Richard Mallory had served ten years in Maryland after a sex-crime conviction, described in later accounts as rape or attempted rape. It was a matter of public record, and nobody went looking until after Aileen Wuornos had been convicted of killing him and sentenced to death. She had testified that he tied her to the steering wheel of his car and raped her and that she shot him to get away. The jury heard the claim without knowing that record existed. She had not mentioned it herself before trial, and Tyria Moore never said she had. When the omission was finally litigated, it was not as prosecutorial misconduct but as a claim that her own trial lawyers had been ineffective for never finding it.
That is the difficulty with her case, and it never resolved. The convictions are settled, six counts of first degree murder and six death sentences, affirmed on appeal and never disturbed. What was never settled is the question underneath them, because the only witness to any of the seven killings was the woman on trial, and over eleven years she gave several irreconcilable accounts of what happened, ending with one in which she admitted she had shot the men for their money and deserved to die for it.
She was born Aileen Carol Pittman on February 29, 1956, in Rochester, Michigan, outside Detroit. Her mother Diane was fourteen when she married Leo Pittman, who was eighteen; Diane filed for divorce two months before Aileen was born. Pittman was later convicted of raping a child and hanged himself in prison. Aileen never met him. Diane left, and Aileen and her older brother Keith were raised by their grandparents as though they were their own children. At six she was badly burned setting fires with lighter fluid and kept the scars on her face for the rest of her life. She was pregnant at fourteen, gave birth in a home for unmarried mothers in the spring of 1971, and the boy was placed for adoption. She was out of the house and earning money on the road before she was old enough to drive.
Twenty years of small crime followed, conducted under a rotation of names, Sandra Kretsch, Lori Grody, Susan Blahovec, Cammie Marsh Greene. In 1974 she was jailed in Colorado for disorderly conduct and firing a pistol from a moving car. In 1976 she married Lewis Gratz Fell, a yacht club president fifty years older than she was; the marriage was annulled after nine weeks, following a restraining order he took out when she beat him with his own cane. Keith died of cancer that July and left her ten thousand dollars in insurance money, which was gone inside a year. A 1981 armed robbery conviction in Florida gave the state the prior violent felony it would later use as an aggravating factor in asking for her death. In 1986, in a Daytona Beach bar, she met Tyria Moore, a hotel maid, and for four years they lived together on what Wuornos brought back from the highways.
On November 30, 1989, she shot Richard Mallory, a fifty-one-year-old Clearwater electronics repair shop owner. A Volusia County deputy found his abandoned car on December 1. His body turned up on December 13 in woods several miles away. He had been shot several times; two rounds through the left lung killed him. In her first account to detectives she said she had been hitchhiking, that they had driven into the woods for an act of prostitution, that he wanted sex without undressing, and that she had decided he meant to rob and rape her, so she got her gun out of her bag and shot him while he was still behind the wheel, telling him she knew what he had intended. She said he denied it. By the time she reached the witness stand the account had grown into a prolonged, violent rape. The Florida Supreme Court would later note that her statements were inconsistent with one another on major points.
Six more men were killed over the following twelve months, all shot with a .22, all of them middle-aged, all of them having picked her up. David Spears, a construction worker from Winter Garden whose age is given as forty-three in some accounts and forty-seven in others, was reported missing in May and found naked beside U.S. 19 in Citrus County on June 1, 1990, shot six times. Charles Carskaddon, forty, a part-time rodeo worker, was found in Pasco County on June 6, shot nine times and wrapped in an electric blanket; witnesses later saw Wuornos with his car, and she pawned a gun that had been his. Peter Siems, a sixty-five-year-old merchant seaman turned missionary, left Jupiter on June 7 to drive to Arkansas and was never seen again; his car was found crashed and abandoned near Orange Springs on July 4, and his body has never been recovered. Troy Burress, a fifty-year-old sausage salesman from Ocala, was reported missing on July 31 and found shot twice in woods along State Road 19 in Marion County on August 4. Dick Humphreys, fifty-six, a retired Air Force major, former police chief and former state child abuse investigator, was found in Marion County on September 12, fully clothed and shot seven times; his car turned up in Suwannee County. Walter Antonio, a trucker, security guard and reserve police officer whose age is given as sixty-one or sixty-two, was found nearly naked on a logging road in Dixie County on November 19. Several were found stripped. Their cars, cash and small possessions were gone.
The crash of Siems's car is what undid her. Two women had been seen walking away from it, which gave investigators descriptions and a composite, and Wuornos's palm print was on the inside door handle. Wuornos was arrested in a Daytona Beach biker bar on January 9, 1991, on the outstanding weapons warrant in the name Lori Grody. Moore was located and brought back, and from a motel room with police listening she telephoned Wuornos in jail over several days and pressed her about what she should do. Wuornos told her to keep quiet, then told the detectives that she had done all of it alone and that Moore had nothing to do with any of it. Moore was never charged and testified for the state.
She went to trial in January 1992 on the Mallory murder alone, and the prosecution was permitted to put the other killings in front of the jury as evidence of a pattern. That ruling, upheld on appeal, is most of why the trial went the way it did: her defense rested entirely on her own account of a single encounter, and the state answered it with six more men shot in materially the same way. The jury convicted her on January 27. It recommended death, and the judge imposed it. She was heard shouting at the jurors as they left.
The rest of the cases never went to a jury. With Steven Glazer acting for her, a lawyer who went by "Dr. Legal" and whose handling of her would later be picked over in open court, she pleaded no contest or guilty in the Spears, Burress, Humphreys, Carskaddon and Antonio cases, and drew a death sentence in each. No charge was ever brought over Peter Siems, because without a body there was no case to bring. Six death sentences, seven men.
The Florida Supreme Court affirmed. It did so while agreeing with her on a point that ought to have counted for something: the trial court, it said, should have found and weighed her alcoholism, the large and largely uncontroverted evidence about the difficulties she had faced as a child, and the fact that she was to some degree impaired and mentally disturbed when she killed Mallory. The trial judge had found exactly one mitigating circumstance, borderline personality disorder, against five aggravating ones. The court identified the omission and affirmed the sentence anyway. The United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 1995.
For most of the decade that followed she fought her convictions, and then she turned around and fought her lawyers for the right to stop. At a hearing in February 2001 a judge ruled her competent to drop her appeals; she chose to continue them, then said afterward that the state's post-conviction lawyers had misled her about whether she could. In April she wrote to the Florida Supreme Court herself, and at the hearing the court ordered she said she had lied at her trial to beat the system, that she had killed the men in the first degree and robbed them, and that there was no sense keeping her alive. She apologized to the families. Asked later how the killings had happened she said that as soon as the men picked her up and parked in the woods she pulled out the gun and shot them, and that this was cold, and that she deserved to die.
Whether any of that could be relied on was the last fight in the case. Her final appeals lawyer, Raag Singhal, wrote to the state Supreme Court expressing grave doubts about her mental condition and asked the governor for a stay on the ground that a society owes it to itself to answer those questions before it kills someone. Jeb Bush granted one on September 30, 2002, and ordered an examination. Three psychiatrists appointed by the state concluded she understood why she had been sentenced and that execution would kill her, which is all Florida law requires. The stay was lifted. Singhal, who had watched her laugh uncontrollably for no reason in their meetings and then write the court letters in an immaculate hand, said she had good days and bad days and that the two were rarely consecutive.
She was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison in Raiford on the morning of October 9, 2002, and pronounced dead at 9:47. She was forty-six, and she had declined a last meal and taken a cup of coffee. Her final statement was about sailing with the Rock and coming back on a big mothership, like the movie. Terry Griffith, Dick Humphreys's daughter, watched her die and said afterward that it had been an easy death, a little too easy.
She is still routinely called America's first female serial killer, which is wrong by a century or more, and the reason for the mistake says something about the case. Women who kill repeatedly have overwhelmingly killed people they knew, in houses, usually by poison, and have been recorded as domestic curiosities. Wuornos shot strangers with a handgun beside public highways for their cars and their cash, which is the pattern police are trained to recognize in men, and it made her legible as a monster in a way that Nannie Doss and Belle Gunness never were. Two films, a television movie and an opera followed. What none of them settled, and what the verdict did not settle either, is the thing she first said and then unsaid: that the first man she killed was raping her when she did it. He had been convicted of doing exactly that to someone else, and her jury was never told.