World's Most Evil Killers - Season 3, Episode 7 - Aileen Wuornos - Full Episode | Forensic Files

-November 30, 1989, Central Florida -- when a 51-year-old male picked up a prostitute
from the side of the road, he had no idea that she would turn out to be a cold-blooded killer.
-She was just utterly remorseless. This is somebody who enjoyed watching men die.
-She shot him four times with a nine-shot revolver. -In her mass-murder spree, hardened killer Aileen Wuornos
targeted middle-aged wealthy men with expensive cars. -And she killed to steal. There was no sympathy, no...
She was just some ruthless, mean bitch. -Very few women have ever killed in such a violent, vile manner in history.
-Eventually, she was recorded confessing with the help of her girlfriend. In just one year, this female serial killer callously shot,
robbed, and murdered seven men, making Aileen Wuornos one of the world's most evil killers.
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Daytona Beach, Florida. It was here that sex worker Aileen Wuornos went on a murderous rampage
between November 1989 and November 1990. Her actions left locals fearing for their lives.
-Wuornos shot and killed, at point-blank range, seven men between 1989 and 1990.
-Here is somebody who is deliberately targeting men who are looking to engage in the services of a sex worker,
and she is killing them and robbing them and disposing of their bodies. -Detective David Taylor was on the police task force
that was instrumental in bringing Wuornos to justice. -It shocked the community that once we identified
Aileen Wuornos as the killer of these men, that a female was that vicious in killing these people.
-About 9 in 10 serial killers are men, and 1 in 10 are women. Female serial killers tend to use quite remote methods
like poisoning, but Wuornos literally went and picked victims as they drove past her on the highway.
It's very rare to have a female serial killer, but it's even rarer to have one that kills
in the way that Wuornos did. She essentially killed like a man. -Mike Joiner was an undercover police officer
on the Wuornos case and was key to her arrest. -She would be on the side of the road and prostituting.
She would pick up men as they stopped to help her, and then she would take them somewhere and kill them
and take their money or take whatever value they had. -Detective Brian Jarvis was also on the Wuornos task force,
and he recalls the impact her killing spree had on Florida. -At this particular time because of the way
the bodies were found, the way things turned up, there was a lot of panic over this.
-To have a serial killer on the loose is something that is going to have an impact on any community.
Everybody in Florida uses the highways. Everybody feels that they have that connection to this case.
-This killer's story begins in 1956. Aileen Wuornos was born on the 29th of February
in Rochester, Michigan. Her mother was just 16 years old when she gave birth and was unable to raise her.
-By March 1960, when Aileen is just 4, she's formally adopted by her mother's parents,
her grandparents. -She had a really brutal upbringing with them, so she was regularly beaten by her grandfather.
There were allegations of incest within the family. -Her grandfather had a homebuilt sauna in his house,
and if he wanted to punish her for doing something he didn't like, he'd lock her in the sauna and crank up the heat
and just let her stay in there. -Aileen's abusive childhood sent her on a downward spiral
and fueled her hatred of men. -This was somebody who was constantly in fear. Wuornos' grandfather allegedly
repeatedly said to her that she was worthless, that she should never have been born, that she was a mistake.
So she's learning that she can't trust anyone, that she can't depend upon anybody,
and this is very, very dangerous. -Aileen learned early to use any means available to survive.
-Before she got to her teen years, she was known as a cigarette bandit. She would trade sexual favors for packs of cigarettes.
-It's said that from around age 11, she's using her body as something to trade, as a tool,
and this kind of disconnection from her emotions is something that is going to have a significant impact
on the rest of her life. -Her behavior left her pregnant, aged 14. -Now, on the orders of her grandfather,
that baby is adopted. It's taken away from her, and this is just reinforcing those ideas that she already has that,
"Those who are supposed to love me hurt me," that, "I am worthless," that, "I'm not deserving of love."
-Shortly after she was forced to give up her child, Aileen was hit by another tragedy.
-Her grandmother dies of liver failure, having been quite a heavy drinker for many years.
Her grandfather actually blames her for her grandmother's death. -Her grandfather was furious
and threw Wuornos out of the house. -Aged just 15, Wuornos was left homeless. Alone, her only option was to live in the woods
at the end of their street. -She lives a very feral existence, sleeping in an old car,
and she's still a child at this point, and this is incredibly damaging. There is absolutely nobody there for her.
She is literally just taking each day as it comes. She's making sure that she has enough to eat.
She is basically using her body as she's used it before. She's learning that life is full of rejection,
it's full of pain, it's full of fear, and that she really needs to hurt others before they get the chance to hurt her.
-One person she was still close to was her brother Keith. Just 11 months older than Aileen,
the rumor was that their relationship was an unnatural one. -There were allegations of incest.
School friends of Keith said that they'd witnessed these things going on. So she felt a connection,
but it was a very pathological and a very toxic one. -Unable to cope living outside
during the cold winter months in Michigan, aged 16, Aileen hitchhiked over 1,000 miles west
to the warmer climes of Colorado. Two years later, she was arrested for her first offense --
driving under the influence and disorderly conduct, which included the dangerous discharge
of a .22-caliber weapon. Eventually, in 1976, age 20, she hitchhiked 2,000 miles
southeast to sunny Florida. -It is no accident that very shortly after she gets to Florida,
she falls in love with -- or at least decides to marry -- a 69-year-old man called Lewis Gratz Fell.
He was president of the yacht club, but it was a doomed marriage. -She's been incredibly violent towards him.
Aileen was actually beating him up. She was hitting him with his own walking cane.
-Lewis put a restraining order on Wuornos and filed for annulment just weeks after they were married.
While the proceedings were going through, Aileen received some devastating family news.
-In 1976, her brother, Keith, dies of throat cancer, and she's absolutely beside herself,
and even though that relationship was an incredibly abnormal and dysfunctional one,
she felt that she had an ally in him, but now she was completely on her own. -Aileen received $10,000 when her brother died.
-She spends it almost within weeks -- guns, cars, motel rooms. And then she decides she has to sustain this lifestyle
and turns to armed robbery to do it. -In 1981, she was arrested for stealing $35
and two packets of cigarettes from a convenience store. Wuornos spent over a year in jail,
but that didn't deter her. Over the next decade, her criminal activity escalated.
-She really did demonstrate versatility. She was being arrested for driving under the influence,
for assault and battery, for robbery. -One man claimed when she was a prostitute again
that she whipped her gun out and put it to his head and demanded $200. She was, to put it politely, out of control.
-In 1986, Wuornos met a woman who changed her life. -When she met Tyria, what Aileen thought,
"This is my soul mate. This is the person I want to spend the rest of my life with,
and I will do anything for this girl." -The owner of The Last Resort Bar in Daytona Beach, Al Bulling,
remembers Wuornos well, who was a regular customer. -She used to come in here. She'd shoot pool here with her girlfriend, Ty.
She was a little mouthy with Aileen. If she needed a beer, she'd sit on a pool table
and kind of demand her get another beer or whatever. -Having blown her inheritance, Wuornos took it upon herself
to raise the money the two needed to live. -Aileen would go out and prostitute to make money
so that she could buy things for Tyria. She would want to take care of her and make sure she was happy and never want to leave her,
and I think that was what it boiled down to. -Daytona Beach, Florida. November 30, 1989, 33-year-old
Aileen Wuornos was now living with lover Tyria Moore and was indulging in a host of petty crimes
to maintain their extravagant lifestyle. The frequency of the crimes and the force
Wuornos used to enact them was increasing. It all came to a head the night she was picked up
by 51-year-old Richard Mallory. -Richard Mallory owned an electrical repair shop,
and he'd been divorced for many years, and he didn't make any secret of the fact
that he did enjoy engaging in the services of sex workers. -He picked her up hitchhiking. They were drinking.
They were hanging out as it were, and one thing led to another, some type of violent encounter where she ended up killing him.
She shot him four times with a nine-shot revolver. She took a couple of pieces of property
that belonged to him, a camera and a radar detector, and she pawned them. She made some money off of the deal.
-When Richard Mallory's body was found two weeks after he was killed, there was no evidence to clarify what sparked her rage.
-When his body was found, it was very decomposed. Basically, all we have to work with
is what we have found at the crime scene -- the physical evidence and the trace evidence, et cetera.
We do know that he was shot multiple times, and this victim was found in a secluded area
right outside the city of Daytona. -What triggered Wuornos to kill for the first time
remains a mystery, but what is certain is that the murder of Richard Mallory was the beginning of a dark and deadly chapter.
-For her entire life, Wuornos has been victimized by men. She's been abused by them,
but now she's turned the tables. She's the one that's in control, and she's very much enjoying it
because she's learned from a very early age that violence equals power, and she really is on quite a high at this point.
-Taking one life once wasn't enough. Six months later, Wuornos struck again. -There's usually what they call a brief cooling-off period,
and this absolutely applied here. Large part of it was due to her paranoia and her fear of getting caught,
and when she came back from that brief cooling-off period, now, she was the predator.
She was looking for who she was going to kill next. -She's somebody who's being proactive.
She's seeking out victims. She's getting access to them. She has an opportunity to harm them,
and she takes that opportunity. -These men, they were all white males. They were all traveling the roads alone.
They were middle-aged, 40 to 65. -On May 19, 1990, she was picked up on the I-75 highway
by a 43-year-old machine operator, David Spears. When they pulled over, and he began to undress,
she slipped out of the passenger side door, walked around to the driver's side, aimed, and fired.
[ Gunshot ] -He'd been shot six times. One shot was not enough for Wuornos. She was making a point with her killings.
She was saying, "This is for all the men who have abused me over the years." -This was somebody who enjoyed watching men die
because for the first time in her life, she was powerful. She was the one in control.
She was the one calling the shots. -David was last seen by his son, leaving work at midday to meet his ex-wife.
When he didn't show up, his family reported him missing. -Our patrol division had come upon a vehicle
that was abandoned on I-75. It was in the southbound lane on the shoulder. It had a flat tire, and when they ran
the VIN number on the vehicle, it came back to David Spears, who had been reported a missing person.
We searched the area. We secured the vehicle to process it, and we found that she had taken some stuff out of the vehicle
and tossed it off the side of the road into the weeds. The items included the license plate or the tag from the car.
-David Spears' body was found less than two weeks later, dumped in Citrus County a few miles from the I-75 highway.
May the 31st, Wuornos went on the prowl again. In Pasco County, Florida, 40-year-old Charles Carskaddon,
a part-time rodeo rider, picked up Wuornos about 30 minutes north of Tampa. -He was traveling back from St. Louis.
He had been up there visiting his mother, and he drove back from St. Louis to the Tampa area
where he was living with his fiancée, and just before he got to Tampa, he encountered Aileen.
-Aileen had developed a deadly routine. Once a man picked her up, his fate was sealed.
-They would drive away, and she'd be undressing, and they'd find a remote location.
She'd encourage the victim to also remove his clothes. -As Charles undressed, Wuornos slipped out of the car
and came round to the driver's side door. Then, at point-blank range, she fired.
♪♪ -She didn't just kill. She shot Charles Carskaddon nine times. ♪♪ -Once she was sure he was dead,
she took his car and his possessions. -She didn't do that with Richard Mallory. She just took items she could use.
Now, she's starting to gather those souvenirs and those trophies, and it's becoming a passion of hers to do this stuff.
-She then dumped Charles' body a few miles from the highway in Pasco County. -She left these victims
basically in the middle of nowhere, and to do that to another human being, there's zero compassion.
She's pure evil. -Just a week after her last killing, the deadly predator was on the hunt again.
On June the 7th, Wuornos chose to work her favorite highway, the I-75 in Central Florida.
After three murders, she'd honed her technique. -Wuornos' victims were all men who drove expensive cars,
so they were the symbol of success. -That night, Christian missionary Peter Siems,
age 65, left his home in Jupiter, Florida, and was driving north on the I-75. -Peter Siems was on a road trip,
and he never made it to his destination. -His intent was to drive up to New Jersey,
and from there, he had planned on going over to Arkansas. He had a number of bibles in the car with him.
He was going to pass them out along the way. -Instead, for some unknown reason, Peter Siems picked up Aileen Wuornos.
-You could not be thought of as a more upright character. He also took part in an Outreach Christian Ministry,
but I think that that infuriated Wuornos because she thought, "You hypocrite, I am going to kill you," and she duly did.
[ Gunshot ] -The following month, the car was found in the Ocala National Forest 50 miles west of Daytona Beach.
The evidence discovered would point to Wuornos as the terrifying serial killer targeting middle-aged men across the Sunshine State.
Daytona Beach, Florida, July 1990. Aileen Wuornos was living in a local motel with her girlfriend, Tyria Moore.
In under seven months, the serial killer had callously shot, murdered, and robbed four men.
In what was by now a sadistic pattern, when each of the middle-aged men pulled over and picked her up,
the 34-year-old sex worker attacked. [ Gunshot ] -She was just utterly remorseless.
She didn't just shoot them once. She'd shoot them three times, four times, five times.
-They had all been shot with a small-caliber weapon, namely a .22, and another trait that these victims shared
was that they had all been robbed of their personal effects, their pants pockets pulled inside out.
Their personal I.D. was missing, and their vehicle was missing, as well. -On July 4, 1990,
the car belonging to 65-year-old Peter Siems was found abandoned in the Ocala National Forest
in Orange Springs, an hour's drive from Daytona Beach. -Now, this is interesting
because his body has never been discovered. The only way we know that he's dead is that his car was taken by Moore and Wuornos
and driven around. -Aileen and Tyria had decided that they wanted to go see the fireworks in Daytona Beach.
As they were driving, they noticed a sign that indicated there was an Indian reservation
up in the Ocala Forest. They turned around, and Tyria was going just a little bit too fast.
She went off the road. The car turned on its passenger side and slid. The engine stalled out.
The carburetor had flooded. They couldn't get it started. -The witness reported the suspicious encounter
to Marion County Police Department in Florida, who went to investigate. -Now, the one thing that was important to note here was,
that was the first time somebody actually saw these girls. -We had received a telephone call through our 911 center
that a vehicle had crashed in the community of Orange Springs, Florida, and walking away from that vehicle were two women.
-When they got to the scene, the investigators searched the car and made note of its distinct condition.
-The license plate had been removed, the driver's side seat was in the forward-most position,
and we would find that certain things were missing from his vehicle. In this case, it was his receipt book and cash.
So at this point, we have another missing person. We have no idea what happened to him.
-Using the VIN number on the vehicle, the car was soon identified as belonging to missing person Peter Siems.
-We searched the areas extensively. I don't know if it was for days or weeks, but it was a long time that we spent up there
looking for Peter Siems' body, looking for any type of evidence. -The police found a series of pawn-shop tickets in the car.
When they tracked down the store, they made a major breakthrough in the case. -One pawn ticket we found was for a box of tools,
and that's one of the things that was stolen from David Spears. The other pawn ticket we found was for a 35-millimeter camera
and a radar detector. That's what was stolen from Richard Mallory. -They submitted the car to forensic examination
and made an important discovery on the driver's side door handle. -Wuornos leaves a palm print in Siems' car,
which will eventually become extremely significant. -Wuornos would pawn many of the items
that she stole from her victims in order to get some fast money, and her fingerprints would still be on these items.
Now, because Aileen had such a significant criminal record, her fingerprints were on file,
and it was only going to be a matter of time before they were matched up, and she was connected to these murders.
-But before the police could piece the puzzle together, Wuornos struck again. -It became very frustrating,
and I can remember even at times thinking, "Are we going to be able to solve this?
Are we going to be able to come up with something?" and every time we got another body, it mounted.
It, you know, it got worse. -On July 30, 1990, Wuornos selected her fifth victim,
a 50-year-old salesman called Troy Burress. -Troy Burress, he'd gone out to do a delivery run,
and when he got to Daytona, he headed north up into Ormond Beach, made a few stops up there, turned around.
When he was returning to the plant, he disappeared. -On the way back to Daytona, he picked up Aileen.
Like previous victims, Troy pulled up at a secluded spot. Minutes later, Wuornos shot him twice at point-blank range.
[ Gunshot ] [ Gunshot ] 50-year-old Troy's body was found five days later. -One of our deputies came upon his truck,
and it had been abandoned at the intersection of State Route 40 and 19, a very isolated area.
-A month later, she took her sixth life. On September 12, 1990, 56-year-old retired police chief
Charles "Dick" Humphreys was coming off the I-75 when he picked up Aileen Wuornos.
They drove to a deserted location a few miles off the highway in southwestern Marion County
and pulled over. David Taylor was the homicide detective called to the scene. -The evidence is consistent with Mr. Humphreys
getting out of the vehicle from the driver's side, and we're looking at Aileen Wuornos
getting out from the passenger side, and it was at that point that shots rang out,
so Mr. Humphreys is shot several times. He staggers over to this location, and that's where Mr. Humphreys collapses,
but what was so important to us was the fact that he was shot one time at a close, non-contact range,
being that the gun was held only just a few inches away from his chest when that round was fired.
-Wuornos shot Charles Humphreys multiple times. -She's using much more violence than she needs
to get the job done. It shows, to me, that she's enjoying this overkill. It's not enough to kill him.
She has to destroy this individual, and this is somebody whose behavior is escalating.
-By the autumn of that year, investigators were still unable to identify the killer and stop the murders.
-By the time Mr. Humphreys was killed, we had thought about there being a connection,
so we had contacted every agency in Central Florida, whether it was on a local, state, or federal level
because we didn't know anything. We were almost in the dark on this, and it was very frustrating.
-Officers revisited the evidence from the previous six murder cases, searching for clues.
-And it wasn't more than just a couple weeks later when Sgt. Brian Jarvis was actually going through other cases in Florida
that had very similar M.O.s such as an older white male shot multiple times, vehicle missing,
and shot with a small-caliber weapon. And it was Brian that began to connect a couple dots.
-By winter of 1990, a task force was formed, made up of detectives from several of Florida's counties.
-We actually all met at the Marion County Sheriff's Office. That's when this picture began to evolve.
"Eh, there's a possibility these cases could be related." -While the police continued their investigation,
Wuornos was free to kill again. -The most important thing on our minds at that point was,
"We got to stop the killing. We have to do something to stop the killing," and then we started with the task force,
and we had another body. It was devastating. -She kills Walter Jeno Antonio, a man of 62,
who was found in a logging road. He'd been shot four times in the back, in the head,
and his car had been stolen. -Antonio's abandoned car was found five days later just south of Daytona Beach in Brevard County.
-Walter Jeno Antonio was a reserve deputy sheriff with the Brevard County Sheriff's Office,
and some of the things that were taken from him, personal effects, were like a set of handcuffs and a flashlight.
-For the task force, another murder was a mighty blow. -It's like, "Why couldn't we do more?"
You know, "How could we let this happen?" and it's kind of a personal blame, and it's, "What can we do?"
-The task force refocused on the case of missing man Peter Siems, hoping to find clues that would lead them to the killer.
-We were perplexed with that case because we had not located his body, but he was a middle-aged white male.
The biggest piece of evidence in that case was we had eyewitnesses that seen these two females
leaving the scene of that crash. -After interviewing the witnesses, the police were able to draw a composite sketch
of the two women, and that changed everything. -I think the eureka moment came the first time we went public.
Within the first hour of releasing these composites, we had a call that came in.
It was item number five, our fifth lead that named Tyria and Aileen, and in very short sequence,
we had three other leads come in that also named the same girls, so now we knew there was something to that.
-Those leads initially took us to some biker bars. Now we have undercover investigators
that are now going from bar to bar looking for people that look familiar with the people in the composite sketches.
-One of the undercover officers sent to find the suspected serial killer was Mike Joiner.
-I was the lieutenant over at Special Investigation Unit, SIU Unit. They'd called me into a meeting and said that they had found out
that she was staying in Daytona or close to Daytona and wanted me to go over there and see if I could find her
in some of those biker bars over there and maybe, you know, get close to her. -Daytona Beach, Florida, January 1991.
After callously shooting and murdering seven men, the net was finally closing in on a cruel serial killer,
Aileen Wuornos. -She is a woman who took pleasure in not only killing but also robbing her victims.
-Wuornos is targeting adult men, and she's a sex worker. It's normally the sex workers
who are vulnerable victims of their clients, so she looks very different. She kills like a man.
She's right in front of them, watching them die and really quite enjoying it. -34-year-old Wuornos did not know it yet,
but she was about to meet her destiny in Daytona Beach. After a composite sketch was released to the public,
dozens of leads came in, and Aileen Wuornos was identified as the prime suspect.
-When we reviewed the leads, it showed us that they had ties to the locations that we were looking at.
It indicated that they'd gone inland, which would've been Marion County, and then to the East Coast, which was Daytona Beach.
So a number of the undercover officers from all over the state that we were working with went over to Daytona Beach
in an attempt to locate her. -Within a couple of days, she was found by undercover police officer Mike Joiner.
-I walked in the bar down there, and I saw her. She was shooting pool, and I recognized her,
and she had a bad scar on her forehead. Did my heart go to racing and beating? No.
An undercover officer's worst enemy here can be hisself if he don't control his emotions.
So I just ordered another beer and kept on working. But I knew I had her, and I knew I wasn't going to let her out of my sight.
-Mike spent three days following Wuornos around the biker bars in the area. In his bid to get close to her,
he even slept at her favorite hangout, The Last Resort. -And they had school buses, seats all on the back porch,
and that's where I slept was on the school bus. And when they'd open the bar up at 7:00,
I went back inside and went drinking again and shooting pool. I mean, that's all you done.
You shot pool and drank beer, and she had no money, and I had all the money, so who's she going to stay the closest to?
Bitch got nowhere. From then on, I had -- I started buying her beer, playing pool,
and we had kind of hung together. -With a task force secretly stationed outside,
on January 9, 1991, Mike Joiner made his move. -We were in the bar. We were dancing, and I had a wad of money,
and that's what she was interested in, and she wanted to know if I wanted to go out
one night and party, and I told her, I says, "Yeah, I'd love to go out, but," I said, "You stink.
You ain't had a bath in I don't know when," and I said, "I stink," and I said, "I ain't doing that.
I'll go get a motel room, and we'll clean up, but I ain't going out with no stinking-ass woman."
-Mike told Wuornos to wait for him at the bar while he went to get his room key.
Instead, he met with the task force outside. -And I meet with my outside people and tell them --
you know, we make a plan because they knew what she had in mind. The exact words I had told him was,
"Piss on the fire and call in the dogs. This hunt's over with. This is her, and I'm not going off with her
'cause I'm not going to be the next victim." -Mike returned to the bar with a motel key
and showed it to Wuornos. He then waited for her to make the next move. -Did I get worried about it? No.
She wasn't going to kill me in the bar. You know, I really wasn't worried about it,
not at that point. I just went and got another beer and said just, "Whenever you get ready, I'm ready to go. Let's go."
-A little while later, Wuornos and the undercover cop walked out of the bar. The owner of The Last Resort, Al Bulling,
was an eyewitness to what happened next. -They were just sitting at the bar drinking, you know?
They didn't want to arrest her in the bar or anything because they didn't know what she had
or didn't want nobody else getting hurt, so they're waiting for her to walk out the door.
Soon as they hit the door, that's when they arrested her. -Wuornos was bundled into a car and taken away.
The task force had successfully executed the arrest safely. -I wasn't worried about my safety
'cause I had the best backup in the world. -It was a relief. I think that's the best way
to describe it, as a relief. -The next day, investigators manage to track down Wuornos' partner, Tyria Moore, in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
-And they said to her, "Let's make a deal. If you can provide evidence, if you can help us convict Aileen Wuornos,
then we will give you immunity from prosecution," so I think this was a very, very tempting offer.
-Tyria agreed to call Aileen and let the police record their conversations. -What?
[ Crying ] -The same month she was arrested, Aileen Wuornos fully confessed to the seven murders.
-Sure. -Despite the seriousness of her crimes, Wuornos refused an attorney. But in what was the cornerstone of her defense,
she claimed that in each case, the men had tried to rape her. -[ Crying ] -Wuornos is trying to look out for herself.
She's still trying to perform this role as the victim because I think she's more than familiar
with the fact that many sex workers are regularly raped and assaulted by their clients,
and I think she's trying to garner a bit of sympathy for herself in doing this. -Her trial for first-degree murder
started a year later on January 13, 1992, at the Volusia County Courthouse near Daytona.
It was an extraordinary defense. After all, she could simply have reported them to the police,
but she didn't do that. She took the law into her own hands and indeed executed them herself.
-Wuornos is a simmering pot of resentment, and it's not enough that she's killed her victims,
but she wants to make them suffer after they've died. She wants to tarnish their reputations,
so she says that her victims picked her up. They targeted her. They were the predators, not her.
-In an unusual twist, Wuornos was only tried for her first murder, that of 51-year-old Richard Mallory.
Florida State Attorney John Tanner was the lead prosecutor. -In Florida, if you have a series of crimes
that are related in certain factors, then you may be able to bring in evidence of those other crimes,
and in this case, it was murder. -Called the Williams Rule, John Tanner was able to draw
a link between the seven murders. -Each of these killings looked almost identical,
showing, I think, basically that this appeared to be the print of the same killer,
and it certainly challenged the theory that she was simply defending herself against rape.
When you're saying that, "Everyone that picked me up tried to rape me," the credibility becomes a real issue.
-On January 27, 1992, Aileen Wuornos was found guilty of the murder of Richard Mallory
and sentenced to death. Then she pulled a major surprise. -One of the odd twists of this whole thing --
after being sentenced for Richard Mallory's death, she elected to plead guilty for five other counts of first-degree murder,
and she accepted the death penalty without going to trial. She really just wanted to get it over with.
She didn't want to go to trial again, and she didn't want to face Tyria. -By November 1992, Wuornos had been given a total
of six death sentences. She was never charged with the murder of Peter Siems as his body was never found.
After 10 years of appeals and litigation, she finally met her fate. -Very close to the end of her life, she said,
"I have hate crawling through my system. I'm competent, sane, and trying to tell the truth.
I'm one who seriously hates human life, and I would kill again." -Aileen Wuornos was executed by lethal injection
on October 9, 2002. -Her reactions were typical Aileen. She was verbal. She was discussing something about,
"The mother ship's ready to blast off," that she would be back again one day, and, "Here we go."
-I've told a lot of people that, when we stop talking about Bonnie and Clyde, that'll probably be the same day
we quit talking about Aileen Wuornos. -Some people believe that she was an abuse victim,
that she was very childlike, vulnerable. Other people feel that she was a sadistic killer.
She enjoyed ending men's lives. In reality, it was probably a bit of both, and that's why we continue to be fascinated by her.
-In just one year, she callously killed seven men in cold blood and then robbed them.
She had a record unmatched by any other female killer. The violent nature of her multiple murders
makes Aileen Wuornos one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

Aileen Wuornos, one of America’s most prolific serial killers, murdered seven men in Florida by shooting them at point-blank range. She was eventually convicted and sentenced to death.

An in-depth look at the lives and crimes of some of the world's most evil killers, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, Cary Stayner, Leonard Lake, Dorothea Puente and more.

Brief Summary

Aileen Wuornos, a female serial killer, murdered seven men in Florida, driven by a traumatic past and a desire for power.

Key points

Aileen Wuornos: The Cold-Blooded Killer. Aileen Wuornos, a sex worker, went on a murderous spree targeting men in Florida.
The Start of a Killing Spree. Wuornos' first murder marked the beginning of her violent rampage.
Escalation of Violence. Wuornos' killings became more brutal as she gained confidence and control.
The Pattern Emerges. Wuornos developed a deadly routine, targeting men who picked her up.
The Discovery of Evidence. Police began to connect Wuornos to the murders through pawn shop tickets.
The Task Force's Frustration. Investigators struggled to connect the murders and felt almost in the dark.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

This was somebody who enjoyed watching men die.

Highlighting Wuornos' sadistic nature during her killing spree.

0:22WatchJul 29, 2021

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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