Aileen Wurnos

The Anguish of Aileen Wuornos

Known famously by many as the first female serial killer, Aileen Wuornos was convicted and found guilty to the murder of six men, and another she has claimed to have murdered but was never discovered by police officials. Born on February 29, 1956, the adolescent from Rochester, Michigan lived what some would call a tragic childhood filled with sexual abuse, teen pregnancy, abandonment. 

The Face of a Cold-Blooded Killer

It is evident to most of Aileen's horrifying past being the cause of her future actions, eventually leading murder. Being the daughter of a convicted child molester, and left stranded with her brother, Keith, by their mother, the pubescent teens were forced to be raised by their grandparents. According to the memoir on Biography.com, Wuornos would later make proclamations about the sexual abuse performed by her grandfather from a young age, and also of the pregnancy at age 14 after one of her grandfather's friends had raped her. After placing the baby up for adoption, the grandfather had thrown Aileen out of the house at the age of 15, forced to provide a means of subsistence for herself. 

As time passed while living in the woods for a great length, Wuornos resorted to prostitution. Hitchhiking from state to state, she later ended up in Florida where her love life thrived, briefly marrying a wealthy, much older man. Wuornos, devastated by the divorce, had many altercations with the law. Arrested for drunk driving, assault, and disorderly conduct, she fell back into prostitution as a means of continuation to her livelihood. Years later and additional crimes committed, Aileen fell into a romantic relationship with another woman by the name of Tyria Moore. Though the two lovers lived with each other, Wuornos continued her profession of a sex worker to provide financial stability. According to Didyouknowfacts.com, it was 1989 when Aileen's past experiences had finally caught up to her, eventually erupting into a murderous rage. 

Wuornos' First Victim

Setting the scene for her Modus Operandi, Wuornos succeeded in her first murder in 1989. Proven to have shot and killed 51 year old Richard Mallory in Clearwater, Florida, Wuornos proclaimed her actions were in self-defense, stating that he attacked her. Aileen then continued to pretend to be in anguish along side the road, later persuading the men who had stopped for her to take them to a location some distance away. Once reaching a remote scenery designated by the damsel, Wuornos would shoot the men to death before stealing their belongings, including the car they drove in on. Across the later months, and additional six men were murdered across the state of Florida. 

Authorities, after some time, had hunted Wuornos - and her lover, Moore - by fingerprints left upon a totaled vehicle belonging another missing man, Peter Siems. After the apprehension of the two outlaws, Moore had relinquished a phone admission by Wuornos, who professed to the murders, taking full responsibility for them.

It was 1992 when Wuornos had to stand trial for the murder of Mallory, later found guilty of first-degree murder by the jury and sentenced to death. Wuornos then stood trial for the remaining five discovered bodies she was believed to have murdered, receiving additional death penalties for each. In 2001, Didyouknowfacts.com also states the troubled individual had written a letter proclaiming, "I killed those men, robbed them cold as ice. And I'd do it again, too. There's no chance of keeping me alive or anything, because I'd kill again." She then went on to say, "I'm competent, sane, and I'm trying to tell the truth. I'm one who seriously hates human life and would kill again."

Mental evaluations performed on Wuornos proved she was mentally unstable, also diagnosing her with borderline personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder. After firing her lawyers, and deemed mentally competent of the understanding to the dealth penalty, Wuornos spent over a decade on death row before being executed by lethal injection on October 9, 2002.