Tragic Childhood
If a scriptwriter had to come up with a childhood that would most likely engender a serial killer, then Aileen "Lee" Wuorno's story would do the trick. Born to a poor working class family in Rochester, Michigan, her life was marked by tragedy from the very start.
Lee was abandoned by her mother when she was barely half a year old, while her father — who was convicted for the rape of a young boy — committed suicide in jail when she was only two.
Violent Household
Parentless at the age of two, Lee was raised by her alcoholic grandmother and her aggressive grandfather, who would regularly take it out on her and beat her up with his belt.
Lacking positive role models at home, Lee would often face disciplinary problems at school and she was only 11 when she started offering sexual favors to her classmates in exchange for cigarettes. Unfortunately, the young girl's living nightmare had barely begun...
Kicked Out Of Home
Not only was she systematically beat up and molested by her grandfather, but she also became pregnant after being raped by one of her granddad's friends when she was only 15 years old.
Shortly after having her child, her grandfather kicked her out of the house. With nowhere to live and without a single penny, she put her daughter in for adoption and settled down in a town near Troy, Michigan. That's when Lee's life on the road eventually began...
Hitchhiking Sex Worker
Finding no other way of earning a living, Lee began working as a prostitute before turning 16. When she turned 20, she hitchhiked all the way to Florida, where she started working as a hitchhiking hooker on the interstate highways.
"Basically, I’d say I had five to six guys interested each day. I wasn’t too high-priced, so I could keep the customers satisfied", she said in an interview. But, tired of her job, she soon came up with a crazy plan to escape her life.
Married To A Wealthy Businessman
Shortly after turning 20, Lee made an attempt to escape her hitchhiking life by getting married to a 69-year-old businessman named Lewis Fell. However, adjusting to a completely different lifestyle was harder than she imagined.
It wasn't long before she started getting into trouble with the local police, as she would often get drunk and pick up fights at the local bar. Fell eventually reported being beat up by Wuornos and filed for a restraining order against her. It wasn't long before her life went back the way it was before...
Going Back Home
Hoping to avoid the costs of a potential divorce, Lee was left with no choice but to file for an annulment and return back to Michigan, putting an end to her two-month marriage.
At this point, Wuornos' brother — the only relative she was close with — died of cancer. As she was his only family member left alive, she collected his life insurance policy, which she used to pay off her fines and buy herself a sports car. But how long would her money last?
In And Out Of Prison
It was only a matter of weeks before her life went downhill: before she knew it, she had spent all her money and crashed her brand new luxury car. Penniless once again, she hitchhiked back to Florida.
After getting arrested a few times for petty theft, she turned back to the streets to work as a prostitute. She served a few days in jail once again in 1986 after pointing a gun at a client inside his car asking him for money. But everything changed when she met this young woman...
Partner In Crime
When Lee was 31 years old, she met a young hotel maid 7 years younger than her named Tyria Moore. Tyria became Lee's first long-term relationship and they moved in together shortly after they started dating.
Tyria fell madly in love with her, but never could have she imagined that she would not only become Lee's lover, but also her partner in crime. However, within two years into their relationship, things started taking a darker turn...
The First Murder
Everything changed by the time Lee turned 33. One day, a 51-year-old man named Richard Mallory pulled over in the highway to pick up Wuornos. This man happened to be a convicted rapist who had recently been released from jail.
Sticking to the facts, Lee ended up shooting him five times and dumping him in the woods. Lee claims that the stranger attacked her and that she only shot him in self-defense, but while this could possibly have been the case, her credibility was undermined once history started repeating itself...
New Victims
A couple of months later, in May 1990, Lee killed a 43-year-old client named David Spears by shooting him six times and dumping his naked body off the highway. His body was found by the police a few days later.
5 days after Spears' body was discovered, the police found the remains of another middle-aged male named Charles Carskaddon, who had also been shot multiple times and thrown off the highway. While Lee had managed to get away with these three murders, her luck was about to run out...
Killer On The Loose
On June 30, 1990, a man in his sixties named Peter Siems went missing when driving from Florida to Arkansas. According to a few witnesses, two women matching Moore's and Wuornos' descriptions had been spotted riding his vehicle.
A week later, the man's car was discovered by the police and Wuornos' fingerprints were detected all over the wheel. But while Lee knew there was always the risk of being caught, she never imagined she would be betrayed by her own lover...
Switching Sides
Wuornos and Moore killed three other men —seven all in all—, but when Moore heard they were being looked for by the police, she rushed back to her home town in Pennsylvania and crashed at her sister's place. However, everything changed when the police contacted Moore and made her an offer she couldn't resist.
The police offered Moore immunity as long as she could get Wuornos to confess to all of her crimes. Once she agreed, the police sent her back to Florida and booked her a room in a motel. But how would she set Lee up?
Falling Into The Trap
The police told Moore exactly what she was supposed to do, step by step. First, she was meant to phone Lee from the motel, pretending to sound scared at the prospect of being looked for by the police. Then, she would beg her to go over the whole story step by step in order to get her to confess to each of her crimes.
After four days of successive phone calls, Wuornos finally confessed to all of the seven murders, though she also told Moore that they had all been made in self-defense after attempted rapes. Now, the police finally had all the evidence they needed to arrest Lee for her ruthless crimes.
Finally Caught
Lee began her last day of freedom by ordering a few drinks at her favorite road bar, when two men approached her and treated her to a few rounds of beer.
Little did she know that these men were actually undercover cops waiting for her to leave the bar and finally arrest her. But the story doesn't end here! Following her arrest, Lee's story got even more perplexing...
She Initially Pleaded Self-Defense
Lee spent her next year in jail while awaiting her trial. She was finally charged for the murder of Richard Mallory on January, 1992. Even though she initially pleaded self-defense, she kept telling conflicting versions regarding her killings.
While she sometimes admitted having killed her victims after attempted rapes, other times she confessed having shot them while trying to rob them in their vehicles. Either way, her credibility was put at stake once her ex-lover, Moore, agreed to serve as a witness against her.
Diagnosed Psychopath
Wuornos finally went on trial for the murder of Richard Mallory on January 16, 1992 and was convicted two weeks later. The sentence, as everybody expected, was death. During the trial, she was diagnosed with psychopathy borderline personality disorder.
Her psychopathic character was mirrored in the fact that she often vindicated and even minimized her crimes. "And they said I did the most horrendous crime in the whole wide world. If it was a horrendous crime, why didn’t I shoot them between the eyes? (...) These men were just shot. They weren’t cut up, they weren’t sliced up", she claimed.
Pleading Guilty
As the months went by, Wuornos' time in jail really started taking a toll on her mental health. She eventually started claiming that she would often be attacked by some sort of sonic weapon, and by 2001, she filed a petition for her sentence to be hurried on the grounds of inhumane living conditions.
Her appointed eccentric lawyer, Steve Glazer, tried arguing that she was insane, but Wuornos insisted on pleading guilty to the murders and being sent to death. His lawyer thus found himself in the odd position of helping Lee take the express route to the death sentence. But did this actually happen?
Death Row
In June 1992, Wuornos finally pleaded guilty to the murder of Charles Carskaddon, and three weeks later, she pleaded no contest to three other killings, to which the sentences were also death. "I know what I did. I’m confessing what I did and go ahead and put the electric chair to me. I shoulda never done it”, she told the police.
As soon as the judge pronounced the veredict, Wuornos screamed out “Thank you. And I’ll be up in heaven while you al lrot in hell". She was evidently unwilling to spend the rest of her life in jail, but there was yet another reason why she was so keen on leaving this world...
Tired Of The Spotlight
Wuornos was tired of the fact that everyone –from journalists, politicians, to the police– was trying to cash in on her story. In fact, her ex-lover Moore had struck a deal with the police to sell the rights to Wuornos' life to Hollywood.
"She was tired of being in the spotlight. She was tired of reporters and lawyers making a career off of her”, her lawyer stated. "There’s no sense in having me tormented for the rest of my life when I don’t deserve to be tormented. It’s evil what those people have done to me", she added. But incredibly enough, her story would take one last surreal twist.
Adoptive Mother
After being sentenced to death, Lee was adopted by a catholic woman named Eileen Pralee. She allegedly adopted her so that she could experience "what it felt like to be part of a family".
"You know we believe in the holly spirit, and so we feel it was him prompting us that this person really needed help and she had nobody to reach out to her, and so we did", Pralee said in an interview. However, there was nothing she could do to change Wuornos' fate.
The Death Of An Infamous Legend
On June 6, 2002, Aileen Wuornos finally got what she had wished for: she was put to death on the electric chair. To the very last day, she insisted that this was what she longed for. "If I were to leave this planet, it wouldn’ be no big deal to me, cause this is a wicked, wicked world”, she said a few weeks before.
This is how Aileen Wuornos became the first woman to be put to death in over a century in Florida and allegedly the first female serial killer to receive this sentence. Her last words? "I’m not afraid. I know from God I’m gonna be with the lord".