In the latest documentary on Aileen Wuornos, branded America’s first female serial killer, her life reads like the bleakest of horror stories. As the Netflix film shows, there is no reprieve or redemption, only a trail of death and destruction, culminating in her execution by lethal injection.
Wuornos killed seven men, claiming she did so in self-defence. She was trapped in street prostitution, and every single one of her victims was a punter.
Wuornos’s life was hell from day one. Abandoned by her mother and raised by her grandparents, she was plagued by child sexual abuse, violence, and neglect. She never knew her father, who was serving life in prison for raping a seven-year-old girl. She herself became pregnant as a result of rape at the age of 13, and was forced to give up the baby. Soon afterwards, she ended up being prostituted on the streets and highways.
The only shocking detail of her story is that she died at the hands of the state, rather than a punter or pimp
The sex trade makes monsters of habitual users — known as “johns” or “tricks” in the US — and can render the used and abused women inhuman in the eyes of the law. Wuornos is an extreme example, but it is prostitution that is to blame for the deaths of all seven men.
Back in 1992, I received a letter from Wuornos. It was addressed to Justice for Women, the feminist law reform campaigning group I co-founded in 1990. She wrote that she didn’t think we could help, not only because we were in a different legal jurisdiction, but also because “too many men are dead”. She said she wasn’t a murderer, that all of the men she killed had raped her, and that she killed these men because each and every one of them had made her fear for her life.
The hell of prostitution had worn her down to the point of where she had no reserves, couldn’t escape her own mind when the johns did what they did to her. She was right — we couldn’t help — but I did write back to her, telling her I understood the torture of prostitution, and that I hoped somehow her legal team could save her from the death penalty. They couldn’t: Wuornos was executed in October 2002.
I have been to Florida’s death row to write about the death penalty (to which I am opposed in all circumstances) and the women who “fall in love” with the men incarcerated there. Wuornos had no such visitors professing their love to her, just people who used her for their own ends.
A lesbian who sold sex to men was always going to be seen as a sexual deviant rather than an abused, desperate woman. Feared and hated, Wuornos was seen as more dangerous than male serial killers, her crimes more heinous. Let’s compare her case to that of, for example, Jeffrey Dahmer — who was convicted of 16 murders.
Dahmer drugged, raped and murdered boys and men, including a native American prostituted child, aged 14. He dismembered one 17-year-old boy, and beheaded another. This sadistic necrophiliac escaped the death penalty, but was killed by a prison inmate in 1994. Incidentally, Dahmer’s profile was closer to that of the men Wuornos killed than to hers; at least two of the men she killed were convicted sex offenders.
The abuse Wuornos experienced was so terrible and relentless that Nick Broomfield, who directed two documentaries about her life, death and how she was exploited whilst on death row, found himself profoundly depressed for some time afterwards.
Although she technically fits the bill, her profile was not that of a serial killer. She didn’t stalk her victims, and found no pleasure in their deaths. Her mental state should have led to her being locked up indefinitely — but they executed her anyway.
A civilised country should not normalise either state execution or the buying and selling of women and girls’ bodies for one-sided sexual pleasure. Nor should it normalise the paid rape of women and girls.
In the Netflix documentary, one of the police officers who worked on the case described Wuornos as “unfuckable”, and wondered out loud how she ever got any business. He didn’t bother to consider why the men (who were not, of course, judged) had been unable to secure a real date, rather than paying for sex.
Really, the only shocking detail of her story is that Wuornos died at the hands of the state, rather than those of a punter or pimp.
There is no need to spend time looking for her “motive”. Towards the end, Wuornos viewed all men as predatory and dangerous, because the vast majority of those she had encountered throughout her life were precisely that.
Was this a cold-blooded, calculated killer who could be held responsible for her delinquent and criminal behaviour? The lead prosecutor was John Tanner — a born-again Christian. In court, he suggested Wuornos was evil and deserving of the harshest punishment. He also happened, in the course of a prison ministry, to have been a former “prayer partner” of Jeffrey Dahmer. In the misogynistic world that allows the buying and selling of women’s bodies, there is no redemption for the women that fight back, only the men that brutalise them.
Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers is now available to stream on Netflix
