret. She went to a home for unwed mothers, gave birth and put her son up for adoption at her grandfather's insistence. Wuornos briefly returned to her grandparents' home, only to leave within the year. By this time, she began selling her body for money, Pralle said. The next couple of years were spent at a reform school in Michigan. Just shy of her 16th birthday, she ran away and hit the road. "That was when her hitchhiking career started," Pralle said. ON THE ROAD Wuornos' travels took her across the continent - to California and Colorado, to New York and even Canada. She came to Florida for the warm weather. The earliest record of her stay dates back to 1976, when she received a traffic ticket under the

4 name of Ailen Gratz Fell in Daytona Beach. It was in Daytona Beach in 1986 that Wuornos met the love of her life the green-eyed, redheaded Tyria Moore in a gay bar called the Zodiac. Two towns to the south is the hamlet of Harbour Oaks, where Wuornos and Moore rented a room. Vera Ivkovich, who owns a Yugoslavian restaurant called the Belgrade, remembers them well. The women stayed in a $50-a-week room behind her restaurant for a few weeks in 1990 before they were evicted around Thanksgiving. In December, television broadcast police sketches of two women suspected in the highway killings. Ivkovich said they resembled her former boarders but didn't call police because she thought they had left the area. Besides, Ivkovich said last week, she had known Wuornos since 1981, when she was "so nice and polite... like a perfect girl." That was the year Wuornos robbed a convenience store in Edgewater at gunpoint. Wuornos had spent 14 months in jail on the robbery conviction. After her release in 1983, she racked up a record that spanned from Daytona Beach to Key Largo with charges that ranged from forgery and minor traffic violations to stealing a Chevy Blazer and carrying a concealed firearm. By the time she returned to the Belgrade in 1990, Wuornos had changed markedly in appearance and demeanor, but Ivkovich still welcomed her friend. In the room Wuornos and Moore shared, a crucifix hangs over the queen-size bed. A picture of The Last Supper in 3-D hangs on the opposite wall. They would eat alone, preferring to take their food to their room whenever someone entered the restaurant, Ivkovich noted. They also pulled baseball caps over their eyes whenever they left the boarding room. Ivkovich eventually evicted the women just before Thanksgiving 1990 because they weren't paying their rent. For Wuornos, it was a short walk from the room with The Last Supper to The Last Resort, a biker bar where she began to hang out. Wedged between a pawn shop and a used car lot, The Last Resort pays tribute to bikers with an old oak tree laden with the remains of nine broken- down motorcycles. Inside, T-shirts from such places as Derek's Motor Cycles in Madison, Wis., and Joe's Cycle Center in Oklahoma are stapled to the ceiling next to bras patrons removed during wild nights.

5 On the front porch is an old car seat where a drunken Wuornos slept Jan. 7, just two days before her arrest. Someone painted a tableau in honor of the bar's most notorious patron. Its legend reads: "Here lied Aileen `Lee' Wuornos. Her last night of freedom at the `Last Resort Bar.' " Cannonball, the 6-foot-6 bartender with a big belly and a black braid down his back, stuck the painting out back by another bar conversation piece a rusted-out casket with maple-leaf trim. Cannonball is almost protective of Wuornos, not wanting her hardships to be exploited. "If she would have been a man, all this garbage wouldn't be said about her," said Cannonball, who wouldn't give his real name. Wuornos came into the bar about four times, beginning after Thanksgiving 1990, Cannonball remembers. She drank Budweiser and became loud and obnoxious. At least one bar regular had suspicions about Wuornos: Cannonball's girlfriend thought she matched one of the police sketches that had been circulating. But Cannonball disagreed. "If you ever seen them two pictures, they don't look like nobody," he said. "They call her `Lee,' but they're just `Ug' and `Lee.' They were ugly." About the time of her first visit to the bar, Wuornos' life began unraveling. Her lover left for Ohio, claiming she feared for her life. Wuornos began drinking heavily. And another man ended up dead in a wooded area. By this time, the police were circling. Nearly 800 tips led them to the Daytona Beach area, and several mentioned Wuornos by one of her aliases. A woman who ran the Fairview Motel next door to the Belgrade identified Wuornos to investigators, and deputy Munster noted Ivkovich told him she had seen Wuornos clean a small handgun. Undercover police began watching Wuornos. The night of Jan. 9, they picked her up at The Last Resort on an outstanding warrant for forgery. On Jan. 15, Moore signed an affidavit stating Wuornos had told her she had killed Mallory. Moore, who has not been charged in the killings, is expected to be a witness for the prosecution. The following day, after receiving a telephone call from an agitated Moore, Wuornos confessed to that crime and others. "If it was in Western days," she said, "they'd put me in a noose and watch.... Let the town watch me die."