Aileen Wuornos was born on February 29, 1956, in Rochester, Michigan. As a child, Wuornos
experienced profound psychosocial trauma within her family system. Her father, a convicted child
molester, killed himself while serving prison time; her mother, overwhelmed by the responsibilities of
motherhood, abandoned Wuornos and her older brother, Keith, who were ultimately raised by their
grandparents.
This meant going from one dysfunctional domestic situation to another. Wuornos’s grandmother
suffered from alcoholism, while her grandfather was prone to outward displays of extreme neglectful
and violent behavior, which included occasionally forcing the Wuornos children out of the home to live
in the woods. Wuornos and her brother first discovered their true identities in later adolescence, which
significantly exacerbated the psychosocial challenges they faced.
Wuornos claimed that her grandfather engaged in sexual contact with her and Keith from a very early
age. In addition, Wuornos became pregnant at age 14, claiming that Keith was the father, and was
subsequently sent to a home for unwed mothers. In March 1971, Wuornos gave birth to a boy, who was
given up for immediate adoption.
As an adult in the mid-1970s, Wuornos barely subsisted, often hitchhiking and engaging in sex work as a
means of survival. After an arrest for charges related to assault and disorderly conduct, Wuornos’ luck
took an unexpected turn for the better: upon arriving in Florida, she met a wealthy yacht club president
named Lewis Fell. The two were married in 1976; however, after Wuornos was arrested for her
involvement in a bar fight, Fell quickly annulled the union.
In the late 1970s, Wuornos’s life steadily spiraled. Following the death of her brother, Wuornos was the
beneficiary of a $10,000 life insurance policy—money that she immediately spent on a luxury car, which
she subsequently wrecked in an accident. Over the next decade, Wuornos continued on her destructive
path, working as a prostitute and committing various crimes that ranged from forgery and theft to
armed robbery and assault.
In 1986, Wuornos met 24-year-old Tyria Moore at a bar in Daytona, Florida, and the two began an
intense yet volatile romantic relationship that continued for several years. The unsuspecting Moore was
gradually drawn into Wuornos’s cycle of vandalism, violence, and harassment. While Wuornos
continued her work as a prostitute during the late 1980s, her violent tendencies took a psychopathic
turn.
From late 1989 into the fall of 1990, Wuornos had shot and murdered seven men along various Florida
highways. In mid-December 1989, the body of Richard Mallory was found in a junkyard, with five more
men’s bodies discovered over the following months. Despite their frequent use of aliases, Wuornos and
Moore were eventually tracked down by authorities from fingerprints and palm prints left in the crashed
vehicle of one of the missing men, Peter Siems. Wuornos was eventually arrested in a bar in Port
Orange, Florida, while police tracked down Moore in Pennsylvania. To avoid prosecution, Moore made adeal; in mid-January 1991, she elicited a phone confession from Wuornos, who accepted sole
responsibility for the murders.
Given the sensational nature of the crimes, the case caused a media frenzy. During the trial, Wuornos
argued that she had been raped and assaulted by Mallory (who had previously served a decade-long
prison sentence for sexual assault) and had killed him in self-defense. Although she would later retract
this assertion, Wuornos stated that her killing of the six other men had also been in self-defense.
On January 27, 1992, a jury found Wuornos guilty of first-degree murder for the Mallory case—a
conviction for which she received the death penalty. In the following months, Wuornos pleaded guilty to
the murders of five other men, which resulted in a death sentence for each plea. While serving her
prison sentence, Wuornos eventually admitted to the killing of Siems, whose body was never recovered;
therefore, no charges were brought against her.
In an unexpected turn of events, after spending a decade on death row, a court-appointed attorney
raised concerns about comments made by Wuornos that suggested she was profoundly disconnected
from reality. However, in 2002, Florida governor Jeb Bush lifted a temporary stay of execution after
three psychiatrists deemed her mentally competent enough to comprehend the death penalty and the
rationale for its implementation.
Despite repeated efforts to avoid execution, Wuornos was executed by lethal injection on October 9,
2002. Her reported final words were, “I would 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 mother ship and all. I’ll be back. I’ll be
back.”
A. Compare data and evidence of similar crimes.
B. Identify patterns found in similar crimes.
C. Make inferences about motivation of the identified individual based on case evidence and comparison to similar crimes.
