State: Victim's kin plan to pass on Wuornos execution

If the poison runs through Aileen Wuornos' body this morning, if she draws her last breath on a prison gurney, the family of Charles "Chuck" Carskaddon won't be there to watch.

The Wuornos case already has spawned two movies, an opera and several books, and Carskaddon's family doesn't want to provide an audience for the final act.

Wuornos, 46, is set to die by lethal injection at 9:30 a.m. for murdering six men along Florida highways in 1989 and 1990. One of them was Carskaddon, whose body was found in Pasco County. She has admitted killing a seventh.

She would be the third woman executed in Florida history.

While death penalty opponents have fought to block her execution, Wuornos has given up. She wrote the Florida Supreme Court last year to say she "would prefer to cut with the chase then and get on with an execution. . . . Taxpayers' money has been squandered, and the families have suffered enough."

A wandering lesbian prostitute, Wuornos last year confessed and recanted earlier claims that the killings were acts of self defense.

Wuornos was arrested in a Volusia County bar called the Last Resort in 1991 after a statewide hunt that had sketches of her face in newspapers and on television almost daily.

On Monday, an activist group filed a motion to stay Wuornos' execution Monday, claiming she was too mentally ill to waive her appeals and be executed. Psychiatrists last week found Wuornos competent, and the appeal was dismissed Tuesday. The state's Capital Collateral attorneys filed a second motion Tuesday, but it, too, was dismissed late Tuesday afternoon.

Carskaddon's mother, Florence, 81, said he was special to her and his family, something Wuornos apparently never considered.

Carskaddon was 40 in June 1990 when he picked up Wuornos in his brown 1975 Cadillac Seville. He had been a trucker until his eyesight began to fail. He took up riding bulls in rodeos.

His body was found clad in a turquoise bathrobe, in woods near a pond a mile west of Interstate 75, just south of State Road 52 in Pasco County. He had been shot nine times.

Wuornos' execution would bring a sense of finality to his family, Mrs. Carskaddon said. But it won't bring him back. It won't comfort his sisters. It won't do anything but end another life, she said. Mrs. Carskaddon thinks killers deserve death. But no execution could make up for the loss.

"I miss my son more every day. He used to call me at night when he was trucking. He'd say "What you got for me cooking? I'm coming through,' " she said. "When phone calls come at night, I sometimes jump. I think it's him."

The state flew Mrs. Carskaddon twice to Florida from her rural home in Prairie Home, Mo., for Wuornos' trial and sentencing. But she said she can't see returning today.

"They offered for me to come down there again," she said. "But Florida has put out enough money on this case. I wouldn't ask them to pay my way down there again. I don't believe she deserves an audience."

Carskaddon's family recalls him as the kind of man who would stop along the road to help someone in trouble. She said he probably saw a woman alone and offered her help.

Wuornos was convicted in Volusia County of the December 1989 shooting death of her first victim, Richard Mallory of Clearwater. She pleaded no contest to five 1990 murders in Marion, Dixie, Pasco and Citrus counties and received six death sentences.

After Mallory's murder, Wuornos laid low for several months until mid 1990, when she murdered and robbed her second victim, David Spears, 43, a Winter Garden construction worker. Over the next few months, she killed four more men. Carskaddon was her third victim, killed five days after Spears.

Wuornos had one visitor scheduled to meet with her from 9 p.m. to midnight Tuesday, family friend Dawn Botkins, said Department of Corrections spokeswoman Debbie Buchanan.

She received no recent visits from her controversial attorney Steven Glazer or a Florida woman, Arlene Pralle, who adopted her when Wuornos was in jail.

Glazer said he would be in court Wednesday, not in Starke. "Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da, life goes on," Glazer said. "You can quote me."

The last woman executed in Florida was Judias "Judy" Buenoano, executed in the electric chair March 30, 1998, for the poisoning death of her husband, Air Force Sgt. James Goodyear. The first known execution of a woman in the state was in 1848, when a slave named Celia was hanged in Jacksonville for the killing of Jacob Bryan, an elderly planter.

An opera, titled Wuornos, premiered in San Francisco last year. A news release called it "a tragic love story of operatic proportions . . . based on the surreal life of a real person, Aileen Wuornos, who is at once villain and hero."

-- Information from Times files and the Associated Press was used in this report.

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Lucy Morgan

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