Women Who Kill Part II: Aileen Wuornos

A man-hating, cold-blooded killer? Or a victim of multiple assaults who acted in self-defense?

Some killers aren’t born. They’re created.

That certainly seemed to be the case for convicted serial murderer Aileen Wuornos. The woman who grew up to be one of the most feared women in Florida was born to a poor family in the small Michigan town of Troy, near Rochester. Her mother, Diane, was two months shy of her 15th birthday when she married 18-year-old Leo Pittman. Pittman was a troubled and violent teenager, known for his propensity for violence and his attraction toward young girls. The teenage bride was rebellious against her working-class parents, whose strict disciplinary tactics seemed to have no effect on their daughter.

Leo and Diane had their first child nine months after their wedding day when Diane gave birth to their son Keith. Not long afterward, Diane became pregnant again with Aileen.

By the time Aileen was born on February 29, 1956, Diane and Leo had separated. By all accounts, Leo only saw his daughter a handful of times after she was born. He did a two-year stint in the Army, drifting from town to town afterward. By 1964, Leo found himself in prison doing a long stretch for kidnapping and raping a seven-year-old girl from Kansas. Five years later, he was found hanging in his cell with a bedsheet wrapped tightly around his neck. He was taken to a hospital, where he died two weeks later, having never regained consciousness.

Diane wasn’t cut out for parenthood either. When Aileen was six months old, she and her older brother were dropped off at the home of Lauri and Britta Wuornos, Diane’s parents.

Aileen’s childhood is full of conflicting accounts, making it difficult to discern truth from fiction. At Aileen’s murder trial years later, she spoke of how her grandfather was an abusive monster, though family members would discount her accusations.

What is certain is that Aileen and Keith were raised to believe that Britta and Lauri were their biological parents. This illusion was shattered when Aileen was 12 and found out the truth, likely from kids in the neighborhood. Her adoptive parents were forced to tell the truth, resulting in Aileen growing out of control from the anger and betrayal that she felt.

Aileen quickly learned that boys had sexual desires that she could satisfy, engaging in acts for small amounts of money, cigarettes, and alcohol when she was only 13. At one point, a friend of her grandfather Lauri took Aileen to a wooded area and the two had sex.

Though it’s not certain, this may have been the man who impregnated Aileen. Britt and Lauri forced Aileen to give the child up for adoption, another event that angered the young girl.

Shunned by her adoptive parents, Aileen ran away from home. She roamed the country, supporting herself by trading sex for money and lodging. She left a trail of misdemeanor charges across the country until she finally settled in Florida in 1976. While there, she became acquainted with Lewis Gratz Fell, a wealthy businessman whose father was the owner of the Keystone Coal Company.

There was a sizable age gap between the pair. Aileen was barely 20, while her new fella was 69 years old. The relationship between Aileen and her new male suitor quickly led to marriage. The two tied the knot in 1976.

But the marriage was mired by Aileen’s growing violent tendencies. After attacking her new husband several times, he filed a restraining order against her and had the marriage annulled after only nine weeks.

For more than a decade after her relationship dissolved, Aileen’s criminal activity slowly escalated. Aside from engaging in sex work to survive, she turned to armed robbery. This led to her being sent to a Florida prison in 1981 on a charge that kept her behind bars for a year (via Oxygen).

Aileen was released from prison and went back to living as a transient, turning tricks to support her nomadic existence. This changed in 1986 when she met a hotel housekeeper named Tyria Moore in a Daytona Beach gay bar. The two women soon began a romantic relationship and moved in together. They lived in various hotel and motel rooms in Florida, supported by the income Aileen was bringing in through sex work.

It’s believed that Aileen first committed murder in 1989. On December 1, police found a vehicle that belonged to a man named Richard Mallory abandoned along a highway. Mallory’s body was found in a wooded area on December 13. He had been shot multiple times (via court documents).

David Andrew Spears was reported missing on May 19, 1990. On June 1, police found his naked body not far off Highway 19 in Citrus County. He had been shot in the torso six times.

Days later on June 6, police in Pasco County found the body of Charles Edmund Carskaddon. The 40-year-year-old had been shot nine times with a small caliber handgun. Detectives determined that he had been killed on May 31.

Peter Siems was reported missing in June 1990. His abandoned car was found soon after, with several eyewitnesses later stating that Aileen and Tyria left it where police discovered it. A palm print matching Aileen’s was lifted from the interior of the car. As Siems’s body was never found, there wasn’t much to go on. But it linked Aileen to the disappearance of a man, which later led to her undoing.

The badly decomposed body of Troy Burress was found in the woods along State Route 19 in rural Marion County, Florida on August 4, 1990.

Police found the body of Charles Richard Humphreys on September 12, 1990. He had been shot six times. Days later, his missing vehicle was discovered several counties away.

Walter Jeno Antonio was found with four bullet wounds in his head and chest. He had been killed on a logging road in Dixie County.

There was a clear M.O. the police were able to determine. Someone was luring men to rural locations and killing them execution style. The contents of their wallets were emptied, and their vehicles were often found abandoned in places far from the murder sites.

There were a good number of clues for investigators to follow, with a trail that led to Wuornos. Along with the fingerprint she left in Siems car, there were numerous items that turned up in pawnshops that belonged to the murdered men. Among them was a handgun that belonged to Carskaddon (via Justia).

When Tyria began to see news reports that two women matching their descriptions were being sought after as suspects in the murders of Florida men, she panicked and fled to her home state of Pennsylvania. Police tracked her down there after Aileen was arrested in a biker bar in Port Orange, Florida. They believed that they had the killer of at least six men in their custody but needed to build a stronger case. To do that, they made a deal with Tyria.

Tyria agreed to try to extract a confession from Aileen over the phone. She was successful, with Aileen taking full responsibility for the deaths in a recorded conversation.

Aileen had previously admitted to Tyria that she had killed Mallory. It was his death that she was put on trial for. In her defense, she insisted that Mallory was trying to rape her and that she only shot him to protect herself.

This might have been the truth. Mallory had previously served a decade in prison for rape, a fact that was not presented at Aileen’s trial (via Biography). Aileen stated that the other men she killed were also out of self-defense, though she later admitted that this wasn’t true.

Aileen was found guilty of Mallory’s murder on January 27, 1992. For the murder, she was given the death sentence. She was executed by lethal injection on October 9, 2002.

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