Damsel of death
Many would say that the real-life exploits of Aileen Wuornos were sensational enough. Yet her case was still surrounded by a great deal of hyperbole.
In some media reports she was described as ‘the first female serial killer’, but that only demonstrates an ignorance of the facts. History is full of women who have committed multiple murders. Take Elizabeth Báthory, for instance, the 17th-century Hungarian countess known as the ‘Bloody Lady of Cachtice’. She was convicted on 80 counts of murder, but some put her total at over 600.
To others, Aileen Wuornos was a ‘lesbian murderer’. That is another false label, because it ignores the fact that she had displayed a marked preference for men as sexual partners. And at one time she had been someone’s wife.
Turmoil
The turmoil that surrounded Aileen began before she was even born. Her mother, Diane, was 15 years old when she married Leo, Aileen’s father.
A little more than a year into the marriage, in March 1955, Diane gave birth to a baby boy who was named Keith. Shortly afterwards, Leo was arrested and charged with a number of petty crimes. However, he managed to avoid going to jail by joining the army. Pregnant with Aileen, Diane saw Leo’s departure as an open door through which she could flee the marriage.
After giving birth to Aileen on 29 February 1956 she returned to her parents’ Troy, Michigan home with her two children in tow. Four years later, she walked out of the door, leaving the two children for her parents to bring up.
Aileen would never see her father. In 1966, Leo was convicted of raping a 7-year-old girl and he was later diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. He spent time in a number of mental hospitals before ending up in a Kansas prison cell. It was there that he hanged himself in 1969. Diane’s parents then legally adopted Aileen and Keith and they were raised side by side with Diane’s two younger siblings. The Wuornos couple did not look like grandparents. Indeed, Aileen maintained that for most of her childhood she thought they were her true parents. It was not always a happy environment. She and Keith suffered beatings from her grandfather.
On the street
At the age of ten, Aileen began having sexual relations with Keith. Their encounters were witnessed by the neighbourhood boys. Within a year, she was having sex with boys other than her brother in exchange for cigarettes and small sums of money.
She used the cash earned with her body to buy drugs and alcohol. In 1970, at the age of 14, Aileen became pregnant. She claimed that an older man, a neighbour, had raped her. When her grandparents found out, she was sent to a home for unwed mothers. On 23 March 1971, she gave birth to a baby boy. The child was taken away for adoption without her ever laying eyes on him.
Four months later, her grandmother died of liver failure. Her passing marked the end of Aileen and Keith’s welcome in the Wuornos household. The two teenagers were told that they must leave the house immediately, never to return. They had no choice but to go their separate ways. Keith found a place to stay with friends in the neighbourhood, while Aileen turned to prostitution.
On the move
Three years passed before Aileen came into contact with the law. However, her crimes at this stage had nothing to do with cash for sex. She was charged with drunk driving, disorderly conduct and firing a gun from a moving vehicle. A further charge of failing to appear in court was added after she returned to Michigan.
Aileen spent so much time moving back and forth across the United States that she was never in any one place for long. Then in 1976, at about the time of her twentieth birthday, she settled at Daytona Beach in Florida. Aileen had not been there long when she learned that the two most influential men in her life, her hated grandfather and her beloved brother, had died. While the old man had killed himself through gas inhalation, Keith’s death was not of his own choosing. On 17 July, he had succumbed to throat cancer. As the beneficiary of his life insurance, Aileen received $10,000. Two months later, the money was gone. One of her purchases was a car, which she subsequently wrecked.
The only way was to go back to hitchhiking. Then in September she was picked up by a wealthy retiree named Lewis Fell. Although he was 49 years her senior, the two were married before the end of the calendar year.
The event even made the society pages of the local newspaper. Fell proved to be a most generous man. He bought his bride a brand-new car and expensive jewellery. She now had every chance of leading a stable life.
However, the marriage was neither peaceful nor enduring. Aileen was not able to change her behaviour. She drank heavily and she would pick fights in the local bars. One bar room encounter led to her being jailed for assault.
Nine weeks after the wedding, Lewis filed for divorce. He claimed that his wife had struck him with his cane after he had refused to give her more money.
On the game
Now that the marriage was over, Aileen returned to prostitution. She worked the exit ramps of the Florida highways. Without Keith to provide comfort and support, her behaviour became increasingly erratic.
In 1978, Aileen took a .22 calibre pistol and shot herself in the stomach. She was rushed to a hospital, where she received the very best in medical attention, but next to no counselling.
Aileen could never have been described as a beauty, but by now her average looks were fading with time, drink and drugs. As a result, her income from prostitution started to decline. Increasingly she turned to crime as a means of support. In May 1981, wearing only a bikini, Aileen held up a small supermarket in Edgewater, Florida. She was soon apprehended when her run-down getaway car overheated and broke down by the side of the highway. After being charged with armed robbery she spent most of the next two years in prison. Though much of her time was devoted to reading the Bible, Aileen did not emerge from jail a changed woman. Over the next two years, she was charged with attempting to pass forged cheques, speeding, grand theft auto, resisting arrest, obstruction and attempting to rob a boyfriend at gunpoint.
She once wrote that she turned to women as partners at the age of 28. The decision, she said, brought ‘a world of trouble’. In the summer of 1986, while drinking in a Daytona gay bar, she met a 24-year-old motel maid named Tyria Moore. The two became lovers that same evening and they soon moved in together. Aileen encouraged Ty to quit her job, saying that she would support them both with her earnings as a prostitute.
The two adopted a transient lifestyle, which was a reflection of Aileen’s success in trading sex for money. They bunked down in friends’ apartments, abandoned trailers, motel rooms and, on occasion, the outdoors.
Loaded pistol
Sex between the two women became a rare thing, yet they stayed together.
If money permitted, they would go to bars or rent motel rooms and just watch television. Though Ty seemed content to be supported by Aileen, she was concerned about her companion’s safety. Aileen took to working the streets and exit ramps with a loaded, concealed pistol.
By the autumn of 1989, Aileen was finding it difficult to support herself and Ty. The lack of money was having an effect on their relationship. Ty returned to work by taking on occasional jobs as a motel chambermaid, which made Aileen worry that her companion would leave her. She would later write that under this pressure she spun out of control.
‘Hypnotically entranced in our companionship, so deeply lost in its same-sex relationship, causing me then to do the unthinkable.’
Aileen was referring here to the events of 30 November 1989. It was on that evening that Aileen committed her first murder. The victim, Richard Mallory, was the 51-year-old owner of an electronics repair shop. Mallory was on his way to Daytona Beach for a weekend of partying when he met Aileen. She then came up with the idea that he could pay her for sex. Mallory apparently agreed, so they drove into the woods outside the city. They shared a bottle of vodka and chatted until dawn. Then, quite suddenly, Aileen pulled out her handgun and shot him four times in the chest and the back. She grabbed whatever money she could find, covered Mallory’s body over with some carpeting and drove off in his car.
When she got home, Aileen told Ty what she had done. Ty did not believe the story until the news of the murder was reported in the media. Even then, she stuck by Aileen.
‘I thought at that time: that, okay, she has all the frustration out of her system – for whatever reason she hated society – that she’ll be okay. But obviously she wasn’t. Obviously it was just the turning point, and she figured she got away with it once – she would keep doing it.’
More murders
Six months after the Mallory murder, in May 1990, Aileen was hitchhiking when she was picked up by a 43-year-old heavy equipment operator named David Spears. Aileen shot him six times and then stole his truck, which she later abandoned. Then on 6 June she flagged down her next victim, 40-year-old Charles Carskaddon. Aileen shot the man six times and then took his gun, money and jewellery. She drove off in his car. After putting some distance between herself and the body, she abandoned the vehicle. Now that she had no means of transport she began hitchhiking again.
She was soon offered a lift by 65-year-old Peter Siems, a former merchant seaman who had devoted his retirement to Christian outreach. The back of his car was loaded with Bibles, but this did not stop Aileen from murdering him.
Aileen then stole Siems’ car, as she had done with her other victims. However, this time she chose to hold on to the vehicle. It was a foolish decision – one that would lead to her capture.
On 4 July, Ty was driving Siems’ stolen car when she took a corner too fast and rolled the vehicle. She and Aileen panicked. They asked a witness not to call the police and then they fled the scene before the emergency vehicles could arrive. Although Aileen had wrenched the licence plates off the car and thrown them into the brush the authorities soon realized that they had found the car belonging to Siems. Added to that, the witness was able to provide extremely accurate descriptions of Aileen and Ty.
Over the next five months, Aileen killed three more men. It had become clear to the authorities that they were dealing with a serial killer. In November 1990 a number of newspapers across Florida ran a story about the killings. They included sketches of the two women who had been seen walking away from Siems’ stolen car.
As a result, Aileen and Ty were identified by a number of people. Sensing that the authorities were closing in on them, Ty made herself scarce while Aileen was buying alcohol. The younger woman travelled north out of the state to stay with her sister in Pittston, Pennsylvania.
Breakthrough
As 1990 drew to a close, the authorities experienced a breakthrough when they came across pawn shop records of some of the items that had been stolen from Aileen’s victims. On 6 January 1991, Aileen was arrested at the Last Resort biker bar in Florida. At the same time, Ty was tracked down to her sister’s Pennsylvania home. She later helped the police out by getting Aileen to contact her at the motel at which she was staying. The telephone calls were then recorded. By 16 January, Aileen had become so fearful that Ty would be implicated in the murders that she confessed.
‘The reason I’m confessing is there’s not another girl,’ she said. ‘I did it. There is no other girl.’
Aileen admitted to killing seven men, though she claimed to have done so in self-defence. She maintained that all of them had either raped her or had intended to rape her.
A full year passed before she finally went on trial for the murder of Richard Mallory. Several people were called by the prosecution, including Ty. It was only then that Aileen realized she had been betrayed. When her former lover took the stand she avoided all eye contact. The only witness for the defence was Aileen herself. Her testimony was erratic and unconvincing.
On 27 January 1992, the jury took less than two hours to find Aileen guilty of Mallory’s murder. She addressed the jury as it was being led out of the courtroom.
‘I’m innocent. I was raped. I hope you get raped. Scumbags of America!’
On the following day Aileen came out with several similar outbursts during the penalty phase of the trial. She was sentenced to death. Over the next two years, she pleaded guilty to two counts of murder and she entered no contest pleas on three more. Although she had confessed to murdering Siems, along with the others, she was not charged, because no body was ever found.
Then in July 2001, after more than ten years in prison, of which nine had been spent on death row, Aileen petitioned the court to put an end to the mandated appeals of her death sentence.
She testified that the murders had not been acts of self-defence, as she had originally claimed.
On 9 October 2002, Wuornos became the tenth woman to be put to death in the United States since the reintroduction of the death penalty in 1976. Two months before, she had begun writing a candid confession:
Dear Lord Jesus,
I know I’ve done some wicked things in my life, and Lord God, I know I deserve every bit of the rot of Hell.