November 30th, 1989, Central Florida. When a 51-year-old male picked up a prostitute from the side of the road, he had no idea that she would turn out to be a cold-blooded killer.
“She was just utterly remorseless. This was somebody who enjoyed watching men die.”
She shot him four times with a nine-shot revolver. In her mass murder spree, hardened killer Aileen Wuornos targeted middle-aged, wealthy men with expensive cars.
“She killed. Still, there was no sympathy. No. She was just a ruthless, mean bitch.”
Very few women have ever killed in such a violent and vile manner in history. Eventually, she was recorded confessing with the help of her girlfriend.
“I’m not going to let you go to jail or anything if I have to confess, I will.”
“Wait, what the hell did you do this? Why did you do this?”
In just one year, this female serial killer callously shot, robbed, and murdered seven men, making Aileen Wuornos one of the world’s most evil killers.
Daytona Beach, Florida. It was here that sex worker Aileen Wuornos went on a murderous rampage between November 1989 and November 1990. Her actions left locals fearing for their lives. Wuornos shot and killed at point-blank range seven men between 1989 and 1990.
“Here is somebody who is deliberately targeting men who are looking to engage in the services of a sex worker, and she is killing them and robbing them and disposing of their bodies.”
Detective David Taylor was on the police task force that was instrumental in bringing Wuornos to justice.
“It shocked the community that once we identified Aileen Wuornos as the killer of these men, that a female was that vicious in killing these people.”
About nine in ten serial killers are men, and one in ten are women. Female serial killers tend to use quite remote methods like poisoning, but Wuornos literally went and picked victims as they drove past her on the highway. It’s very rare to have a female serial killer, but it’s even rarer to have one that kills in the way that Wuornos did.
“She essentially killed like a man.”
Mike Joiner was an undercover police officer on the Wuornos case and was key to her arrest.
“She would be on the side of the road and prostituting. She would pick up men as they stopped to help her, and then she would take them somewhere and kill them and take their money or take whatever value they had.”
Detective Brian Jarvis was also on the Wuornos task force, and he recalls the impact her killing spree had on Florida at this particular time.
“Because of the way the bodies were found, the way things turned up, there there’s a lot of panic over this. To have a serial killer on the loose is something that is going to have an impact on any community. Everybody in Florida uses the highways; everybody feels that they have that connection to this case.”
This killer’s story begins in 1956. Aileen Wuornos was born on the 29th of February in Rochester, Michigan. Her mother was just 16 years old when she gave birth and was unable to raise her. By March 1960, when Aileen is just four, she’s formally adopted by her mother’s parents, her grandparents.
“She had a really brutal upbringing with them. So she was regularly beaten by her grandfather. There were allegations of incest within the family. Her grandfather had a home-built sauna in his house, and if he wanted to punish her for doing something he didn’t like, he’d lock her in the sauna and crank up the heat and just let her stay in there.”
Aileen’s abusive childhood sent her on a downward spiral and fueled her hatred of men.
“This was somebody who was constantly in fear. Men… Wuornos’s grandfather allegedly repeatedly said to her that she was worthless, that she should never have been born, that she was a mistake. So she’s learning that she can’t trust anyone, that she can’t depend upon anybody, and this is very, very dangerous.”
Aileen learned early to use any means available to survive. Before she got to her teen years, she was known as a “cigarette bandit.” She would trade sexual favors for packs of cigarettes.
“It’s said that from around age 11, she’s using her body as something to trade, as a tool. And this kind of disconnection from her emotions is something that is going to have a significant impact on the rest of her life.”
Her behavior left her pregnant aged 14. Now, on the orders of her grandfather, that baby is adopted; it’s taken away from her. And this is just reinforcing those ideas that she already has: that those who are supposed to love me hurt me, that I am worthless, that I’m not deserving of love. Shortly after she was forced to give up her child, Aileen was hit by another tragedy. Her grandmother dies of liver failure, having been quite a heavy drinker for many years. Her grandfather actually blames her for her grandmother’s death.
“Her grandfather was furious and threw Wuornos out of the house.”
Aged just 15, Wuornos was left homeless, alone. Her only option was to live in the woods at the end of their street.
“She lives a very feral existence, sleeping in an old car, and she’s still a child at this point. And this is incredibly damaging. There is absolutely nobody there for her. She is literally just taking each day as it comes. She’s making sure that she has enough to eat. Um, she is basically using her body as she’s used it before. She’s learning that life is full of rejection, it’s full of pain, it’s full of fear, and that she really needs to hurt others before they get the chance to hurt her.”
One person she was still close to was her brother, Keith, just 11 months older than Aileen.
“The rumor was that their relationship was an unnatural one. There were allegations of incest. Um, school friends of Keith said that they’d witnessed these things going on. So she felt a connection, but it was a very pathological and a very toxic one.”
Unable to cope living outside during the cold winter months in Michigan, age 16, Eileen hitchhiked over a thousand miles west to the warmer climbs of Colorado. Two years later, she was arrested for her first offense—driving under the influence and disorderly conduct—which included the dangerous discharge of a .22 caliber weapon. Eventually, in 1976, age 20, she hitchhiked 2,000 miles southeast to sunny Florida.
“It is no accident that very shortly after she gets to Florida, she falls in love with, or at least decides to marry, a 69-year-old man called Lewis Gratz Fell. He was president of the yacht club, but it was a doomed marriage.”
“She’s been incredibly violent towards him. Aileen was actually beating him up; she was hitting him with his own walking cane.”
Lewis put a restraining order on Wuornos and filed for annulment just weeks after they were married. While the proceedings were going through, Aileen received some devastating family news. In 1976, her brother Keith dies of throat cancer, and she’s absolutely beside herself. And even though their relationship was an incredibly abnormal and dysfunctional one, she felt that she had an ally in him, but now she was completely on her own. Aileen received $10,000 when her brother died. She spends it almost within weeks—guns, cars, motel rooms—and then she decides she has to sustain this lifestyle and turns to armed robbery to do it. In 1981, she was arrested for stealing $35…
“And go, is trying to look out for herself. She’s still trying to perform this role as the victim because I think she’s more than familiar with the fact that many sex workers are regularly raped and assaulted by their clients. And I think she’s trying to garner a bit of sympathy for herself in doing this.”
“I don’t know what to do. I know that I don’t want my girlfriend involved because this is why I’m doing this.”
“In talking to her parents in Texas, that she did not do anything.”
Her trial for first-degree murder started a year later on January 13th, 1992, at the Volusia County Courthouse near Daytona. It was an extraordinary defense. After all, she could simply have reported them to the police, but she didn’t do that. She took the law into her own hands and indeed executed them herself.
“Wuornos is a simmering pot of resentments, and it’s not enough that she’s killed her victims, but she wants to make them suffer after they’ve died. She wants to tarnish their reputations. So she says that her victims picked her up, they targeted her, they were the predators, not her.”
In an unusual twist, Wuornos was only tried for her first murder, that of 51-year-old Richard Mallory. Florida State Attorney John Tanner was the lead prosecutor in Florida.
“If you have a series of crimes that are related in certain factors, then you may be able to bring in evidence of those other crimes, and in this case, it was murder, called the Williams Rule.”
John Tanner was able to draw a link between the seven murders.
“Each of these killings looked almost identical, showing, I think, basically that this appeared to be the print of the same killer. And it certainly challenged the theory that she was simply defending herself against rape.”
“When you’re saying that everyone that picked me up tried to rape me, credibility is, uh, becomes a real issue.”
On January 27th, 1992, Aileen Wuornos was found guilty of the murder of Richard Mallory and sentenced to death. Then, she pulled a major surprise, one of the odd twists of this whole thing. After being sentenced for Richard Mallory’s death, she elected to plead guilty for five other counts of first-degree murder, and she accepted the death penalty without going to trial.
“She really just wanted to get it over with. She didn’t want to go to trial again, and she didn’t want to face Tyra.”
By November 1992, Wuornos had been given a total of six death sentences. She was never charged with the murder of Peter Sims, as his body was never found. After 10 years of appeals and litigation, she finally met her fate. Very close to the end of her life, she said:
“I have hate crawling through my system. I’m competent, sane, and trying to tell the truth. I’m one who seriously hates human life, and I would kill again.”
Aileen Wuornos was executed by lethal injection on October 9th, 2002.
“Her reactions were a typical Aileen. She was verbal. She was discussing something about the motherships ready to blast off, uh, that she would be back again one day.”
“And here we go.”
“I’ve told a lot of people that when we stopped talking about Bonnie and Clyde, that’ll probably be the same day we quit talking about Aileen Wuornos.”
“Some people believe that she was an abuse victim, that she was very childlike, vulnerable. Other people feel that she was a sadistic killer; she enjoyed ending men’s lives. In reality, it was probably a bit of both, and that’s why we continue to be fascinated by her.”
In just one year, she callously killed seven men in cold blood and then robbed them. She had a record unmatched by any other female killer. The violent nature of her multiple murders makes Aileen Wuornos one of the world’s most evil killers.
