The Postmodern Female Serial Killer
In a previous book, which focused primarily on the history of male serial murderers, I described Ted Bundy as our first postmodern serial killer because unlike “outsider” serial killers of the past, he was more like us—or at least like those of us who believe in a college education and the middle-class values and ambitions that go with it. Bundy was not one of those solitary, backwoods, cellar-dwelling creatures hanging corpses by the heels on hooks in the mudroom or some twitchy, glassy-eyed vagrant trolling for hitchhikers and runaways behind the wheel of a Dumpster car full of crumpled beer cans and dirty rags. Bundy had his own upscale apartment with drawers full of fine linen, glassware, and ski sweaters. He was attractive, charming, well-mannered, and appeared to be ambitious—the quintessential 1970s yuppie. But sometimes Ted would snatch young women from public places, beat them into unconsciousness, and take them away in his cute Volkswagen Beetle to some lonely dark place. Then he’d kill them and have sex with the corpses. He was the real American Psycho—a popular dinner guest and date, a handsome law student with political ties to the Republican Party in Washington State. Eventually he could have been a candidate for governor—maybe higher. His smile and hair were styled just right for that.
AILEEN WUORNOS
Aileen Wuornos was everything Ted Bundy was not, and that precisely makes her our postmodern female serial killer. While—until Ted Bundy came along—we thought male serial killers were creepy monsters, our perception of female serial killers was that they were lethal “ladies.” We saw them as respectable and sometimes attractive women who harbored homicidal intentions behind a façade of feminine mystique: arsenic and old lace, deadly damsels. They used their very beauty, charm, and genteel manners to lure victims into their homicidal webs ( just like Bundy) while maintaining their façade of wife, mother, nurse, babysitter, or widow. Aileen Wuornos would tear that stereotype down.
Between the male Ted Bundy and the female Aileen Wuornos our perceptions of gender differences in serial killers crisscrossed to opposite poles. Ted Bundy normalized the serial killer into one of us while Aileen Wuornos, randomly preying with a handgun on strangers in the night, unleashed the female serial killer from the cult of feminine domesticity. Aileen Wuornos thrived in the very territory where other women feared to go and where so many women were themselves killed—hitchhiking on darkened highways and turning tricks on roadsides. She was like no other female serial killer before her and she might be signaling the shape of things to come—the infinite possibilities of female serial emancipation with its dark burden and price to pay, an opposite predatory polar star to the traditional female as victim.
Just like Ted Bundy, after her apprehension, Aileen became a television courtroom celebrity, a documentary star, and an interview-of-the-week. Long before we heard of her, Aileen claimed that one day somebody would write a book about her and make a movie and she was right. Several books have been written, in fact, since her arrest. But books were just the beginning. Murder Trail, a four-part docudrama that looked at the Wuornos phenomenon and other criminals, was produced for the Discovery Channel and was only one in a string of film and television programs about her. Others included A&E’s American Justice and endless coverage on Court TV. Wuornos made more appearances on Sixty Minutes and Dateline than some presidential candidates. Then there was the 1992 made-for-TV movie Overkill: The Aileen Wuornos Story, starring Jean Smart of the television sitcom Designing Women, and two documentary features by director Nick Broomfield: Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer, followed by the sequel, Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer.
There are hundreds of websites devoted to Wuornos, which portray her alternately as victim, heroine, or fiend. Wuornos was even the subject of an opera in San Francisco by Carla Lucero, who explained, “I feel a strong yet reluctant connection to Aileen Wuornos. Her story embodies the darkness in every victim’s soul and the fleeting fantasies of every survivor…Aileen takes us into an abyss, leaving us to seek our own light. Maybe the light is in the knowledge that we chose another path; that we survived.”134
A year after Wuornos was executed, she achieved the ultimate cult status with a Hollywood movie, Monster, which won an Academy Award for Best Actress for Charlize Theron for her portrayal of Wuornos.
Aileen Wuornos As a Child
In life Aileen Wuornos was as far as one can be from the red carpet of Oscar night. She was born in 1956 and raised in Troy, Michigan, a forlorn suburb fifteen miles north of Detroit. Aileen’s mother, Diane, was 16 years old and already separated from the father, a 19-year-old delinquent named Leo Pittman, reportedly a cruel and abusive spouse. Diane believes she was severely beaten by Leo when she was several weeks pregnant with Aileen. In any case, Aileen never met her natural father—he would commit suicide while serving a life sentence for kidnapping and raping a 7-year-old girl. It happens that way with serial killers—sometimes and not infrequently, they are just born into bad blood.
Diane had already given birth to Aileen’s older brother, Keith, the year before. She was a single mother with two children, and she attempted to raise them but she did not do a very good job of it. Witnesses later recalled the two children crying and wailing for hours as Diane slept or just went away. One day when Aileen was six, Diane went out to dinner, leaving the children with her roommate. She never returned, and after a week the roommate called Diane’s parents, Lauri Wuornos, a Ford factory worker, and his wife, Britta, who came by and picked up their grandchildren.
There was a twisted psychopathology already in play between Diane and her parents. Diane claimed that her mother, Britta, was jealous of her because Lauri was sexually interested in her. Although she stated that her father never actually sexually abused her, he would frequently touch her accidentally and once attempted to passionately kiss her. Aileen would later claim that her grandfather Lauri abused her but never went as far as accusing him of sexual abuse, other than laughingly recounting one similar attempt to French kiss her.
When Aileen was two, Diane returned to reclaim her two children but shortly afterward abandoned them again with the babysitter. If early infant attachment theory has anything to do with mental disorder and psychopathy, then definitely Aileen Wuornos is a candidate. Britta and Lauri, who already had two older children of their own (in addition to Aileen’s mother, Diane), finally adopted Aileen and her brother as their own. Like Ted Bundy, who believed his grandfather was his father and his mother was his sister, Aileen believed that Britta and Lauri were her natural parents, and her aunt and uncle were her siblings. And like Ted Bundy, Aileen would be about 11 years old when she learned the truth from other kids about her actual family ties. But here end the similarities with Ted Bundy.
Photographs of schoolgirl Aileen Wuornos reveal a beautiful, fine-haired, blonde, freckled little girl with a beaming, open smile dressed in one those cheap synthetic dresses with a white frilly collar that all smartly dressed little girls wore in the early 1960s. There are family photos of Aileen at the age of 6, preciously seated in the center of her family on a footstool, while her brother, Keith, and her “stepbrother,” Barry, and “stepsister,” Lori, are lined up in a semicircle standing behind her—everyone smiling. There is Aileen on the deck of a small boat vacationing in the summer with her family at the age of 13, a gangly skinny ’tween with long legs in cutoff jeans all pretty and again smiling. And yet another picture of her on her bike—smiling. Aileen was always smiling in family photographs somebody was proud enough to take—memories apparently worth recording.135 But things were not as they seemed.
Neighbors recall that the Wuornos home was always dark and curtained, and nobody was ever invited in. Lauri was reportedly a despotic “stepfather,” disciplining Aileen with a leather belt, beating her on her naked buttocks and legs according to her own testimony. Moreover, Keith and Aileen were disciplined by Lauri and Britta by stricter standards than their natural children, particularly their youngest child, Aileen’s “stepsister,” Lori, who was only two and a half years older than Aileen. Later the accounts by Aileen of her “stepparents’” alcoholism and her abuse at their hands came into conflict with the recollections of her “stepsister” and “stepbrother,” who denied their own abuse and Aileen’s as well.
Parental abuse at such a young age is difficult to interpret. The line between physical and sexual abuse can sometimes be razor thin and memories are often repressed or modulated by children. In the early 1960s, being spanked or even hit with a belt, naked buttocks or not, was not unusual. This kind of punishment also modulated between ritualistic light slaps on the behind with a belt sufficient to frighten any child to actual brutal beatings with a belt—it all depended upon the particular parent. One parent’s spanking is another’s brutality. Yet Aileen appeared to be singled out for punishment. Lauri did not allow her to receive Christmas presents. Once, when she threw away a baked potato, which she could not finish, Lauri made her take it out of the garbage and eat it. He forced her to watch as he drowned a kitten she was not supposed to keep.
From an early age, Aileen showed a precocious talent for singing and dancing and said she wanted to be a movie star. She craved the center of attention. But about the age of eight, Aileen developed a hair-trigger temper, which isolated her from other children, who became afraid of her. Lori recalls that Aileen desperately attempted to fit in and that she counseled her several times to “be nice” and keep her temper and moodiness in check. It did not work. Lori attempted to include Aileen with her own playmates, but inevitably Aileen would whine and rage, alienating them. Lori was told by her playmates not to come back with Aileen. She didn’t. Some thirty years later, after Aileen was charged with seven murders, Lori would tearfully say, “I still cry that we rejected her when she was little. The time she wanted to play and we wouldn’t let her.”
Lori recalled that Aileen could be very nice, but it seemed somehow forced, as if she was deliberately tailoring her niceness because she knew that was the only way people would accept or tolerate her. But she would easily lose control and fly into rages. Lori felt sorry for her, but she was not going to sacrifice her own friendships and social life for Aileen. Lori recalled that later, when Aileen began to abuse drugs, her temper got worse and on several occasions when enraged she lunged at her or Keith with a knife, threatening to kill them.
At school until about the age of eight, Aileen was clever and received good marks. But from eight onward, with her developing behavioral problems, Aileen had no friends, received low grades, and had conflicts with her teachers. She was also diagnosed with vision and hearing problems. But Britta refused to have Aileen evaluated for these problems, insisting that she simply “did not pay attention.” Aileen’s verbal IQ was tested at a low 80, but despite her behavioral problems, she did not receive any counseling—probably as a result of Britta’s resistance. During her trial, one psychiatrist testified that there was a wide gap between Aileen’s verbal IQ and her functional IQ, which apparently was quite high. This gap could have resulted in the uncontrollable behavioral episodes. The psychiatrist described it as “sand in the fuel line” of an otherwise working engine. Her brain sputtered—would stop and start. Sometimes she was emotionally in control, at other times she’d be raging completely out of it.
Cigarette Pig
By the time Aileen was eleven there was something seriously wrong: She was having sex with neighborhood boys in the surrounding woods and ravines in exchange for spare change or cigarettes. This kind of sexualized behavior at so early an age almost inevitably suggests that Aileen had been sexually abused as a child. Although she would occasionally hint at it, in the end she denied it vehemently. If not that, then she might have desperately found sex a key to overcoming the rejection she suffered at the hands of her peers.
Numerous male witnesses later recalled losing their virginity to Aileen when they were 12 to 14 years old. They said it was joyless and mechanical, with Aileen saying very little during these encounters. Sometimes she participated in group sex with six or more boys. With these acts came denigration—she was nicknamed “Cigarette Pig” by the boys in the neighborhood and at school for her propensity to exchange sex for cigarettes. When she attempted to form an attachment to some of the boys she had sex with, she was brutally and publicly rejected.
This just underscores how deceptive the smile of the cute 13-year-old in the photographs might have really been.
It was the 1960s in a Detroit suburb. Aileen quickly fell into a world of available drugs and alcohol, as did many kids her age. She smoked weed and dropped LSD but eventually settled on tranquillizers and alcohol as her drugs of choice. She shoplifted, getting caught in the same K-Mart where Britta was employed. Britta quit in embarrassment. Aileen fought with Lauri and Britta and had sex with her brother, Keith.
When Aileen was fourteen she became pregnant. Wuornos gave different versions of how she became pregnant: In one version it was a family friend and in another it was an Elvis impersonator who kidnapped and raped her. Lauri was unsympathetic. On January 19, 1971, Lauri drove Aileen to Detroit and dumped her into the Florence Crittenton Home for unwed mothers. On March 24, Wuornos gave birth to a boy, whom Lauri insisted be given up for adoption without Wuornos being allowed to see him, despite her pleading. Aileen named the baby Keith in honor of her brother.
After returning home, Wuornos re-entered high school but did not last long there. She ran away from home several more times and got into minor trouble with the law. Eventually, Lauri told her not to return. She ended up bingeing on alcohol and drugs, hooking up with men she’d pick up hitchhiking, or sleeping in abandoned cars or in the woods near their home. Keith, likewise, had gotten into trouble and had left home.
Aileen was 15 years old when the only mother she had really known, Britta, died of cirrhosis of the liver. It came as a shock to most of the children—Britta had effectively concealed her alcoholism from them. Although Aileen had ambivalent feelings toward Britta, she nevertheless was the closest thing she had to a caring mother. When she was in the home for unwed mothers, Lauri had prohibited any visits or phone calls from home, but Britta wrote numerous letters to Aileen. Now she was dead.
Aileen’s stepsister, Lori, had to search her out among the abandoned cars on the outskirts of town to tell her of Britta’s death. When Aileen went to the funeral home she acted out, dressing inappropriately in jeans, frivolously switching signs between the men’s and ladies’ washrooms, and blowing cigarette smoke into Britta’s face as she lay in her coffin. Wuornos growled, “If I want to blow smoke in the old slob’s face, I will!” before she was ejected from the funeral home. With Britta’s death, her last connection with any caregiver of consequence had been severed.
Diane, Aileen’s natural mother, arrived shortly after the funeral of her mother and was shocked to find her children as hardened and homeless juveniles living on the street. Diane had given birth to two other children since abandoning Keith and Aileen and was raising them in Texas, again as a single mother on social assistance. She claims that social services authorities in Texas would not allow her to bring home an additional two children. “It sounds so cold…not being able to take your own children…but there’s only so much a person can do,” Diane says. Completely estranged, Lauri, 15-year-old Aileen, and her 16-year-old brother were cast adrift into their separate ways.
Back then, Aileen did not look anything like she did when she was arrested for murder. She was blond and very attractive in a cute kind of way. But she led a vagrant’s life, hitchhiking and hooking along Michigan’s roads, sleeping over with men she picked up along the way or prostituting herself from dingy motels, ever increasing her travel circle farther out to Ohio, then Pennsylvania, and eventually south to Georgia and Florida. She habitually stole from clients and from people who befriended her for short periods of time before her sudden rages would put them off.
Keith would pull himself out of drug and alcohol abuse to successfully pass his physical and join the Army in 1974, only to be diagnosed with cancer a month later. While he battled the cancer, the now widowed Lauri committed suicide in 1976 by running his car engine in a closed garage. Neither Aileen nor Keith went to the funeral. Aileen was nowhere to be found and had she been contacted it is unlikely she would have cared much about her hated stepfather/ grandfather’s death. Keith’s condition by this time was critical with the cancer having spread to his throat, brain, lungs, and bones.
Four months later, Keith died.
In the middle of all this, Aileen got married. One day while hitchhiking in Florida she was picked up by Lewis Gratz Fell, a wealthy retired 69-year-old blueblood Philadelphian. Fell wanted a beautiful young blonde on his arm and Aileen fit the bill. Aileen wanted a secure “sugar daddy” and Fell was exactly what she thought she needed. Fell gave Aileen a large diamond engagement ring and the marriage made the Daytona newspaper social pages along with a wedding photo of the strangely mismatched couple.
Aileen returned for a visit to Troy, proudly showing off her ring and new silver-haired husband, claiming she was blissfully happy. But within days the bride began to get drunk and hang out in her familiar lowlife bars, much to the annoyance of Fell. He quickly returned to Florida without her and filed a restraining order claiming that Aileen had beaten him with his cane. Shortly afterward, he filed for divorce.
Aileen reversed the story and claimed that it was she who was beaten but several witnesses had been told by Aileen that she became fed up with Fell when he doled out money to her “thirty dollars at a time.” She said she took his walking cane away from him and beat him. Altogether, the marriage lasted for a month.
Missing Years Adrift
For the next ten years, Aileen drifted across the U.S. living on the fringes of the highway system—hanging out at biker bars, hooking and stealing, occasionally dropping in on people she knew like her mother, Diane, in Texas and Lori, who was now married. The visits never lasted long and were always punctuated with Aileen’s raging outbursts.
Aileen had an ingratiating charm about her but it could turn dark and ugly on a dime. One can see it in her interviews in the Broomfield documentaries. Broomfield had developed a relationship with her over the duration of two films made in the years while she stood trial and then awaited her execution. As long as the interviews went her way, she was charming, sweet, and friendly with him, but anytime Broomfield strayed from the agenda her eyes would go cold and dark like a shark’s, her nostrils flaring. Hours away from her execution she angrily dismissed Broomfield from her sight forever when he failed to stick to a closely scripted scenario she had wanted to play out before his camera. Aileen was like one of those friendly and cuddly pit bulls that suddenly turns and lunges for your throat for no apparent reason other than something clicks in their brain.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Aileen Wuornos began to accrue a long list of criminal convictions, albeit under several different pseudonyms: assault and battery, armed robbery, theft, prohibited possession of a firearm, drunk and disorderly, and DUI. At some point she—either accidentally or in a botched suicide attempt—shot herself in the abdomen.
In Daytona in 1981 she finally settled into a comfortable, casual relationship with Jay Watts, a 52-year-old autoworker. She moved in with him and apparently they lived relatively happily together for two months. This, perhaps, was the first relationship that Aileen managed to sustain. But one night they argued, according to Watts over some matter so trivial that he could not even recall what it was. Watts testified that Aileen was always a boisterous, outgoing, friendly woman who was fun to be with, and he had never witnessed her legendary temper. That night was no exception—she seemed a little upset but she was not at all violent.
Aileen remembered it differently. She recalled that she had a lot on her mind that evening and had asked Watts if he’d mind giving her some privacy in the bedroom they shared. According to her, Watts took it the wrong way and said, “You can leave my room and the rest of the house for that matter!”
Waking up the next morning, Aileen was convinced that it was over between the two of them. Taking a six-pack of beer and driving off in a car that Watts had bought and restored for her, she drove down to the beach and got drunk. She then bought more beer and afterward purchased a .22 handgun at a pawnshop. She walked over to a K-Mart and bought some bullets, then to a liquor store where she bought some whisky and mixed it with Librium. She says she was contemplating suicide.
Then, dressed in her bikini, she stumbled into a convenience store, waving her gun as she attempted to rob it. According to her, she wanted to be arrested so that Watts would have to come to rescue her, pay her bail, and take her home. That would prove he still loved her.
Aileen was arrested without any trouble a few miles down the road. She was sentenced to three years in prison. Watts found a lawyer for her and visited her and they corresponded. Watts recalled that Aileen railed against lesbians in the prison, saying that she had to fight them off and that they disgusted her. Watts supported Aileen in prison for about a year before they finally drifted apart. Realizing that Watts was drifting away from her, Aileen placed a personal ad in a biker magazine and received several hundred replies.
Aileen was released in August 1983 and immediately hitched a ride to Washington, D.C., where she showed up at the door of one of her pen pals, Ed, a 47-year-old Maryland engineer. After telling him she was gay and that they would have to keep it platonic, she moved in with him for a tumultuous three months of nonstop drinking, raging, and fantasizing. During the three months she made several trips back and forth to Florida in Ed’s car, where she would stay with Jay Watts, stealing things from him on her departures.
Ed would later recall that Wuornos spun fantasies of stomping a biker who had attempted to rape her. She described and acted out how she turned the tables on him, getting him to the ground and kicking and stomping on his head. She would lose her temper at the most trivial provocation and sometimes with no provocation at all.
Aileen initiated sex with Ed once, who was surprised because she had told him she was gay. Aileen replied, “I was just joking! Let’s go find out how gay I am.” Five minutes after having sex, Aileen got up and returned brandishing a kitchen utensil, threatening to kill Ed. He managed to talk her down, but she was clearly wearing out her welcome.
Both Ed and Jay Watts recall that Aileen also had a fantasy about being like Bonnie and Clyde, admiring the bandits’ violent migratory careers. She was fascinated with outlaws and bikers and the violent subculture that enveloped them.
Ed eventually managed to get Aileen out of his apartment when she drank so much that she collapsed and had to be hospitalized. It was a relief to be free of his raging houseguest. Aileen drifted back toward Florida, sometimes hooking along the highways and sometimes stealing things from the cars of clients and people who might have given her a ride. Somewhere along the way she stole a handgun from a car glove compartment.
In the ensuing months, under various aliases, Wuornos built up a lengthy criminal record. She was arrested driving a stolen car. In another incident she tried to drive away from a license checkpoint and was pursued and stopped by police. A search of the vehicle uncovered the stolen handgun and a box of ammunition. Several months later she was again arrested with another handgun in her possession. She was arrested again for forging bad checks totaling $5,595 but she did not show up for sentencing. The only thing that kept Aileen out of prison was her uncanny luck in passing herself off under different aliases and fleeing.
Since her release from prison in 1983, Aileen began claiming to be a lesbian. In a telephone conversation with Lori in 1984, Aileen said, “I’m gay and I know you are not going to like that.” Around this time, Aileen had a brief and tumultuous relationship with a woman named Toni.
Tyria “Ty” Moore: Aileen Finds True Love
Sometime in June 1986, Aileen met Tyria “Ty” Moore in a gay bar in Daytona. Their relationship was vividly documented in the movie Monster, with Christina Ricci in the role of Ty (although her name would be changed in the movie). This would become the longest sustained relationship Aileen ever had—four and a half years—during which Aileen would come to commit her string of seven known serial murders. Ty was six years younger than the 31-year-old Aileen, who was now using a truncated version of her name: Lee. Ty and Lee became a couple. Ty was mesmerized by the boisterous, hustling, and motor-mouthed Lee, who dominated the younger woman.
Over the next four years the couple drifted from cheap motel rooms and small backroom apartments, mainly in the Daytona area but in other parts of Florida as well. Tyria would work as a chambermaid in the low-end motels that dotted the Florida highway system while Lee would remain in her room getting drunk. Whenever there was a shortage of money, Lee would hit the highways and hitchhike from exit to exit, turning tricks in between. Sometimes she made only $20 but other times she would come back with as much as $300.
Aileen was extremely jealous and possessive of Tyria, preferring that she not work at all and remain in her room while Lee turned tricks to sustain them. Some of the couple’s former landlords record that there were sometimes days when the two women would not come out of their rooms other than to purchase beer, cigarettes, and snacks. Housekeeping would remove mountains of empty beer cans and snack wrappers from their room.
Ty, who had no previous criminal record other than a breaking-and-entering charge when she attempted to recover her belongings from the apartment of an ex-lover, began to accrue minor charges and incidents: driving without headlights, disobeying a traffic sign. In July 1987, Ty was treated for scalp lacerations after an altercation in a bar. All minor things compared to Aileen’s record.
Lee and Ty lived a shadowy existence on the dark fringes of the Sunshine State. They plodded on foot in a freeway world of out-of-state cars rushing north and south. Lee and Ty inhabited a world of dingy, dirty little bars and stale, low-rent motel rooms and trailer parks, only needing to be within walking distance of a minimart with its supply of beer and cigarettes. It was a cash world where identities were rarely asked for—only that the rent be paid in advance. They were constantly on the move, either because of trouble with the law or because of eviction for noise as Lee and Ty fought frequently and loudly, or for failure to pay rent or damage to the premises.
While Lee kept mostly kept to herself and focused all her attention on Ty, with whom she was madly in love, Ty worked and circulated among other people. Sometimes Tyria invited her fellow workers home to the motel room she shared with Lee. Almost everyone had the same impression of Aileen—she was outwardly friendly but there was something darkly menacing and overcontrolling about her at the same time. She was scary.
In the autumn of 1989 Lee and Ty were living in a room at the Ocean Shores Motel in Ormond Beach, north of Daytona. Ty was working as a housekeeper in the nearby Casa Del Mar Hotel. On November 23, around the Thanksgiving holiday, Ty brought over a fellow employee, Sandy Russell, a pretty 29-year-old blonde, for a Thanksgiving meal of frozen turkey TV dinners. Russell would later recall that although Aileen was outwardly friendly, she did not partake of the meal she served and instead just sat there watching her eat. Later in the evening, Aileen was drunk and waved a handgun around, describing how she had shot herself in the stomach some years ago. Again, Aileen’s incipient menacing behavior overshadowed her overt attempt at maintaining a friendly demeanor toward the guest Ty had brought home.
The First Murder
On November 30, Aileen set out to make some money by hooking on the highways. She was no longer the cute blonde she was when she was twenty. Overweight and cranky, her face and teeth showed the years of neglect and drug and alcohol abuse. Aileen was rough trade, dressed in unflattering cutoff jean shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, which did little to disguise her flabby beer belly.
Numerous authors remark how Aileen’s overweight and rough look must have had a detrimental effect on her earning potential as a prostitute and perhaps that was the motive for her killing—desperate need for cash. Aileen was not a call girl, the kind of refined and pretty prostitute men hire for a “girlfriend experience.” She was a roadside ho and the rougher and more haggard she looked the more she attracted a specific clientele desiring some quick and dirty sex with an underclass female with whom they would never imagine being seen in the light of day. They were not looking for a girlfriend substitute; these men wanted a fix of degrading sex. Aileen was for them the roadside Cigarette Pig of her childhood, and no matter how rough and worn she looked she would have suffered no shortage of clients who wanted this kind of sex.
Tyria would later testify that Aileen returned early in the morning the next day smelling of alcohol and with a Cadillac she said she had “borrowed.” They had been looking at a small apartment nearby and were planning to move soon, having already packed some of their things in boxes. Lee told Ty that she had made a lot of money the night before and that they could move to the apartment that very day. After having moved their things, Aileen put a bike in the trunk and drove off to “return the car.”
That evening as Lee and Ty sat in their new apartment guzzling beer and watching TV, Lee suddenly said, “I killed a guy today.” Ty said nothing, glassily watching TV. Aileen continued to pour out details: She shot the man and hid his body in the woods, covering his remains with a carpet. The unfamiliar possessions and clothing that Ty saw Aileen bring to the apartment belonged to the victim. Lee attempted to show Ty a photograph of him, obviously taken from his wallet. Ty looked away. The car, Lee explained, was his and she had gotten rid of it this afternoon.
Ty did not pose a single question, not even why. She just continued watching the TV show like a docile cow. When asked later if Aileen ever told her why she had killed the man, Ty would reply that motive never came up in the conversation.
On December 6, using identification she stole from Ty’s former roommate, Lee pawned a camera and radar detector she had taken from the car for thirty dollars. As required by local law, her thumb was inked and a fingerprint pressed into the pawnshop’s receipt book next to her signature. The name was fake; the thumbprint was not. With the press of thumb, Aileen had crushed any possibility of getting away unidentified. The stolen identification would later bring police to the roommate, and from the roommate to Ty, then from Ty to Aileen and her thumbprint. That’s how eventually Aileen Wuornos would go down, but not for at least a year.
Police on a routine patrol found the abandoned car first, emptied and carefully wiped clean of fingerprints. A check of the VIN number and tags returned the name of 51-year-old Richard Mallory as the owner. In a small depression near the car police found a wallet with several expired credit cards and business cards. Also found half-buried were two plastic tumblers and a bag containing a half-empty bottle of vodka.
The driver’s seat was pulled more forward than a distance compatible with the height description of the owner. Ominously, there appeared to be a bloodstain on the backrest of the driver’s seat.
Mallory was found later, on December 13, approximately five miles away from the car. His body was discovered by several men scavenging for recyclable debris in a small clearing littered with garbage among palmettos. The body had been almost entirely hidden beneath a large scrap of carpeting. Mallory was lying facedown, fully clothed, his jeans zipped up fastened, and his belt buckled with the buckle slightly off-center. His front pockets were pulled out as if somebody had been searching through them. He was shot four times in the chest with copper-coated hollow-point .22 bullets. One of the bullets appeared to have entered his body while he was still seated in his car. His blood alcohol level was .05, in the lower limits of intoxication.
Mallory was the owner of an appliance repair shop and was known to frequent prostitutes. After her arrest, Aileen would claim that she had shot him because she “realized” he was going to rape her.
“The Psychic Abolition of Redemption”—Aileen’s Second Murder
Aileen killed for the second time six months later. The victim was 43-year-old David Spears, a large, soft-spoken man who was described as “everyone’s idea of a nice guy.” He was predictable, hardworking, honest, sweet, and responsible. In many ways he was the opposite of the first victim, Mallory. Spears had three children and although he was divorced from his wife of twenty years, they had continued in a relationship for the last six years and were considering remarrying. David had already bought a new engagement ring. His wife and children lived about a hundred miles away near Orlando, and it was Spears’s routine to spend every weekend staying at their house. On Saturday morning, May 19, 1990, he was on his way in his pickup truck for one of those weekend stays. This one was special, too, because one of his daughters was celebrating her twenty-third birthday and college graduation. He was carrying a large sum of cash as a graduation present for his daughter and was due to arrive at around 2:00 p.m. He never showed up and did not call—very unlike him.
David Spears’s badly decomposing naked body was found on June 1, in a clearing amidst pine trees and palmettos south of Chassahowitzka off route US 19, about 80 miles beyond his planned destination. The corpse was so badly decomposed and gnawed at by animals that at first it could not be determined if it was a man or a woman. The autopsy found at least nine bullet wounds and recovered six .22 slugs. At least one or two bullets had been fired into Spears’s back, while the rest were fired into his torso and abdomen from the front.
Spears’s pickup truck had already been found earlier, looted and abandoned. Police found blood on the driver’s side inner running board and an empty condom package.
According to Aileen’s confession after her arrest, Spears had picked her up hitchhiking near where route 27 intersects with I-4—approximately thirty minutes away from where his wife and children lived and were waiting for him to celebrate. She claimed that without phoning his wife and offering some excuse, the reliable and predictable Spears drove some eighty miles beyond his destination to the Homosassa area where he pulled off the road into a deserted area to have sex with Aileen, at around one or two in the morning—nearly nine hours after he was due to meet his family.
Wuornos claimed they drank a lot of beer, both got naked, and were “screwing around” when Spears invited her into the back of the pickup truck. There Wuornos says she saw a lead pipe just as Spears got violent with her. Wuornos said she leapt from the back and ran to the passenger door, retrieved her bag, and shot Spears as he stood by the opened tailgate of the truck. Wounded, Spears made a desperate dash back to the driver’s side and attempted to get in to presumably drive away. Wuornos stated that she then shot him across the cab from the passenger side, shouting, “What the hell you think you’re doin’, dude…I’m gonna kill you, ’cause you were trying to do whatever you could with me!”
Spears staggered back away from the truck, whereby Wuornos slid over to the driver’s side and fired a third shot that brought him down to the ground. She did not recall firing at least another four shots into his chest and two in his back. Before she drove off in his truck, she stole about $500 to $700, which she found in his clothes and hidden in the vehicle. She then drove home, unloaded some of the tools she thought she could sell from the back of the truck, and then dumped the pickup by a remote roadside. Ty, who was working the day shift that day, recalled Aileen coming by with a “borrowed” pickup truck but she did not ride in it.
The geography of the murder site, the time line, and Spears’s reliably consistent commitment to his family suggests that it is unlikely that thirty minutes before arriving at his appointment with them he would have suddenly changed his mind and spent the next nine hours hanging out with a roadside hooker some eighty miles beyond his original destination. At least not without calling.
Ian Brady, the Moors Murders serial killer, the accomplice of Myra Hindley whose story is told further on, wrote that it is the second murder that is the most important in the evolution of the serial killer. The first murder leaves the killer in a state of confused shock. According to Brady, the killer is
…too immersed in the psychological and legal challenges of the initial homicide, not to mention immediate logistics—the physical labour that the killing and disposal involve. He is therefore not in a condition to form a detached appreciation of the traumatic complexities bombarding his sense.
…The second killing will hold all the same disadvantages, distracting elements of the first, but to a lesser degree. This allows a more objective assimilation of the experience. It also fosters an expanding sense of omnipotence, a wide-angle view of the metaphysical chessboard.
In many cases, the element of elevated aestheticism in the second murder will exert a more formative impression than the first and probably of any in the future. It not only represents the rite of confirmation, a revelational leap of lack of faith in humanity, but also the onset of addiction to hedonistic nihilism.
The psychic abolition of redemption.136
Serial Murder
There were six months between Aileen’s first and second murders. She did not wait that long to commit her third. She was now transformed into a monstrous killing machine. About two weeks later, somewhere near Tampa, Wuornos encountered 40-year-old Charles Carskaddon, a laborer on his way to Florida to pick up his fiancée and drive back with her to Missouri where he had just landed a job as a punch press operator. Aileen shot him dead in the backseat of his Cadillac. According to her testimony, she then searched the car and discovered a .45 handgun. Obviously he was planning to kill her, Aileen explained. She became so enraged after finding the gun, she says, that she reloaded her nine-shot .22 revolver and pumped several more shots into Carskaddon.
As before, Wuornos took her trophy car and loot home to Ty. They target practiced together with Carskaddon’s .45. The car was kept for about two days before being abandoned.
Seven days later in a coffee shop near I-95 not far from Bunnell, Wuornos met Peter Siems, a 65-year-old preacher traveling in a Sunbird full of Bibles on his way to join a Christ Is the Answer Crusade caravan. She ended up in his car. According to Wuornos they stripped naked and were going to have sex on a blanket on the ground but then she realized that he was planning to rape her. She shot him dead, abandoned his body, and again looted his car and drove it home. Siems’s body has never been found.
Ty remembered a Bible suddenly appearing in their room. This time, Aileen kept the car. She parked it behind the motel they were staying at. When Ty asked about it, Lee told her she had borrowed it but there was a problem returning it.
A month later, Aileen still had the car, chauffeuring Tyria around in it. On July 4, Lee and Ty took the car out for a holiday joyride. They kept stopping along the way and buying beer. It was not unusual for Ty and Aileen to put away up to three cases of beer in one day. Aileen was so drunk that she could not drive any longer. She asked Ty to drive, even though she was as drunk as Aileen. Ty ended up losing control and they crashed the car in a ditch near some houses.
As people came out to help, Aileen and Ty ran away, but not before they were seen. When police recovered the vehicle, they found it was registered in the name of Siems, who had been reported missing by his family. Careful descriptions of the two women seen escaping were taken and sketches were produced based on the witness recollections. A handprint belonging to Wuornos was lifted from the abandoned vehicle.
Interestingly enough, police had already suspected that a female offender might be behind some of these murders, although because of different jurisdictions, the murders were not yet linked together. In the case of Mallory, police suspected that one of the hooker-strippers he had recently hired might be behind his death, while in the case of Spears, the possibility that his ex-wife might somehow be involved crossed their investigative minds. The pattern of the shooting—shots to the torso—was to police indicative of a female shooter. Even when shooting themselves, women rarely aimed at the head, preferring instead a shot to the heart or other parts of the torso, according to police.
Next, 50-year-old Eugene “Troy” Burress, a route driver for a sausage company failed to come home on July 30 nor did he return his delivery truck to the company. The truck was found the next day along his route. Troy would be found on August 4 lying facedown off a small dirt road, shot twice. According to Aileen, he had picked her up along the road, they had agreed to have sex, but instead Troy had thrown a ten-dollar bill at her and said he was going to rape her. She shot him once in the chest. As he lay dying on the ground, she put another shot into his back. Eugene Burress was a married man with children and grandchildren with no history of erratic behavior or vices. His family was devastated by his murder and put a reward out for any information leading to the arrest of the culprit.
On September 11, Aileen murdered her sixth victim, Dick Humphreys, a former Alabama police officer and chief and now employed as a child abuse investigator. When he failed to return home one night without calling, his wife began desperately calling his work and former police partners. The next day some kids bicycling in deserted terrain behind housing developments found Humphreys in a field by a road, slumped over in almost a sitting position. He was fully dressed but his pockets had been turned inside out. He was still wearing his watch and wedding ring. He had been shot seven times. One of the shots was to the back of his head. On his right side there was a small bruise consistent with a mark made by a barrel of a gun being forced hard against his side. A toxicology report showed no traces of marijuana or alcohol in his system. Again, Humphreys had no known kinky history and left behind an adoring and grieving family.
On November 17, 1990, around the Thanksgiving holiday, Aileen murdered 60-year-old Walter Jeno Antonio, a trucker, security guard, and member of the reserve police. According to Aileen, she was picked up by him while hitchhiking and he agreed to “help her make some money” by having sex in the backseat of his car. But when she undressed, Aileen claimed that Antonio flashed a police ID and told her he would arrest her unless she had sex with him for free. They got out of the car and began to argue. When Antonio went to her side of the vehicle, Aileen said she drew her .22 handgun. They struggled but Aileen prevailed, and as Antonio ran for his life she shot him in the back. She shot him three more times, once execution-style to the back of the head the same way she had shot Dick Humphreys. She took a gold and diamond ring from Antonio’s finger, a present from his fiancée, whom he was to shortly marry.
Downfall and Arrest
Aileen’s mistake was to kill four of her victims in the same county—the pattern of .22-caliber shootings of middle-aged and elderly men dumped by roadsides was too obvious to ignore. Eventually, similar murders in the other counties also hit the radar screen. With the description of two women running from Peter Siems’s car and the palm print left behind, police traced Wuornos to one of the aliases she was using—the one when she was arrested for possession of a .22 by coincidence. The thumbprint she left behind when she pawned Mallory’s camera and radar detector would lead to Aileen and Ty through the identification presented to the pawnshop, which had been stolen from Ty’s roommate. For the longest time, police thought that Aileen and Ty were a team and separate task forces searched for both women.
In the autumn of 1990, things between Ty and Lee were not going well. When police issued a public announcement about their search for two female serial killer suspects, along with a sketch of their faces, Ty finally broke up with Aileen and flew back home to Ohio. Tyria knew about some of the murders—at least three. She had ridden in the cars that Lee brought back and she had seen the loot.
Aileen Wuornos was finally spotted on January 8, 1991, and put under surveillance. When Aileen crashed a huge drunken all-night party at The Last Resort, a biker bar in Daytona, police, fearing that they would lose her in the rowdy crowd, decided to arrest her in the early morning hours. Aileen was actually so burnt out that she had fallen asleep in a corner of the bar—her last sleep in freedom. A plaque put up by the owners would later mark the spot.
A separate team working in Ohio had already tracked down Ty in Scranton, Pennsylvania, staying with some relatives. They picked her up.
Lovers’ Betrayal
After her and Lee’s apprehension, Tyria Moore would make a series of incriminating phone calls to Lee in jail while police recorded the conversations. Ty was promised immunity if she could prove that she was not present at the murders and assisted police in convicting Aileen. With police prompting her, Tyria began spinning a web over the phone that would entrap Aileen.
WUORNOS: Hey, Ty?
MOORE: Yeah.
WUORNOS: What are you doin’?
MOORE: Nothin’. What the hell are you doin’?
WUORNOS: Nothing. I’m sitting here in jail.
MOORE: Yeah, that’s what I heard.
WUORNOS: How…what are you doin’ down here?
MOORE: I came down to see what the hell’s happenin’.
WUORNOS: Everything’s copasetic. I’m in here for a…a…vi…uh…con…carryin’ concealed weapon back in ’86…and a traffic ticket.
MOORE: Really?
WUORNOS: Uh huh.
MOORE: ’Cause there’s been officials up at my parents’ house askin’ some questions.
WUORNOS: Uh oh.
MOORE: And I’m gettin’ scared.
WUORNOS: Hmmm. Well, you know, I don’t think there should be anything to worry about.
MOORE: Well, I’m pretty damn worried.
WUORNOS: I’m not gonna let you get in trouble.
MOORE: That’s good.
WUORNOS: But I tell you what. I would die for you.
The phone calls continued in this vein for several days, with Tyria weeping over the phone that she was scared she would be charged as an accessory to the murders.
WUORNOS: I…listen, you didn’t do anything and I’m…I will definitely let them know that, okay?
MOORE: You evidently don’t love me anymore. You don’t trust me or anything. I mean, you’re gonna let me get in trouble for somethin’ I didn’t do.
WUORNOS: Tyria, I said, I’m NOT. Listen. Quit cryin’ and listen.
MOORE: I can’t help it. I’m scared shitless.
WUORNOS: I love you. I really do. I love you a lot.
MOORE: I don’t know whether I should keep on livin’ or if I should…
WUORNOS: I’m not gonna let you go to jail. Listen, if I have to confess, I will.
MOORE: Lee, why in the hell did you do this?
WUORNOS: I don’t know. Listen, did you come down here to talk to some detectives?
MOORE: No. I came down here by myself. Just why in the hell did you do it?
WUORNOS: Ty, listen to me. I don’t know what to say, but all I can say is self-defense. Don’t worry. They’ll find out it was a solo person, and I’ll just tell them that, okay?
The hint of Aileen’s defense was cropping up in the conversation—“self-defense.” No doubt that to some extent Aileen was convinced—not in a delusional kind of way but more as a rationalization—that defending herself is what she was doing when she killed those seven victims. But there were lots of other things mixed into it:
WUORNOS: I probably won’t live long, but I don’t care. Hey, by the way, I’m gonna go down in history.
MOORE: What a way to go down in history.
WUORNOS: No, I’m just sayin’…if I ever write a book, I’m gonna have…give you the money. I don’t know. I just…let me tell you why I did it, alright?
MOORE: Mmm.
WUORNOS: Because I’m so…so fuckin’ in love with you, that I was so worried about us not havin’ an apartment and shit, I was scared that we were gonna lose our place, believin’ that we wouldn’t be together. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s the truth.
And there it probably is. Why Aileen Wuornos killed then and not earlier. The sense one gets of Aileen and Tyria is that Aileen was the husband and Tyria the wife who craved security. In fact, Aileen referred to Tyria as her “wife.” But it was Ty who would take on miserable little jobs to guarantee a minimum flow of income while nagging Aileen about her freelancing lifestyle. The constant moves and evictions, the poverty and insecurity tore at Tyria and threatened their relationship—threatened Aileen’s status as the “husband”—threatened the only long-term intimate relationship Aileen had ever managed to form in her entire life, the only loving family she felt she had. It is a Greek tragedy of epic proportions: After taking a life of abuse and rejection, it was only when Aileen finally found a loving partner that she became a killing monster.
Aileen killed in rage for love and in the end that same love would betray and kill her. Aileen confessed her way into a death sentence to save Tyria.
“I Killed ’Em All Because They Got Violent with Me and I Decided to Defend Myself.”
On January 16, about a week after her arrest and after her conversations with Tyria, Aileen made a videotaped confession. Her first murder, the killing of Richard Mallory, became the crucial one in the series for several reasons. First, Wuornos would be tried separately for each murder and this would be the first case to go before a jury. And second, this would be the crucial testing of her claim of self-defense.
After a long introductory statement explaining that she was alone in committing the killings, and that Tyria was in no way involved or knew the details of her crimes, Aileen made a rambling three-hour-long confession.
She recounted that on the evening of November 30, 1989, she was hitching on the highway between Tampa and Daytona after a busy day of turning tricks. Richard Mallory pulled over and offered her a ride to Daytona where he was going to see a woman with whom he had an on-and-off relationship.
According to Aileen, it started off as a pleasant drive across the state. They conversed pleasantly as Mallory smoked marijuana and drank vodka. She turned down his offer of the marijuana but accepted a mixed drink of orange juice and vodka. Along the way they pulled over at a convenience store and Mallory bought Aileen her drink of choice: a six-pack of beer. They arrived outside of Daytona around midnight, but instead of dropping Aileen off and heading to his destination, Mallory and Aileen pulled over to an isolated area away from the road and continued talking and drinking. At some point Aileen said she had told Mallory that she was a prostitute and asked if he wanted to “help her make some money.” After quickly negotiating a price, Mallory agreed.
It was around 5:00 a.m., Wuornos said, when Mallory initiated sex. She took her clothes off and they hugged and kissed a little. But when Aileen suggested that Mallory take his clothes off, he refused, saying that he’d just unzip his pants. That is entirely conceivable. People who knew Mallory reported that he was somewhat paranoid and cautious. In the last three years he had changed his door locks eight times and was convinced that somebody was following him. Moreover, smoking weed can heighten a sense of paranoia.
The evening had gone pleasantly so far, but between Mallory’s paranoia and Aileen’s hair-trigger rages, something suddenly went very wrong. According to Wuornos, Mallory’s refusal to get undressed was proof that he intended to rape her. She opened the door and stood outside the car naked. Aileen confessed that she bent down into the car to get her bag off the floor in which she had a .22 handgun. Mallory was still seated behind the wheel of his car. Aileen recounted that as she picked up her bag, Mallory turned in his seat and grabbed at it, which further confirmed for her his intention to rape her.
Aileen said that she wrenched the bag free of Mallory’s grip, drew her handgun, and shot him once through the chest as he still sat in the driver’s seat. According to Aileen she shouted, “You sonofabitch! I knew you were going to rape me.”
Mallory staggered out of the car, attempting to run away. Aileen stated that she then ran around the front of the car to where he was stumbling away and said, “If you don’t stop, man, right now, I’ll keep shooting.” She then fired a second shot, which brought Mallory down to the ground. Hovering over Mallory now collapsed on the ground, she squeezed off two more shots into his chest.
One of the bullets had passed through Mallory’s lung and punched a hole through his chest cavity, causing massive internal bleeding. Mallory apparently lived another ten to twenty minutes before succumbing to the wound. Aileen stood by as he died.
Aileen stated in her confession:
So, I said, “Well, since I’ve been talkin’ to you all night long, I think you seem like a pretty nice guy, you know, so okay, let’s…let’s go have fun. So I started to lay down and he was gonna, you know, unzip his pants. And I said, “Why don’t you take your clothes off?” My God, you know, I said, “Well, it will hurt to do it like that.” Then he got pissed, callin’ me. He said, “Fuck you, baby, I’m gonna screw you right here and now”…something like that.
…And I said, “No, no, you’re not gonna just fuck me. You gotta pay me.” And he said, “Oh, bullshit.” And that’s when he got pissed. Now I’m coming back to recollection. Okay, so then we started fightin’ and everything else and I jumped out. He grabbed my bag and I grabbed my bag and the arm busted and I got the bag again and I pulled it out of his hand and that’s when I grabbed the pistol out. And when I grabbed the pistol out, I just shot ’im in the front seat.
…And then when I shot him the first time, he just backed away. And I thought…I thought to myself, Well, hell, should I, you know, try to help this guy or should I just kill him. So I didn’t know what to do, so I figured, well, if I help the guy and he lives, he’s gonna tell on me and I’m gonna get it for attempted murder, all this jazz. And I thought, Well, the best thing to do is just keep shootin’ him. Then I’d get to the point that I thought, Well, I shot him. The stupid bastard woulda killed me so I kept shootin’. You know. In other words, I shot him and then I said to myself, Damn, you know, if I didn’t…sh…shoot him, he woulda shot me because he woulda beat the shit outta me, maybe I would have been unconscious. He woulda found my gun goin’ through my stuff, and shot me. Cause he probably woulda gone to get for tryin’ to rape me, see? So I shot him and then I thought to myself, Well, hell, I might as well just keep on shootin’ ’im. Because I gotta kill the guy ’cause he’s goin’ to…he’s gonna…you know, go and tell somebody if he lives, or whatever. Then I thought to myself, Well, this dir…this dirty bastard deserves to die anyway because of what he was tryin’ to do to me.
So those three things went in my mind for every guy I shot…I have to say it, that I killed ’em all because they got violent with me and I decided to defend myself. I wasn’t gonna let ’em beat the shit outta me or kill me, either. I’m sure if after the fightin’ they found I had a weapon, they would’ve shot me. So I just shot them.137
After waiting for Mallory to die, Aileen went through his pockets taking his money and identification and then dragging his corpse away and covering it with a scrap of carpeting and some cardboard. Still naked, she drove Mallory’s Cadillac away from the scene to another isolated spot nearby. She then dressed and finished her remaining beer. She kept what she thought was valuable and the rest of the items, like Mallory’s extra clothing, she flung into woods along the way and into a Dumpster. As the sun rose, she drove back to the motel where Ty was still asleep.
Explaining Aileen Wuornos
Years later when Aileen was waiting on death row, she would say, “It took me seventeen years to finally kill somebody…to have the heart to do it…a rapist or anybody. But I finally got really stone-cold and said, you know, enough is enough.”
There is a certain melancholy logic in Aileen’s confession—a meeting of Mallory’s paranoia with Aileen’s own long-standing rage. There is a string of accounts going back to her childhood of how Aileen’s mood would suddenly shift from friendly to menacing. Although Aileen had not hurt anyone seriously for many years, she had scared a legion of people with her sudden rages—from her own stepsister to friends, lovers, and casual acquaintances. It was only a matter of time before she hurt somebody.
Once she killed, however, she crossed into a whole new cathartic territory—she was in a sense reborn as a monster. However voluntarily she pursued murder in her life, Aileen nonetheless had been used and abused sexually since the age of eleven—that is an indisputable fact. Whatever violent fantasies she might have kept in check during her rages were finally unleashed into reality and there was no going back. She had become a killer and one more or less murder would never change that. Whatever had restrained her from taking life until that point was rendered meaningless.
The morning of the first murder, she made no mention of the attempted rape to Ty when she returned to their motel room nor did Aileen have any marks or bruises on her according to Ty. In fact, Aileen on no occasion ever told Tyria that she had been raped or assaulted when she was roadside hooking. It was only thirteen months later, when she was confessing to police, that she first claimed she shot Mallory because she became afraid he intended to rape her.
In their psychological analysis of Wuornos, Stacey Shipley and Bruce Arrigo argue that she is a perfect case study of attachment disorder–triggered psychopathy. Her rages, parasitical behavior, inability to form attachments, and grandiose narcissisms rise like monsters in the night from her dysfunctional childhood. These behavioral traits lead to further alienation from her peers and abuse, which further deepened and amplified her behavioral disorders. Her sexual behavior as a child exposed her to even more victimization. By the time Aileen was in her midteens she had been thoroughly abused, used, and conceivably raped numerous times—a Cigarette Pig from the age of eleven. The fact that Aileen Wuornos did not kill anyone until she was in her thirties is somewhat of a miracle, actually, and might even argue for some sort of deep inner spark of goodness in the woman.
As Shipley and Arrigo argue:
She was socialized to modulate her own emotions through detachment and to control her environment through aggression and violence. In spite of the abuse she endured, Aileen learned to identify with the aggressor. The world was made of two kinds of people: victims and offenders. She chose the latter category. Her rigid internal working model of herself and the world she inhabited did not allow for anything in between. She no longer would be the victim.138
Deborah Schurman-Kauflin writes about the female multiple murderers she surveyed:
Within their lives, they had felt powerless against a parade of horrible events, and in order for them to restore a sense of balance (at least in their minds), they used the murders of other people like many people use a cigarette…They crave it because it calms them down, for within it, though they know it is bad for them, it serves as an immediate source of pleasure. And to the female multiple murderer, controlling another human being to death serves the same purpose. They are seeking a calm in their lives that they will never have, and deep down, they truly know it will never “fix” their lives.139
We will never really know what happened with Richard Mallory. Did he actually attempt to rape Aileen? Many will, of course, say yes, that even if she had agreed to have sex with him, was naked, and then suddenly refused at the last moment even for a reason as trivial as that he did not want to take his pants off, it was rape. No means no.
Others might say that even if that is rape, it is not the kind of rape that would justify killing. Mallory was not making an unexpected unilateral sexual advance. They had agreed to have sex. The issue was not whether they were going to have sex, but how—whether Mallory was going to take his pants off or just unzip.
Aileen’s Defense—“I Thought I Gotta Fight or I’m Going to Die.”
None of this would be an issue, however, by the time Aileen went to trial for the murder of Richard Mallory a year later. Her defense had changed radically as did her account of her encounter with Mallory.
According to her courtroom testimony on January 25, 1992:
I told him I wouldn’t have sex with him. “Yes, you are, bitch. You’re going to do everything I tell you. If you don’t, I’m going to kill you and have sex with you after you’re dead just like the other sluts. It doesn’t matter, your body will still be warm.” He tied my wrists to the steering wheel, and screwed me in the ass. Afterwards, he got a Visine bottle filled with rubbing alcohol out of the trunk. He said the Visine bottle was one of my surprises. He emptied it into my rectum. It really hurt bad because he tore me up a lot. He got dressed, got a radio, sat on the hood for what seemed like an hour. I was really pissed. I was yelling at him, and struggling to get my hands free.
Finally, he untied me from the steering wheel and put the rope around my neck. He’s still saying all kinds of jazz about what he wants to do to me. He told me to turn toward him, lie down, and spread my legs. And I guess he’s going to zipper fuck me. He had his clothes on. He was holding the cord around my neck like reins. I thought, I gotta fight or I’m going to die.
I jumped up real fast, and spit in his face. And he said, “You’re dead, bitch. You’re dead.”
I grabbed my bag and whipped my pistol out toward him, and he was coming toward me with his right arm, and I shot immediately. I shot at him. He started coming at me again. I shot. He stopped. I kind of pushed him away from me. He kind of sat up on the driver’s seat. I hurriedly opened the passenger door, ran around the driver’s side, opened the door real fast, looked at him and he started to come out. And I said, “Don’t come near me, I’ll shoot you again,” or something like that. “Don’t make me have to shoot you again,” something like that. He just started coming at me and I shot him…He fell to the ground.
Despite efforts by the defense to exclude from the evidence Aileen’s videotaped confession from the previous year, which was radically different from her claim now, the jury got to see the evolution of Aileen’s defense from having shot Mallory because he did not want to take his pants off after her agreeing to have paid sex with him to now his outright anal rape of her after tying her hands and threatening to kill her. Moreover, it wasn’t just Mallory—all seven of Aileen’s victims were nothing but rapists she had shot in self-defense. Not only was Aileen defending herself, but they deserved to die. This was a particularly reprehensible defense because it instantly reduced all of the victims to the lowest denominator of rapist and raised Aileen to the height of victimhood.
“Everywoman’s Most Forbidden Fantasy”: Feminist Martians to Aileen’s Defense
The case of Aileen Wuornos and her “self-defense from rape” claim attracted a radical fringe of feminists like flies to a turd and there was no bigger fly than Phyllis Chesler, a professor of women’s studies and psychology at City University of New York (College of Staten Island), an author and an “expert witness” on battered women who kill their male aggressors. As one reviewer of Chesler’s ideas states, “This isn’t feminism for cowards.”140 Indeed it isn’t.
Chesler offered herself to Aileen’s attorney as an “expert witness” in the phenomena of female-perpetrated murder in self-defense against rape and lobbied the media on behalf of Wuornos, writing an opinion piece for the New York Times entitled “A Double Standard for Murder?”141
When Chesler was smartly turned away by Aileen’s lawyers, she bulled ahead anyway and made contact directly with Wuornos, eventually meeting with her and bolstering her assertions with the assurance that she is the victim and that her righteous self-defense against rape has led to her being falsely accused of being a serial killer by the phallocentric heteropatriarchal oppressors of all women.
Chesler published an account of her role in the case in her book Notes of an Expert Witness.142 Chesler tells us that as soon as she had heard, even before Aileen was identified and arrested, that Florida police were seeking two women suspects in a series of highway murders, she thought the story…
…sounded diabolically whimsical as Orson Welles’s 1938 broadcast on the Martian invasion. What was Everywoman’s most forbidden fantasy and Everyman’s worst nightmare doing on television? Was this some kind of joke? Perhaps these women were feminist Martians on a mission to avenge the Green River killings or the Montreal massacre.* If not, did female serial killers really exist on earth?143
According to Chesler, women could not be serial killers because, “Serial killers are mainly white male drifters, obsessed with pornography and woman-hatred, who were themselves paternally abused children.”144 (Emphasis in the original.)
This, of course, is nonsense. Most serial killers are not drifters (only 35 percent are migratory) and many male serial killers were maternally abused, the single greatest contribution to their hatred of women. For example, Edmund Kemper, who would eventually kill eight women, including his mother, was disciplined by her at the age of eight by being forced to sleep in a dark cellar for eight months, his only exit a trap door in the floor on which she would stand a kitchen table.145 Henry Lee Lucas’s prostitute mother, Viola, would insist that both Henry and his legless invalid father watch her having sex with her customers. If they refused, she would beat them with a club. The only thing Lucas loved in his childhood was a pet mule, but when his mother found out about his affection for it, she forced him to watch as she shot it dead. She then beat Lucas for how much it was going to cost to haul the dead animal away.146 Ottis Toole, who would partner with Lucas and who is suspected to have murdered and decapitated Adam Walsh, the son of John Walsh, the host of America’s Most Wanted, was dressed as a girl in petticoats and lace by his mother. Eddie Cole, who murdered thirteen victims, was dressed as “Mamma’s little girl” by his mother and forced to serve drinks to her guests and lovers. At least seven serial killers when they were boys, including Charles Manson, are known to have been tormented by their mothers by being dressed as girls. When Jerry Brudos’s mom discovered nocturnal seminal stains on his bedsheets, she forced him to wash them by hand and sleep without sheets while they dried on the line for the neighbors to see. Brudos was forced to live in a garden shed, when his mother decided that her favorite older son needed a room all for himself. Joseph Kallinger’s mother refused to allow her adopted son to play outside, flogged him with a whip, beat him with a hammer, threatened to cut off his genitals if she caught him having erections, and selected his wife for him. In every serial killer’s life, Mom is always there with him.
Chesler proclaims that, “99 percent of mass, sexual, and serial murder” is committed by men.147 I don’t know about mass and sexual murder, but according to the most extensive study on serial homicide in the U.S. between 1800–1995, 83–85 percent of victims had been killed by male serial killers only.148 That means women are complicit in 15–17 percent of all serial homicides—nearly every sixth serial killing! While men commit a large majority of serial homicides, women’s contribution to the death toll is not nearly as insignificant as Chesler claims. So much for Chesler’s claimed “expertise.”
It is not Chesler’s ignorance in the face of her claim to expertise that is so daunting.149 What makes Chesler so offensive is her blanket denigration of the victims that Wuornos murdered. Chesler is no different from those who devalue the lives of prostitute victims “because they were worthless whores who asked for it by cruising the streets” or those who would claim “that prostitutes deserve to be raped—it is an occupational hazard,” when she proclaims that Wuornos was a victim simply because, “The men she killed all fit the profile of johns, those who frequent prostitutes.”150 Tell that to the family of the preacher Peter Siems whose body has never been found, the Bibles in his car flung out the window by Wuornos. Or to the widow of former police officer and child abuse investigator Dick Humphreys, who was never late without calling her. Or the daughter of David Spears, whose graduation gift Wuornos spent on beer and cigarettes after murdering her father. What “profile of johns” did these victims have according to Chesler? She never says. That they were all males perhaps?
Yes, preachers and cops sometimes pick up prostitutes. But with the exception of one victim, none of these men had arrests on their records for picking up prostitutes or any other criminal offenses. It is entirely unclear how Aileen got into their cars in the first place. Humphreys, the former police officer, for example, had a mark on his body consistent with that from a barrel of a handgun being pressed hard against his side. Aileen was not dressed provocatively as a prostitute: She wore grungy cutoff jeans and a T-shirt and hitchhiked, propositioning men once inside the car. She could have just as easily been posing as a motorist in distress. In fact, the profile of the preacher, the ex-cop, and the police reservist, was precisely of the type of male who would stop and assist a person by a roadside appearing to be in distress, especially a woman. Chesler should be ashamed of herself. At least Aileen Wuornos was fighting for her life when she slandered her victims. What was Chesler’s excuse?
Chesler reserved her contempt for one victim in particular—the first, Richard Mallory. In many ways, Richard Mallory is the Rosetta stone for understanding what might have triggered the one-year killing spree unleashed by Aileen Wuornos. According to Chesler, Mallory’s former girlfriend, Jackie Davis, gave a “grim” portrayal to the police of the victim
Mallory, Ms. Davis recounted, had served ten years in prison for burglary, suffered from severe mood swings, drank too much, was violent to women, enjoyed the strip bars, was “into” pornography, and had undergone therapy for some kind of sexual dysfunction. A search of Mallory’s business revealed that he was erratic in business, heavily in debt, in trouble with the IRS, and had received many hostile letters from angry customers.151
Chesler says that in a series of meetings with Wuornos’s public defender, Trish Jenkins, nearly seven months before the trial, “feminists, myself included, had asked Jenkins and her investigator, Don Sanchez, to look into Mallory’s past. They never did.”152
Moreover, according to Chesler’s account, the testimony of Jackie Davis about Mallory’s “past violence toward women” was not admitted into evidence by the judge. Chesler also claims that the defense’s request “for a continuance to allow the defense to find and question Davis anew” was also denied. Chesler concludes, “In my view, the absence of such corroborating evidence was absolutely damaging to Wuornos’s self-defense claim.”153
Sounds like a conspiracy between a phallocentric judge and an incompetent defense to railroad Wuornos into a death sentence because she dared to defend herself against a member of the patriarchy attempting to rape her. But Chesler does not tell us the full story of Jackie Davis’s statement to the police.
In fact, Davis never said that Mallory was abusive or violent with her. She actually stated that he was “kind and gentle but prone to mood swings. Sometimes he was sweet and easygoing, at others, he shrank back into his shell.”154 Chesler’s definition of “abusive treatment of women” consisted of Mallory’s propensity to hire strippers and prostitutes, two at a time, and watch them having simulated sex with each other.
For radical feminists like Chesler, there are no prostitutes—only “prostituted women.” That is almost the only term that Chesler uses in her article, implying that all prostitutes are forced into selling themselves, obviously by men. She consistently refers to Wuornos as a “prostituted woman” despite the fact that nobody forced Wuornos into prostitution, nobody “ran” Wuornos, she never had a pimp (at least not one who could survive her temper). Aileen sadly chose to prostitute herself instead of taking on menial work the way her lover, Tyria, did. Wuornos’s reluctance to work was even a source of conflict between her and Tyria.
(Not that Chesler has much respect for what Aileen told her either when they met. After being told by Aileen that she chose to be a prostitute and that some of her johns were her friends, Chesler said, “She’s as conventional as most (abused) women.”155 For creatures like Chesler it was never about Aileen anyway.)
Nor did the judge prevent Jackie Davis from testifying. It is true that the defense learned very late about Jackie Davis. But during the trial, Davis was brought into court and deposed by the defense to decide whether to put her on the stand in front of a jury. Her testimony, it turned out, consisted of inadmissible hearsay—gossip she had heard from other people. She personally had never been abused by Mallory nor did she herself have any direct knowledge at all of his abusing other women (as we on Earth understand the term “abuse” and not as Chesler defines it on her feminist Mars).
Not only did Jackie Davis have a date with Mallory the day he disappeared, but after his death she took the responsibility of arranging for his funeral. She was very fond of Mallory and reluctant to testify for the defense. At the end of her questioning, it was the defense lawyer who decided not to call Davis to the stand in front of a jury, not the judge.156
But one cannot write off Chesler as some kooky radical feminist that easily. Between the trial in 1992 and the appeals that would be lodged the next year, to her credit Chesler did what Wuornos’s defense team did not. She hired a private investigator, an ex-police officer who had initially worked on the Wuornos case, to investigate Mallory’s past. He discovered that Mallory had served four years (Chesler says ten) for housebreaking with the intent to commit rape! If Mallory was “abusive” because he liked to hire “prostituted women” then imagine what this made him now!
The only problem is that Mallory had committed this one offense thirty years ago when he was a pimple-faced 19-year-old on the eve of his induction into the army. Mallory broke into a home he was familiar with when he worked as a beverage delivery boy and he advanced on the woman who lived there but ran off the instant she resisted. Mallory did indeed undergo therapy and was confined in a psychiatric wing of a Maryland prison. He confessed that he had irresistible impulses to make sexual advances toward women—not quite the same as rape but still well on the way there. He was released after four years but was registered as a “defective delinquent” until 1968—for ten years. (Probably the source of Chesler’s error that he was imprisoned for ten years.)
Mallory was acutely aware of his problem early in his life and attempted to deal with it himself. He had actually quit his job as a delivery boy because he was concerned about his desires to make inappropriate sexual advances toward female customers. In the thirty years subsequent to his release, Mallory did not commit any other offense and seems to have redirected his sexual impulse toward his girlfriends and prostitutes. Mallory frequented prostitutes for over twenty years in the area where he lived and many knew him by name. Not one reported any abusive behavior by him, before or after his murder. Nothing in this makes him an upstanding citizen and decent human being, but neither is it evidence for the credibility of Wuornos’s claim of her brutal anal rape at the hands of Mallory.
A judge in Aileen Wuornos’s appeal ruled that this information would not have changed the validity of her defense claim of being raped, and would not have been admissible anyway, as Mallory’s offense had happened only once and so long ago that it could not have served as evidence for assessing his current conduct.
As Aileen Wuornos grew more menacing in court, yelling at a jury when convicted, “I hope you get raped. Scumbags of America!” her feminist defenders began to fade and fall by the wayside. In the end, Chesler concluded, “Her bullets shattered the silence about violence against prostituted women, about women fighting back: and about what happens to them when they do.”157 And then Chesler moved on to her next new soapbox.*
“On a Killing Day…”—What Triggered Aileen?
Something could have happened halfway between the prosecution’s scenario and Wuornos’s claim. It did not take much to set Wuornos off and Mallory was known to be paranoid, particularly after he drank. It could have even happened on an animallike level—when the scent of fear can spark aggression. Perhaps Mallory sent a fear signal to Wuornos, which made her afraid that he might attack her and she responded. Perhaps he just said something that triggered Wuornos’s legendary temper, like the hundreds of people in the past. Maybe there was a scuffle exactly as Wuornos described in her confession, and in the heat of the moment she shot Mallory dead. Or maybe he actually did rape her exactly as she testified a year later in her trial. It is possible. Mallory, at least at some point in his life, had that in him—maybe this was the night it flowered once more. It is possible.
Whether Mallory actually raped Aileen, attempted to, or whether she thought he did or whether both their damaged and twisted personalities came violently together in a lethal cocktail of rage and paranoia, the fact remains that Wuornos went on to murder another six middle-aged men in what appears to have been cold-blooded rage and profit killings. Did they all try to rape her? Rape indeed can seriously be an occupational hazard of a prostitute, but if so, to what extent? Is it conceivable that in a year a roadside prostitute like Aileen could get raped seven times? Nobody can definitively answer that question because there are no objective studies of the issue. One study that is commonly cited by feminists reported that 55 prostitutes in Oregon claimed to be raped an average of 33 times a year, but the study was conducted by the Council for Prostitution Alternatives, which had its own agenda, nor were the claims of the women documented in any way.
Police officers have a different take on it. As one officer explained, cops on a daily basis go out on the street looking for trouble yet some spend twenty years on patrol without ever needing to draw their weapon. It’s not quite the same thing, but it illustrates that the frequency with which bad things happen on the street is difficult to determine.
It becomes a little easier, if one considers the histories of the men Wuornos murdered. With the exception of one, none of the men Aileen accused of trying to rape her had any criminal records for sexual assault. Could Aileen have met six first-time rapists in the span of a year—six middle-aged and elderly men who, after a lifetime of never having committed (at least as far as we know) a sexual assault, chose so late in their life to do so for the first time with Aileen? Not likely.
Much was made of the fact that Aileen had picked up hundreds of men (she claimed 250,000—you do the math as to how impossible that is) without killing them. Aileen herself pointed out how many rides she had in men’s cars without killing them. It was only these seven rapists, she insists. And Chesler grabs on to this argument as well, citing a favorite film, the obscure Dutch A Question of Silence, in which, while shopping in a store, three women, each of whom “has had enough of being treated like a ‘woman’ by men…spontaneously stomp to death the 250,001st man who treats them with contempt; and they do so without exchanging a word.”158
But that is not how serial killers function. Once they start killing, they do not kill everybody they meet whenever they have an opportunity. Serial killers function in a cyclical pattern with peaks and valleys in their desire to kill. There is more to it than just opportunity. Wuornos not killing every man who came into contact with her does not make the ones she did kill rapists.
Many of the men who had come forward to say they had survived an encounter with Aileen Wuornos had some scary stories to tell. One described her akin to a werewolf, her personality suddenly changing to such a dark and menacing tone that he suddenly became so afraid that he had to trick her into getting out of his car and then suddenly drove off before she could get back in.
Most likely, Aileen went into one of her well-documented high rages—and perhaps her rages have always been driven by a history of sexual assault—and once she learned to kill, she would express her rage with the finality of murder and took cathartic satisfaction in the control she exercised over her victim’s body and property: murder as a calming cigarette.
Even if Mallory had really attempted to rape her and she really was defending herself, once she had killed she became addicted to it. There might have been a remnant of some moral compass still guiding Aileen; her assertions that she would never kill in cold blood ring true, even though she did precisely that. To overcome that paradox, she needed to convince herself that the men she was killing were really going to rape her and thus deserved to die. It is unlikely that she made up the motive as an afterthought—she was probably deluding herself as she went along—looking hopefully for some sign that the man whose car she had entered harbored some sinister intent and therefore deserved to die.
As Aileen said, “I had a lot of guys, maybe ten to twelve a day. I could have killed all of them, but I didn’t want to. I’m really just a nice person. I’m describing a normal day to you here, but a killing day would be just about the same. On a normal day we would just do it by the side of the road if they just wanted oral sex or behind a building or maybe just off the road in the woods if they wanted it all.
“On a killing day, those guys wanted to go way, way back in the woods. Now I know why they did it: They were gonna hurt me.”
Maybe that is all it took.
Her relationship with Tyria might have been critical to the killing as well. Not only was she in love with Tyria, but the love was reciprocated. After a lifetime of rejection, beginning with her own mother, mistreatment at the hands of her grandparents, rejection by her peers, by the boys she had sex with from the age of eleven, her infant child being taken away from her, her failed marriage, and all the other brief relationships that came apart, Tyria was the first to stay with Aileen. Tyria was Aileen’s first significant relationship that appeared to function on some level. But it might have also been the very “trigger” that finally turned her to serial murder.
Fantasies, facilitators, and triggers are the three pillars of serial murder. Aileen fantasized about revenge against the males who had sexually abused her throughout her life—even in the highly unlikely case that she had not been actually raped in the past, she certainly felt she had been. One does not need a psych degree to figure out what kind of fantasies a woman might have who was sexually used from age eleven the way Aileen was. Facilitators are the “lubricants”—pornography, drugs, or alcohol—which enhance the fantasy and lower the inhibitions to realize the fantasy. Aileen was almost always drinking when she killed (although Aileen was almost always drinking when she did anything). Finally, the trigger is usually a series or combination of pressures in daily life that law enforcement call “stressors,” which at some point drive the predisposed individual to crack and act upon their fantasy. When investigating a serial murder suspect, police will often attempt to seek out and identify a pattern of “stressors” in the suspect’s life—divorce, loss of a job, a death in the family, some kind of failure, a breakup with a girlfriend, parental conflict. In the FBI study of male serial killers, 59 percent reported conflict with a female occurring just prior to their killing for the first time, and sometimes before subsequent murders. Other stressors included: conflict with parents: 53 percent; financial: 48 percent; employment problems: 39 percent; marital problems: 21 percent; legal problems: 28 percent; conflict with a male: 11 percent; physical injury: 11 percent; death of a significant person: 8 percent; and birth of a child: 8 percent.159
Aileen’s relationship with Tyria could have easily served as the stressor for her murders. Aileen killed her first victim, Richard Mallory, just a few days after Ty brought home for a Thanksgiving meal, Sandy Russell, a pretty 29-year-old blonde. Aileen did not kill again until Tyria’s half-sister, Tracy Moore, came to stay with them during the summer and Ty was focusing all her attention on her. During Tracy’s stay, Aileen murdered David Spears, Charles Carskaddon, and Peter Siems. Just before Lee murdered Dick Humphreys, Ty had lost a job and was talking about leaving Florida and moving back to Ohio. When Aileen murdered Walter Jeno Antonio, Ty had gone off by herself to Ohio for the Thanksgiving holiday with her family, having told Lee that she needed a break from her. And as Aileen herself blurted out in those taped telephone conversations with Tyria, “Let me tell you why I did it, alright?…Because I’m so…so fuckin’ in love with you, that I was so worried about us not havin’ an apartment and shit, I was scared that we were gonna lose our place, believin’ that we wouldn’t be together.”
The Prostituted Serial Killer
Aileen Wuornos might not have been the “prostituted woman” that Chesler wanted her to be, but she was a prostituted serial killer. Everybody made money or mileage from the plight of Aileen Wuornos (including, I suppose, me with this writing). Three police officers and Tyria were negotiating Hollywood deals before Aileen even went to trial. Her attorney was charging the media $10,000 per interview, with Aileen deciding how the money would be dispersed among her hangers-on. (She herself could not retain the money under the Son of Sam Law, which prevents offenders from profiting from their notoriety.)
A born-again Christian legally adopted Aileen so that she could have access to her and then went on to support Aileen in her “no contest” pleas to hasten her execution so that “she could go home to Jesus.” Filmmaker Nick Broomfield made two films about Aileen, falling just short of following her with his cameras into the death chamber. And a few years after Aileen was dead, actress-model Charlize Theron put an Oscar statue on her shelf for her portrayal of Aileen in Monster. Everybody got a piece of Aileen—from the virgin boys who fucked her for a cigarette to the low-budget filmmakers, true crime hacks, documentary voyeurs, lawyers, TV producers, radical feminists, militant lesbians, born-again Bible thumpers, both pro-and anti-death activists, and the Florida justice system that let her sloppily put herself to death. During her last “no contest” trials, Aileen did not even bother attending, preferring to remain in her cell. She just wanted it all to be over. Her claims of being raped became muted and ambiguous and her final story was that the police deliberately allowed her to commit the series of murders so that they could enhance the value of the movie deal about her case.
Aileen Wuornos finally got her wish when she was executed by lethal injection at the age of 46 on October 9, 2002. She was the tenth woman in the U.S. to be executed since the reintroduction of the death penalty in 1976. Aileen’s last words were, “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.”
She was cremated and her ashes were sent back to Michigan where they were spread around a tree, at Aileen’s request, to the sound of Natalie Merchant’s song, “Carnival.” Aileen had listened to the song repeatedly while on death row.
In the Last Resort Bar in Daytona Beach where Aileen was arrested there is a portrait of her with the inscription: here lied aileen “lee” wuornos her last night of freedom january 9, 1991, at the last resort bar. The adult woman in the portrait is as shining, spirited, and beautiful as the little girl in the family photos of Aileen when she was a 6-year-old schoolgirl. Somebody once brought in an unflattering photo of Aileen clipped from a newspaper and attempted to place it over the face in the portrait because the woman in the painting looked too much better than Aileen really did.160 The artist objected, saying that she had painted Aileen that way deliberately because everybody deserves a break. If so, then it probably is the only break Aileen ever got in her sad and, as Natalie Merchant said of her, “tortured, torturing life.”