The Damsel of Death: The Oscar-Winning Life of Aileen Wuornos
She was a victim-of-circumstances turned serial-killer
Charlize Theron won the Academy Award for Best Actress for the movie Monster, based on the life of Aileen Wuornos, the American Serial Killer, who in the eyes of many was more a victim than a criminal.
She was abandoned by her teenage mother and was raised by an alcoholic grandmother and a cruel grandfather who regularly beat her with his belt buckle. Her father, convicted and jailed for kidnapping and raping a child, committed suicide in jail when she was 2.
By 13, she’d been raped and was pregnant and by 14 she quit school. After being kicked out by her grandfather, Lee (Aileen) Wuornos’ she began her journey towards becoming the first female serial killer.
To me, the above description clearly sounds like someone who is more a victim than a criminal, but the path that Aileen went on will send chills down your spine.
The Beginning of the Crime Road
Since age 15, Aileen became a hitchhiking hooker, who would ask for a ride on Florida’s interstate highways.
In an interview on her story in 60 Minutes Australia, Lee comments:
“Basically I’d have 5–6 guys per day interested, they could be interested in $30, $40, or $100 — I wasn’t so high priced, as long as I could keep the customer satisfied.”
However, her experiences as a prostitute as well as her childhood abuse at the hands of her grandfather pushed her onto the path of revenge.
At the age of 33, Lee decided to seek revenge from these men who had led her down a life of degradation and misery over all these years.
She would wait on the highways of Florida and stop passing vehicles — and would typically attract middle-aged men who would stop for her. While she claims she clearly stopped them with the intent of showing them a trick or two, it is also believed that she posed as a damsel in distress. So while the men thought that they were helping her, she claims they all knew what their real intention was.
However, the fact that is undisputed is that she would shoot all of these men at point-blank range, drop their bodies in the woods, and drive away in their cars.
Here is an interesting excerpt from the same interview from 60 Minutes Australia (transcribed by me):
Interviewer: Maybe you were just born bad?
Lee: “I’m telling you man — No! I wasn’t born bad. You guys got this wrong, they all lied to you so bad, all of them!”
Interviewer: “But you’ve been convicted of killing 7 men.”
Lee: Everybody’s been looking at the number …
Interviewer: “You killed 7 men, 7 strangers, does that not make you a serial killer?”
Lee: “I didn’t kill them every day, did I? I killed them over a span of 12 months. And that’s a hell of a lot of men I went through before the next jerk came along and I used protection — like a condom, from AIDS.”
Interviewer: “So, it was self defense?”
Lee: “Yeah”
Interviewer: “Lee, the first one, perhaps. The second one, maybe, but seven times?”
Lee: “So what?”
The Arrest and Claims of Self Defense
Lee committed all her murders between November 1989 to November 1990 over a period spanning roughly twelve months.
Lee was arrested on January 9, 1991, from the biker’s bar The Last Resort.
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It is almost poetic justice that she’d be arrested at a bar with that name. Wuornos, right until her execution, and throughout her trial claimed that she was a victim of sexual assault, rape, and many other brutalities and committed all her murders as self-defense.
In her own confession of her many murders, Wuornos said:
“I wanted to confess to you that Richard Mallory did violently rape me as I’ve told you; but these others did not. [They] only began to start to.”
Richard Mallory was her first victim, and the experience that she went through with the rape that he committed on her, made her turn to self-defense with her following victims, even before they’d committed the heinous act.
With Richard, Wuornos claimed she was sodomized and brutally beaten after being driven to an abandoned area for sexual requests. Two days later, a Volusia County deputy sheriff found Mallory’s abandoned vehicle.
The Execution
Wuornos was executed on October 9, 2002, and even up until her execution, she claimed that she was mistreated while in prison in various ways and that there were attempts to push her over the brink via physical and mental torture.
Wuornos, 46, was pronounced dead from lethal injection at 9:47 a.m. in Florida State Prison near Starke.
She had admitted guilt to the killings, and had gone willingly to the chambers. In a Feb 2001 interview to ABC News affiliate WPLG, she is reported to have said:
“I was sentenced to death, I need to die for the killing of those people.”
A Criminal or a Victim?
I’d leave this for you to interpret as you see fit. Just like me, you have Aileen’s accounts, her trial, and a variety of other narrative and facts. Yet, it does seem that whether she was a monster or a victim, there was a factor of circumstances that drove her into a murderer. She was abused and abandoned first, which then turned her towards prostitution.
She was raped as a child, and then as a prostitute, and selling your body for money, doesn’t make you any less of a victim of rape than any other woman. Did she want to be a prostitute or a murderer? Does anyone ever?
But the truth is, she did get pushed onto that road, by society and circumstances.
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