Aileen Carol Wuornos was born in Michigan on February 29, 1956. Her father, Leo Pittman, was a convicted child molester who killed himself in prison; she never met him. Her mother left, and she and her brother Keith were raised by their grandparents. She was burned in a lighter fluid accident at six and carried the scars on her face. She was pregnant at fourteen and gave birth on March 23, 1971; the boy was taken for adoption immediately. She was out of the house and living by prostitution before she was old enough to drive.
What followed was twenty years of small crime under a rotation of names. As Sandra Kretch she was jailed in Colorado in 1974 for disorderly conduct and firing a pistol from a moving car. In 1976 she married Lewis Gratz Fell, a yacht club president fifty years her senior; the marriage lasted nine weeks and ended with a restraining order after she beat him with his own cane. Her brother died of cancer four days before the divorce was final and left her ten thousand dollars, which went. She was arrested for armed robbery in 1981 and took her aunt's name, Lori Grody, for the forgery and car theft charges that followed. In 1986 she met Tyria Moore, a hotel maid, and the two lived together for four years on what Wuornos earned on the highways.
On November 30, 1989, she shot Richard Mallory, a Clearwater shop owner, and left his body in woods off I-95 in Volusia County. It was found on December 13. She said at trial that Mallory had tied her wrists to the steering wheel and raped her and that she shot him to get free. Mallory had served ten years in Maryland for violent rape. The jury never heard it; the prosecution did not disclose it and the defence did not find it until after the conviction.
Six more men followed through 1990. David Spears in Citrus County on June 1, Charles Carskaddon on June 6, Peter Siems in July, whose car was found abandoned on State Road 315 but whose body never was, Troy Burress in the Ocala National Forest on August 4, Dick Humphreys in Marion County on September 12, and Walter Antonio on a logging road in Dixie County on November 19. All were shot with a .22, all were middle-aged men who had picked her up, and several were found stripped. She took cars, cash and small possessions.
Wuornos and Moore crashed Siems's car in July 1990 and were seen walking away from it, which gave police two descriptions and a set of prints. Wuornos was arrested in a Daytona biker bar on January 9, 1991. Moore, who had gone back to Pennsylvania, agreed to telephone her from a motel room wired by police and press her to confess, which she did, saying she had done it alone and that Moore had nothing to do with it. Moore was never charged.
She was convicted of Mallory's murder on January 27, 1992, and sentenced to death. She pleaded no contest or guilty in the other cases and received six death sentences in all. She dropped self-defence over the following decade. In 2001 she asked the courts to stop her appeals, telling them plainly that she had killed and robbed the men in cold blood, that she would kill again, and that she was competent and tired of being called crazy. Three state-appointed psychiatrists examined her for fifteen minutes and found her fit. Governor Jeb Bush signed the warrant, and she was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison on October 9, 2002. Her last statement was about a mother ship.
She is often described as America's first female serial killer, which she was not, and the description says more about how unlike the pattern she was. Most women who kill serially kill people they know, usually by poison. Wuornos shot strangers with a handgun on public highways, which is why she was read as an aberration and why the self-defence claim was never quite settled by the verdict.