What Did Aileen Wuornos Do? Inside The Serial Killer’s Crimes And Execution

Aileen Queen of Serial Killer

Courtesy of Netflix

In the 2003 crime thriller Monster, Charlize Theron plays a prostitute who murdered seven of her male clients between 1989 and 1990. The film is based on real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos, who earned the nickname “Damsel of Death” and is the subject of Netflix’s new documentary, Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers.

The documentary, which debuted on Netflix on Oct. 30, dives into Wuornos’ life and crimes. Directed by Emily Turner, the film uses decades-old archival footage from former Dateline correspondent Michele Gillen, audio interviews with people who knew the killer, police tapes and more. There are also never-before-seen conversations between Wuornos and filmmaker Jasmine Hirst while the serial killer was on death row.

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“She is so confusing and so complex, which runs so in the face of how we like women to be,” Turner told Netflix’s Tudum. “And something that felt really important to me was that we weren’t here to make an apology piece about what she’d done. I hope that people come to really different conclusions.”

Keep reading to learn about Wuornos’s life, including the men she killed, how she was caught, and her fate on death row.

Who Was Aileen Wuornos?

Aileen Wuornos was born in 1956 in Rochester, Mich., and had a tumultuous childhood. Her mother abandoned her and her brother, Keith Wuornos, when she was four years old, while her father, Leo Pittman, was sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping and raping a seven-year-old girl. He later died by suicide in prison, according to A&E + Crime Investigation.

Wuornos was left in the care of her maternal grandparents. She later claimed that her grandmother was an alcoholic, while her grandfather allegedly physically and sexually assaulted her during her youth. At 14, she became pregnant after being raped, and her brother might have been the father. She gave birth to a baby boy and placed him for adoption.

After her grandmother died, she and her brother became wards of the court. Aileen dropped out of school and became a wanderer, and she supported herself with prostitution. During the 1970s and 1980s, she was arrested for numerous petty crimes, including disorderly conduct, drunk driving, assault, shoplifting, prostitution, per EBSCO’s Research Starters database.

Her brother died from cancer in 1976, and Wuornos received an insurance payment of $10,000, which she spent on legal fees and purchased a luxury car, only to wreck it. Her grandfather also committed suicide during this time.

She hitchhiked to Florida, where she continued to commit more crimes, and from May 1982 to June 1983, she was imprisoned on an armed robbery charge. According to a 2005 article in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, Wuornos also struggled with her mental health and attempted suicide six times from age 14 to 22.

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What Did Aileen Wuornos Do?

In 1989, Wuornos was working as a prostitute along Florida state highways when she committed her first known murder. Her victim was Richard Mallory, a 51-year-old electronics shop owner, who picked her up on Nov. 30, 1989. Two weeks later, he was found dead in the woods outside Daytona, shot three times with a .22-caliber pistol, per EBSCO.

In her first confession to officers, she claimed that she and Mallory went into a secluded wooded area, and they began disagreeing after she believed he was going to take her money, which he had given her, and rape her. She later changed her story and said he did not pay her but still tried to have sex with her, which led them to fight.

In later testimony, Wuornos alleged that Mallory raped, beat and sodomized her, and she shot him in self-defense, per court filings from Wuornos’ 2000 appeal to the Florida Supreme Court.

How Many Men Did Aileen Wuornos Kill?

Wuornos confessed to killing seven men over a 12-month span, from December 1989 to November 1990. All of her victims were middle-aged to late-middle-aged white men, including a construction worker, a rodeo worker, a truck driver, and a retired chief of police, per A&E Crime Investigation.

Her second murder took place a few months after Mallory’s death when she took the life of David Spears, a 47-year-old construction worker in Winter Garden, by shooting him six times in the torso. His body was discovered in Citrus County in June 1990.

On May 31, 1990, she killed her third victim, Charles Carskaddon, a 40-year-old rodeo worker. The medical examiner found nine small-caliber bullets in his lower chest and upper abdomen, according to court documents.

Meanwhile, her fourth victim was 65-year-old retiree Peter Siems, who disappeared from Jupiter in June 1990, and his body was never found. Witness identified Wurnos and her partner, Tyria Moore, as the two women who were seen abandoning Siems’ car.

Wuornos’ subsequent murder was Troy Burress, a 50-year-old sausage salesman from Ocala, whose body was found with two bullet wounds in a wooded area along State Road 19 in Marion County. The sixth known murder was former police chief and retired Air Force major, Charles Richard “Dick” Humphreys. Authorities found that the 56-year-old had been shot six times in the head and torso, per court documents.

Her last known victim was Walter Jeno Antonio, a 62-year-old security guard, in November 1990 in Dixie County. Antonio was found near a remote logging road, his body was nearly nude, and he had been shot four times in the back and head.

How Was Aileen Wuornos Caught?

Wuornos’s suspected involvement in the murders began after her fingerprints from the crime scenes matched prints in the database from her previous arrests. She was arrested in January 1991 at the Last Resort biker bar in Volusia County, Fla.

Meanwhile, her partner, Moore, was in Pennsylvania. In exchange for immunity from prosecution, Moore cooperated with authorities and attempted to elicit incriminating statements from Wuornos during recorded phone calls set up by investigators, according to Netflix.

Wuornos admitted in numerous phone calls to murdering the men, but claimed they had attempted to sexually assault her and that she shot them in self-defense. Moore also testified against her former girlfriend in court.

What Happened At Aileen Wuornos’ Trials?

Wuornos was charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of six men. She was not charged with Siems’ murder because his body was never found, although she did confess to killing him as well, according to People.

In the trial for Mallory’s death, Wuornos’ defense claimed that she killed him in self-defense after he raped her, while Moore testified against her. The jury found her guilty, and she was sentenced to death.

As for the other murders, Wuornos pleaded guilty or no contest, saying that she had to “get right with God,” per A&E Crime + Investigation. She ultimately received six death sentences within one year.

“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,” she said in March 1992.

What Was Aileen Wuornos Sentenced To?

After receiving six death sentences, Wuornos appealed her conviction to both the Florida Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court. Both appeals were denied.

Leading up to her execution, Wuornos maintained that she murdered the men and stole from them.

“I killed those men, robbed them as cold as ice. And I’d do it again, too,” Wuornos told CNN in October 2002. “There’s no chance in keeping me alive or anything, because I’d kill again. I have hate crawling through my system.”

“I am so sick of hearing this ‘she’s crazy’ stuff,” she continued. “I’ve been evaluated so many times. I’m competent, sane, and I’m trying to tell the truth, and I’ll take a polygraph on every single word on those pages.”

After examining Wuornos, a panel of three psychiatrists ruled her competent for execution. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush also approved the execution. During a final psychiatric evaluation, Wuornos said she was ready to die because she was “tired of lying,” according to Florida state attorney John Tanner, who prosecuted the case, per CNN.

When Was Aileen Wuornos Executed?

Aileen Wuornos was executed by lethal injection on Oct. 9, 2002, at 9:47 a.m. ET at the Florida State Prison near Starke, Fla., according to the Florida Department of Corrections.

Wuornos refused her final meal, and her last words were: “I’d just like to say I’m sailing with The Rock, and I’ll be back like Independence Day with Jesus, June 6, like the movie, big mothership and all. I’ll be back.”

Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers is streaming on Netflix. Watch the official trailer below.