One of the more interesting facts about serial killer Aileen Wuornos was that, unlike the vast majority of female serial murderers, she had an MO that men such as David Berkowitz and Robert Hansen had preferred: the gun. Women who kill tend to do it with more, well, “feminine” methods, such as poison, that don’t have such an outward show of violence. Wuornos used a .22 caliber pistol and usually shot her victims at point-blank range.
Anyone reading the horrific résumé of Aileen Wuornos could have easily predicted that she was destined to murder someone someday. She was the carnal product of a teenage couple, and her father, a teenage pedophile in and out of mental hospitals, committed suicide. Her mother, Diane Pratt, could not stand the crying of Aileen and her brother, Keith, so one day in early 1960 she left them with her parents, Lauri and Britta Wuornos. Their stay with their grandparents was tumultuous: Keith and Aileen possibly had sex and the promiscuous Aileen gave birth to an illegitimate son at the ripe old age of fourteen on March 23, 1971. The following July their grandmother died and their grandfather immediately wanted both kids out of the house.
They became wards of the court, and Aileen started to work the streets as a teenage prostitute, serving time in prison for prostitution, theft, violence, and the assumption of false identities. Although she was young, anger was already boiling inside her. Once, in a bar in Troy, Michigan, a bartender angered her and she threw a cue ball at his head, an act that might have at least put him in the hospital and quite possibly killed him had she connected.
In 1976, Keith died of throat cancer, and she got a pleasant surprise: He had left her $10,000. Rather than use the money to help straighten out her life, she bought a new car—which she wrecked—and quickly spent the rest on bars, booze, and drugs. Around this time, she grew sick of the Michigan winters and looked south toward a warmer climate and headed for Florida.
Florida was a repeat of the beginning of her life, only more so. She was constantly stealing, serving time in jail, using aliases, and working the streets. However, in June 1986, Aileen met the great love of her life in a Daytona bar—the obese, nearly toothless lesbian Tyria Moore. They started living together and seemed devoted to each other long after the sexual passion of their relationship had cooled.
As the years went by, Aileen’s anger became even more out of control. She would not back down from a fight in any situation, and she did not take insults lightly. She started carrying a gun, and the rage, resentment, and terror inside of her started getting close to the surface. She told Tyria that she was just waiting for the chance to kill someone because of what people had done to her over the course of her life.
On November 30, 1989, the body of a fifty-one-year-old electrician from Palm Beach named Richard Mallory showed up in the woods northwest of Daytona Beach. He had been shot in the chest three times with a .22. After that, bodies of men were found in rapid succession: On June 1, 1990, the body of forty-three-year-old David Spears was found in a wooded area about forty miles north of Tampa. He had been shot six times with a .22. On June 6, the body of forty-year-old Charles Carskaddon was found; he had been shot nine times, also with a .22.
Cops noted the similarity in the killings but, as most police do, had not yet announced that there was a serial killer to avoid inciting panic. They did have one lead that summer: Peter Siems had been reported missing earlier in the year, and his wrecked car was found on July 4 in Orange Springs, Florida. Witnesses had seen two blonde women get out of the car, and when police investigated, they found a bloody palm print on the car’s trunk. They lifted it and kept it for future reference.
Soon, however, it became clear that Florida had a real problem on its hands. The body of Eugene Burress, age fifty, was found fully clothed in Ocala National Forest on August 4, 1990. He had been shot in the back and chest. A retired police chief from Alabama was discovered next, fifty-six-year-old Dick Humphreys. His body was found in an unfinished housing development on September 12; he had been shot seven times with a .22. And then the body of Walter Antonio, a sixty-year-old trucker, was found in the woods northwest of Cross City on November 19, 1990. Now the police could no longer suppress what was going on, and the story of the murdered men exploded in the media. The police said they were looking for two blonde women in connection with the case.
The police received calls identifying Tyria Moore and Lee Blahovec—one of Wuornos’s aliases—as the women they were looking for. The palm print confirmed that the blondes were involved.
Officers tracked both women down, but they were not with each other at the time—Wuornos was pawning tools and other items stolen from her victims, and Moore was at her sister’s house. The investigators had a proposition for Moore: They wanted her to get Wuornos to incriminate herself over the phone. With cops listening, Tyria begged Aileen to confess to the killings for her sake.
On June 16, 1991, Aileen confessed to six murders. She denied that she had killed Siems and a John Doe. This confession, plus the belongings of the men recovered from pawnshops and storage facilities where Aileen had sold or stashed them, was enough to convict. On January 27, 1992, Aileen Wuornos was convicted of murder, and on January 28, she was sentenced to death. Later, she was convicted of the other killings and received another death sentence.