Case File: Aileen Wuornos

Aileen Wuornos was born in 1956 in Rochester, Mich., to a 16-year-old mother who had married at age 14. Her estranged father was sentenced in 1967 to life imprisonment for raping and killing a 7-year-old girl; he later died by suicide in prison. 

Wuornos’s mother left her when she was 4 years old, abandoning the girl and her brother to the care of her maternal grandparents, who did not reveal their identities as such until Wuornos was 12. Her grandparents were abusive alcoholics, and Wuornos later claimed her grandfather physically and sexually assaulted her repeatedly during her youth. By age 11, she was prostituting herself in exchange for cigarettes and food.

At age 15, Wuornos gave birth to a boy in 1971–her older brother might have been the father–and her son was immediately put up for adoption. Soon thereafter, her grandfather threw her out of the house, and, after briefly becoming a ward of the court, Wuornos ran away and lived in a wooded area on the outskirts of Troy, Mich., where she survived by petty theft and prostitution.

By 1974, Wuornos was 18 years old and had moved to Colorado, where she was arrested for driving under the influence and other offenses. The list of crimes committed during this grim period off Wuornos’s life included armed robbery, auto theft, check forgery and assault. 

Relocating to Florida in 1976, Wuornos married Lewis Fell, a 69-year-old retired yacht club president. But Wuornos wasn’t about to settle down; she soon started getting into barroom brawls and other legal trouble. Just nine weeks after their wedding, the unhappy couple’s marriage was annulled.

Around that time, Wuornos received a $10,000 payout from her brother’s life insurance policy after he died of cancer. That money lasted only a few weeks, however; Wuornos bought a luxury car, then totaled it in a wreck.

As her life became increasingly desperate—and her rap sheet grew longer, with a brief stint in prison for armed robbery—Wuornos reportedly attempted suicide several times. By 1986, she was living aimlessly in Florida when she met 24-year-old Tyria Moore in a Daytona gay bar. The pair moved in together, and Moore was soon pulled into Wuornos’s never-ending cycle of crime, prostitution and violence. 

In 1989, Wuornos shot and killed Richard Mallory, 51, after they went to a remote area in central Florida for a sexual encounter. Wuornos later claimed Mallory grew violent and proceeded to beat, rape and sodomize her. That encounter sparked a killing spree, and the following year, a bloodthirsty Wuornos killed at least six other middle-aged men, including a construction worker, a rodeo worker, a trucker and a retired chief of police. 

Her victims were typically taken to an isolated place, shot several times and robbed. Their bodies were usually found weeks later after being dumped in the woods on the side of the highway, and their vehicles were often stolen, then abandoned. Wuornos and Moore would occasionally sell objects taken from the victims at local pawn shops. 

The sudden rash of murders in the same area of central Florida had law enforcement on high alert, and it wasn’t long before police were able to match crime scene fingerprints with Wuornos’s prints, which were easily available from her long and colorful criminal record.

In January 1991, Wuornos was arrested at the aptly named Last Resort biker bar in Volusia County, Fla., while her partner Moore—who was implicated in many of Wuornos’s crimes—was in Pennsylvania. 

After Moore was returned to Florida by police, investigators convinced her to allow them to listen to her telephone conversations with Wuornos in exchange for immunity from prosecution. Within a few days, Wuornos admitted in a series of phone calls to killing the men, claiming they were trying to rape her and she acted in self-defense. 

Wuornos’s trial for the killing of Mallory began in January 1992. During the trial, her defense tried to introduce evidence that Mallory had previously been convicted of assault with intent to rape and had a record as a sex offender—supporting Wuornos’s contention that she acted in self-defense—but the judge refused to allow the evidence. Given her telephone confessions and Moore’s testimony, her conviction was all but assured, and her jury found her guilty, after which she was sentenced to death. 

In subsequent trials for her other murders, Wuornos pleaded guilty or no contest to her other murders, saying she needed to “get right with God.” She also maintained in court that “Richard Mallory did violently rape me as I've told you; but these others did not,” referring to her other victims. Within a year, Wuornos had received six death sentences. 

In a bizarre twist of fate, during her imprisonment, Wuornos was legally adopted by Arlene Pralle, who claimed that she had a dream in which she was told by Jesus to take care of Wuornos. Pralle helped with Wuornos’s defense, but the relationship was short-lived as Wuornos came to believe that Pralle was mainly interested in the publicity.

At her 1993 sentencing, an angry Wuornos looked at Assistant State Attorney Ric Ridgeway and shouted, “I hope your wife and children get raped in the ass!” among other obscenities. 

While in prison, Wuornos displayed increasingly irrational and paranoid behavior, insisting that prison staff were soiling her food with urine and other contaminants. She exhausted her appeals in 1996 when the U.S. Supreme Court denied her final appeal. 

By this time, Wuornos seemed to have accepted her fate. “I killed those men … [and] robbed them as cold as ice. And I'd do it again, too,” she wrote in a 2001 petition to the Florida Supreme Court. “There’s no chance in keeping me alive or anything, because I'd kill again. I have hate crawling through my system ... I am so sick of hearing this 'she's crazy' stuff. I've been evaluated so many times. I'm competent, sane, and I'm trying to tell the truth. I'm one who seriously hates human life and would kill again.”

On October 9, 2002, Wuornos was executed by lethal injection at the Florida State Prison near Starke, Fla. She refused a last meal, and her final 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.”

Wuornos’s case shined a harsh light on the treatment many sex workers endure, and the difficulty of establishing nonconsensual rape in cases of prostitution. 

The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty stated in a press release, “[p]olice found ‘nothing dirty’ on the victim [Mallory] and concluded that there was nothing to substantiate the defendant’s tale of sexual assault. Had they simply run Mallory’s name through the FBI’s computer network, they would have known he served a decade behind bars for violent rape years before.”

The life and crimes of Wuornos—one of America’s few female serial killers—have inspired numerous media portrayals, including a 2001 opera titled Wuornos, two critically acclaimed documentaries by Nick Broomfield and the 2003 feature film Monster starring Charlize Theron as Wuornos and Christina Ricci as Moore.