FEMALE SERIAL KILLER: AILEEN WUORNOS

March 23, 1971, Aileen Wuornos pushed against everything tangible, excruciating pain shooting through her from stem to sternum, glaring back at the jeering looks from those who surrounded her to both witness and aid the birth of her child. Shortly after, ragged and in pieces splayed out on the birthing table, with nothing left in her to contest, her baby boy was ripped from her side and adopted right out from under her. It was decided that a fourteen year old would know nothing about raising a child, still being one herself. She had said later that her child was her brother, Keith’s, although there was no evidence except for her word.

Having been drained and left out to dry, Wuornos made her own way, selling the only thing she had to sell, herself. Despite the scars on her face from a lighter fluid accident when she was six, she managed to drum up enough customers to get by, being that she was exiled from her family and community.

In 1974 Wuornos tried her hand at being someone else, someone completely new: Sandra Kretch. Unfortunately, Sandra Kretch was a lot like Aileen Wuornos, she was jailed in Jefferson County, Colorado for disorderly conduct, drinking in a vehicle and firing a pistol from a moving vehicle.

Just two years later she married a seventy year old yacht club president named Lewis Gratz Fell. Their marriage lasted a mere nine weeks before it ended in divorce and a restraining order against Wuornos for beating Fell with his own cane. If her motive for marrying a man half a century older than her was money, the necessity was no longer there after her brother had died of throat cancer, leaving her 10,000 dollars, just four days before the divorce was finalized to Fell.

And then the money ran out, and on May 20, 1981 she was caught for armed robbery. When she was released she tried her hand for the second time at an alias. She used her aunt’s name: Lori Christine Grody. Being Lori got her through a couple of other petty crimes like forgery, driving without a license, grand theft auto, and things of that nature. It was under this alias that she was first caught for robbing one of her customers at gun point in her vehicle.

1987 was the year of Susan Blahovec, and it was at this time that she met her lover Tyria Moore, seven years younger than her and working as a maid in a hotel. Wuornos, Blahovec at the time decided to support herself and her lover through prostitution, a career that she had pursued off and on for more than half of her life. Wuornos kept to her wild ways and was unable to stay off the radar.

So the next year Wuoronos took her final alias, Cammie Marsh Greene. But even as Greene, little altercations followed her, arguments between her and city bus drivers, landlords, and grocery store managers over lottery tickets pulled at her and tugged. Keeping her head down and muddling through was all she could think to do to make it through the world with her Moore.

In 1989 she rarely went anywhere without a pistol, and it came in handy one night while with a John by the name of Richard Mallory allegedly got out of hand with Wuornos, tying her hands to the steering wheel and torturing her on a dirt road close to I95 in Volusia County, Florida. Pictures were taken of the steering wheel, showing scratch marks that could prove that Wuornos’ wrists were secured to the wheel. Wuornos claimed self defense, in the murder of Mallory. It was later revealed that Mallory had served ten years for rape, but this information was neglected at the time of Wuornos’ trial.

Mallory’s body was found naked wrapped up in a carpet by two men looking for sellable junk on December 13, 1989. But Wuornos didn’t stop with Mallory, an unidentified body was found May 5, 1990 naked on I75 in Brooks County, Georgia. After that, the bodies were found one right after the other:
June 1, 1990—David Spears, I75 Citrus County, Florida
June 6, 1990—Charles Carskaddon, I75
July 4, 1990—Peter Siems’ car (no body), State Rd.315, Marion County, Florida
August 4, 1990—Troy Burress, Ocala National Forest
September 12, 1990—Dick Humphreys, Marion County, Florida
November 19, 1990—Walter Gino Antonio, logging rd. in Dixie County, Florida

Wuornos was caught and with the help of Tyria Moore, was given a death sentence by the state of Florida in 1992. After ten years in prison, suffering maltreatment from state employees, Wuornos made the decision to withdraw her prior plead of self-defense, and claim cold blooded murder:

I killed those men, robbed them as cold as ice. And I’d do it again, too. There’s no chance in keeping me alive or anything, because I’d kill again. 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. –Wuornos, 2001

Wuornos is hardly the first female serial killer in America, let alone the world, and after learning her story one starts to wonder whether or not she even qualifies as a serial killer to begin with. The majority of female serial killers tend to use a more intimate weapon, like poison. And many of their victims are people who have been close to them. There’s a certain level of feelings associated between the killer and her victim. Wuornos’ weapon of choice, on the other hand, was a .22 caliber pistol, a fast and clean method of murder, and her victims were complete strangers she picked up as Johns.

Her style lacks a certain familiarity that females have, and instead moves to a more anonymous feel that her stiff-upper-lip lifestyle cultivated. Even though this is out of character, it is hard to believe that every month or so, she had to kill in self-defense. It would mean that her dangerous life-style was only ever a detriment once a month in the year 1990, out of all the years that she’d been working the highway. Or that after Mallory supposedly mistreated her, she became a magnet to all other creeps, and once a month she had to defend herself.

Or, we could recognize this for the cycle it is, notice the regularities: naked men, monthly cycle, in cars near highways, .22 caliber shots. There is a pattern here.

Was it her environment chipping away at her until she cracked? The beatings she faced as a child from her grand parents, the baby that was stolen from her, her life of selling flesh, they were all just bricks in the wall. Or perhaps it was genetics. Wuornos’ father was Leo Arthur Pittman, a convicted child molester, passed his time in his younger years would tie two cats together by their tails, and toss them over a clothesline to fight.

Regardless of her motive, Aileen Wuornos will go down in history as a killer that preyed on truck drivers and who’s last words claimed to be back with a mother ship.