Aileen Wuornos was convicted of murdering six men she had met on Florida's highways between late 1989 and late 1990, and she confessed to killing a seventh. The men were middle-aged and mostly strangers to one another: a store owner from Clearwater, a construction worker, a man moving home to Missouri, a retired merchant seaman, a sausage company delivery driver, a state social services worker and a security guard on his way to pick up a truck. Each had picked her up. Each was shot with a small .22 caliber revolver, and each lost his car, his money or his belongings.
Wuornos was 34 when she was arrested in January 1991 at a biker bar near Daytona Beach. In a videotaped confession she said she had shot the men in self-defense because they had threatened or attacked her. She held to that account through her first trial, then pleaded no contest or guilty to the other cases, and in 2001 told a judge that she had killed the men in cold blood to rob them. Her case drew wide attention because police and the press treated her as a rarity, a woman who killed strangers with a gun, and because the man she was tried for killing turned out to have a past that her jury never heard about. She was executed in October 2002 after firing her lawyers and asking to die.
The Florida Department of Corrections recorded her date of birth as February 29, 1956. Britannica gives her birthplace as Rochester, Michigan, and says she was first known as Aileen Pittman; at her 1992 trial she testified that she had been born in Troy, Michigan.
Much of what is known about her childhood comes from testimony given at her penalty hearings, from relatives and expert witnesses who did not always agree. Her parents were teenagers who separated before or shortly after she was born, according to the defense experts in her Volusia County case. Her father, Leo Pittman, was imprisoned for molesting a child and later hanged himself in prison, the experts testified; the psychologist and writer Phyllis Chesler, who studied the case, wrote that she never met him. Her mother, Diane, left Aileen and her older brother, Keith, when they were very young. Arlene Pralle, who later adopted Wuornos as an adult, told a Marion County jury in 1992 that the children had been abandoned at about six months of age. Their maternal grandparents raised them and legally adopted them. Wuornos testified that she learned only at about the age of ten that the people raising her were her grandparents.
Defense experts described a childhood marked by poverty of care. She was badly burned at about the age of nine. She had problems with her hearing and eyesight, struggled at school and was tested with an IQ of 81. She began drinking at about 12. Pralle testified that her grandfather, an alcoholic, beat her severely, and her biological mother testified in the Dixie County case that he had abused her physically and sexually. Wuornos herself denied in that hearing that her grandfather had abused her. Her uncle Barry Wuornos, who had grown up in the same house and was raised alongside her as a brother, testified in the Volusia case that the family was "pretty straight", and a Marion County investigator said Barry and an aunt denied any abuse.
At about 13 or 14, by the various accounts given in court, she was raped and became pregnant. She was sent to a home for unwed mothers and the baby, a son, was placed for adoption. Her grandmother died of liver failure, according to Chesler, and the court in the Dixie County case accepted as a mitigating fact that the grandmother died an alcoholic. Wuornos spent about eight months in a juvenile facility, the Volusia experts said, and was then put out of her grandfather's house. By 16 she was living on her own and selling sex, which she went on doing, by her own count in court, for about twenty years.
Her grandfather later killed himself. Chesler dates his suicide to 1976, the year her brother Keith died of cancer at 21. Pralle said Keith's death devastated her. Wuornos tried to kill herself at least twice, the defense experts testified.
As an adult Wuornos drifted between Michigan and Florida, hitchhiking and working the roads. She testified in 1992 that customers had maced, beaten and raped her over the years, and the defense experts said she had been attacked by clients on a dozen occasions.
In 1981 she robbed a convenience store in Florida after a day of drinking and drugs, according to the defense brief in the Volusia appeal, which describes the conviction as robbery with a deadly weapon. The Florida Supreme Court later referred to it as a 1982 robbery conviction. That conviction was the prior violent felony the state relied on when it first asked for her death. A state witness testified in 1992 that she had told a prison interviewer in 1982 that she had found religion.
In 1986, at a gay bar in the Daytona Beach area, she met Tyria Moore, a woman from Ohio who was then in her early twenties and worked at hotels. They lived together for about four and a half years, according to the Florida Supreme Court, moving between cheap motels and rented rooms. Moore's pay from hotel jobs helped support them, and Wuornos brought in money from prostitution. She drank heavily, and by the late 1980s she carried a gun. She testified that she had been carrying it for about six months before she met Richard Mallory.
Richard Mallory was 51 and lived in Clearwater, on the Gulf Coast. Accounts of his business differ: a video store owner (UPI), an appliance store owner (Knight Ridder), an electronics shop owner (the Associated Press) and the owner of a TV repair store in Palm Harbor (WFLA). He was last seen alive in Clearwater on November 30, 1989. WFLA reported that he closed his store that day and drove onto Interstate 4 toward Volusia County, on the Atlantic side of the state.
On December 1, 1989, Volusia County Deputy John Bonnevier found Mallory's car abandoned in a wooded area of north Volusia County, near Ormond Beach. Inside were a half-empty vodka bottle, an empty beer bottle, a coat hanger and two of Mallory's driver's licenses. His wallet and credit cards were later found buried in a small hole nearby, and the car appeared to have been wiped down. On December 13, 1989, men searching for scrap metal found his body under debris in woods off U.S. 1 near Interstate 95, several miles from the car. He had been shot several times; the medical examiner found that two bullets to the left lung had killed him. At trial the pathologist said death was probably not instantaneous.
Tyria Moore later testified that on December 1 Wuornos, who appeared slightly drunk but calm, drove her from Ormond Beach to Holly Hill in a car Moore did not recognize, and told her that night that she had shot and killed a man. "I didn't believe it," Moore said. Wuornos pawned Mallory's camera and radar detector within days, and more of his property was later found in a unit at Jack's Mini-Warehouse that she and Moore used.
Five days after Mallory's car was found, on December 18, 1989, the lead investigator, Lawrence Horzepa of the Volusia County Sheriff's Office, took a taped statement from Mallory's former girlfriend, Jacqueline Davis. What she said, and when the defense learned of it, became a central issue at trial.
Over the next eleven months six more men were killed in a band of central and north Florida. Each died of gunshot wounds from a .22, and each was found in a remote place, often well away from his vehicle.
David Spears was 43 and came from Winter Garden, in Orange County. He worked for Universal Concrete Company in Sarasota. A co-worker last saw him on May 19, 1990, the day he was paid, when he set off for Ocoee. His body was found on June 1, 1990, on a dirt road off U.S. 19 in southwest Citrus County, north of the Hernando County line. A forensic anthropologist, Dr. William Maples, found six gunshot wounds. His 1983 Dodge pickup turned up near Interstate 75 and County Road 318 in Marion County with a flat tire; his toolbox, his clothes, a ceramic panther, the license plate and the keys were gone.
Charles Carskaddon was 40. On May 31, 1990, he drove his 1975 Cadillac away from his mother's house in Perryville, Missouri, heading for Tampa to collect his girlfriend and bring her back to Missouri to live, according to the defense brief in his case. He had with him a .45 automatic pistol and two blankets. On June 6, 1990, two fishermen found his body near Pittman Pond, about two miles west of the junction of Interstate 75 and State Road 52 in Pasco County. It was covered with his electric blanket. The medical examiner, Dr. Joan Wood, recovered eight .22 caliber bullets and fragments of a ninth. He was not identified until September 12, 1990, through fingerprints. His Cadillac was recovered in Marion County, and later found stripped in a junkyard. Wuornos pawned his .45 at a shop called Labosca Investments under the name Cammie Greene, and her thumbprint on the pawn ticket matched hers.
Peter Siems was 65 and lived in Jupiter, on Florida's southeast coast. A retired merchant seaman, he had become a Christian missionary, UPI reported. He left Jupiter in June 1990 and was reported missing on June 22. His body has never been found.
Troy Burress was 50, according to UPI in 1991 and to CBS News in 2001 (UPI gave 46 in 1992). He lived in Ocala and drove a delivery truck for the Gilchrist Sausage Company. He was last seen at about 2 p.m. on July 30, 1990, making a delivery in Seville, with about 200 dollars in cash he had collected on his route. At about 3 a.m. the next day his truck was found at the junction of State Roads 40 and 19, in the Ocala National Forest, with the keys and his delivery receipts missing. On August 4 his body was found in woods off a dirt road near State Road 19, about eight miles away. His wallet and credit cards were found nearby; the cash was gone. He had been shot twice. His sister, Letha Prater, and his daughter, Wanda Pouncey, spoke publicly about his death for years afterward.
Charles Richard Humphreys, known as Dick, was 56 and lived in Crystal River. He worked for the state Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services and had just celebrated his 35th wedding anniversary when his family reported him missing on September 11, 1990. The next day two boys on bicycles found his body, fully clothed, in an isolated subdivision north of County Road 484 in southwest Marion County. His pockets had been turned inside out. He had been shot seven times, according to the Florida Supreme Court. His wallet was found about fifty miles away in Lake County, and on September 25 his car was found behind an abandoned gas station at U.S. 90 and Interstate 10, in Suwannee County, with the license plate removed. His daughter, Terry Griffith, would later watch Wuornos die.
Walter Antonio was 62, according to the Florida Supreme Court, and lived in Brevard County; UPI described him in 1992 as a Brevard County sheriff's reservist. He had worked as a security guard and had decided to go back to driving trucks. On November 18, 1990, he left Cocoa for Montgomery, Alabama, to pick up an 18-wheeler. The next day his body was found in woods about a quarter mile from U.S. 19, north of Cross City in Dixie County. He had been shot four times in the back. His car was found five days later in Brevard County. Wuornos pawned his ring.
Wuornos later gave her own accounts of each death. In her statement about Antonio, which the Florida Supreme Court summarized, she said he had picked her up for sex, shown a police badge she believed was fake and threatened to arrest her unless she had sex with him for free; she said she pulled her gun in a struggle and shot him. The court found that the state's theory, a planned killing, was supported by the evidence.
The killings crossed six counties and several sheriff's offices, and for months they were investigated separately. John Bankston, writing in Police Magazine in 1996, credited Investigator John Tilley of the Marion County Sheriff's Office with connecting them after reading a state crime bulletin; Tilley met investigators from the Spears and Carskaddon cases on September 6, 1990. Sergeant Bruce Munster coordinated the effort from Ocala, and Marion County became the lead agency. Its sheriff, Don Moreland, later said his office had led the investigation.
The break came from the one case with no body. On July 4, 1990, Peter Siems's car was found wrecked at Orange Springs, in Marion County. Witnesses saw two women leave the crash, and one of them left a bloody palm print, Police Magazine reported; the print was later matched to Wuornos, according to the defense brief in the Mallory appeal. In November 1990 investigators released composite sketches of the two women, based on the witnesses' descriptions, and asked the public for help. "We don't normally go to the press," Munster told Police Magazine, but he said investigators felt they had a responsibility to warn people about picking up female hitchhikers.
The sketches led to tips, including from a motel owner who recognized the women. Moore, seeing the composites on television, left Wuornos in December 1990 and went back north to her family. Pawn records gave investigators a name: Wuornos had left her thumbprint on the ticket when she pawned Mallory's camera, and she had pawned items belonging to Carskaddon and Antonio under aliases. Investigators traced her to the Daytona Beach area about a week before her arrest.
On the night of January 9, 1991, Wuornos was at the Last Resort, a biker bar on South Ridgewood Avenue in Port Orange, just south of Daytona Beach. She was a regular there and sometimes slept on its porch, UPI reported, and she and Moore had stayed at a cheap motel down the street. An arrest affidavit, quoted by WKMG in 2024, says undercover detectives "located Wuornos at the Last Resort Bar and took her into custody." The bar's owner, Al Bulling (spelled Bullings by WKMG), said undercover officers had been drinking with her that night. She was arrested on an outstanding warrant for carrying a concealed firearm, not for murder.
Police had already found Moore. Florida officers contacted her in Pennsylvania, according to the Florida Supreme Court, and she agreed to come back to Florida and help them get a confession; UPI reported in 1992 that she had gone to Ohio. Investigators paid for her travel and lodging and helped her write a letter to Wuornos in jail. Over three days Moore and Wuornos spoke in about ten recorded telephone calls (eleven, by Police Magazine's count), with an officer sitting beside Moore and passing her written notes. Wuornos's appeal lawyers later said Moore lied to her, threatened suicide and pressed her to take the blame. The state said Wuornos used the calls to urge Moore to stop cooperating. In one call, as quoted by Fox News in 2025, Wuornos told her: "If I have to confess everything just to keep you from getting in trouble, I will." Moore was never charged with any crime.
On January 16, 1991, at the Volusia County Branch Jail, Wuornos gave a long videotaped statement to Investigator Horzepa, with an investigator from Marion County. A lawyer from the public defender's office was sent to see her and strongly advised her not to talk. She refused the advice. The Florida Supreme Court later held that she had freely waived her rights and that her will had not been overborne.
She described seven killings. In each, she said, she had acted in self-defense, because the men had become violent or threatening or had refused to pay. She said she had a drinking problem and had usually been drunk on the days of the killings. She expressed remorse and said she deserved the death penalty. Her accounts of Mallory's death changed from one telling to the next. The first, the court said, described a struggle over her bag and the gun; later versions added a rape and bondage. The prosecutor in her first trial said the tape ran about three hours.
That night Wuornos was charged with first degree murder in Mallory's death. "I believe Ms. Wuornos is a killer who robs, not a robber who kills," said Captain Steve Binegar of the Marion County Sheriff's Office, the chief investigator. "We believe she pretty much meets the guidelines of a serial killer." Police divers recovered a corroded .22 revolver from Rose Bay, near a motel where she had lived, together with handcuffs, flashlights and a pocket knife; Moore showed them where to look. The defense later stipulated that bullets from Humphreys, Spears, Burress and Mallory were fired from that gun.
A Marion County sergeant, Robert Douglas, told reporters that hatred of men seemed to be her only motive. The Volusia County state attorney, John Tanner, compared the case to Ted Bundy's and said women who killed usually chose less violent methods, "usually poison." A Volusia County grand jury indicted her on January 28, 1991, for the first degree murder and armed robbery of Mallory. Indictments followed in Marion County on February 20 (Humphreys and Burress), in Citrus County on February 22 (Spears), in Pasco County on April 16 (Carskaddon), and later in Dixie County (Antonio). No charge was ever brought for Peter Siems.
The case drew film and book interest almost at once. In July 1991 the state attorney's office looked into whether Marion County sheriff's officers had agreed to sell their story, the St. Petersburg Times reported; in December 1991 the paper reported that the office had found no evidence that three investigators had signed a movie contract. At the first trial, defense lawyer William Miller cross-examined Moore about rumors of a movie deal, Police Magazine wrote. In 2025 the producer Jackie Giroux, who had bought rights to Wuornos's life story, told Fox News that the news media had made her "the queen of the serial killers."
Wuornos also acquired an advocate. Arlene Pralle, a born-again Christian who lived in Marion County, began writing to her after the arrest and, with her husband, legally adopted her. Pralle screened media requests for interviews and was paid 7,500 dollars for one broadcast, according to evidence the state presented in the Marion County penalty hearing. She helped hire Steven Glazer, the private lawyer who represented Wuornos in her later cases. In August 1991 the St. Petersburg Times reported that Wuornos had told a jailer the men deserved to die because she feared they would hurt her or others.
Wuornos was tried first for Mallory's murder, in Volusia County Circuit Court at DeLand, before Judge Uriel Blount. Jury selection began on January 13, 1992. The prosecutor was State Attorney John Tanner. She was defended by the public defender's office: Tricia Jenkins, Billy Nolas and William Miller.
On the Friday before jury selection the defense moved to compel discovery and asked for more time. It said the state had only then turned over Jacqueline Davis's December 1989 statement, which the defense said described Mallory's past, including a burglary charge at 18, a prison term and his use of pornography. The state said Davis had been named in discovery long before. Judge Blount denied a continuance. During the trial he first ruled Davis's evidence inadmissible, then allowed it after a proffer; the defense rested without calling her. On cross-examination at the proffer, according to the state's brief, Davis said Mallory had never been sexually aggressive toward her or any woman.
Moore was the state's main witness. Testifying on January 16, she described the drive in Mallory's car and Wuornos's admission. Asked by Miller about Wuornos's devotion to her, she stayed composed. She said she had cooperated after seeing the composite drawings, because she wanted investigators to know she had nothing to do with the killing.
The central ruling came on January 17. Over defense objections, Judge Blount allowed the state to present evidence of the other killings under Florida's Williams rule, which admits evidence of similar crimes when they tend to prove something in dispute, such as intent. Tanner argued that the other killings showed Wuornos meant to rob and kill, not defend herself. "We don't try people on propensity, we don't try people on their character," Nolas answered. Witnesses described the deaths of Humphreys, Burress, Spears, Carskaddon and Antonio and the disappearance of Peter Siems. On January 21, Siems's son Stephen, then 24, an engineer from Arkansas, identified scissors, a shaving kit, a jacket, suitcases and a license plate found in the abandoned car. "If I remember right, these are the scissors my father used to use to cut my hair," he said. As he left the stand, Wuornos told her lawyers there was "lie after lie after lie." A crime scene analyst, William Schwoob, testified that he had opened a briefcase from the storage unit using the first six digits of Humphreys's Social Security number. Two men testified about encounters with Wuornos on the road; one, the truck driver Bobby Copas, said she had threatened him with a gun in November 1990. The jury saw an edited portion of her videotaped confession dealing only with Mallory.
Wuornos was the only defense witness. She testified for about three hours, telling the jury that Mallory had tied her up, raped her and threatened to kill her, and that she shot him when he came at her again. She said she had not told investigators about the assault and had confessed to clear Moore. "Everyone has the right to defend themselves," she said. The defense rested on January 24.
On Monday, January 27, 1992, the jury found her guilty as charged of first degree murder and armed robbery with a firearm. As she was led out she shouted at the jurors that she had been raped. The penalty phase began the next day. Three defense mental health experts, Dr. McMahon, Dr. Harry Krop and Dr. Toomer, diagnosed borderline personality disorder and testified that she had been under extreme emotional disturbance and substantially impaired. Dr. Barnard, for the state, agreed on borderline personality disorder but also found antisocial personality disorder and found neither condition extreme. "Lee is a damaged, primitive child," Jenkins told the jury. Tanner said the case was "not about mercy" and "not about mental illness." After about two hours, on January 30, the jury unanimously recommended death. Three jurors were in tears.
On January 31, 1992, Judge Blount sentenced her to death, and to ten years for the armed robbery. He found five aggravating circumstances: her prior violent felony, a murder during a robbery, a murder to avoid arrest, a murder that met Florida's statutory test of being especially atrocious or cruel, and a murder that was cold, calculated and premeditated. He found one mitigating circumstance, borderline personality disorder. Pralle pleaded for "mercy for my daughter's life." Wuornos told the court she was "no serial killer" and blamed her lawyers and the prosecutor. The forewoman, Pamela Mills, said: "I don't dislike the woman. I feel sorry for her but I went with the evidence." The trial had lasted 14 days.
Wuornos did not go to trial again. On March 26, 1992, the public defender's office in Marion County withdrew, and Glazer took over. On March 31 she pleaded no contest before Judge Thomas D. Sawaya to the murders and armed robberies of Humphreys, Burress and Spears, without any bargain or promise that her life would be spared, and the judge adjudicated her guilty. Glazer said he had advised her against it. "I killed in self defense but I still can't live with myself," she told the court, according to her appeal brief, and she said she wanted to be executed as soon as possible. Asked why she was pleading, she said: "Because I love the Lord, God. And I just feel that I took a life so it's time for me to go."
A sentencing jury heard evidence in Marion County beginning on May 4, 1992; Wuornos asked to be excused and the court allowed it. The defense played her confession and called Pralle, who described the abandonment, beatings and early pregnancy and said Wuornos had become a Christian. The state answered with Copas, with an officer who said she had threatened to kill him while being transported, and with relatives who denied any abuse. The jury recommended death by 10 to 2 in each case, and on May 15, 1992, Judge Sawaya imposed three death sentences.
In Pasco County she pleaded guilty on June 22, 1992, before Judge Lynn Tepper, after the court refused a no contest plea. "I'm pleading guilty in self-defense," she said. Within weeks Dr. Krop, advising the defense, reported that she was delusional and not competent to proceed; two court-appointed experts found her competent, and on September 17, 1992, the court agreed. Before the penalty phase the state asked the court to bar any self-defense claim and any evidence of Mallory's past, and her lawyer said he would not offer the Mallory evidence. On January 25, 1993, she waived a jury, the presentation of mitigating evidence and her own presence. "I just want to go back to death row and be left alone," she said. On February 5, 1993, Judge Wayne L. Cobb sentenced her to death for Carskaddon's murder. "Big deal," she said.
In Dixie County, a rural county whose officials worried about the cost of a capital trial, she pleaded guilty to Antonio's murder and robbery. At the plea hearing Glazer told the court that she understood he did not have "the capital experience necessary to take her case to trial" and that he would ask to withdraw if it went to trial. The jury recommended death by 7 to 5, the narrowest of her six recommendations. On February 4, 1993, Judge Royce Agner sentenced her to death, with a consecutive 17 year term for the robbery.
On November 10, 1992, NBC's Dateline aired a report by Michele Gillen, built on research by the NBC investigator Jack Kassewitz, revealing that Mallory had a criminal record in Maryland, Chesler wrote in the St. John's Law Review. According to Montgomery County, Maryland, court records cited by Chesler, in 1957 Mallory entered a married woman's home and tried to rape her. He was convicted of attempted rape, sentenced to four years and held for about ten years in all, much of it at Patuxent Institution as a sex offender, where his record described him as impulsive and explosive. WFLA, in a later account, said he had pleaded insanity and served ten years in a prison mental institution. Chesler wrote that she and other feminists had urged the public defenders in the spring of 1991 to look into his past, and that a routine records check would have found it. On camera, she reported, Tanner conceded that preparation had been incomplete and that the case might have to be retried.
Wuornos's lawyers argued that the record should overturn her conviction and death sentences, the St. Petersburg Times reported in October 1992. It never did. The Florida Supreme Court, deciding her Mallory appeal in 1994, found that Davis's name and statement had been disclosed within the time limits of the discovery rules, so there was no violation. No court ever ordered a new trial.
The Florida Supreme Court affirmed all six death sentences.
In the Mallory case, decided on September 22, 1994 (644 So. 2d 1000), the court held that the other killings were properly admitted to rebut her claims of self-defense and lack of intent, that her confession was voluntary, and that some victim impact material and an invalid jury instruction on cold, calculated premeditation were harmless. It also held that the trial court should have found and weighed her alcoholism, the evidence of her difficult childhood and some degree of impaired capacity, but that leaving them out was harmless because they weighed little against the aggravating circumstances. Justice Gerald Kogan, concurring, wrote that "the facts here present two quite different pictures of Aileen Wuornos": one of a woman who had lived a life of victimization and violence, the other of a calculating killer who lured men to their deaths to take their property. He found that she had a colorable claim of self-defense, undermined by her own inconsistent statements.
In the Marion and Citrus cases, decided on October 6, 1994 (644 So. 2d 1012), the court rejected her argument that her no contest pleas were not knowing and voluntary. "It is emphatically defense counsel's role to tell the defendant of strategies, consequences," it wrote, and her religious remarks at the plea hearing did not require a competency hearing: "Fervently held religious beliefs do not equate to serious instability." In the Pasco case, decided on September 21, 1995 (676 So. 2d 966), the court found that the trial judge had wrongly found the killing cold, calculated and premeditated, relying only on the other crimes, and had wrongly failed to find her personality disorder as mitigation, but held both errors harmless. In the Dixie case, decided on May 9, 1996 (676 So. 2d 972), it rejected the argument that Antonio's own conduct mitigated the crime, holding that the statute "does not encompass situations in which the killer surprises the victim with deadly force." The United States Supreme Court declined to hear each case.
Wuornos spent about a decade on Florida's death row for women at Broward Correctional Institution. Prison records summarized by the Florida Commission on Capital Cases list a series of disciplinary reports between 1992 and 2000, mostly for disobeying orders, disrespect and spoken threats; one in January 2000 led to disciplinary confinement.
Her lawyers from the state's Capital Collateral Regional Counsel filed motions for postconviction relief in the circuit courts, and several were denied in 2000 and 2001. At a hearing in February 2001 a judge ruled her competent to drop her appeals, but she chose to continue them; she later said the agency's lawyers had misled her about whether she could stop. That month she told the Miami television station WPLG: "I need to die for the killing of those people." She then wrote to the Florida Supreme Court asking to end her appeals and fire her lawyers. In June 2001 the court sent the question of her competence back to the circuit court.
At the hearing, on July 20, 2001, before Circuit Judge Michael Hutcheson, she testified for about 90 minutes. "I killed those men in the first degree, robbed and killed them," she said, and she said she had lied at her trial to beat the system. "I am a serial killer. I would kill again," she said, and "there's no sense in keeping me alive." She apologized to the families. Asked how the killings had happened, she said: "That's cold. I do deserve to die." Her lawyer, Richard Kiley, said she did not understand the consequences. Judge Hutcheson found her competent. "I don't hate her. I hate what she did," said Letha Prater, Troy Burress's sister. His daughter, Wanda Pouncey, said it was time for the case to end.
On April 1, 2002, the Florida Supreme Court approved the finding, discharged the Capital Collateral Regional Counsel and dismissed her remaining appeals and petitions. Governor Jeb Bush signed her death warrant on September 5, 2002, setting the execution for October 9.
Her final lawyer, Raag Singhal of Fort Lauderdale, wrote to the Florida Supreme Court expressing "grave doubts" about her mental condition. "I don't think we should be executing somebody simply because they're a volunteer," he said. Governor Bush issued a stay and ordered a mental examination. Three psychiatrists concluded that she understood why she was to be executed and that execution would end her life, the standard Florida law required, and the stay was lifted in the week before the execution. Tanner, who watched the examinations, said she was lucid and "knew exactly what she was doing." Speaking years later in a television documentary, Singhal said she "had good days and bad days, and rarely were the two consecutive." He described her laughing uncontrollably in meetings and then writing to the court in careful handwriting.
On October 8, 2002, the Florida Supreme Court rejected two last efforts to stop the execution, one by a Tampa lawyer and one by the Florida Support Group, an affiliate of an Ohio anti-death penalty organization, which argued that she was mentally ill and that the competency examination had been inadequate.
The British filmmaker Nick Broomfield, who had made a 1992 documentary about the selling of her story, filmed her in the last days for a second film, made with Joan Churchill. In those interviews, Variety reported, she insisted that her mind was being controlled by radio waves.
Her childhood friend Dawn Botkins visited her for three hours on the night of October 8. Botkins said afterward that Wuornos was "extremely happy, ready to go," that she had prayed for the victims' families and asked forgiveness, and that she was angry because she believed police could have caught her sooner.
She was woken at 5:30 a.m. on October 9, 2002, at Florida State Prison near Starke. She declined a last meal and asked only for a cup of coffee, a prison spokesman said. Thirty-two witnesses watched as she was strapped to a gurney. Her final statement was: "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." The Rock, the Knight Ridder report explained, was a biblical reference to Christ. She was pronounced dead at 9:47 a.m., six minutes after the lethal injection began. She was 46.
She was the tenth woman executed in the United States since the death penalty resumed in 1976, and the second in Florida in that period, after Judy Buenoano in 1998. Terry Griffith, Dick Humphreys's daughter, said: "In my opinion, it was a very easy death, it was a little bit too easy." Tanner said the evidence had been overwhelming that she killed seven men in cold blood. Billy Nolas, one of her trial lawyers, said she had borderline personality disorder rooted in childhood neglect and sexual abuse. "She is the most disturbed individual I have represented," he said. The family of Charles Carskaddon chose not to attend, the St. Petersburg Times reported. Botkins took her ashes home to Michigan for burial.
Her story has been retold many times. Broomfield's first documentary was released in 1992 and the second, Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, was shown at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2003. A television movie, Overkill: The Aileen Wuornos Story, aired in 1992, and an opera by the composer Carla Lucero, Wuornos, opened in San Francisco in 2001 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. In February 2004 Charlize Theron won the Academy Award for best actress for playing her in a 2003 feature film. In 2025 Netflix released Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers, directed by Emily Turner, which used Moore's recorded call and archive footage of Michele Gillen's Dateline reporting. "I don't think she was ever really listened to by the adults in her life," Turner said.
The Last Resort still trades on her name. In 2024 WKMG reported that the bar displayed newspaper clippings about her and that she was still receiving mail there, years after her death.
Peter Siems has never been found, and no one has been charged with his death.
Aileen Wuornos was executed on October 9, 2002. All six of her murder convictions were final before her death. No court ever vacated any of them, and no posthumous proceeding has been reported.
Proven by final judgment: the first degree murders of Richard Mallory (jury verdict, Volusia County), Charles Humphreys, Troy Burress and David Spears (no contest pleas, Marion and Citrus counties), Charles Carskaddon (guilty plea, Pasco County) and Walter Antonio (guilty plea, Dixie County), with armed robbery convictions in each case except Pasco, where only murder was charged.
Admitted but never charged: the killing of Peter Siems. Wuornos confessed to it in January 1991, and his property and her palm print were in his car, but his body has never been found. Before her trial she offered to help find it, possibly in South Carolina; a Marion County investigator told her Florida could make no deal over a crime outside the state.
Self-defense. Wuornos told police in 1991, and the Mallory jury in 1992, that she had killed in self-defense. In 2001 she told a judge she had killed the men to rob them. Moore testified that Wuornos never told her she had been beaten or raped. The Florida Supreme Court found her accounts inconsistent with one another on major points, and Justice Kogan found her self-defense claim colorable but undermined. The one corroborating fact, Mallory's 1957 Maryland attempted rape conviction, was never heard by any jury. Whether it would have changed the verdict is unknowable; what is documented is that the record existed and was found by a television investigator, not by the police or either side's lawyers.
Other deaths. In January 1991 UPI reported that police were looking at eight deaths along the Interstate 75 corridor, including those of Douglas Giddens, 46, of Willacoochee, Georgia, and an unidentified man found in south Georgia, and that Curtis Reid, 50, of Titusville, might also be a victim. None of these deaths was ever charged to Wuornos, and no court record attributing them to her has been reported.
The "first female serial killer." She is often called the first, which is wrong; WFLA noted that historians point to earlier cases such as Jane Toppan's in Massachusetts. ABC News and WFLA described her more narrowly as the first woman to fit, or be profiled under, the FBI's profile of a serial killer.
Details that vary between accounts: Mallory's age (51 in most sources; 52 in early 1991 reports) and occupation (video store, appliance store, electronics shop, TV repair store; an electrician, in two later UPI items); the year of her robbery conviction (1981 in the defense brief; 1982 in the Florida Supreme Court); Burress's age (50 or 46); Antonio's age (62 in the court record; 60 in a 1991 UPI report); whether Humphreys was shot six or seven times; where Moore was when police reached her (Pennsylvania, according to the court; Ohio, according to UPI); the number of recorded calls (about ten or eleven); Carskaddon's hometown (Perryville, Prairie Home or Booneville, Missouri, in different documents); and her birthplace (Rochester or Troy, Michigan). Several later reports wrongly say she was convicted of seven murders; she was convicted of six.
February 29, 1956: Aileen Carol Wuornos is born in Michigan (Florida corrections record).
Early childhood: her mother leaves; her maternal grandparents raise and later adopt her and her brother, Keith.
At about 13 or 14: she becomes pregnant and gives birth to a son, who is adopted.
1976: her brother Keith dies of cancer; her grandfather kills himself (Chesler).
1981 or 1982: convicted of robbery of a Florida convenience store.
1986: meets Tyria Moore in the Daytona Beach area.
November 30, 1989: Richard Mallory is last seen in Clearwater.
December 1, 1989: Mallory's car is found in north Volusia County.
December 13, 1989: Mallory's body is found off U.S. 1.
December 18, 1989: Investigator Horzepa takes a statement from Jacqueline Davis.
May 19, 1990: David Spears is last seen.
May 31, 1990: Charles Carskaddon leaves Missouri for Tampa.
June 1, 1990: Spears's body is found in Citrus County.
June 6, 1990: Carskaddon's body is found in Pasco County.
June 1990: Peter Siems leaves Jupiter; reported missing June 22.
July 4, 1990: Siems's car is wrecked at Orange Springs; two women are seen leaving it.
July 30, 1990: Troy Burress disappears on his delivery route; his body is found August 4.
September 6, 1990: investigators from several counties meet to compare cases.
September 11, 1990: Dick Humphreys is reported missing; his body is found the next day.
November 18, 1990: Walter Antonio leaves Cocoa; his body is found in Dixie County on November 19.
November 1990: composite sketches of two women are released.
December 1990: Moore leaves Florida.
January 9, 1991: Wuornos is arrested at the Last Resort on a concealed weapons warrant.
January 1991: Moore makes recorded calls to Wuornos in jail.
January 16, 1991: videotaped confession; charged with Mallory's murder.
January 28, 1991: Volusia County indictment.
February 20 and 22, 1991: Marion and Citrus county indictments.
April 16, 1991: Pasco County indictment.
January 13, 1992: the Mallory trial opens in DeLand.
January 27, 1992: guilty of first degree murder and armed robbery.
January 30, 1992: jury recommends death, 12 to 0.
January 31, 1992: sentenced to death by Judge Uriel Blount.
March 31, 1992: no contest pleas in the Humphreys, Burress and Spears cases.
May 15, 1992: three death sentences from Judge Thomas D. Sawaya.
June 22, 1992: guilty plea in the Carskaddon case.
November 10, 1992: Dateline reports Mallory's Maryland record.
February 4, 1993: death sentence in the Antonio case (Judge Royce Agner).
February 5, 1993: death sentence in the Carskaddon case (Judge Wayne L. Cobb).
September 22, 1994: Florida Supreme Court affirms the Mallory judgment.
October 6, 1994: Florida Supreme Court affirms the Marion and Citrus judgments.
September 21, 1995: Florida Supreme Court affirms the Pasco judgment.
May 9, 1996: Florida Supreme Court affirms the Dixie judgment.
February 2001: found competent to drop her appeals; she continues them.
July 20, 2001: tells Judge Michael Hutcheson she killed the men to rob them; found competent.
April 1, 2002: Florida Supreme Court dismisses her remaining appeals.
September 5, 2002: Governor Jeb Bush signs her death warrant.
Early October 2002: a stay for a mental examination is lifted.
October 8, 2002: Florida Supreme Court rejects last challenges.
October 9, 2002: executed at Florida State Prison; pronounced dead at 9:47 a.m.
2003: Broomfield and Churchill's second documentary is shown.
February 2004: Charlize Theron wins the Academy Award for playing her.
October 2025: Netflix releases Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers.
October 20, 2026: Peter Siems remains missing; no later development found.