Richard Mallory, 51, Clearwater electronics shop owner. On December 1, 1989, a deputy in Volusia County discovered an abandoned vehicle belonging to Richard Mallory.

His body was found December 13, several miles away in a wooded area. Mallory had been shot several times, but two bullets to the left lung were found to have caused hemorrhaging and ultimately death.

David Spears, 43, Winter Garden construction worker, body found June 1, 1990, along Highway 19 in Citrus County. Except for a baseball cap, Spears was nude. He had died of six bullet wounds to the torso.

Charles Carskaddon, 40, part-time rodeo worker, body found June 6, 1990, in Pasco County. The medical examiner found nine small caliber bullets in his lower chest and upper abdomen.

Troy Burress, 50, a sausage salesman from Ocala, was reported missing July 31, 1990. On August 4, 1990 law officers found the body in a wooded area along State Road 19 in Marion County. The body was substantially decomposed, but evidence showed he had been shot twice.

Charles "Dick" Humphreys, 56, retired Air Force major, former police chief and Florida state child abuse investigator, body found in Marion County on September 12, 1990.

The body was fully clothed, and had been shot six times in the head and torso. Humphreys' car was found in Suwannee County.

Walter Jeno Antonio, 62, body found on November 19, 1990 near a remote logging road in Dixie County. His body was nearly nude, and had been shot four times in the back and head. Law officers found Antonio's car five days later in Brevard County.

Peter Siems, 65. In June 1990, Peter Siems left Jupiter, Florida, heading for New Jersey. Law officers later found Siems' car in Orange Springs on July 4, 1990.

Aileen Carol Wuornos (February 29, 1956 – October 9, 2002) was an American serial killer who killed seven men in Florida in 1989 and 1990, claiming they raped or attempted to rape her while she was working as a prostitute. She was convicted and sentenced to death for six of the murders and executed by lethal injection on October 9, 2002.

Early life

Childhood

Wuornos was born as Aileen Carol Pittman in Rochester, Michigan, on February 29, 1956. Her mother, Diane Wuornos, was 15 years old when she married Aileen's father, Leo Dale Pittman, on June 3, 1954. Less than two years later, and two months before Aileen was born, Diane filed for divorce. Aileen had an older brother named Keith, who was born in February 1955.

Wuornos never met her father, because he was in prison for the rape and attempted murder of a seven-year-old girl when she was born. Leo Pittman was considered to be a schizophrenic, and was convicted of sex crimes against children, was in and out of prison, and hanged himself in prison in 1969. In January 1960, when Aileen was almost 4 years old, Diane abandoned her children, leaving them with their maternal grandparents, Lauri and Britta Wuornos, who legally adopted Keith and Aileen on March 18, 1960.

At age 11, Wuornos engaged in sexual activities in school in exchange for cigarettes, drugs, and food. She had also engaged in sexual activities with her own brother. Wuornos claimed that she was sexually assaulted and beaten as a child by her grandfather, an alcoholic. According to her accusations, before beating her, he would force her to strip out of her clothes. In 1970, at age 14, she became pregnant, having been raped by a friend of her grandfather. Wuornos gave birth at a home for unwed mothers, and the child was placed for adoption. A few months after her baby was born, Wuornos dropped out of school at about the time that her grandmother died of liver failure; Wuornos and her brother subsequently became wards of the court. When she was 15, her grandfather threw her out of the house, and she began supporting herself as a prostitute and living in the woods near her old home.

Early criminal career

On 27 May 1974, Wuornos was arrested in Jefferson County, Colorado, for driving under the influence (DUI), disorderly conduct, and firing a .22-caliber pistol from a moving vehicle. She was later charged with failure to appear (FTA).

In 1976, Wuornos hitchhiked to Florida, where she met 69-year-old yacht club president Lewis Gratz Fell. They married that same year, and the announcement of their nuptials was printed in the society pages of the local newspaper. However, Wuornos continually involved herself in confrontations at their local bar and eventually went to jail for assault. She also hit Fell with his own cane, leading him to get a restraining order against her. She returned to Michigan where, on 14 July 1976, Wuornos was arrested in Antrim County, Michigan, and charged with assault and disturbing the peace for throwing a cue ball at a bartender's head. On July 17, her brother Keith died of esophageal cancer and Wuornos received $10,000 from his life insurance. Wuornos and Fell annulled their marriage on July 21 after only nine weeks of marriage.

On 20 May 1981, Wuornos was arrested in Edgewater, Florida, for the armed robbery of a convenience store, where she stole $35 and two packs of cigarettes. She was sentenced to prison on 4 May 1982, and released on 30 June 1983. On 1 May 1984, Wuornos was arrested for attempting to pass forged checks at a bank in Key West. On 30 November 1985, she was named as a suspect in the theft of a revolver and ammunition in Pasco County.

On 4 January 1986, Wuornos was arrested in Miami and charged with grand theft auto, resisting arrest, and obstruction of justice for providing identification with her aunt's name. Miami police officers found a .38-caliber revolver and a box of ammunition in the stolen car. On 2 June 1986, Volusia County, Florida deputy sheriffs detained Wuornos for questioning after a male companion accused her of pulling a gun, in his car, and demanding $200. Wuornos was found to be carrying spare ammunition, and a .22 pistol was discovered under the passenger seat she had occupied.

Around this time, Wuornos met Tyria Moore, a hotel maid, at a Daytona gay bar. They moved in together, and Wuornos supported them with her prostitution earnings. On 4 July 1987, Daytona Beach police detained Wuornos and Moore at a bar for questioning regarding an incident in which they were accused of assault and battery with a beer bottle. On 12 March 1988, Wuornos accused a Daytona Beach bus driver of assault. She claimed that he pushed her off the bus following a confrontation. Moore was listed as a witness to the incident.

Murders

• Richard Mallory, age 51, 30 November 1989—Electronics store owner in Clearwater, Florida. Wuornos' first victim was a convicted rapist whom she claimed to have killed in self-defense. Two days later, a Volusia County, Florida, Deputy Sheriff found Mallory's abandoned vehicle. On December 13, Mallory's body was found several miles away in a wooded area. He had been shot several times, but two bullets to the left lung were found to have been the cause of death. It was on this murder that Wuornos would eventually be condemned.

• David Spears, age 43—Construction worker in Winter Garden, Florida. On 1 June 1990, his nude body was found along Highway 19 in Citrus County, Florida. He had been shot six times.

• Charles Carskaddon, age 40, 31 May 1990—Part-time rodeo worker. On 6 June 1990, his body was found in Pasco County, Florida. He had been shot nine times with a small-caliber weapon.

• Peter Siems, age 65—In June 1990, Siems left Jupiter, Florida, for New Jersey. On 4 July 1990, his car was found in Orange Springs, Florida. Moore and Wuornos were seen abandoning the car, and Wuornos' palm print was found on the interior door handle. His body was never found.

• Troy Burress, age 50—Sausage salesman from Ocala, Florida. On 31 July 1990, he was reported missing. On 4 August 1990, his body was found in a wooded area along State Road 19 in Marion County, Florida. He had been shot twice.

• Charles "Dick" Humphreys, age 56, 11 September 1990—Retired U.S. Air Force Major, former State Child Abuse Investigator, and former Chief of Police. On 12 September 1990, his body was found in Marion County, Florida. He was fully clothed and had been shot six times in the head and torso. His car was found in Suwannee County, Florida.

• Walter Jeno Antonio, age 62—Police Reservist. On 19 November 1990, Antonio's nearly nude body was found near a remote logging road in Dixie County, Florida. He had been shot four times. Five days later, his car was found in Brevard County, Florida.

Justice system

Apprehension and sentencing

On 4 July 1990, Wuornos and Moore abandoned Peter Siems's car after they were involved in an accident. Witnesses who had seen the women driving the victims' cars provided police with their names and descriptions, resulting in a media campaign to locate them. Police also found some of the victims' belongings in pawnshops and retrieved fingerprints matching those found in the victims' cars. Wuornos had a criminal justice record in Florida, and her fingerprints were on file.

On 9 January 1991, Wuornos was arrested on an outstanding warrant at The Last Resort, a biker bar in Volusia County. Police located Moore the next day in Scranton, Pennsylvania. She agreed to elicit a confession from Wuornos in exchange for prosecutorial immunity. Moore returned with police to Florida, where she was put up in a motel. Under police guidance, Moore made numerous telephone calls to Wuornos, pleading for help in clearing her name. Three days later, on 16 January 1991, Wuornos confessed to the murders. She claimed the men had tried to rape her and she killed them in self-defense.

On 14 January 1992, Wuornos went to trial for the murder of Richard Mallory. Prior bad acts are normally inadmissible in criminal trials, but under Florida's Williams Rule, the prosecution was allowed to introduce evidence related to her other crimes to show a pattern of illegal activity. On 27 January 1992, Wuornos was convicted of Richard Mallory's murder with help from Moore's testimony. At her sentencing, psychiatrists for the defense testified that Wuornos was mentally unstable and had been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder. Four days later, she was sentenced to death.

On 31 March 1992, Wuornos plead no contest to the murders of Dick Humphreys, Troy Burress, and David Spears, saying she wanted to "get right with God". In her statement to the court, she stated, "I wanted to confess to you that Richard Mallory did violently rape me as I've told you; but these others did not. [They] only began to start to." On 15 May 1992, Wuornos was given three more death sentences.

In June 1992, Wuornos plead guilty to the murder of Charles Carskaddon; in November 1992, she received her fifth death sentence. The defense made efforts during the trial to introduce evidence that Mallory had been tried for intent to commit rape in Maryland and that he had been committed to a maximum security correctional facility in Maryland that provided remediation to sexual offenders. Records obtained from that institution reflected that, from 1958 to 1962, Mallory was committed for treatment and observation resulting from a criminal charge of assault with intent to rape and received an over-all eight years of treatment from the facility. In 1961, "it was observed of Mr. Mallory that he possessed strong sociopathic trends". The judge refused to allow this to be admitted in court as evidence and denied Wuornos' request for a retrial.

In February 1993, Wuornos plead guilty to the murder of Walter Jeno Antonio and was sentenced to death again. No charges were brought against her for the murder of Peter Siems, as his body was never found. In all, she received six death sentences.

Wuornos told several inconsistent stories about the killings. She claimed initially that all seven men had raped her while she was working as a prostitute but later recanted the claim of self-defense. During an interview with filmmaker Nick Broomfield, when she thought the cameras were off, she told him that it was, in fact, self-defense, but she could not stand being on death row—where she had been for 12 years at that point—and wanted to die.

Execution

Wuornos' appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was denied in 1996. In 2001, she announced that she would not issue any further appeals against her death sentence. She petitioned the Florida Supreme Court for the right to fire her legal counsel and stop all appeals, saying, "I killed those men, robbed them as cold as ice. And I'd do it again, too. There's no chance in keeping me alive or anything, because I'd kill again. I have hate crawling through my system...I am so sick of hearing this 'she's crazy' stuff. I've been evaluated so many times. I'm competent, sane, and I'm trying to tell the truth. I'm one who seriously hates human life and would kill again." A defense attorney argued that she was in no state for them to honor such a request.

Florida Governor Jeb Bush instructed three psychiatrists to give Wuornos a 15-minute interview. The test for competency requires the psychiatrist(s) to be convinced that the condemned person understands that she will die and for which crime(s) she is being executed. All three judged her mentally fit to be executed.

Wuornos later started accusing the prison matrons of abusing her. She accused them of tainting her food, spitting on it, serving her potatoes cooked in dirt, and her food arriving with urine. She also claimed overhearing conversations about "trying to get me so pushed over the brink by them I'd wind up committing suicide before the [execution]" and "wishing to rape me before execution". She also complained of strip searches, being handcuffed so tightly that her wrists bruised any time she left her cell, door kicking, frequent window checks by matrons, low water pressure, mildew on her mattress and "cat calling ... in distaste and a pure hatred towards me". Wuornos threatened to boycott showers and food trays when specific officers were on duty. "In the meantime, my stomach's growling away and I'm taking showers through the sink of my cell."

Her attorney stated that "Ms. Wuornos really just wants to have proper treatment, humane treatment until the day she's executed", and "If the allegations don't have any truth to them, she's clearly delusional. She believes what she's written".

During the final stages of the appeal process she gave a series of interviews to Broomfield. In her final interview shortly before her execution she claimed that her mind was being controlled by "sonic pressure" to make her appear crazy and described her impending death as being taken away by angels on a space ship. Wuornos said to Broomfield, "You sabotaged my ass, society, and the cops, and the system. A raped woman got executed, and was used for books and movies and shit." Her final words in the on-camera interview were "Thanks a lot, society, for railroading my ass." Broomfield later met Dawn Botkins, a childhood friend of Wuornos', who told him, "She's sorry, Nick. She didn't give you the finger. She gave the media the finger, and then the attorneys the finger. And she knew if she said much more, it could make a difference on her execution tomorrow, so she just decided not to."

Wuornos was brought into the death chamber on October 9, 2002. She had had KFC as her last meal and was given a $20 budget. Her last words before the execution were "Yes, I would just like to say I'm sailing with the rock, and I'll be back, like Independence Day with Jesus. June 6, like the movie. Big mother ship and all, I'll be back, I'll be back." At 9:47 A.M. EDT, Aileen Wuornos died. She was the tenth woman in the United States to be executed since the Supreme Court lifted the ban on capital punishment in 1976, and the second woman ever executed in Florida.

After death

After her execution, Wuornos' body was cremated. Her ashes were taken by Dawn Botkins (a childhood friend) to her native Michigan and spread beneath a tree. She requested that Natalie Merchant's song "Carnival" be played at her funeral. Natalie Merchant commented on this when asked why her song was played during the credits of the documentary Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer:

When director Nick Broomfield sent a working edit of the film, I was so disturbed by the subject matter that I couldn't even watch it. Aileen Wuornos led a tortured, torturing life that is beyond my worst nightmares. It wasn't until I was told that Aileen spent many hours listening to my album Tigerlily while on death row and requested "Carnival" be played at her funeral that I gave permission for the use of the song. It's very odd to think of the places my music can go once it leaves my hands. If it gave her some solace, I have to be grateful.

— Natalie Merchant

Broomfield later stated:

I think this anger developed inside her. And she was working as a prostitute. I think she had a lot of awful encounters on the roads. And I think this anger just spilled out from inside her. And finally exploded. Into incredible violence. That was her way of surviving. I think Aileen really believed that she had killed in self-defense. I think someone who's deeply psychotic can't really tell the difference between something that is life threatening and something that is a minor disagreement, that you could say something that she didn't agree with. She would get into a screaming black temper about it. And I think that's what had caused these things to happen. And at the same time, when she wasn't in those extreme moods, there was an incredible humanity to her.

Legacy

Books

FBI profiler Robert K. Ressler mentioned Wuornos only briefly in his autobiographical history of his 20 years with the FBI. Writing in 1992, he said he often does not discuss female serial killers because they tend to kill in sprees instead of in a sequential fashion. He noted Wuornos as the sole exception. Ressler, who coined the phrase serial killer to describe murderers seeking personal gratification, does not apply it to women killing in postpartum psychosis or to any murderer acting solely for financial gain, such as women who have killed a series of boarders or spouses. In 2002, journalist Sue Russell wrote a book about Wuornos called Lethal Intent.

Documentaries

Filmmaker Nick Broomfield directed two documentaries about Wuornos:

• Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1994)

• Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003)

Wuornos was the subject of an episode of the documentary TV series Biography.

Wuornos was featured in the Deadly Women episode "Predators".

Film

The theatrical film Monster (2003) starred Charlize Theron and Christina Ricci. It tells Wuornos' story from childhood until her first murder conviction. The film earned Theron the 2003 Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as Aileen Wuornos.

The TV movie Overkill: The Aileen Wuornos Story (1992) starred Jean Smart.

Opera

An operatic adaptation of Wuornos' life events premiered at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on June 22, 2001. Entitled Wuornos, the opera was written by composer/librettist Carla Lucero, conducted by Mary Chun, and produced by the Jon Sims Center for the Performing Arts.

The singer Jewel wrote a song about Aileen called 'nicotine love'.

Wikipedia.org

October 9, 2002

STARKE, Fla. -- Prison officials in Florida executed convicted serial killer Aileen Wuornos Wednesday morning. Wuornos was pronounced dead at 9:47 a.m. EDT, but the process of injecting lethal drugs into both of her arms started promptly at 9:30, according to WESH-TV news reporter Claire Metz, who witnessed the execution.

A brown curtain was drawn back, and witnesses saw Wuornos turn to them, make a bizarre face, kind of smile, roll her eyes and turn away; she was strapped in completely, unable to move anything but her head, Metz reported.

At 9:31, she shut her eyes, and her head jerked backward; at 9:32, her mouth seemed to drop open, her eyes opened to slits, and it appeared she was gone, according to Metz.

It's an execution that many believed was a long time in coming. Wuornos' final ride, in a hearse from the death chamber, was a far different road than the one that led to her execution.

Victims' family members aren't sorry that she's gone. "She got off really easy. These men suffered. These men's families suffered tremendously all these years. I mean it was cold-blooded murder," said Wanda Pouncey, a victim's daughter. "I wish it would have been a little bit more, a little harder on her. It was very, very easy. Very easy ... even the years in prison that she did. It was a piece of cake. It was a cake walk," said Teri Griffith, a victim's daughter.

For years after her arrest, Wuornos claimed she was the victim. But on death row two years ago, she told Metz she killed the men in cold blood, something she's repeated again and again this year. "I robbed them, and I killed them as cold as ice, and I would do it again, and I know I would kill another person because I've hated humans for a long time," Wuornos stated.

Volusia County State Attorney John Tanner prosecuted Wuornos and felt obligated to witness the execution. "She liked to be in control. In fact, these killings, as much as anything, were acts of ultimate control, and we've seen that in serial killer patterns in the past. She killed these men to bring about the ultimate in control over their lives, which was to terminate it," Tanner said.

Governor Jeb Bush signed a death warrant for Aileen Wuornos, a hitchhiking prostitute who killed 6 men along Florida highways and volunteered for execution. Her execution was set for Oct. 9.

Wuornos, 46, was convicted of fatally shooting 6 middle-aged men who picked her up as a hitchhiker along the highways of northern and central Florida in 1989 and 1990. Her story has been portrayed in 2 movies, 3 books and an opera.

Wuornos dropped her appeals and volunteered for execution last year, obtaining the Florida Supreme Court's permission to fire her appellate attorneys. Wuornos told the Supreme Court in a letter that she is one "who seriously hates human life and would kill again."

Wuornos was convicted and condemned in 1 case in Volusia County and pleaded no contest in the other 5, which were in Marion, Citrus, Pasco and Dixie counties. Wuornos is 1 of 3 condemned women in the state, which also has 369 men on death row. Like the other women, she is housed at Broward Correctional Institution in Pembroke Pines.

Florida has executed only one other woman since 1848: Judy Buenoano, who died in the electric chair in March 1998. Florida's main method of execution now is lethal injection.

In one of her letters to the court, Wuornos said she wanted to "waive off in the remainder of my appeals, since I've come clean. All were in flat murder to rob." Wuornos had previously claimed in requests for a new trial that the victims had tried to rape or kill her.

During her 1992 trial for murdering Richard Mallory - her 1st victim and a convicted rapist - Wuornos testified he sexually assaulted her and she feared for her life.

She later made similar claims against all her victims. Mallory, a 51-year-old Clearwater electronics technician, picked her up on a rainy night in late 1989. He offered her some vodka and marijuana, but bought her beer when she asked.

They drove into the woods and fell asleep. When she awoke, she took out her gun, woke Mallory up and robbed him. She then shot him dead.

Aileen Wournos (FL) Oct. 9, 2002 7:00 AM EST

Aileen Wournos, a white woman, is scheduled to be executed Oct. 9 for a series of murders she committed in Florida in late 1989 and 1990.

She confessed to six murders, but claimed she killed only in self-defense, resisting violent assaults by men while working as a prostitute. At her trial for the murder of Richard Mallory, Wournos testified that she shot him only after he attempted to violently rape her.

Police found “nothing dirty” on the victim and concluded that there was nothing to substantiate the defendant’s tale of sexual assault. Had they simply run Mallory’s name through the FBI’s computer network, they would have known he served a decade behind bars for violent rape years before.

The defendant’s confession speaks for itself, and the argument that six murders over two months were all in self-defense is difficult to justify.

However, this example of poor investigating and insufficient defense researching represents a common trend in death penalty cases: critical evidence goes undiscovered, especially in cases of poor defendants. When Dateline NBC reported the Mallory rape charges in November of 1992, Wournos was already sitting on death row.

Despite the facts inexcusably undetected by investigators, the death sentence was extremely harsh to begi with in this case, considering the mitigating evidence in the punishment phase of the trial.

The defense showed that Wournos suffered a tragic, abusive upbringing, which resulted in antisocial and borderline personality disorders.

Her mother abandoned her as an infant, and her father served time in mental hospitals in several states as a deranged child molester.

Eventually, her father, like her grandfather, committed suicide, and her grandmother died of liver failure from alcoholism. Wournos suffered from physical abuse as a child, and later told police she had sex with her brother at a very early age.

During both the trial and the appeal, the court declined to find the statutory factor of extreme emotional disturbance.

This case, from the early investigations to the appeals process, has been tainted by publicity and media drama. Three top investigators in the case hired lawyers within weeks of the arrest to field offers from Hollywood concerning movie deals. The media’s idea of catching a “serial killer” unjustly simplified the complexities of this case.

As reporter Michele Gillen said on NBC upon revealing new evidence after the conviction and death sentence: “She’s a sick woman…but that’s no reason for the state to say, ‘She confessed to killing men; we don’t have to do our homework.’”

Wuornos Attracts Interest Until End

October 7, 2002

PORT ORANGE -- At a gritty biker bar called the Last Resort, Al Bulling recalls the crowds that have come from as far as Japan to glimpse the spot where the world's first known female serial killer enjoyed her final hours of freedom.

Tourists, news crews, filmmakers and Geraldo Rivera have stopped by the small Volusia County bar in the decade since Aileen C. Wuornos played country music on the jukebox and drank beer moments before police arrested her on a firearms charge. "They walked her outside, took her away, and that was the end of that," said Bulling, who owns the 23-year-old Port Orange landmark. But it was only the beginning.

Wuornos has gained worldwide notoriety and is the subject of at least three movies, two books, a comic book and a San Francisco opera whose final act may have been written last month when Gov. Jeb Bush signed the warrant ordering Wuornos, 46, to be executed by lethal injection Wednesday.

She was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1989 murder in Volusia County of Richard Mallory, a Clearwater businessman whose body was found covered with a piece of carpet in a wooded area in Ormond Beach. He was shot four times with a .22-caliber gun and left lying on his back, his pants pockets emptied and turned inside out.

She would later plead no contest or guilty to five similar murders in Marion, Citrus, Pasco and Dixie counties, for which she would receive five more death sentences. Wuornos, who has spent more than a decade on death row, confessed to a seventh killing, but that victim's body was never found.

FBI's 1st female serial killer

Wuornos was not the first woman to murder multiple people, but criminologists became intrigued with the case. That's because she was the first to fit the FBI's definition of a serial killer, which includes killing more than three people, targeting victims whom she did not know and who did not know each other, and allowing some time to elapse between each killing, said David Damore, who prosecuted Wuornos in the Mallory case. Wuornos would choose her targets at random, allowing anywhere from a few days or months to pass before killing again.

She knew none of her victims. They all were middle-aged or older men who stopped to pick up Wuornos as she hitchhiked on Florida highways. All were killed with multiple gunshots.

James Fox, a leading national expert on serial killings, said Wuornos became known as the first woman who sought strangers as victims resembling highly publicized male serial killers such as Ted Bundy. "She was the first female to kill in the predatory style of male serial killers," said Fox, a criminal-justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston who has published five books on multiple killings.

Other women who have killed serially know their victims, he said, such as the cases of a nurse who murdered patients, mothers who killed children or a landlady who killed tenants -- all over a period of months or years.

But the Wuornos fascination crept outside law-enforcement circles. An abusive childhood, and her initial insistence that she killed men to defend herself against rape and robbery, resonated with some who saw her as the symbol of a strong woman rebelling against male violence.

Others were drawn to the story of her hardscrabble youth -- she was living on the streets by age 15 -- her career as a prostitute, her relationship with a lesbian lover and her open defiance of authority and the judicial system.

Unrelentingly grim and angry, she has screamed at judges and once called the jurors who convicted her "scumbags of America" as she was escorted from the courtroom. While Wuornos was in jail awaiting her trial, a self-described born-again Christian couple from North Florida adopted her, yet again drawing attention to the serial killer.

"There's so much sensationalism attached to her life and her story," said Carla Lucero, a San Francisco composer who wrote an opera about Wuornos' life. "I really felt for this woman. She never gave up on the concept of love, and she's been betrayed all the way down the line."

The opera, titled Wuornos, debuted in San Francisco last year and is on its way to premiere in Europe. It portrays Wuornos as a woman whose background drove her to kill as a means to survive and then was abused again by the criminal-justice system.

No heroine, prosecutor says

Though she has been glorified on stage, those closest to the case say such portrayals are exaggerations. "She's really a much more shallow character than she's been portrayed as," said Damore, the former prosecutor. "She has been made into something she's not. She truly hated men. I think it's a tragedy to make her into some type of heroine figure."

Damore said Wuornos never showed any remorse for the seven men she confessed to killing and robbing, sometimes after offering them sex for money. "Some people think, 'Here was this poor woman who had to go out and prostitute herself, and she had to fight to survive,' " Damore said. "Five, maybe six, of these murders had nothing to do with sex. Several of these men were shot in the back from some distance."

Wuornos left her victims in wooded areas, where she killed them before ditching their cars elsewhere and pawning their belongings for money so she and her former lover, Tyria Moore, could eat and pay for another night's stay at a cheap motel, according to court records.

After Wuornos' arrest at the Last Resort, Moore was found in Pennsylvania and helped investigators by urging Wuornos to confess to the murders. Wuornos, who acted alone, confessed because she thought police were targeting Moore, her partner of more than two years, as the killer, and wanted to protect her, according to court records.

Subject of movies, comic

In 1992, the same year after Wuornos was convicted of killing Mallory, the Lifetime cable network aired the made-for-television movie Overkill: The Aileen Wuornos Story, starring Jean Smart. A more recent film, Damsel of Death, premiered at a film festival in New York, promising in an advertisement, "You've seen Ted Bundy, Son of Sam, Jeffrey Dahmer. Now see the Damsel, herself, Aileen Wuornos."

There was even a film documenting the fanfare surrounding Wuornos' case. A "True Crimes" comic book for sale on the Internet packaged the Wuornos story with that of another famed criminal, mob boss John Gotti.

Lenny Siems, whose father, Peter Siems, was murdered by Wuornos, said he's aware of her notoriety but has never seen the movies or read the books based on the case. "When it's someone related to you, it brings up too many memories," Siems said. His father's body was never found. "I've tried not to think about it too much," said Siems, a teacher in Mississippi. "I just think it's sick and twisted."

Ruled competent to die

Wuornos' persistent and loud demands to be executed have brought her additional attention. Wuornos insists she should die because she would kill again if given the opportunity.

A psychiatric evaluation earlier this month found her competent to be executed. In an earlier letter to the Florida Supreme Court, Wuornos said she is ready to "cut to the chase then and get on with an execution."

Wuornos has said little during the years about her infamy but expressed concerns. When informed about the opera last year, Wuornos wrote in a letter, "My main concern is if this composer has been made aware of the fact that I've come clean in all of my cases. "I killed in pure hate, robbing along the way. So if this person hasn't [heard], then I'd sure appreciate it if someone would inform him or her of it."

Wuornos' arrest re-enacted

Wuornos' attempt to "come clean" has done little to diminish interest in her case. In March, a Japanese film crew re-enacted Wuornos' arrest at the Last Resort, according to bar owner Bulling. "They had American actors, but they didn't really have a script because it was all going to be dubbed in Japanese for Japanese TV anyway," said Bulling.

Tourists, he said, come from all over to have a drink where Wuornos played pool with her girlfriend and sometimes slept on an old car seat at the bar. "She didn't really act any different than anybody else," Bulling said. "She never had any transportation, so sometimes she would ask people to take her places."

Some tourists buy black T-shirts with an image of Wuornos and the words, "On A Killing Day." The shirts misspell her first name as "Eileen." The bar has adopted the logo "Cold Beer and Killer Women" and is counting down the days to Wuornos' execution on a Jim Beam chalkboard, along with the days until a fall biker rally when the bar will feature women wrestling in creamed corn. Some of the regulars said they would gather Wednesday to celebrate Wuornos' passing.

Aileen Wuornos: Killer Who Preyed on Truck Drivers

By Marlee MacLeod

The Myth and the Reality

Some of what you’ve heard about Aileen Wuornos is true.

Yes, she killed seven men in Florida. Yes, she was a prostitute. She gave a shocking, detailed confession at the behest of her lesbian ex-lover, and during her trial she was legally adopted by a well-meaning woman who claimed to receive her instruction from God.

She had memorable profane outbursts in more than one courtroom, and she awaits execution on Florida’s death row, the recipient of six death sentences, more than anyone else residing there. All these things are true.

It’s important, however, to dispel some of the hyperbole surrounding the Wuornos case at the outset. She was not America’s first female serial killer.

Women have been murdering serially for as long as men, though their victims are usually family members or acquaintances, and they most often choose poison over other means of disposal.

Wuornos killed strangers with a gun, an unusual but not unprecedented fact that the media seized upon and ran with rampantly.

Furthermore, Wuornos’s activities as a prostitute are ridiculously exaggerated. Her claim of having had sex with 250,000 men (which was widely reported as truth) is preposterous; such a feat would require the bedding of 35 different men a day every day for 20 years. Wuornos had neither the stamina nor the planning skills necessary for such a record-breaking performance.

Even with these most sensational claims discredited, Aileen Wuornos remains intriguing. She is both repellent and strangely pathetic.

Her belligerence all but sealed her fate from the moment she was apprehended, and inspired contempt in most who encountered her or heard of her case. Her bravado and her claims that all seven of her victims tried to rape her are as incomprehensible as her boast of having serviced 250,000 johns.

Add to these the melodrama of her confession, her befriending and adoption by Arlene Pralle, and her never-had-a-chance personal history, and her story fairly reels one in.

A Poor Beginning

Wuornos’s father, Leo Dale Pittman, was a child molester and a sociopath who was strangled in prison in 1969. Her mother, Diane Wuornos, married Pittman when she was fifteen and bore him two children. She divorced Pittman less than two years into the marriage, a few months before Aileen was born.

Diane found the responsibilities of single motherhood unbearable and in 1960 she abandoned Aileen and her brother Keith, who were then adopted by their maternal grandparents, Lauri and Britta Wuornos.

The Wuornoses raised Aileen and Keith with their own children in Troy, Michigan. They did not reveal that they were, in fact, the children’s grandparents. Aileen discovered the truth at around age twelve, information, which did not help an already troublesome situation.

Lauri Wuornos drank heavily and was strict with the children; when they discovered their true parentage they rebelled against his severity, quickly becoming incorrigible. Aileen was pregnant at age fourteen and sent to an unwed mothers’ home for the duration of her pregnancy.

The staff found her hostile, uncooperative, and unable to get along with her peers. She delivered a baby boy, who was put up for adoption, in January 1971. In July of the same year Britta Wuornos died.

Diane Wuornos offered to let Aileen and Keith come live with her in Texas, but they declined, as she intended to establish rules and keep order in her household. Aileen, known to friends as Lee, dropped out of school, left home and took up hitchhiking and prostitution.

In the next few years Keith died of throat cancer and Lauri committed suicide, and Lee headed for Florida, where she met and married an elderly man named Lewis Fell who had a comfortable income from railroad stocks.

The marriage was short; Fell obtained a restraining order and an annulment after Lee was arrested for hurling a cue ball at a bartender’s head back home in Michigan. He claimed she had squandered his money and beaten him with his cane when he was not forthcoming with even more cash.

Keith’s life insurance had paid off well for Lee and her siblings. Lee received $10,000, which was gone in two months. She drifted back to Florida and embarked on a decade of failed relationships and small-time crime-forgery, theft, and a rather ridiculous armed robbery that put her in prison for a spell.

From time to time she turned tricks, but even as an exit-to-exit interstate prostitute she was not a hot commodity. When she met twenty-four-year-old Tyria Moore at a Daytona gay bar in 1986, Lee was lonely and angry and ready for something new.

For a while it was great. Ty loved her and didn’t leave her; she even quit her job as a motel maid for a while and allowed Lee to support her with her prostitution earnings. Their ardor cooled, though, and money ran short-still, Ty stayed with Lee, following her from cheap motel to cheap motel, with stints in old barns or in the woods in between.

Lee’s market value as a prostitute, never spectacular, fell even more. Their existence, meager though it was, became ever harder to maintain. Clearly, something had to change.

Mysterious Deaths

Richard Mallory liked a change now and again, too. The middle-aged owner of a Clearwater, Florida electronics repair business was known to close up shop abruptly and disappear for a few days at a time on drinking and sex binges. He changed the locks to his apartment eight times in three years.

He kept employees at his business only long enough to clear the backlog of work that accrued during one of his disappearances, letting them go once his repair orders were caught up again. His only constants were alcohol, sex and paranoia. So when he didn’t show up to open his shop in early December 1989, no one thought much of it.

There was no one close enough to him to notice he was gone. It wasn’t until his 1977 Cadillac was found a few days later outside Daytona that anyone knew anything was amiss.

On December 13, 1989, Jimmy Bonchi and James Davis were looking for scrap metal along a dirt road close to Interstate 95 in Volusia County, Florida. Instead of saleable junk they found a body wrapped in carpet.

Fingerprints carefully taken from the badly decomposed hands proved that this was Richard Mallory. He had been killed with three shots from a .22.

Several months of investigation into his sordid lifestyle and somewhat shady acquaintances produced no real leads. Initial suspicion revolved around a stripper who went by the name of Chastity, but the evidence, what little of it there was, didn’t add up. Mallory’s case went cold.

On May 5, 1990 the body of an unidentified male was found naked in Brooks County, GA, close to Interstate 75 and just across the state line from Florida. Two .22 caliber slugs were found in the remains, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation had no leads as to the identity of their mysterious corpse.

On June 1, another unidentified naked male body was found in the woods of Citrus County, Florida, about 40 miles north of Tampa. Police initially suspected Mathew Cocking, a surveyor who had found the body, as he was known to carry a gun and spewed profanity and threats at anyone who questioned him about his find.

The identification of the body on June 7 as that of David Spears of Bradenton, Florida cleared Cocking. Spears had been a heavy-equipment operator who was last seen on May 19th. His truck was found shortly after that on Interstate 75 with the doors unlocked and the license plate missing.

Meanwhile, thirty miles south in Pasco County, yet another naked body was found a few miles off Interstate 75.

This one was discovered on June 6, and was so badly decomposed that medical examiners were not able to obtain fingerprints and could not estimate time of death.

The nine bullets found in the remains were damaged by the decomposition, but were determined to have come from a .22 caliber weapon.

Pasco County detective Tom Muck had no immediate luck identifying his John Doe (later determined to be Charles Carskaddon), but had heard about the case in Citrus County. He notified Citrus County sheriff’s investigator Marvin Padgett about the similarities and told him to stay in touch.

Searching further for leads, he called the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and was told of their own mystery guest. Again, he noted similarities, but didn’t feel he had enough information to put together an investigation.

Killing Spree Continues

On July 4, a car careened off State Road 315 near Orange Springs, Florida and came to rest in some brush.

Rhonda Bailey, who was sitting on her porch at the time and watched the accident happen, said two women clambered frantically from the car, throwing beer cans into the woods and swearing at each other.

The brown-haired woman said little; the blond, whose arm was bleeding from an injury sustained in the crash, did most of the talking.

She begged Bailey not to call the police, saying her father lived just up the road. She and her companion got back in the car, which now had a smashed windshield and other damage, and got it out of the brush. The crippled vehicle didn’t take them far, though.

They abandoned it just down the road and began walking. Hubert Hewett of the Orange Springs Volunteer Fire Department responded to a call about the accident and asked the two women if they had been the ones in the car.

The blond cursed at him and said no, they had not, and they did not want any help. He left them alone and they walked on.

Marion County sheriff’s deputies found the car where the women had left it. It was a 1988 Pontiac Sunbird, gray with four doors. The glass in the front doors, as well as the windshield, was smashed. There were apparent bloodstains throughout the interior, and the license plate was missing.

A computer search based on the VIN number revealed that the car belonged to Peter Siems, who had disappeared on June 7 after leaving his home in Jupiter, Florida to visit relatives in Arkansas.

Siems was a 65-year-old retired merchant seaman who devoted much of his time to a Christian outreach ministry. John Wisnieski of the Jupiter Police, who had been working the case since Siems was reported missing, sent out a nationwide teletype containing descriptions of the two women.

He also sent a synopsis of the case and sketches of the women to the Florida Criminal Activity Bulletin. Then he waited. He was not optimistic about finding Siems alive.

Troy Burress left on his delivery route from Gilchrist Sausage early on the morning of July 30. When he didn’t return that afternoon, Gilchrist manager Johnny Mae Thompson started calling around and discovered Burress hadn’t shown up at his last few delivery stops. Late that night she and her husband went out looking for him.

At 2:00 a.m. Burress’s wife reported him missing. At 4:00 a.m. Marion County sheriff’s deputies found his truck on the shoulder of State Road 19, twenty miles east of Ocala. It was unlocked and the keys were missing. So was Burress.

He was found five days later. A family out for a picnic in the Ocala National Forest happened upon his body in a clearing just off Highway 19, about eight miles from where his truck was found.

The Florida heat and humidity had hastened decomposition, precluding identification at the scene, but his wife identified his wedding ring. He had been killed with two shots from a .22 caliber gun, one to the chest and one to the back. Investigator John Tilley’s initial suspect was a drifter named Curtis Michael Blankenship.

He had been hitchhiking on Highway 19 the day of Burress’s disappearance and was picked up close to the abandoned truck. It became evident as the investigation progressed, however, that Blankenship was not involved. For the time being, Tilley had no more suspects.

Women Suspected

Dick Humphreys never made it home from his last day of work at the Sumterville office of the Florida’s Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services. A protective investigator specializing in abused and injured children, he was about to transfer to the Department’s Ocala office.

He was fifty-six, and this was not his first career; previously, he’d been a police chief in Alabama. He celebrated his thirty-fifth wedding anniversary on September 10; on September 11, he disappeared.

On the evening of September 12 his body was found in Marion County. He’d been shot seven times. Six .22 caliber slugs were recovered from his body; the seventh went through his wrist and was never found. His car was found in late September in Suwanee County.

About a month later the nude body of Walter Gino Antonio was found on a logging road in Dixie County. Sixty-year-old Antonio was a trucker, a sometime security guard, and a member of the Reserve Police. He’d been shot four times with a .22. When he was found on November 19 he’d been dead less than 24 hours. His car was found five days later across the state in Brevard County.

Captain Steve Binegar was commander of the Marion County Sheriff’s Criminal Investigation Division, and he knew about the crimes in Citrus and Pasco Counties. He could not ignore the similarities and was formulating a theory, along with a multi-agency task force with representatives from counties where victims were found.

No one stopped to pick up hitchhikers anymore, he reasoned, so the perpetrator(s) of these crimes had to be initially non-threatening to the victims. He suspected women—specifically, he suspected the two women who had wrecked Peter Siems’s car and walked away.

He turned to the press for help. In late November, Reuters ran a story about the killings, saying police were looking for the women. Papers across Florida picked up the story and ran it, along with police sketches of the women in question.

Investigation Pays Off

It didn’t take long for the leads to start pouring in, and by mid-December, police had several tips involving the same two women. A man in Homosassa Springs said the two women had rented a trailer from him about a year earlier.

Their names were Tyria Moore and Lee. A woman in Tampa said the women had worked at her motel south of Ocala. Their names, she said, were Tyria Moore and Susan Blahovec.

An anonymous caller identified the women as Ty Moore and Lee Blahovec, who bought an RV in Homosassa Springs. Lee Blahovec was the dominant one, the caller said, and a truck stop prostitute. Both were lesbians.

The mother lode, though, came from Port Orange near Daytona. Police there had been tracking the movements of Lee Blahovec and Tyria Moore, and provided a detailed account of the couple’s movements from late September to mid-December.

They had stayed, primarily, at the Fairview Motel in Harbor Oaks, where Blahovec registered as Cammie Marsh Greene.

They spent a bit of time living in a small apartment behind a restaurant very near the Fairview, but returned to the motel. In early December they left the Fairview. Blahovec/Greene returned alone, and stayed until December 10.

A quick computer check gave driver’s license and criminal record information on Tyria Moore, Susan Blahovec and Cammie Marsh Greene. Moore had no real record, breaking and entering charges against her in 1983 having been dropped.

Blahovec had one trespassing arrest, while Greene had no record at all. Additionally, the photograph on Blahovec’s license did not match the one for Greene.

The Greene ID was the one that paid off best. Volusia County officers checked area pawnshops and found that in Daytona, Cammie Marsh Greene had pawned a camera and a radar detector, and had left the requisite thumbprint on the receipt. These items had belonged to Richard Mallory. In Ormand Beach, she pawned a set of tools that matched the description of those taken from David Spears’s truck.

The thumbprint was the key. Jenny Ahern of the Automated Fingerprint Identification System found nothing on her initial computer search, but came to Volusia County and began a hand search of fingerprint records there. Within an hour, she found what she came for. The print showed up on a weapons charge and outstanding warrant against a Lori Grody.

A bloody palm print found in Peter Siems’s Sunbird matched Lori Grody’s prints as well. All this information was sent to the National Crime Information Center. Responses came from Michigan, Colorado and Florida. Lori Grody, Susan Blahovec and Cammie Marsh Greene were all aliases for Aileen Carol Wuornos.

The Hunt for Wuornos

The hunt for Wuornos began in earnest on January 5, 1991. Pairs of officers, including two undercover as "Bucket" and "Drums," drug dealers down from Georgia, hit the streets hoping to track her down. On the evening of January 8, Mike Joyner and Dick Martin, in their roles as "Bucket" and "Drums," spotted her at the Port Orange Pub.

They meant for their takedown to develop gradually, as they wanted an airtight case, but Port Orange police entered suddenly and took Wuornos outside. Mike Joyner frantically phoned the command post at the Pirate’s Cove Motel, where authorities from six jurisdictions had come to work the case.

This development wasn’t because of a leak, they surmised; these were just cops doing their jobs. Bob Kelley of the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office called the Port Orange police station and told them not to arrest Wuornos under any circumstances.

The word was relayed to the cops in the nick of time, and Wuornos returned to the bar. Joyner and Martin struck up a conversation with her and bought her a few beers. She left the bar at around 10:00, declining an offer for a ride. Once again, the cautious takedown was almost ruined.

Two Florida Department of Law Enforcement officers pulled up behind Wuornos as she walked down Ridgwood Avenue, following her with their lights off. Officers at the command post made a call and got the FDLE officers off the street and Wuornos made it to her next destination, a biker bar called the Last Resort. Joyner and Martin met her there for a while, drank more beers, shot more bull.

They left just after midnight. Wuornos didn’t leave at all. She spent her last night of freedom sleeping on an old car seat in the Last Resort.

The following afternoon, Joyner and Martin were back at the Last Resort as "Bucket" and "Drums," talking Wuornos up and wearing transmitters that kept the police apprised of everything that went on.

They had planned on making their collar later that night, but the Last Resort was gearing up for a barbecue, and bikers would start pouring in any second.

The decision was made at the command post to go ahead with the arrest. Joyner and Martin asked Wuornos if she’d like to get cleaned up at their motel room. She accepted their offer and left the bar with them.

Outside on the steps, Larry Horzepa of the Marion County Sheriff’s Office approached her and told her she was being arrested on the outstanding warrant for Lori Grody. No mention was made of the murders, and no announcement was made to the media that a suspect had been arrested. Their caution was wise: as of yet, they had no murder weapon and no Tyria Moore.

Confession

On January 10 Moore was located. She was living with her sister in Pittston, Pennsylvania. Jerry Thompson of Citrus County and Bruce Munster of Marion County flew to Scranton, Pennsylvania to interview her.

She was read her rights but not charged with anything. Munster made sure she knew what perjury was, swore her in, and sat back as she gave her statement.

She had known about the murders since Lee had come home with Richard Mallory’s Cadillac, she said. Lee had openly confessed that she had killed a man that day, but Moore told her not to say anything else. “I told her I didn’t want to hear about it,” Moore told Munster and Thompson. “And then any time she would come home after that and say certain things, telling me about where she got something, I’d say I don’t want to hear it.”

She had her suspicions, she admitted, but wanted to know as little as possible about Lee’s doings. The more she knew, she reasoned, the more compelled she would feel to report Lee to the authorities. And she didn’t want to do that. “I was just scared,” she said. “She always said she’d never hurt me, but then you can’t believe her, so I don’t know what she would have done.”

The next day Moore accompanied Munster and Thompson back to Florida to assist the investigation. A confession would make the case against Wuornos virtually airtight, and Munster and Thompson explained their plan for obtaining one to Moore on the flight.

They would put her in a Daytona motel and have her make contact with Lee in jail, saying she’d received money from her mother and came down to get the rest of her things.

Their phone conversations would be taped, and Moore was to tell Wuornos that authorities had been questioning her family, that she thought the Florida murders would be mistakenly pinned on her (Moore). Munster and Thompson hoped that, out of loyalty to Moore, Wuornos would confess.

The first call from Wuornos came on January 14. She was still under the impression that she was only in jail for the Lori Grody weapons violation. When Moore broached her suspicions, Wuornos reassured her. “I’m only here for that concealed weapons charge in ’86 and a traffic ticket,” she said, “and I tell you what, man, I read the newspaper, and I wasn’t one of those little suspects.”

She was aware, though, that the jailhouse phone was monitored, and made efforts to speak of the crimes in code words and to construct alibis. “I think somebody at work -- where you worked at -- said something that it looked like us,” she said, “And it isn’t us, see? It’s a case of mistaken identity.”

For three days the calls continued. Moore became more insistent that the police were after her, and it became clear that Wuornos knew what was expected of her. She even voiced suspicion that Moore was not alone, that someone was there taping their conversations.

But as time passed, she became less careful about what she said. She would not let Moore go down with her. “Just go ahead and let them know what you need to know…what they want to know or anything,” she said, “and I will cover for you, because you’re innocent. I’m not going to let you go to jail. Listen, if I have to confess, I will.” And on the morning of January 16, she did.

Wuornos came back to two main points over and over during her confession to Larry Horzepa and Bruce Munster. First, she made it clear that Moore was not involved in any way in any of the murders.

Additionally, she was emphatic in her assertion that nothing was her fault, not the murders and not any circumstance that led her down the criminal path that was her life.

All the killings were done in self-defense, she claimed. Each victim had either assaulted her, threatened her, or raped her. Her story seemed to develop as she told it.

When she thought she’d said something incriminating she would back up and retell that part, changing details to suit her overall scenario. She’d been raped several times in the past few years, she claimed, and had had enough. When each of her victims became aggressive she killed out of fear.

Several times Michael O’Neill, a public defender from the Volusia County public defender’s office, advised Wuornos to stop talking, finally asking in exasperation, “Do you realize these guys are cops!” Wuornos answered, “I know. And they wanted to hang me. And that’s cool, because maybe, man, I deserve it. I just want to get this over with.”

An avalanche of book and movie offers poured in to detectives, relatives, Moore and even Wuornos herself. Wuornos seemed to think she would make millions from her story, not yet realizing that Florida had a law against criminals profiting in such a manner.

She was all over the local and national media. She felt famous, and she continued to talk about the crimes with anyone who would listen, including Volusia County Jail employees. With each retelling she refined her story, casting herself in a better light each time.

Aileen's Defender

Into this tumult came Arlene Pralle, a forty-four-year-old "born-again" Christian who ran a horse breeding and boarding facility near Ocala. She had seen Wuornos’s picture in a newspaper and wrote her a letter. “My name is Arlene Pralle,” she began, “I’m born-again. You’re going to think I’m crazy, but Jesus told me to write you.”

She provided her home telephone number, and on January 30 Wuornos called her (collect) for the first time. Almost immediately, Pralle became her ardent defender and helpmate. Pralle advised her that her public defenders were trying to profit from her story, as was everyone else.

Wuornos asked for and got new attorneys. Pralle spoke with reporters, describing her relationship with Wuornos to a Vanity Fair reporter as, “a soul binding. We’re like Jonathan and David in the bible…It’s as though part of me is trapped in jail with her. We always know what the other is feeling and thinking.”

To another reporter she said, “If the world could know the real Aileen Wuornos, there’s not a jury that would convict her.”

Throughout 1991, Pralle appeared on talk shows and in tabloids, talking to anyone who would listen about what she perceived as Wuornos’s true, good nature.

She arranged interviews for Wuornos with reporters she thought would be sympathetic, and in this forum Wuornos continued to tell and embellish her fantastic story.

Both Wuornos and Pralle emphasized Wuornos’s troubled upbringing, and both leveled accusations of corruption and complicity at anyone who was handy-the agents proffering the book and movie deals, the detectives, the attorneys and, especially, Tyria Moore.

And just when it seemed things couldn’t get any weirder, they did. On November 22, 1991, Arlene Pralle and her husband legally adopted Aileen Wuornos. Pralle said God had told her to.

The Trial

Wuornos’s attorneys engineered a plea bargain, to which Wuornos agreed, in which she would plead to six charges and receive six consecutive life terms.

One state attorney, however, thought she should receive the death penalty, so on January 14, 1992, Wuornos went to trial for the murder of Richard Mallory. The evidence and witnesses against her were severely damaging.

Dr. Arthur Botting, the medical examiner who had autopsied Mallory’s body, stated that Mallory had taken between ten and twenty agonizing minutes to die. Tyria Moore testified that Wuornos had not seemed overly upset, nervous or drunk when she told her of killing Mallory. Twelve men told of encounters with her along Florida’s highways over the years.

Florida has a law known as the Williams Rule that allows evidence relating to other crimes to be admitted if it helps to show a pattern. Because of the Williams Rule, information regarding the other killings was presented to the jury.

Wuornos’s claim of having killed in self-defense would have been a lot more believable had the jury known only of Mallory. Now, with the jury made aware of all of the murders, self-defense seemed improbable, at best. After the excerpts from her videotaped confession were played, the self-defense claim seemed ridiculous.

On the tape Wuornos appeared confident and not at all upset by the story she was telling. She made easy conversation with her interrogators and repeatedly told her public defender to be quiet. Her image spoke from the screen-“I took a life…I am willing to give up my life because I killed people…I deserve to die.”

Tricia Jenkins, one of Wuornos’s public defenders, did not want her client to testify and told her so. But Wuornos insisted on telling her story. By now, her account of Mallory’s killing barely resembled the one she gave in her confession.

Mallory had raped and sodomized her, she claimed, and had tortured her. On cross-examination, prosecutor John Tanner obliterated any shred of credibility she may have had. As he brought to light all her lies and inconsistencies, she became agitated and angry.

Her attorneys repeatedly advised her not to answer questions, and she invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination twenty-five times. She was the defense’s only witness, and when she left the stand there was not much doubt about how her trial would end.

On January 27, Judge Uriel Blount charged the jury. They returned with their verdict less than two hours later. They found Wuornos guilty of first-degree murder, and as they filed out of the courtroom she exploded with rage, shouting, “I’m innocent! I was raped! I hope you get raped! Scumbags of America!” Her outburst was still fresh in the minds of jurors as the penalty phase of her trial began the next day.

Expert witnesses for the defense testified that Wuornos was mentally ill, that she suffered from borderline personality disorder, and that her tumultuous upbringing had stunted and ruined her. Jenkins referred to her client as “a damaged, primitive child” as she pleaded with the jury to spare Wuornos’s life.

But jurors neither forgot nor forgave the woman they’d come to know during the trial. With a unanimous verdict, they recommended that Judge Blount sentence her to the electric chair. He did so on January 31.

Unrepentant

Wuornos did not stand trial again. On March 31 she pleaded no contest to the murders of Dick Humphreys, Troy Burress and David Spears, saying she wanted to “get right with God.” In a rambling statement to the court she said, “I wanted to confess to you that Richard Mallory did violently rape me as I’ve told you. But these others did not. [They] only began to start to.”

She ended her monologue by turning to Assistant State Attorney Ric Ridgeway and hissing, “I hope your wife and children get raped in the ass!” On May 15, Judge Thomas Sawaya handed her three more death sentences. She made an obscene gesture and muttered, “Motherfucker.”

In June, she pleaded guilty to the murder of Charles Carskaddon, and in November, she received her fifth death sentence.

In early February of 1993, she was sentenced to die after pleading guilty to the murder of Walter Gino Antonio. No charges were brought for the murder of Peter Siems, as his body was never found.

For a time there was speculation that Wuornos might receive a new trial for the murder of Richard Mallory. New evidence showed that Mallory had served ten years in prison for sexual violence, and attorneys felt that jurors would have seen the case differently had they known this fact. No new trial was forthcoming, though.

The State Supreme Court of Florida has affirmed all six of her death sentences, and she is in her second round of appeals, a round that will eventually wend its way to the United States Supreme Court. Those many appeals proceed haltingly, as Florida’s efforts to streamline its appeals process create new delays. She will probably be put to death in five to seven years.

Associated Press reported that serial killer Aileen Wuornos was executed by lethal injection at 9:47 a.m.,Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2002, more than a decade after she murdered six men along central Florida highways while working as a prostitute. The execution took place at Florida State Prison near Starke, Florida.

Wuornos, 46, was the tenth woman in the U.S. and the second woman in Florida to be executed since the death penalty resumed in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Fifty-one men have been executed by Florida between 1976 and Oct., 2002. Judy Buenoano was the other woman executed in Florida during that time span.

"I'd just like to say I'm sailing with the Rock and I'll be back like Independence Day with Jesus, June 6, like the movie, big mothership and all. I'll be back," Wuornos said from the execution chamber. The Rock is a Biblical reference to Jesus.

For years, Wuornos claimed she shot the men out of self-defense while being raped and sodomized. Later, she recanted her claims, saying she wanted to make peace with God.

Wuornos also claimed to have killed a seventh man. Her life story spawned two movies, several books and the opera "Wournos," by Carla Lucero, which debuted last year.

Wuornos gave her last media interview Tuesday to British producer Nick Broomfield, who did a documentary on her in 1993, but she stormed out after about 35 minutes, Broomfield said.

"My conclusion from the interview is, today we are executing someone who is mad. Here is someone who has totally lost her mind," Broomfield said Wednesday outside the prison.

State Attorney John Tanner, who watched psychiatrists interview her for 30 minutes last week, said she was cognizant and lucid. "She knew exactly what she was doing," Tanner said.

(members.tripod.com/ahrens/serial/)

She has been heralded in tabloid headlines and on television talk shows as Americas first female serial killer. In fact, Aileen Wuornos was neither the first nor the worst, although she did display a curiously masculine tendency to prey on strangers of the opposite sex.

Suspected of at least seven murders, sentenced to die in four of the six cases she confessed to police, Wuornos still maintains that some or all of her admitted killings were performed in self-defense, resisting violent assaults by men whom she solicited while working as a prostitute. Ironically, information uncovered by investigative journalists in November 1992 suggests that in one case, at least, her story may well be true.

Americas future media monster was born Aileen Pittman in Rochester, Michigan, on February 29, 1956. Her teenage parents separated months before she was born, father Leo Pittman moving on to serve time in Kansas and Michigan mental hospitals as a deranged child-molester.

Mother Diane recalls Aileen and her older brother Keith as crying, unhappy babies, and their racket prompted her to leave them with her parents in early 1960. On March 18 of that year, maternal grandparents Lauri and Britta Wuornos legally adopted the children as their own.

Aileens childhood showed little improvement from there. At age six, she suffered scarring facial burns while she and Keith were setting fires with lighter fluid.

Aileen later told police that she had sex with Keith at an early age, but acquaintances doubt the story and Keith is unable to speak for himself, having died of throat cancer in 1976.

At any rate, Aileen was clearly having sex with someone, for she turned up pregnant in her fourteenth year, delivering her son at a Detroit maternity home on March 23, 1971.

Grandmother Britta died on July 7, and while her death was blamed on liver failure, Diane Pratt suspected her father of murder, claiming he threatened to kill Aileen and Keith if they were not removed from his home.

In fact, they became wards of the court, Aileen soon dropping out of school to work the streets full-time, earning her way as a teenage hooker, drifting across country as the spirit moved her.

In May 1974, using the alias Sandra Kretsch, she was jailed in Jefferson County, Colorado, for disorderly conduct, drunk driving, and firing a .22-caliber pistol from a moving vehicle. Additional charges of failure to appear were filed when she skipped town ahead of her trial.

Back in Michigan on July 13, 1976, Aileen was arrested in Antrim County for simple assault and disturbing the peace, after she lobbed a cue ball at a bartenders head. Out-standing warrants from Troy, Michigan, were also served on charges of driving without a license and consuming alcohol in a motor vehicle.

On August 4, Aileen settled her debt to society with a $105 fine. The money came, at least indirectly, from her brother.

Keiths death, on July 17, 1976, surprised her with a life insurance payment of $10,000, squandered within two months on luxuries including a new car, which Aileen promptly wrecked.

In late September, broke again, she hitched a ride to Florida, anxious to sample a warmer climate, hoping to practice her trade in the sun. It was a change of scene, but Aileens attitude was still the same, and she inevitably faced more trouble with the law.

On May 20, 1981, Wuornos was arrested in Edgewater, Florida, for armed robbery of a convenience store.

Sentenced to prison on May 4, 1982, she was released thirteen months later, on June 30, 1983. Her next arrest, on May 1, 1984, was for trying to pass forged checks at a bank in Key West.

On November 30, 1985, named as a suspect in the theft of a pistol and ammunition in Pasco County, Aileen borrowed the alias Lori Grody from an aunt in Michigan. Eleven days later, the Florida Highway Patrol cited Grody for driving without a valid license.

On January 4, 1986, Aileen was arrested in Miami under her own name, charged with auto theft, resisting arrest, and obstruction by false information; police found a .38-caliber revolver and a box of ammunition in the stolen car.

On June 2, 1986, Volusia County deputies detained Lori Grody for questioning after a male companion accused her of pulling a gun in his car and demanding $200; in spite of her denials, Aileen was carrying spare ammunition on her person, and a .22 pistol was found beneath the passenger seat she occupied. A week later, using the new alias of Susan Blahovec, she was ticketed for speeding in Jefferson County, Florida.

The citation includes a telling observation: Attitude poor. Thinks she is above the law. A few days after the Jefferson County incident, Aileen met lesbian Tyria Moore in a Daytona gay bar. They soon became lovers, and while the passion faded in a year or so, they remained close friends and traveling companions, more or less inseparable for the next four years.

On July 4, 1987, police in Daytona Beach detained Tina Moore and Susan Blahovec for questioning, on suspicion of slugging a man with a beer bottle. Blahovec was alone on December 18, when highway patrolmen cited her for walking on the inter-state and possessing a suspended drivers license.

Once again, the citation noted Attitude POOR, and Susan proved it over the next two months, with threatening letters mailed to the circuit court clerk on January 11 and February 9, 1988.

A month later, Wuornos was trying a new approach and a new alias. On March 12, 1988, Cammie Marsh Green accused a Daytona Beach bus driver of assault, claiming he pushed her off the bus following an argument; Tyria Moore was listed as a witness to the incident.

On July 23, a Daytona Beach landlord accused Moore and Susan Blahovec of vandalizing their apartment, ripping out carpets and painting the walls dark brown without his permission.

In November 1988, Susan Blahovec launched a six-day campaign of threatening calls against a Zephyr Hills supermarket, following an altercation over lottery tickets.

By 1989, Aileens demeanor was increasingly erratic and belligerent. Never one to take an insult lightly, she now went out of her way to provoke confrontations, seldom traveling without a loaded pistol in her purse.

She worked the bars and truck stops, thumbing rides to snag a trick when all else failed, supplementing her prostitutes income with theft when she could.

Increasingly, with Moore, she talked about the many troubles in her life, a yearning for revenge. Richard Mallory, a 51-year-old electrician from Palm Harbor, was last seen alive by coworkers on November 30, 1989.

His car was found abandoned at Ormond Beach, in Volusia County, the next day, his wallet and personal papers scattered nearby, along with several condoms and a half-empty bottle of vodka.

On December 13, his fully-dressed corpse was found in the woods northwest of Daytona Beach, shot three times in the chest with a .22 pistol.

Police searching for a motive in the murder learned that Mallory had been divorced five times, earning himself a reputation as a heavy drinker who was very paranoid and very much into porno and the topless-bar scene.

A former employee described him as mental, but police came up empty in their search for a criminal record. They could find nothing dirty on the victim, finally concluding he was just paranoid and pussy-crazy.

The investigation was stalled at that point on June 1, 1990, when a nude John Doe victim was found, shot six times with a .22 and dumped in the woods forty miles north of Tampa. By June 7, the corpse had been identified from dental records as 43-year-old David Spears, last seen leaving his Sarasota workplace on May 19.

Spears had planned to visit his ex-wife in Orlando that afternoon, but he never made it. Ironically, his boss had spotted the dead mans missing pickup truck on May 25, parked along I-75 south of Gainesville, but there the trail went cold. By the time Spears was identified, a third victim had already been found.

Charles Carskaddon, age forty, was a part-time rodeo worker from Booneville, Missouri, missing since May 31. He had vanished somewhere along I-75, en route from Booneville to meet his fiancée in Tampa, his naked corpse found thirty miles south of the Spears murder site on June 6.

Carskaddon had been shot nine times with a .22-caliber weapon, suggesting a pattern to officers who still resisted the notion of a serial killer at large.

On June 7, Carskaddons car was found in Marion County, a .45 automatic and various personal items listed as stolen from the vehicle.

Peter Siems, a 65-year-old merchant seaman turned missionary, was last seen on June 7, 1990, when he left his Jupiter, Florida, home to visit relatives in Arkansas.

Siems never arrived, and a missing-person report was filed with police on June 22. No trace of the man had been found by July 4, when his car was wrecked and abandoned in Orange Springs, Florida.

Witnesses described the vehicles occupants as two women, one blond and one brunette, providing police sketch artists with a likeness of each. The blond was injured, bleeding, and a bloody palm print was lifted from the vehicles trunk.

Eugene Burress, age fifty, left the Ocala sausage factory where he worked to make his normal delivery rounds on July 30, 1990.

A missing-person report was filed when he had not returned by 2:00 A.M. the next day, and his delivery van was found two hours later. On August 4, his fully-dressed body was found by a family picnicking in the Ocala National Forest.

Burress had been shot twice with a .22-caliber pistol, in the back and chest. Nearby, police found his credit cards, clipboard, business receipts, and an empty cash bag from a local bank.

Fifty-six-year-old Dick Humphreys was a retired Alabama police chief, lately employed by the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services to investigate child abuse claims in Ocala.

His wife reported him missing when he failed to return home from work on the night of September 11, 1990, and Humphreys was found the next day in an undeveloped subdivision, shot seven times with a .22 pistol, his pants pockets turned inside-out.

On September 19, his car was found abandoned, stripped of license plates, behind a defunct service station in Live Oak.

Impounded on September 25, the car was not traced to Humphreys until October 13, the same day his discarded badge and other personal belongings were found in Lake County, seventy miles southeast of the murder scene. Victim number seven was 60-year-old Walter Antonio, a truck driver from Merrit Island who doubles as a reserve police officer for Brevard County.

Found in the woods northwest of Cross City on November 19, 1990, he had been shot three times in the back and once in the head.

Antonio was nude except for socks, his clothes later found in a remote area of neighboring Taylor County. His car, meanwhile, was found back in Brevard County on November 24. Police determined that Antonios killer had stolen a distinctive gold ring, along with his badge, nightstick, handcuffs, and flash-light.

By that time, journalists had noted the obvious pattern detectives were reluctant to accept, and media exposure forced authorities to go public with their suspect sketches on November 30, 1990.

Over the next three weeks, police received four calls identifying the nameless women as Tyria Moore and Lee Blahovec.

Their movements were traced through motel receipts, detectives learning that Blahovec also liked to call herself Lori Grody and Cammie Marsh Green. Fingerprint comparisons did the rest, naming Blahovec/Grody/Green as Aileen Wuornos, placing her at the scene where Peter Siemss car was wrecked in July, but it still remained for officers to track the women down. Meanwhile, Cammie Green was busy pawning items stolen from her victims, pocketing some extra cash.

On December 6, she pawned Richard Mallorys camera and radar detector in Daytona, moving on to Ormond Beach with a box of tools stolen from Richard Spears. (She also left a thumb print behind in Ormond Beach, identical to that of Lori Grody.)

The next day, in Volusia County, Green pawned Walter Antonios ring, later identified by his fiancée and the jeweler who sized it. With mug shots and a list of names in hand, it was a relatively simple matter to trace Aileen Wuornos, though her root-less life style delayed the arrest for another month.

On January 9, 1991, she was seized at the Last Resort, a biker bar in Harbor Oaks, detained on outstanding warrants for Lori Grody while police finished building their murder case.

A day later Tyria Moore was traced to her sisters home in Pennsylvania, where she agreed to help police. Back in Florida, detectives arranged a series of telephone conversations between Moore and Wuornos, Tyria begging Aileen to confess for Moores sake, to spare her from prosecution as an accomplice.

One conversation led police to a storage warehouse Aileen had rented, a search revealing tools stolen from David Spears, the nightstick taken from Walter Antonio, another camera and electric razor belonging to Richard Mallory.

On January 16, 1991, Wuornos summoned detectives and confessed six killings, all allegedly performed in self-defense.

She denied killing Peter Siems, whose body was still missing, and likewise disclaimed any link to the murder of a John Doe victim shot to death with a .22-caliber weapon in Brooks County, Georgia, found in an advanced state of decay on May 5, 1990. (No charges were filed in that case.)

I shot em cause to me it was like a self-defending thing, she told police, because I felt if I didnt shoot em and didnt kill em, first of all ... if they had survived, my ass would be gettin in trouble for attempted murder, so Im up shits creek on that one anyway, and if I didnt kill em, you know, of course, I mean I had to kill em ... or its like retaliation, too. Its like, You bastards, you were going to hurt me. Within two weeks of her arrest, Aileen and her attorney had sold movie rights to her story.

At the same time, three top investigators on her case retained their own lawyer to field offers from Hollywood, cringing with embarrassment when their unseemly haste to profit on the case was publicly revealed.

In self-defense, the officers maintained that they were moved to sell their version of the case by pure intentions, planning to put the money in a victims fund. To a man, they denounced exposure of their scheme as the malicious work of brother officers, driven by their jealousy at being cut out of the deal.

A bizarre sideshow to the pending murder trial began in late January 1991, with the appearance of Arlene Pralle as Aileens chief advocate. A 44-year-old ranchers wife and born-again Christian, Pralle advised Wuornos in her first letter to prison that Jesus told me to write you.

Soon, they were having daily telephone conversations at Pralles expense, Arlene arranging interviews for Wuornos and herself, becoming a fixture on tabloid talk shows from coast to coast. In Pralles words, their relation-ship was a soul binding. Were like Jonathan and David in the Bible.

Its as though part of me is trapped in jail with her. We always know what the other is feeling and thinking. I just wish I was Houdini. I would get her out of there. If there was a way, I would do it, and we could go and be vagabonds forever. Instead, Pralle did the next best thing, legally adopting Wuornos as her daughter.

Aileens trial for the murder of Richard Mallory opened on January 13, 1992. Eleven days later, Wuornos took the stand as the only defense witness, repeating her tale of violent rape and beating at Mallorys hands, insisting that she shot him dead in self-defense, using her pistol only after he threatened her life.

With no hard evidence to support her claim, jurors rejected the story, deliberating a mere ninety minutes before they convicted Aileen of first-degree murder on January 27. Im innocent, she shouted when the verdict was announced. I was raped! I hope you get raped! Scumbags of America! The jury recommended death on January 29, and the following day Aileen was formally sentenced to die.

In April, she pled guilty to the murders of victims Burress, Humphreys, and Spears, with a second death sentence delivered on May 7, 1992. Around the same time, Aileen offered to show police where the corpse of Peter Siems was hidden, near Beaufort, South Carolina.

Authorities flew her to the Piedmont State, but nothing was found at the designated site, Daytona police insisting that Wuornos created the ruse to get a free vacation from jail. They speculate that Siems was dumped in a swamp near I-95, north of Jacksonville, but his body has never been found.

The Wuornos case took an ironic twist on November 10, 1992, with reporter Michele Gillens revelations on Dateline NBC. Thus far, Aileens defenders and Florida prosecutors alike had failed to unearth any criminal record for Richard Mallory that would substantiate Aileens claim of rape and assault.

In the official view, Mallory was clean, if somewhat paranoid and pussy-crazy. Gillen, though had no apparent difficulty finding out that Mallory had served ten years for a violent rape in another state, facts easily obtained by checking his name through the FBIs computer network.

The fascinating part about this, Gillen said, is here is a woman who for the past year has been screaming that she didnt get a fair trial and that everyone was rushing to make a TV movie about her--and in reality that comes true. (The first TV movie depicting Aileen aired on a rival network one week to the day after Gillens report.)

The Story of Aileen Wuornos

Aileen "Lee" Wuornos is on Death Row in Broward County, convicted of the murder of six men. Lee says all of the men raped or attempted to rape her.

We Believe Aileen Acted in Self-Defense

At the time of the killings, Lee was working as a highway prostitute. All of the men she killed were men who picked her up and who, she says, violently attacked her. Lee was picked up by many other men during this period and she did not harm them. Several men have testified that they spent days or weeks with her and she never threatened them.

They did say that she was worried that they would attack her. Prostitutes are much more likely to be raped than women in other jobs. One study of a group of prostitutes said that they had been raped an average of 33 times a year.

In the Seattle area, at least 65 prostitutes and strippers have been killed by the "Green River Murderer" who has never been caught. New York police recently arrested Joel Rifkin, who confessed to the murders of 17 prostitutes.

When they stopped Rifkin by chance, the cops were not even investigating the disappearances of these women. Very few murders of prostitutes are ever investigated or solved.

We Believe Lee Did Not Receive a Fair Trial

Lee has been tried only once--for the killing of Richard Mallory--but has been convicted of six murders. In her videotaped confession, which was the key evidence used by the prosecution in her trial, Lee said more than 60 times that she acted in self-defense. None of these references was included in the version of that tape which was shown to the jury.

The prosecution claimed that Mallory had no history of sexual violence. It was later revealed that Mallory had been convicted of attempted rape in Maryland, and had threatened to harm other women.

Evidence of these prior attacks was not presented at her trial. The jury was allowed to hear evidence of crimes Lee had not been convicted of.

We Believe Lee Was Inadequately Represented By Counsel

Her trial attorneys first failed to interview, and later failed to call, several witnesses who had volunteered information which corroborated Lee's testimony. Her trial attorneys delayed in researching evidence of Mallory's history of violence against women.

The judge then ruled it inadmissible because it was introduced too late. Private attorney Steven Glaser encouraged her to plead no contest to five murder charges, without securing a sentencing offer or informing her of all her options.

We Believe Officers Involved In Investigating The Case Behaved Unethically

There is evidence that Volusia County sheriff deputies negotiated contracts for book and movie deals about Lee's case before she was even arrested. Deputies arranged with Tyria Moore, Lee's former girlfriend, to set Lee up. Though Tyria was implicated in several of the killings, she was never charged.

Officer Brian Jarvis, initially the chief investigator on the case, was removed from the case when he questioned the conduct of his colleagues on the case. He later reported vandalism to his house, theft of his records on the case and threats against him and his family. We Believe Lee Is Not a Serial Killer

According to the prosecution, portraying Lee as a "serial killer" won them the death penalty. Lee does not fit the profile of a serial killer. No serial killer has ever claimed they killed in self-defense. Serial killers stalk their victims; they do not kill in moments of fear or passion.

We Believe Sexism, Anti-Lesbian and Anti-Prostitute Prejudice Were Used To Condemn Lee To Death

Prosecutors made repeated references to Lee's romantic relationships with women. 80% of women on death row in Florida are lesbians. Though Lee does not consider herself a lesbian, society's fear and hatred of lesbians was used against her.

People have trouble believing that a prostitute would need to kill six times in self-defense. Yet recently, a Los Angeles store owner killed five men in four different armed robbery attempts. This man was never charged with any crime.

Tens of thousands of women are in prison in the U.S. for killing men who abused them. A study by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence found that men who kill their wives or girlfriends serve an average of 2-6 years, while women who kill their male partners serve an average of 15 years.

Ted Bundy, who killed more than 30 women in Florida, had offers from several well-known private criminal attorneys to defend him pro bono.

At one time his defense team included five public defenders and a volunteer consultant on jury selection. Lee's supporters have been unable to find any such assistance for her; she has had to rely on overworked public defenders.

Demand Equal Justice for Aileen Wuornos

Write the Florida Supreme Court, 5th Judicial Circuit, 300 South Beach Street, Daytona Beach, FL 32114, and urge them to grant Aileen Wuornos a new trial. Write letters of support to Aileen Wuornos, A#150924 DR1, Broward County Correctional Institution, P.O. Box 8540, Pembroke Pines, FL 33024.