Aileen Wuornos

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Aileen Carol Wuornos

Aileen Carol Wuornos (born February 29, 1956 in Rochester , Michigan as Aileen Carol Pittman , † October 9, 2002 in Bradford County , Florida ) was an American serial killer who probably killed seven men between December 1989 and November 1990.

Childhood and youth

Wuornos, who had Finnish ancestors on his mother's side , was born on February 29, 1956 as Aileen Carol Pittman in Rochester, Michigan. Her parents Diane (née Wuornos) and Leo Pittman were both teenagers - she was 14 and he was 18 - when they married on June 3, 1953. The marriage was marked by Leo Pittman's frequent alcohol consumption, infidelity, and domestic violence. During the marriage, Aileen's brother Keith, 11 months older, was born. At the time of Aileen's birth, her mother was 16 years old and had already divorced her husband. Aileen never met her father. He had several criminal records and was considered a pedophile sociopath who was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for the abduction and rape of a seven-year-old girl in November 1962 and sentenced to life imprisonment in September 1965, which he served in the Lansing Correctional Facility in Kansas . In January 1969 he was found hanged in his cell. It was not determined whether his death was due to his own fault or to third-party negligence.

After the divorce, Diane lived alone in Troy with her children . In early 1960 she moved to Houston , Texas , leaving Aileen and Keith in the care of their parents, Lauri and Britta Wuornos in Rochester, who adopted their grandchildren on March 18, 1960. Aileen only found out about her adoption at the age of ten (eleven or twelve, according to other sources). Her uncle Barry (* 1944) and her aunt Lori (* 1953), with whom she grew up in the same household, as well as her birth mother, she had taken to be her siblings. The Wuornos were among the blue-collar - middle class at. Lauri Wuornos worked as a control engineer in a factory, Britta Wuornos was a housewife. Information about the family life of the Wuornos is partly contradicting. Lauri Wuornos has been described by some as an authoritarian but loving grandfather, while others say he was an alcoholic who allegedly abused his adopted children both physically and emotionally. Among other things, he described her as "worthless" and "unwanted" and hit Aileen so hard with a belt in an incident that the then seven-year-old could not go to school the next day. Wuornos told a friend about sexual abuse by her grandfather / adoptive father, but later downplayed her testimony. Close family members denied that Lauri Wuornos had sexually abused his granddaughter or adopted daughter, while others thought it very likely.

Relatives described Aileen as a difficult child with a quick temper and destructive behavior. She often skipped school and received bad grades. (Her IQ was just over 80 and thus in the range of the learning disability .) She ran away from home again and again, smoked, consumed alcohol and other drugs , committed theft and started fires. At the age of nine (six according to another source), she drew permanent burn scars on her face and hands when a fire started. Although she tried to commit suicide several times, she received no psychological help. From the age of eleven, Wuornos engaged in sexual activities with boys from the neighborhood and asked for beer, cigarettes or money. When she was 13, she had sex with her grandfather's adult friend. She is also rumored to have had an incestuous relationship with her brother Keith.

She became pregnant when she was 14. When her grandparents found out about the pregnancy, they took Wuornos to a home for single mothers in Detroit , where she gave birth to a son on March 23, 1971. According to Smith, the boy was given up for adoption against her will, but according to Reynolds, Wuornos did not want her son and therefore decided to give up the boy for adoption. The birth father of the child is unknown; According to Wuorno's own statements, many sources assume that the pregnancy was the result of rape.

Britta Wuornos, who had been a dry alcoholic for several years, died on July 7, 1971. Her daughter Diane's suspicion that Lauri Wuornos had killed his wife through domestic violence could not be confirmed by the coroner. Instead, liver failure was found to be the cause of death. After her grandmother died, 15-year-old Aileen dropped out of school and from then on lived on the streets. She frequented bars, hitchhiked around, and mostly slept in the woods or in abandoned cars. She earned her living through prostitution . All her attempts to do a more regular job failed.

Criminal career

On May 27, 1974, Wuornos was arrested in Jefferson County , Colorado for disorderly conducts , drunk driving, and shooting from a moving vehicle. In 1976 she hitchhiked to Florida, where she met the then 69-year-old yacht club president Lewis Gratz Fell (1907-2000), whom she married on May 4, 1976. After she hit him with his cane, Fell obtained a court prohibition of contact and applied for the annulment of the marriage in July 1976 .

On July 13, 1976, Wuornos was arrested in a Michigan bar and charged with assault and disturbance of the peace for throwing a billiard ball at a bartender's head. Her brother Keith died of throat cancer on July 17, 1976 at the age of 21 . She received $ 10,000 from his life insurance policy, which she spent within two months (including on a Pontiac Grand Prix , which she wrecked shortly afterwards).

On May 20, 1981, she was arrested for armed robbery of a grocery store. She was sent to prison and was released on June 30, 1983. She was arrested again on May 1, 1984 for trying to cash a counterfeit check. She was arrested and sentenced for aggravated car theft on January 4, 1986 and attempted robbery on July 2 of the same year. In 1988, she and her friend Tyria Moore, a former housekeeper with whom she had lived since 1986, were punished for assault with a beer bottle.

Murder victim

  • Richard Mallory (51): Killed several times on November 30, 1989. His abandoned car was found two days later and his body wasn't found until December 13th. Mallory was a convicted rapist whom Wuornos, as she testified at the beginning of the police interrogation, killed in self-defense.
  • Dick Humphreys (USAF) (56): killed on May 19, 1990 with six shots. His body was found on September 12 of the same year.
  • David Spears (43): Killed with six shots. His naked body was found on June 1, 1990.
  • Charles Carskaddon (40): Killed on May 31, 1990 with nine shots. His body was found on June 6, 1990.
  • Troy Burress (50): Killed with two shots on July 30, 1990. His body was found on August 4, 1990.
  • Walter Gino Antonio (62): Killed four times on November 19, 1990. His almost naked body was found the same day, and his car five days later.

The murder of Peter Siems (65), who disappeared on June 7, 1990 on the journey from Florida to Arkansas , is also attributed to Wuornos . According to Wuornos' testimony, his body, which has not yet been found, is in the territory of the US state of Georgia . Siems' car was found on July 4, 1990 after Wuornos and Moore used it to cause an accident. Although they subsequently removed the license plates, the police were able to secure the imprint of a blood-smeared palm on the inside of the door handle. However, she was not charged in this case.

Arrest, sentencing and execution

The above-mentioned car accident put the police on the trail of the criminal. Witnesses saw Aileen Wuornos and Tyria Moore as they got out of the car at the scene of the accident. Police found a palm print of Wuornos on the inside of the door handle. Objects belonging to the victims 'possession were also transferred to pawn shops, and Wuornos' fingerprints could also be secured on them.

Wuornos was arrested on January 9, 1991. She had confessed to her first murder in December 1989 to her friend Tyria Moore. Moore later stated that she did not believe her and, while Wuornos was in custody, assisted the police, who recorded Moore's phone calls with the detainee to obtain details about the crime. Wuornos confessed to having murdered and robbed seven men. She first testified to the police and later in the process that each of her victims threatened, attacked or raped her.

During the trial, on November 22, 1991, Wuornos was adopted by the born again Christian Arlene Pralle and her husband, who learned about the case from the newspaper. Despite the initial help, the friendship turned out to be disadvantageous for Wuornos, as Arlene Pralle and the inexperienced lawyer were more interested in the lucrative sale of Wuornos' history and even convinced Wuornos to accept the death sentence. A late hired new attorney was unable to prevent the United States Supreme Court from carrying out the death penalty.

In 1992, Wuornos was sentenced to death by a Florida court for six murder cases . The execution by lethal injection took place on 9 October 2002 in Florida State Prison instead. Her ashes were scattered by her friend Dawn Botkins on their farm in Wuornos' home state Michigan.

reception

Wuornos' life and execution have been the subject of several films, television programs, and books. Documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield shot two portraits of her: Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1992) and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003). Also in 1992, the TV film Overkill: The Aileen Wuornos Story was directed by Peter Levin . In 2001 the opera Wuornos by Carla Lucero was performed in San Francisco . The 2015 season Hotel of the successful series American Horror Story also features the ghost of the late Aileen Wuornos, played here by Lily Rabe . The most famous film is Monster (2003) with Charlize Theron , who received the Oscar and the Golden Globe for best actress in 2004 for her portrayal of the murderer .

During the trial, feminists like Phyllis Chesler, a woman researcher , spoke up , who understood Wuornos' acts as a result of violence against prostitutes and saw the trial as an example of what was in store for "retaliated" women. Chesler suspected that "a quarter of a million suitors" were finally too many for Wuornos "before she went crazy or, I dare say, had a lucid moment". The Californian Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Transgender Art and Culture presented a documentary on Wuornos, saying it tells the story of "an ordinary working class woman" whose abuse by men has driven her into "extraordinary living conditions." The Prison Activist Resource Center claimed on its website that the death sentence was a result of "sexism and prejudice against lesbians and prostitutes".

Wuornos himself changed her statements about the events several times. At first she appealed - especially in the first case - to self-defense. In a newspaper interview after several years on death row, however, she said that it was "in no case self-defense": "I just robbed and killed her." In a TV interview, she repeated this self-accusation. When the conversation ended and the cameras were supposedly off, she told the reporter the opposite again, pleading self-defense several times, and said she had just had enough of the torture in prison and wanted to end it. In her last interview before the execution, she looked confused. The reporter later wondered how she had passed the morning's mental health test.

See also

literature

  • Lisa Kester, Daphne Gottlieb: Dear Dawn: Aileen Wuornos in Her Own Words. Soft Skull Press, Berkeley, CA 2012, ISBN 978-1-59376-290-2 .
  • Hans Pfeiffer : The compulsion to series - serial killers without a mask. Militzke Verlag, Leipzig 1996, ISBN 3-86189-729-6 , p. 73 ff.
  • Michael Reynolds: I hate all men. The incredible story of a serial killer. Heyne, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-453-08274-5 .
  • Aileen Wuornos, Christopher Berry-Dee: Monster: My True Story. John Blake Publishing, London 2006, ISBN 978-1-84454-237-6 .

Web links

Commons : Aileen Wuornos  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Joseph Michael Reynolds: Dead Ends: The Pursuit, Conviction, and Execution of Serial Killer Aileen Wuornos. Open Road Media, New York, NY 2016, ISBN 978-1-5040-3866-9 , p. 312.
  2. ↑ Joseph Michael Reynolds: Dead Ends: The Pursuit, Conviction, and Execution of Serial Killer Aileen Wuornos. Open Road Media, New York, NY 2016, ISBN 978-1-5040-3866-9 , pp. 149, 313.
    According to Abbe Smith ( The "Monster" in All of Us: When Victims Become Perpetrators. 2005, p. 371 ) Wuornos was born in neighboring Troy . In Wuornos' autobiography ( Monster: My True Story , p. 4), however, Rochester is also mentioned as the place of birth.
  3. ↑ Laurie Nalepa, Richard Pfefferman: The Murder Mystique: Female Killers and Popular Culture. Praeger, Santa Barbara, CA 2013, ISBN 978-0-313-38010-5 , p. 116.
  4. ↑ a b c d e Abbe Smith: The "Monster" in All of Us: When Victims Become Perpetrators . In: Suffolk University Law Review . tape XXXVIII , 2005, p. 367-394 , here: p. 371 f. (English, online [PDF; 2.5 MB ; accessed on December 30, 2019]). Available at Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works .
  5. ↑ Joseph Michael Reynolds: Dead Ends: The Pursuit, Conviction, and Execution of Serial Killer Aileen Wuornos. Open Road Media, New York, NY 2016, ISBN 978-1-5040-3866-9 , pp. 316-319.
  6. ↑ Joseph Michael Reynolds: Dead Ends: The Pursuit, Conviction, and Execution of Serial Killer Aileen Wuornos. Open Road Media, New York, NY 2016, ISBN 978-1-5040-3866-9 , pp. 315, 323.
  7. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Laurie Nalepa, Richard Pfefferman: The Murder Mystique: Female Killers and Popular Culture. Praeger, Santa Barbara, CA 2013, ISBN 978-0-313-38010-5 , pp. 116 f.
  8. ↑ a b Joseph Michael Reynolds: Dead Ends: The Pursuit, Conviction, and Execution of Serial Killer Aileen Wuornos. Open Road Media, New York, NY 2016, ISBN 978-1-5040-3866-9 , p. 320.
  9. ↑ a b Abbe Smith: The "Monster" in All of Us: When Victims Become Perpetrators . In: Suffolk University Law Review . tape XXXVIII , 2005, p. 367–394 , here: p. 377 (English, online [PDF; 2.5 MB ; accessed on December 30, 2019]). Available at Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works .
  10. ↑ Joseph Michael Reynolds: Dead Ends: The Pursuit, Conviction, and Execution of Serial Killer Aileen Wuornos. Open Road Media, New York, NY 2016, ISBN 978-1-5040-3866-9 , p. 319.
  11. ↑ a b c d e f Abbe Smith: The "Monster" in All of Us: When Victims Become Perpetrators . In: Suffolk University Law Review . tape XXXVIII , 2005, p. 367-394 , here: p. 373 f. (English, online [PDF; 2.5 MB ; accessed on December 30, 2019]). Available at Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works .
  12. ↑ Michael Newton: The great encyclopedia of serial killers . VF Collector, Graz 2002, ISBN 3-85365-189-5 , p. 428 .
  13. ↑ Joseph Michael Reynolds: Dead Ends: The Pursuit, Conviction, and Execution of Serial Killer Aileen Wuornos. Open Road Media, New York, NY 2016, ISBN 978-1-5040-3866-9 , pp. 321 f.
  14. ↑ Joseph Michael Reynolds: Dead Ends: The Pursuit, Conviction, and Execution of Serial Killer Aileen Wuornos. Open Road Media, New York, NY 2016, ISBN 978-1-5040-3866-9 , p. 322.
  15. ↑ Joseph Michael Reynolds: Dead Ends: The Pursuit, Conviction, and Execution of Serial Killer Aileen Wuornos. Open Road Media, New York, NY 2016, ISBN 978-1-5040-3866-9 , p. 323.
  16. ↑ Joseph Michael Reynolds: Dead Ends: The Pursuit, Conviction, and Execution of Serial Killer Aileen Wuornos. Open Road Media, New York, NY 2016, ISBN 978-1-5040-3866-9 , pp. 149 f.
  17. ↑ Joseph Michael Reynolds: Dead Ends: The Pursuit, Conviction, and Execution of Serial Killer Aileen Wuornos. Open Road Media, New York, NY 2016, ISBN 978-1-5040-3866-9 , p. 327 ff.
  18. ^ The Doe Network: Case File 1810DMFL
  19. ↑ Aileen Carol Wuornos # 805
  20. ↑ She's a murderer - end of story
  21. ↑ Documentation Eileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer
  22. ↑ YouTube - Last interview before the execution. The mentioned comment can be heard at the end.
personal data
SURNAME Wuornos, Aileen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wuornos, Aileen Carol (full name); Pittman, Aileen Carol
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American serial killer
DATE OF BIRTH February 29, 1956
PLACE OF BIRTH Rochester , Michigan
DATE OF DEATH October 9, 2002
Place of death Bradford County , Florida