Aileen Wuornos

by Read Listen Learn

Aileen Wournos

A serial killer is a person who kills three or more times because of an emotional need; they usually kill one person at a time. They don't do it for money. Most serial killers are men but sometimes a woman.

In the late 1980s in North Florida, USA, the police had a problem. Prostitutes were using the busy highway system to pick up men. The women waited by the side of the road for a car to stop. The man would then drive the prostitute down one of the many side roads that came off the main highway and went nowhere, just ending in the forest, a kilometre or two away. There would be nobody else around.

One day in 1989, down one of these little roads, things turned violent. Aileen Wuornos, a prostitute, shot and killed a man, then took his money and his watch. She left the dead man and his car deep in the forest to be found later. Wuornos said the man had attacked her. She did what she did to stop him raping or killing her. We may never know if this is true but we do know that she went on to kill at least eight other men in, more or less, the same way.

Wuornos was born Aileen Pittman on 29th February, 1956, in Michigan. Her life began as it would continue: badly. Her mother, Diane Wuornos, was married at 15 and had Aileen when she was only 17. Her marriage to Leo Pittman was short and ended in divorce. Leo, Aileen's father, was schizophrenic and soon went to prison for raping and nearly killing a little girl. Diane Wuornos gave Aileen and her brother to her own mother and father, their grandparents. They adopted the children and Aileen Pittman became Aileen Wuornos.

Her grandfather was an alcoholic who violently, sexually abused her. At age 11, Aileen was having sex with boys at school for cigarettes or drugs. A couple of years later, her grandfather made her leave home and go and sleep in the forest near the house. She began to work as a street prostitute. Soon, she was travelling around the United States, living by prostitution and crime. Often, the police found her with a gun. Inevitably, she went to prison in the early ‘80s for robbery. Before she had gone to prison, Aileen only seemed interested in sex with men.

After prison, she was a lesbian and only had sex with men when they paid her. She found a girlfriend called Tiaria Wade and they began to live together in a motel room. It was shortly after this that Aileen Wuornos killed for the first time.

Aileen spent a lot of the money she had taken from the dead man on presents for her girlfriend. She was sure she would soon be caught for the killing. She was a criminal known to the police. Her fingerprints were all over the dead man's car and on the police computer. She waited, but no-one came for her and so she went out and killed another man; and another, until she had killed and robbed at least nine. At some time in this chain of murders, her girlfriend certainly realised what was happening. She was even seen with Aileen abandoning the car of a man killed earlier that day.

Finally, the police arrested Wuornos and her girlfriend but Tiaria Wade made a deal with the police. She would tell everything in court and make sure that her girlfriend, Aileen, got the death penalty, if the police would agree to take no action against her. Later, it would become clear that Wade and the police had other reasons for making this deal. Aileen Wuornos was found guilty of seven of the nine murders. Some twelve years later, after the court had decided that she was not insane, the state of Florida executed her by injection on 9th October, 2002.

After the arrest, rumours grew about many points of the case. Some people, including Wuornos herself, could not understand why the police had taken so long to catch her when she had left so much evidence. Some said the police had decided to let her kill several times so that men would be too scared to pick up women along the highways. This would stop the prostitution. And, until Wuornos was caught, it did stop most of it.

Many people were shocked and surprised that Wuornos' girlfriend, Tiaria Wade, was never sent to prison. It was perfectly clear that she knew what was going on, enjoyed the extra money, and even helped Aileen with at least one of the killings. Anyway, the police case against both women was strong and they didn't really need Wade's evidence to show that Wuornos was the killer.

However, if Wade had been found guilty of a crime, she could not, by US law, have made a lot of money selling her story to Hollywood, TV and the press. Without her, the police detectives couldn't sell their story either. In the end, Wade, the detectives and others made a lot of money this way. The detectives who arrested Wuornos were on the phone talking to Hollywood producers as soon as they got back to the police station with her.

Aileen Wuornos had a hard life from the start. Her mother was too young. Her father killed himself in prison, where he had gone for the most disgusting crimes. Her grandfather raped and beat her and then she went out into the world to live by stealing, and by selling her body. The only time anyone paid any attention to her was after she had killed nine men. Of course, there is a movie about her, also a TV movie, a long documentary film as well as many books.