Born in 1956 in a quiet Michigan town, her life began with chaos. When she was just four years old, her 20-year-old mother packed up and disappeared, leaving her and her brother behind.
The mother later said that it was probably “the biggest mistake” she have ever made in her life.
Almost at the same time, her 23-year-old father, already behind bars for the kidnapping and assault of a young girl, took his own life in prison.
From that moment, the children were left in the care of their grandparents. But instead of safety, their new home became another nightmare.
Her grandmother struggled with alcoholism, and her grandfather was said to be violent, even predatory.
”I should have . . . adopted them to strangers. We, in our family, suffered a form of child abuse. My father was verbally abusive. My mother was verbally abusive, and we were always told we were no good,” the girl’s mother later told The Tampa Bay Times.
Became wards of the state
By the age of 13, she was pregnant after being assaulted. Some even whispered that her own brother might have been the father. But according to many others, she was allegedly assaulted by a friend of her grandfather.
Family members later told The Tampa Bay Times that no one believed her at the time. No police report was ever filed.
She gave the baby up for adoption, hoping to give him a better life than the one she’d been handed.
Soon after, tragedy struck again. Her grandmother passed away, and it was a tough blow for her. She described her as a “really clean and decent” woman who didn’t drink or swear. Soon after hat, her grandfather took his own life.
She and her brother, Keith, became wards of the state. By age 11, she began engaging in sexual activity at school in exchange for cigarettes, drugs, and food. Alone and desperate, the teenage girl then dropped out of school and began living on the streets, surviving through petty crime and prostitution.
Over the next decade, she racked up arrests for theft, assault, and disorderly conduct — the kind of rap sheet that seemed to grow longer with each passing year.
By her mid-20s, she had drifted to Florida, a state that would soon learn her name in the worst possible way. In 1989, a man’s body was found deep in the woods near Daytona Beach, shot multiple times. Two weeks later, police linked the murder to a woman who had recently been seen hitchhiking nearby.
