Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong’s sense of superiority and intellectual authority expanded over the years until, by young adulthood, she saw herself as a genius. Her bipolar disorder and her intense narcissism fused so that she thought of herself as part of a certain class of the brilliant—individuals who, like her, suffered from bipolar disorder but were capable of achievements well beyond those of ordinary people. “You have to remember, and I am not just bragging about it,” she once said of her bipolar disorder, “but it has been linked to genius. Lincoln, Churchill, Teddy Roosevelt, Van Gogh, Beethoven, Hemingway—some of the greatest artists and writers who ever lived were bipolar.”1 She also spoke of what she considered being a “functioning bipolar”2: “It is like Churchill. He had it, but he could also run the country.”3
She was quick, however, to exclude herself from another class of people, though she was more suited to this group than she ever would be to the pantheon of the world’s greatest creative minds. “I am not,” she said, in another moment of introspection, “one of those people who goes around like Ted Bundy and does these horrible things.”4 She said she was never the aggressor, but was prey to abusive men, including her father and the two boyfriends she killed—Bob Thomas and Jim Roden. She was not “some degenerate criminal,”5 she said, and certainly not a murderer with multiple victims.
“I am no serial killer,” she once declared from prison, “and every psychiatrist who has examined me knows that. I have been a victim of this domestic shit all my life.”6
But Diehl-Armstrong was like Ted Bundy. As the United States magistrate judge, Martin C. Carlson, repeatedly wrote in rejecting one of her appeals, Diehl-Armstrong fit the definition of a serial killer, which put her in an exclusive criminal cohort. And as a female serial killer, she was even more unique.
“Serial murder,” according to the FBI, “is a relatively rare event, estimated to comprise less than one percent of all murders committed in any given year.”7 Using this percentage estimate, in 2015, when the FBI recorded 15,696 murders, the number of those attributed to a serial killing would have been about 157.8 About one in six serial killers, or 16 percent, are women.9 Most researchers agree that, no matter what the gender, a serial killer “is someone who kills three or more persons, with time elapsing between homicidal events.”10 This “cooling-off” period differentiates serial killers from mass murderers, who kill a large number of people at once, or spree murderers, who kill a large number of people over a short period of time. Serial killers are more methodical, and their slayings frequently follow patterns. For the FBI, “the time period between murders separates serial murder from mass murder,”11 and the bureau has developed its own definition of serial murder, in terms of numbers. The FBI, as of 2005, defined serial murder as “the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s), in separate events.”12
The FBI’s definition was broader than what Congress developed seven years earlier, in 1998, in the Protection of Children from Predators Act. It strengthened federal penalties for a variety of crimes against children, and allowed the federal government to take over jurisdiction of investigations of serial killers: “The Attorney General and the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation may investigate serial killings in violation of the laws of a State or political subdivision, if such investigation is requested by the head of a law enforcement agency with investigative or prosecutorial jurisdiction over the offense.”13 As for serial killing, the act stated, “The term ‘serial killings’ means a series of three or more killings, not less than one of which was committed within the United States, having common characteristics such as to suggest the reasonable possibility that the crimes were committed by the same actor or actors.”14 As the FBI noted, the act provided a legislative definition of serial murder primarily for purposes of jurisdiction: “It was not intended to be a generic definition for serial murder.”15
Forensic criminologist Eric W. Hickey, who has extensively studied serial killers, offers a broad definition, one focused less on precise numbers than on the pattern of killing and the commonality of victims:
In essence, serial murderers should include any offenders, male or female, who kill over time. Most researchers agree that serial killers have a minimum of three or four victims. Usually there is a pattern in their killing that can be associated with the types of victims selected or the method or the motives for the killing. This includes murderers who, on a repeated basis, kill within the confines of their own home, such as a woman who poisons several husbands, children, or elderly people in order to collect insurance. In addition, serial murders include those men and women who operate within the confines of a city or a state or even travel through several states as they seek out their victims. Consequently, some victims have a personal relationship with their killers and others do not, and some victims are killed for pleasure and some merely for gain. Of greatest importance from a research perspective is the linkage of common factors among the victims.16
Taking the various definitions together, a serial killer can be defined as a man or a woman who kills at least two or three people in separate incidents, with a cooling-off period of at least a week.17 The killings also often share common characteristics or methods, “to suggest the same offender committed the murders.”18
No matter how insightful the findings of Hickey and other criminologists, their research can be secondary to a source that has perhaps most influenced Americans’ views of serial killers: the movies. The number of films about serial killers has exploded in recent decades. More than 270 went to the big screen in the 2000s, compared with 150 in the 1990s, 23 in the 1980s, 20 in the 1970s, 12 in the 1960s, and 4 in the 1950s.19 The increase in the number of movies reflects the increase and notoriety of serial killers. The case of Ted Bundy, convicted in 1979, executed in 1989, and known to have killed as many as fourteen women in the 1970s, invariably helped boost the number of cinematic depictions of serial killers. So did the cases of John Wayne Gacy, “The Killer Clown,” convicted in 1980 and executed in 1994 for the deaths of thirty-three mostly teenage boys in the Chicago area; “The Green River Killer,” Gary Leon Ridgeway, who pleaded guilty in 2003 to murdering forty-eight women in Washington state in the 1980s and 1990s; and Jeffrey Dahmer, who was convicted in 1992 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, of dismembering seventeen men and boys, some of whose body parts he ate or stored in his freezer. In Hollywood, where a good story usually features a villain and a hero, films about serial killers contain both, to the extreme: the careful, obsessive, and sexually twisted serial killer is the human destroyer who must be stopped; the world-weary and wily FBI agent or police detective is the last hope to catch the killer and end the carnage.
The success of the formula peaked in 1991, with the release of The Silence of the Lambs, the only horror film to win the Academy Award for best picture. It also took the Oscar for best adapted screenplay (Ted Tally), director (Jonathan Demme), actor (Anthony Hopkins), and actress (Jodie Foster). The film’s main characters have become cultural icons: Foster’s Clarice Starling, the FBI trainee assigned to help catch a serial killer known as Buffalo Bill; and Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter, a serial killer to whom Starling turns for guidance in finding her quarry. The movie, based on the 1988 novel by Thomas Harris, portrays Lecter as immensely intelligent, vicious, cannibalistic—and debonair. He is the serial killer as modern-day Lucifer: a psychopath whose charisma and elegance nearly mask his depravity. “Hannibal,” New York Times critic Vincent Canby wrote, “is one movie killer who is demonstrably as brilliant and wicked as he is reported to be.”20
Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter has a female counterpart, to a degree. She is Aileen Wuornos, a real-life serial killer from Florida whose troubled existence unfolds in the 2003 film Monster. Charlize Theron won the Academy Award for best actress for her portrayal of Wuornos, a prostitute-turned serial killer who fatally shot seven men along highways in Florida in 1989 and 1990. She was convicted in 1992 and executed by lethal injection in 2002, when she was forty-six years old. Wuornos attracted intense media attention long before Monster posthumously introduced her to a wider audience. She was a woman, and a serial killer—a combination that, in 1989 and 1990, was so foreign in popular culture and among law enforcement that the FBI called Wuornos America’s “first female serial killer.”21 The title was erroneous. “Oh, no she’s not,” Eric Hickey recalled telling the FBI about its first-ever designation for Wuornos. “I go way back to the 1800s.”22
The recognition that women were capable of serial murder goes back much farther, to the ancient Greeks and the tales they told to make sense of the world. The various versions of the myth of Medea, the sorceress and doomed wife of Jason, the leader of the Argonauts and searcher of the Golden Fleece, are replete with murder. Medea, out of love for Jason and later out of revenge, kills eight people, directly or indirectly, including her children.23 But Medea is also portrayed not as a cold-blooded killer but as a complicated person whose animosity toward her unfaithful husband can be considered justified. For many critics, Medea, particularly as Euripides portrays her in his masterpiece, Medea, represents a signal heroine in “proto-feminism.”24
Greed, revenge, power, and heartbreak mostly motivate Medea. But she is a tragic figure—one of the most tragic and complex figures in Greek literature, immortalized in Medea, which Euripides wrote in 431 BCE. His Medea is strong, deadly, and manipulative, yet also sympathetic, a woman whose anger at Jason is understandable. She kills her brother, betrays her father, and abandons her homeland to help Jason steal the Golden Fleece and achieve fame, but he casts her aside for a younger princess. Murder is Medea’s only defense, for her and her children. She kills two of their sons so that a furious Jason will not punish her by enslaving them. And in killing their sons, Medea punishes Jason. Medea proclaims the reasoning behind the murderous rage of her final serial killings, of her children, in Medea:
For though a woman is timid in everything else, and weak, and terrified at the sight of a sword: still, when things go wrong in this thing of love, no heart is as fearless as a woman’s; no heart is so filled with the thought of blood.25
Medea ends with Medea flying into the sky on a chariot pulled by dragons. Her dead children are at her side.
Hundreds of years after Euripides wrote Medea, two powerful women were real-life serial killers in ancient Rome, and they once worked together to poison an emperor. One of the women was royalty: Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE), the “empress of poison,” who was a lover to her brother, Emperor Caligula; a wife of her uncle, Emperor Claudius; and the mother of Emperor Nero. Agrippina was also the daughter of a Roman commander, Germanicus; a great-granddaughter of Mark Antony; and a granddaughter of Caesar Augustus.26
Agrippina killed primarily to advance her career and to secure power for her son, Nero. When he became emperor, she reached the height of her authority: she was known as Augusta, or an empress, and had her visage stamped on Roman coinage—an honor reserved for men and women elevated to “godlike status.”27 Agrippina’s contemporary and co-killer was Locusta (believed to have died in 69 CE), a native of Gaul who settled in Rome, where she turned into the preeminent poisoner of the age—an age when poison, derived mainly from mushrooms, herbs, and other plants, was a preferred method of murder, particularly in royal households. Unlike Agrippina, Locusta mainly killed for hire.
Agripinna’s household was filled with death, sex, and intrigue among brothers and sisters and other relatives. Roman historians said she conspired in a number of deaths, including that of one of Caligula’s wives, who was forced to commit suicide, and Agrippina’s sister-in-law. Agrippina’s most brazen killing occurred in 54 CE, when, according to the historian Tacitus, she had a servant serve the sixty-four-year-old Claudius, her husband, mushrooms laced with poison—a poison that Tacitus reported Agrippina got from Locusta: “What was needed was something subtle that would upset the emperor’s faculties but produce a deferred fatal effect. An expert in such matters was selected—Locusta, recently sentenced for poisoning but with a long career of imperial service ahead of her. By her talents, a preparation was supplied.”28 Claudius’s death allowed Nero, who was Claudius’s adopted son, to take the throne instead of Brittanicus, who was Claudius’s biological son and Agrippina’s stepson.
The murders continued. Agrippina, upset with Nero over one of his romantic affairs, started to favor Brittanicus, and suggested he would be a better emperor. Nero had Locusta fatally poison Brittanicus. The first effort at poisoning failed, and Nero had Locusta tortured; she concocted a second mixture, “from well-tried poisons,” and it worked.29 A grateful Nero is said to have rewarded Locusta with a villa, and he established a school for her in Rome, where she taught about poisons. Nero also is said to have hired Locusta to poison his mother. Agrippina survived, though Nero later had her executed. Locusta, wealthy from her poisoning commissions, lost influence after Nero killed himself in 68 CE. The new emperor, Galba, had her executed in 69 CE. According to the Roman historian Cassius Dio, “Lucusta [sic] the poison merchant, and some others who had been active in Nero’s day, he [Galba] ordered to be carried in chains all over the city and afterwards to receive punishment.”30 Locusta, whom one emperor hired to kill, lost her life at the hands of another.
Agrippina and Locusta often murdered for causes, including a desire for power and control. They were serial killers with political agendas, who acted more like serial assassins than serial killers who murdered largely for the thrill. The crimes of Agrippina and other “imperial serial killers,” including the likes of Locusta, “lack the sexual dimension we associate with modern serial killers,” according to journalist Peter Vronsky, who has compiled a history of female serial killers. “The first female who classically fits the bill of the modern serial killer,” Vronsky has also written, “is Elizabeth Báthory—the female Dracula.”31 Also, from Vronsky: “Elizabeth Báthory is special in that she is the only female sexual sadistic serial killer without a dominant male partner—to this day, four hundred years later. We have never had another quite like her.”32
Báthory, a countess, was born into aristocracy in 1560 in the Kingdom of Hungary, and married a count at fifteen; they had four children before the count died when Báthory was forty-three. Marriage was not the source of Báthory’s power. Her own family controlled Transylvania, home of the fictional Count Dracula, whose creation she is said to have influenced. Her castle still stands in Čachtice, in western Slovakia. Over thirty-five years, until her arrest, at age fifty, in 1610, Báthory, known as the Blood Countess, is believed to have killed hundreds of young women and girls, many of them servants. Legend holds that she bathed in her victims’ blood to retain her youthful complexion. Though Báthory is not believed to have drawn such bloody baths (none of the court records in her case contain such allegations), the rise of such a legend is understandable—in truth, according to records from her trial, she beat her victims so badly that she was covered in their blood, as if she had bathed in it.33
Báthory, highly educated and wealthy, appears to have killed out of wantonness and cruelty, and because she could, again and again. The authorities declined to investigate why scores of girls had failed to return from Báthory’s castle until the missing girls were nobles, rather than peasants. Whatever the social class of the victims, Báthory treated them the same—she beat and tortured them to death, often by burning their genitals with a candle, biting their shoulders and breasts, and pouring cold water on their naked bodies as they were left to die in the snow. Báthory had accomplices—her top servants helped with the murders—but she was in control of her castle and in control of those who lived and died. With the statements of Báthory’s top servants as evidence, the Hungarian Parliament charged Báthory with killing as many as fifty-one girls over sixteen years. The number was likely much higher. One witness testified at trial that she found, in Báthory’s chest of drawers, a register that listed the names of 650 of her victims.
Báthory’s case never went to a public trial. But based on the evidence, the Hungarian king’s lord in her region, Prince George Thurzo, Báthory’s cousin, ordered her in 1611 to spend the rest of her life walled in an apartment in Čhactice Castle. The Hungarian Parliament ordered her name never be uttered in “polite society.”34 Four of her servants were tried and convicted, and three were executed. Báthory was found dead in her castle in 1614, at the age of fifty-four.
Báthory died without explaining her crimes, which were so plentiful and horrific as to seem unreal today, as if Elizabeth Báthory were a mythic murderer, such as Medea, or a fictional character, such as Dracula. Some have argued the case against Báthory was exaggerated and political, and based on “a family plot to seize her wealth.”35 But Báthory was a real person, and evidence of her slayings included the dead bodies found throughout her castle and the documented statements of witnesses who were consistent in their testimony. As one of her most thorough biographers has written: “While history has embroidered portions of the Countess’ infamy, she was still, however, torturing and killing servant girls.”36 As to why Báthory killed, witnesses in the case against her suggested “diabolical impulses.”37 Others believe she experienced epileptic seizures and fits of rage as a child, and that members of her family might have suffered from mental illness, possibly from inbreeding.38 Why Báthory killed remains in dispute, as does the number of her victims. No matter how many girls and young women Báthory killed, her inhumanity set her apart, even among serial killers.
Elizabeth Báthory’s case for decades remained a secret to the populace in Hungary. The case against her was never made fully public when she was arrested, and the Hungarian Parliament’s order of silence about her case also kept her crimes off limits for public discussion. Because of these prohibitions, Báthory “would have remained merely an anonymous monster had not a Jesuit scholar, Father Laszlo Turoczy, discovered the trial records in 1720, about one hundred years after her death. Turoczy restored the legendary female vampire to human form with a name, identity, history, and detailed description of her crimes in a book published only in Latin.”39 Báthory’s story, though made public, remained filled with legend until the 1980s, when an American scholar, Raymond T. McNally, got access to the original trial documents. Then her life and crimes became even more widely circulated.
Without the discovery of the trial records over the centuries, Elizabeth Báthory might still exist in the haze between history and fiction, if she were known to exist at all. The slow dissemination of her story shows how much of the information about female serial killers, including their number, is limited to how much their contemporaries disclosed about them. Other female killers might have struck in the seventeenth century and earlier, but perhaps the authorities in their cases covered up the prosecutions, as they did in the case of Báthory. Such secrets were much harder to conceal in the 1800s, as the rise of newspapers coincided with the massive growth of cities during the Industrial Revolution. As more and more people packed into London and other urban areas, criminals, including serial killers, had more available victims than they did when the population was largely rural. And when a serial killer claimed victims in the cities, the newspapers were sure to report about the deaths. As Peter Vronsky has written, “By the time Jack the Ripper made his appearance in 1888, the press was primed for and experienced in its coverage of horrendous crimes.”40
The reporting of female serial killers had become more frequent in the decades before Jack the Ripper first appeared in the press. The number of female serial killers exploded between 1843 and 1852 in England, when nine female serial killers were known to have been executed. The rise of the female serial killer coincided with the “Hungry ’40s,” an era of deep depression in Great Britain.41 Poisoning was the most common method of murder, and arsenic the most common poison—it was easily available at pharmacies or chemists in the 1800s for use as a cosmetic; women took it in small doses to improve their complexions. And arsenic was easy to dissolve in coffee and other hot liquids. In using arsenic to murder, female serial killers turned to what was most available to them; if arsenic helped a woman become more beautiful in a man’s eyes, it was also effective in killing that man. Arsenic was so potent a weapon for English women that the British Parliament in 1851 passed the Sale of Arsenic Act, which restricted the sale and use of the poison.42
But arsenic was still available. Mary Ann Cotton, a nurse and Sunday school teacher who lived in a mining village in Durham County, in northeastern England, extracted arsenic from rat poison, whose sale remained unregulated in Great Britain. She fatally poisoned as many as twenty-one victims between 1864 and 1872. They included eight of her biological children, seven stepchildren, a lover, three husbands, and her mother.43 Cotton, who was executed in 1873, when she was forty years old, was “the most prolific British serial killer before Harold Shipman”—one of the most prolific serial killers in history, a physician known as “Doctor Death,” who authorities believe killed at least 215 of his patients between 1975 and 1998 by lethal injection of the painkiller diamorphine, also known as medical heroin.44
Mary Ann Cotton killed primarily to collect insurance. Her murders reflected the poverty of the mining communities where she grew up and later worked as a nurse. The symptoms of arsenic poisoning—such as diarrhea and vomiting—were also prevalent in general among the poor and undernourished. “The incompetence and heavy workload of local physicians, the poor nutrition of the urban working class, and imperfect record-keeping all helped the killings to go unchallenged,” according to a detailed study of Cotton’s deadly career. “Meanwhile, Mary Ann’s experience as a nurse gave her perfect access—and she undoubtedly relished monitoring the painful, protracted deaths of her victims.”45
Cotton’s killings stopped after she poisoned her seven-year-old stepson in 1872. Investigators first suspected death by natural causes, but the police probed further and the newspapers—their quest for a sensational crime story on full alert—reported on Cotton’s deadly past. Her infamy was such that a nursery rhyme circulated after her execution, by hanging:
Sing, sing, oh what can I sing?
Mary Ann Cotton is tied up with string.
Where, where? Up in the air,
sellin’ black puddens a penny a pair.46
The profusion of her murders gave Mary Ann Cotton, like Elizabeth Báthory, nearly mythical status.
Female serial killers also struck in the United States in the mid- and late 1800s, and arsenic was frequently their poison of choice, too. Unlike Britain, the United States had no laws regulating arsenic’s availability and use, which made it even more available in the United States. One female serial killer, Lydia Sherman, was known as the “Derby poisoner,” because of the town in Connecticut where she lived and killed, with arsenic. Police believed she killed three husbands and several children—some accounts put the number of her victims at as many as ten—though she was convicted, in 1871, only of killing her third husband, Horatio N. Sherman, in a second-degree murder. She mixed arsenic in hot cider, her husband’s favorite drink. A suspicious doctor ordered an autopsy, and a toxicology expert at Yale College determined that Horatio Sherman had arsenic in his system when he died. The police charged his wife.47
Lydia Sherman killed for insurance money, and to relieve herself of husbands and children who had become burdensome. Serial murder allowed Lydia Sherman to achieve a sense of freedom when she felt unduly tethered to a spouse or to the hearth. The first husband she killed, Edward S. Struck, was a disgraced policeman in suburban New York City who was discharged from his job in a dispute over a fight at a saloon in which a detective was killed. Unable to work, he became too much trouble for his wife, who decided to kill him after a friend suggested “she could get rid of the man by poison,” according to a contemporary newspaper account. “She took kindly to the idea, and she gave him arsenic in his food, and she also, with the same poison, killed their youngest two children, so that they should also not be burdens to her, and should not have, as she says, to grow up to life’s cares.”48 Lydia Sherman, then Lydia Struck, moved to Litchfield, Connecticut, where she married another man, Dennis Hurlburt. She poisoned him because “she did not get along particularly satisfactorily to herself with him.”49 Lydia Sherman’s final stop was Derby, where she served her third and final husband his hot toddy of death. She also killed their two small children with arsenic. She got it from a familiar source: rat poison.
Lydia Sherman was sentenced in 1872 to life in prison, where she died, at age fifty-eight, in 1878. She was a black widow—a label for a female serial killer that police would attach to so many of her successors in multiple murder.
A twentieth-century equivalent of Lydia Sherman was Nannie Doss, known as the “Giggling Grandma,” who started killing at age thirty and did not stop for twenty years, in 1954, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her victims were four of her five husbands (the first survived), two children, her mother, two sisters, a grandson, and a nephew. She killed by poisoning her victims with liquid rat poison, and she killed primarily for insurance money and because one husband after another upset her.50 One cheated on her, and she said another drank too much, though she appeared to need no excuse to kill. “The media dubbed her the ‘Giggling Grandma’ because Nannie laughed and smiled while admitting to police that she had killed four of her five husbands.”51 They were Robert F. Harrelson (liquid rat poison in corn whiskey), Arlie J. Lanning (poisoned amid accusations of infidelity), Richard C. Morton (poisoned for cheating), and Samuel Doss (killed with arsenic-laced stewed prunes).52
After Samuel Doss’s death, police pressed Nannie Doss once an autopsy showed he had large quantities of arsenic in his system. The police questioned Nannie Doss and she finally confessed to killing ten people. Doss was a forty-nine-year-old babysitter and housekeeper who devoured romance novels and told police that she was “searching for the perfect mate, the real romance of life.”53 Doss pleaded guilty to murdering her last husband and in 1955 was sentenced to life in prison, where she died of leukemia ten years later.54
Doss died a celebrity; her fame originated in the number of her victims and her attitude to them and to her life. She continued to read romance novels in prison, and wrote her memoirs for Life magazine. While incarcerated, she also kept a sense of humor and lighthearted outlook—characteristics that were evident when she smiled for the cameras as she left the courthouse in Tulsa after receiving a life sentence. Doss alluded to her poisonings of the past when she joked with a reporter from the Tulsa World who visited her in prison, where she was the second-oldest inmate. “When they get shorthanded in the kitchen here, I always offer to help out,” she told the reporter, “but they never do let me.”55
Aileen Carol Wuornos’s method of murder betrayed none of the patience of her predecessors, such as Nannie Doss, who poisoned their victims to death slowly but surely. Wuornos was the rare female serial killer who used a gun—a .22-caliber pistol that she fired into seven male victims, mostly in the chest, though she shot one in the head. Their deaths were intensely violent and quick. No serial killer, male or female, can ever be said to have killed without anger or malice. But Aileen Wuornos killed with extraordinary rage—toward men.
She had reason to be furious. By the time she committed her roadside murders in central Florida between December 1989 and November 1990, when she was thirty-three and thirty-four years old and a prostitute, Wuornos had survived a past almost beyond comprehension in its horror. She was born to teenage parents in 1956 in suburban Detroit. Her father, a repeat sex offender, killed himself while in prison and had no part in her life. Her mother abandoned Wuornos and her older brother when Wuornos was three years old; the two went to live with their maternal grandparents, who adopted them. When she was thirteen years old, Wuornos learned that her grandparents were not her real parents and that her aunts and uncles were not her siblings, as she had thought. In this regard, as Peter Vronsky has written, Wuornos’s childhood was similar to that of Ted Bundy, who learned in adolescence that his father was really his grandfather and his mother was really his sister.56
Wuornos was seen in family photos as an attractive child, but she was severely burned in the face when she and her brother were playing with lighter fluid when she was six years old. Her grandfather sexually abused her, and at age fourteen she became sexually active with neighborhood boys, was raped, and became pregnant; she gave her baby boy up for adoption. Wuornos would later state that she was raped at least five times before her eighteenth birthday. According to one summary of her life: “By the age of fifteen, Wuornos had been rejected by her grandfather, her grandmother was dead, and she was a ward of the court. In 1971, at that young age, she began a life of petty crime, prostitution, and drifting that eventually led to a year of serial killing in Florida.”57
By the time she was twenty-two years old, Wuornos had tried to kill herself at least six times. At age twenty, she had hitchhiked to Florida, where she scratched out a living as a hustler and prostitute. She married a wealthy seventy-year-old yachtsman, though the relationship lasted only a month after the two accused each other of abuse. Throughout the 1980s, while still in Florida, Wuornos was charged with a number of crimes, including what was the most serious before she murdered—armed robbery of a convenience store in Edgewater, for which she was convicted and served thirteen months in prison. In June 1986, Wuornos started a four-year intimate relationship with a woman she met in a bar. Wuornos and the woman, Tyria Moore, lived together and were occasionally in trouble with the law together. Wuornos by 1989 had a number of aliases: Susan Lynn Blahovec, Lee Blahovec, Lori Kristine Grody, and Cammie Marsh Greene.
Aileen Wuornos’s first murder victim was found dead in December 1989 in a wooded area near Daytona. He was Richard Mallory, a fifty-one-year-old electrician who had picked up Wuornos for sex. She shot him three times in the chest. The other murders followed in an orderly succession. Each victim, police said, was a john: David Spears, a forty-three-year-old equipment operator, shot six times, May 1990; Charles Carskaddon, a forty-year-old rodeo worker, shot nine times, June 1990; Peter Siems, a sixty-five-year-old missionary, shot, July 1990; Troy Buress, a fifty-year-old truck driver, shot twice, August 1990; Dick Humphreys, a fifty-six-year-old child-abuse investigator, shot seven times, September 1990; Walter Antonio, a sixty-year-old truck driver and reserve police officer, shot three times in the back and once in the head, November 1990.58
Wuornos robbed many of her victims and stole their cars, which left behind a trail of evidence investigators used to catch her. In November 1990, police connected Wuornos and Moore to an accident involving a car they had stolen from Wuornos’s victim Peter Siems in July 1990. In December 1990, Wuornos, sometimes using an alias, pawned items that she had stolen from victims Richard Spears and Richard Mallory. In January 1991, police arrested Wuornos at a bar in Ormond Beach, Florida, called the Last Stop. Tyria Moore, who was involved in none of the murders, agreed to cooperate; in recorded phone conversations, Moore urged Wuornos to confess. Wuornos eventually admitted to all seven murders, including that of Siems, whose body was never found.
Wuornos argued self-defense at her trial, in Volusia County in January 1992, for the murder of Mallory, her first victim. Wuornos claimed Mallory beat, raped, and sodomized her, though testimony from Moore undercut Wuornos’s testimony. The trial also did not include evidence that Mallory was a convicted rapist, which could have bolstered Wuornos’s credibility. Following her arrest and before her trial, Wuornos had told police that she shot all the victims in self-defense: “I mean, I had to kill them,” she said. “Or it’s like retaliation, too. It’s like, you bastards, you are going to hurt me.”59
Wuornos’s trial lasted two weeks, and the jury deliberated for two hours before convicting her of first-degree murder on January 27, 1992. The jury two days later recommended the death penalty. Wuornos, known as “the highway hooker” and “damsel of death,”60 went on to plead guilty in the deaths of six of the other victims, except for Siems, whose murder she admitted to out of court. She got a total of six death sentences.
After her conviction in Mallory’s death, Wuornos shouted at the jury: “I’m innocent! I was raped! I hope you get raped!”61 But as her appeals went on for a decade, she eventually recanted her claims that the victims raped and sodomized her and that she killed in self-defense. “I robbed them, and I killed them as cold as ice, and I would do it again, and I know I would kill another person because I’ve hated humans for a long time,” Wuornos said in a prison interview.62 In letters to the Florida Supreme Court in 2001, Wuornos wrote she wanted to make peace with God, and that she wanted to drop her appeals and get executed. “There are six cases which had all been unanimously decided for in Death, and of which I firmly agreed in with their final decision, since I’m one who seriously hates human life and would kill again,” Wuornos wrote in one letter. In another, she wrote that she had “come clean . . . so would prefer to cut with the chase then and get on with an execution—of which I’ve been sentenced under 6 times. Taxpayers money has been squandered and the families have suffered enough.”63
Questions persisted about Wuornos’s sanity during her appeals, though Florida governor Jeb Bush lifted a stay on her execution after three psychiatrists who interviewed Wuornos found that she understood the reason for her pending death. Aileen Carol Wuornos was executed by lethal injection at the Florida State Prison near Starke, southwest of Jacksonville, at 9:47 a.m. on October 9, 2002. She was the tenth woman in the United States executed since the United States Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.
In her last words, Wuornos said she had given up her fate to “the Rock,” or Jesus, and she referred to a popular movie about brave forces from Earth that repel an alien invasion. “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,” Wuornos said. “I’ll be back.”64 Members of the victims’ families said they had no regrets that Wuornos was gone. “It’s sad to see anyone die,” one said, “but I’m not sad she died.”65