Featured Image Credit: Netflix
Topics: True Crime, Crime, US News, Real Life, True Life
Rhianna Benson
Topics: True Crime, Crime, US News, Real Life, True Life
Between 1989 and 1990, Florida prostitute Aileen Wuornos murdered seven of her male customers.
Despite her grisly crimes earning her the nickname 'Damsel of Death', and securing her position as 'America's first female serial killer', in recent years, Wuornos' case has inspired an unusual mix of sympathy and fascination among true crime fans.
Such especially seems to be the case this week, after a harrowing new Netflix documentary hears from a man whose life she once spared.
For those unfamiliar with Wuornos' crimes, multi-state police first linked her to a series of fatal shootings across Florida in 1991 after the bodies of seven male victims were found in areas with high prostitution.
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With a history littered with abandonment, drug and alcohol abuse and sexual assault - horrors which saw her turn to sex work to support herself - police used a witness report and forensic evidence to bring Wuornos in.
A confession was then secretly recorded by her then-girlfriend Tyria Moore, during which she admitted to each of the seven murders, going on to turn down the police's suggestion of a lawyer.
Despite claiming self-defence in each of the cases while appearing in court, Wuornos was subsequently sentenced to death, and remained at the Florida Department of Corrections Broward Correctional Institution until her execution in 2002.
Wuornos' case has accumulated something of cult following in recent years.
Some criminologists have suggested that this may have potentially been spurred by identification with the horrific abuse she endured as a teenager, while others claim media portrayals of the killer - including in the 2003 biopic Monster - may have humanised Wuornos.
By the sounds of things, however, large amounts of recent sympathy for the multi-murderer has been motivated by new first-hand accounts from those who knew Wuornos best as featured in the eerie new true crime doc, Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers.
One individual to give his account of the killer in the feature-length film is a driver, who claimed he gave Wuornos a ride in his car whilst she was in the midst of her crime spree.
Speaking in the programme, the unnamed man recalled: "She had the opportunity if she wanted to."
He added of Wuornos - who, at the time, was also robbing some of her victims: "I had about $3,300, $3,400, $3,500 cash on me. I had a gold watch worth about $1,200, I had a ring worth about $450."
The survivor went on to insist in her defence: "If Lee would want to kill somebody it would've been me. I'm living proof that Lee's not a cold-blooded killer."
Another individual in agreement with these claims is Judge Gayle Graziano, who is also featured in the film.
"She killed seven men," Graziano pointed out in the doc. "She said during that same time period she had 400 johns. She hadn’t killed any of them. Why these seven? Why didn’t she kill all of them?"
Wuornos raised the same point during her initial police interview, being heard in archival footage telling officers: "I’m not a serial killer. I didn’t kill the men like the everyday profile of a serial killer, and I didn’t plan these murders, or anything like that."
Asked in return why she killed the men, she claimed: "Self-defence."
Despite her plea, prosecutor John Tanner told the jury of Wuornos' crimes in court: "This was not so much a crime of passion, as it was a crime of absolute control and domination over the victim."
Towards the end of the documentary, archival footage shows Wuornos reflecting on her crimes ahead of her execution, claiming that the mistreatment she endured at the hands of men had, in fact, spurred her on during the crimes.
"My head is swimming in thought," she explained in an often nonsensical final interview. "I’m not going to go to prison for life for these creeps. I’m gonna get me a bunch of rapists.
"So, I was ready - ‘Tell me a rapist, and you’re dead'. Well, that didn’t happen. I was running into these idiots, drug-smugglers - I’m highly against drugs.
"When he kept telling me about drug-smuggling, I side-waysed him. That’s what happened."
Wuornos continued: "I got first-degree, I don’t care about anything more now. It’s over.
"The real Aileen Wuornos is not a serial killer, I was so drunk and so lost, so f****d up in the head, man, I turned into one, but my real self is not one. Now, I’ve told the truth. I want you all out there to know that telling the truth was the hardest thing."
She added: "I kept thinking for days, and I was fighting the demons in me that kept saying, 'Don’t tell the truth, you’ll go to hell with me’. And I said, 'No way, man, I’m going to the Lord, Jesus Christ, I’m going to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth'."
Wuornos also issued a controversial statement of apology to the families of her victims before biting the bullet.
"I’m really sorry that your father, brother or whoever he might have been for you in kinship or relationship, I’m really sorry they got killed," she cries in the doc. "I was messed up in the head, and after the rapes, I lost it."
She continued: "I said, ‘You ain’t gonna take me to prison - if I spent the rest of my life in prison over these creeps, I’m gonna take a bunch of you creeps with me before I go’. And that’s what happened."