Aileen Wuornos
Aileen Wuornos was an American woman born into a tumultuous environment marked by familial instability and abuse. After being abandoned by her mother, she and her brother were adopted, but her troubled upbringing included alleged sexual molestation by her grandfather and other hardships. Wuornos became a wanderer, supporting herself through prostitution and accumulating a history of arrests for various crimes, including armed robbery.
In 1989, she was implicated in the murders of several men, including her first victim, Richard Mallory, whom she claimed had attempted to assault her. Wuornos confessed to these killings, asserting self-defense against sexual aggression, a claim that garnered mixed public reactions. Her trial and subsequent execution in 2002 drew significant media attention, sparking discussions on gender, violence, and the impact of abusive backgrounds, particularly in the context of women's criminality. Wuornos's life and crimes have been the subject of numerous cultural works, including books and films, highlighting the complexities of her story and the societal issues surrounding it.
Aileen Wuornos
American serial killer
- Born: February 29, 1956
- Birthplace: Rochester, Michigan
- Died: October 9, 2002
- Place of death: Starke, Florida
Major offenses: Prostitution, robbery, and murder
Active: December 1, 1989-November 19, 1990
Locale: Northern and central Florida
Sentence: Death by lethal injection in six separate sentences
Early Life
Aileen Carol Wuornos was born into a troubled family. Her parents were teenagers and separated not long after her birth. Her father, Leo Pittman, was a child molester who was committed to mental hospitals in Kansas and Michigan before committing suicide. Her mother, Diane, abandoned Aileen and her brother Keith in 1960. Diane’s parents, Lauri and Britta Wuornos, legally adopted the children later that year. Wuornos later claimed that Lauri, her grandfather, had sexually molested her and that Britta, her grandmother, was an alcoholic.
Wuornos was sexually active from an early age and later reported that one of her partners was her brother. In 1971 she gave birth to a son at a Detroit maternity home; her brother may have been the father. During the summer of that year, Britta died, officially of liver failure. Aileen’s mother then accused Lauri of killing Britta, claiming that he had also threatened to kill his grandchildren. The two Wuornos children became wards of the court, but Aileen dropped out of school and became a wanderer, supporting herself by prostitution. During the 1970s and 1980s, she was arrested for numerous petty crimes, including disorderly conduct, drunk driving, assault, and shoplifting, as well as prostitution.
Criminal Career
On her brother’s death in 1976, Wuornos received an insurance payment of ten thousand dollars, but she spent the money on her legal fines and on a car that she wrecked. Later that year, she hitchhiked to Florida, where she lengthened her record with arrests for armed robbery of a convenience store, passing forged checks, auto theft, and other charges. From May 1982, to June 1983, she was imprisoned on an armed robbery charge. While in Florida, Wuornos formed one of the few close relationships in her life. She met Tyria Moore, a woman originally from Ohio, in a gay bar in Daytona, Florida. The two women became lovers and friends, traveling together and sharing difficult lives.
Police officers who arrested Wuornos, under various aliases, frequently noted her hostile attitude. She seemed to seek out confrontation and traveled with a loaded pistol when she picked up customers in bars and truck stops or hitchhiked to sell sex to truck drivers. On November 30, 1989, she took a ride with Richard Mallory, a fifty-one-year-old electrician. Two weeks later, Mallory was found dead in the woods outside Daytona, shot three times in the chest with a .22-caliber pistol. Over the course of the next year, a number of additional dead men, some nude and some clothed, were discovered in similar circumstances.
Legal Action and Outcome
Wuornos became a suspect in the crimes when she tried to pawn items belonging to Mallory and another victim, Walter Gino Antonio. Although she used an alias, police identified her by the fingerprints on pawn shop cards. Wuornos confessed almost immediately to six killings, but she claimed that the men had attempted to assault her sexually and that she had shot them in self-defense. Wuornos was sentenced to death by lethal injection in 1992.
The appeal of the death sentence lasted more than a decade. In November 1992, Dateline NBC reporter Michele Gillens discovered that Mallory had served ten years in prison for violent rape, giving some credibility to Wuornos’s claim that she had been assaulted. During her trial, Wuornos also obtained an advocate in the person of Arlene Pralle. Reporting that she had received instructions in a dream to help Wuornos, Pralle and her husband legally adopted the troubled woman. Nevertheless, the United States Supreme Court denied the appeal in 1996, and the State of Florida executed Wuornos on October 9, 2002.
Impact
The trial and conviction of Aileen Wuornos drew wide public attention and became the basis of numerous books, plays, an award-winning film, and even an opera. Part of the impact of the Wuornos case was due simply to the fact that the offender was a woman who killed men. Serial killers are generally identified as men, often killing for sexual motivations, with women or younger men as the victims. Thus, Wuornos was frequently billed as the first female serial killer, although there have been many women who have killed multiple victims.
Part of the impact of the Wuornos case was also a result of her defense. Wuornos maintained that she had been sexually abused throughout her life and that the men she had killed were attempting to sexually assault her. The troubled childhood raised questions about the degree of responsibility held by someone who has been repeatedly attacked. Moreover, the revelation that her first victim had been a rapist suggested that there may have been some element of truth to her claims.
Some feminist social critics took the Wuornos case as an illustration of the condition known as battered person syndrome, a psychological reaction to repeated brutality. The moral complexity of the Wuornos case appeared in the acclaimed 2003 film Monster, which told the killer’s story from the time she met her female lover until she was convicted of murder. The film portrayed Wuornos as an individual who had been abused by everyone in her life except the lover and as someone who deserved a certain amount of sympathy.
Bibliography
Pearson, Kyra. “The Trouble With Aileen Wuornos, Feminism’s ‘First Serial Killer.’” Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 4.3 (2007): 256–275. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 23 June 2016.
Reynolds, Martin. Dead Ends: The Pursuit, Conviction, and Execution of Female Serial Killer Aileen Wuornos, the Damsel of Death. New York: St. Martin’s, 2004. Print.
Russell, Sue. Lethal Intent. New York: Kensington, 2002. Print.
Shipley, Stacey L., and Bruce A. Arrigo. The Female Homicide Offender: Serial Murder and the Case of Aileen Wuornos. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2003. Print.
Wuornos, Aileen, and Christopher Berry-Dee. Monster: My True Story. London: John Blake, 2004. Print.