Original subtitles

She was a killer.

There's no better way to describe her. Aileen was a killer.

She used her sexuality to lure men in

and then turned on them and murdered them.

Nobody really looked beyond the perception of her being...

America's first female serial killer.

Some of them may have picked her up for sex...

but not all of them.

Does a part of us support what she's done

because of what has been done to her?

Abuse, trauma, sexual abuse,

rape and teen pregnancy, abandonment.

And that was just when she was a minor.

This is evil, what those people had done to me.

In 1989, I was working alongside Brian Jarvis

on the Highway Murders case, one of the worst cases I ever worked on.

Seven men dead,

bodies discarded like roadkill in Florida back roads.

When we identified who we were looking at

as the killer of these men,

we did an intensive background investigation on her.

You want coffee? - Cigarette?

First, I'll need your full name for the record.

You arrested me. You know my name.

Help me.

Aileen Carol Wuornos. People call me Lee.

She did not have a good childhood:

it was horrendous, for lack of a better word.

It was just a horrendous childhood.

Brutally, and ruthlessly,

and repeatedly abandoned and abused her whole life.

She was failed time and time again.

Every pivotal moment of her life,

she was failed and betrayed and abandoned in the process.

Where were you born?

Rochester, Michigan.

Troy, technically, is where I grew up. You want the zip code too?

- I don't know Troy. - Nice neighbourhood.

And your biological father?

Leo Pittman.

Never met the asshole. He was in prison before I was born.

Sentenced to life for raping a seven-year-old.

Nice genes, right?

Leo hanged himself in a Kansas prison on January 30th 1969...

...serving a life sentence for kidnapping and raping a child.

The impact this has at such an early, early stage

in the development of an individual...

is incredibly powerful.

Her mother, Diane, was 16 when she gave birth.

Aileen, not yet four years old.

Diane had abandoned her children entirely.

Just left.

Packed up and disappeared.

Always being alone

also will have created in her

an absolute, desperate need for love.

Aileen and her older brother, Keith,

were taken in by their maternal grandparents,

Lauri and Britta Wuornos.

They were legally adopted on March 18th 1960.

But that isn't the beginning of happier times.

From the frying pan to the fire, you might say.

Hellfire.

As she grew up, she maintained some of her...

characteristics of childhood,

in so much as the way of life, and the lack of support,

and the lack of a relationship and family:

all the things that normal children would be raised with.

But she did not have that.

Both grandparents were alcoholics.

Lauri, according to Aileen,

and to several school friends who were interviewed later,

was also violent and sexually abusive.

None of it was ever formally investigated.

At 11 years old, as a human being,

Aileen is so diminished that she's known as the 'Cigarette Bandit':

she is selling sex for cigarettes.

Everything is about manipulation, about bartering,

about coercion, about exploiting what you can out of other people.

And the only... in a way, the only currency...

children who have been abused in this way see they have...

is their own bodies, their own sexuality.

At 13, she was being raped.

She would later describe waking up at parties,

wrists tied to a bedpost,

not knowing how many men had been there...

...not knowing how much time had passed.

It will have sculpted an identity

where she sees her only value lying in her sexuality

as a result of all the abuse she has been subjected to.

It will have sculpted a view of others...

not just that others are not to be trusted,

but indeed, that others are to be exploited.

And it will have sculpted a view of the world

as something that will inflict pain upon her...

unless she fights back.

At 14, she was pregnant,

the result of a rape by a man twice her age.

She was sent to a home for unwed mothers in Detroit

on March 23rd 1971.

She gave birth to a little boy.

She called him Keith, after her brother,

though he was immediately taken from her for adoption.

Back at home, now aged 15,

her grandmother Britta died of liver failure.

Her grandfather blamed Aileen for Britta's death, and he threw her out.

Fifteen years old,

evicted from the only home she'd ever known...

...and into the Michigan woods.

She lived there in the woods, surviving on scavenging...

and theft and prostitution...

...through two harsh winters.

This will have underscored her sense of worthlessness.

Her sense of being completely disconnected from the world.

Being a total underclass.

Look, I know what you think: that I'm some white trash.

We weren't trash. I'll tell you this much, my family was decent.

Real decent.

I got seven bodies of men you might call decent.

In 1974, aged 18,

Aileen was arrested in Jefferson County, Colorado:

DUI and firing a .22-calibre pistol from a moving vehicle.

First arrest.

First time the justice system got a proper look at her.

There was nobody else telling her otherwise.

There was nobody else there to protect her, or to...

... tell her that, you know, she is worth something,

and she is valuable, and she is a human being.

Really, there was just nobody in her life that cared about her.

And that is tremendously sad,

and certainly shaped her behaviour later in her life.

In 1976, a tragedy.

First, her grandfather Lauri,

just like her father, committed suicide.

Then that same summer,

her brother Keith died, aged just 21.

- Tell me about your brother Keith. - Why?

Just background stuff

Keith was the best person I ever knew. Period. Full stop.

Died of throat cancer in 1976.

He had a tumour the size of half a football in his neck.

He was my real blood, no-one else's.

He left me $10,000 in a beneficiary.

I blew it in a month

$10,000. Gone in a month. Trying to fill the hole.

I had no-one... when he was gone.

It was just me.

In 1978, aged 22,

she attempted suicide by shooting herself in the stomach.

It was not the first attempt between the ages 14 and 22.

She'd attempted suicide six times.

These are cries for help.

These are expressive... suicidal attempts

rather than organised, planned,

instrumental suicide attempts.

Certainly did not, at any point, receive any help that she...

should've gotten, but she had no support system,

so that's not... not at all surprising.

In 1981,

armed robbery of a convenience store in Edgewater, Florida.

In 1984, attempting to pass forged cheques in Key West.

In 1986, car theft.

In Miami, police found a loaded ...38 revolver in the stolen vehicle.

What does her police record tell us?

That she's a petty criminal, not a murderer.

Not yet.

You kill anyone, Aileen?

Where'd you meet your girlfriend?

Tyria Moore?

The Zodiac Bar.

South Daytona. June 1986.

Biker party. We just started talking, that was it.

That was what?

Look, I'd been alone on the road since I was 13 years old.

And I'd never once had a conversation with someone...

where I wasn't watching for what they wanted from me.

With Ty, I just... talked.

For the first time in 20 years, I just talked to somebody.

Because of Aileen's traumatic childhood,

and experiences growing up with...

abuse, neglect and abandonment,

she did have to go to great lengths to,

in her mind, maintain relationships.

Her relationship to Tyria Moore was...

really the first time that she felt...

that she could trust somebody.

And she did not want to let that go.

She really wanted to keep,

and maintain, that relationship at any cost.

Tyria was 24, a motel maid.

Aileen called her her wife.

They moved in together.

Aileen continued working the highways to pay the bills.

Then came 1989...

and everything was about to change.

A serial killer was about to be born.

The investigation involving the seven men

that were killed by Aileen Wuornos goes back to November 30th 1989.

A man by the name of Richard Mallory,

who owned a small electronic repair shop in New Port Richey, Florida,

had been on his way to Daytona Beach to spend the weekend there.

He never arrived, and when he didn't come back to open his shop,

he was reported missing.

His vehicle was recovered in Volusia County,

logged as an abandoned vehicle,

cos nobody knew anything had happened to him.

They impounded the vehicle, and it sat in their impound lot

until December 13th.

On December 13th, there were a couple people going around,

looking for scrap metal to sell.

And as they went through it with their metal detector,

they saw a red tarp.

They looked at the tarp and noticed there was a hand

sticking out from underneath the tarp.

It turned out that that was the body of Richard Mallory.

In her words, she mentions that she was reacting to a threat:

a real threat of being assaulted.

So that is something to not ignore.

They called the local authorities:

the Volusia County Sheriff's Office initiated an investigation

into the death of Richard Mallory.

Richard Mallory, 52 years old.

He had a television and VCR repair shop in Clearwater.

He was going to Daytona Beach.

He never arrived.

His body was found December 13th on I-95:

been shot four times with a .22.

His wallet was gone. His cash was gone.

What do you want me to say?

I want you to tell me what happened on that road.

I want you to tell me what he was doing picking up a woman,

hitchhiking alone, on a Florida highway.

What do you think he wanted?

He had a family that loved him, Lee.

They buried him December, before Christmas.

She was meeting and servicing several johns a day.

But there were seven murders in about a year.

It would be six months before we had another related killing,

though at the time, we did not know about it.

And this was when David Spears had left Sarasota

en route to Orlando.

He had been travelling on his way to Orlando,

which is not too far from us, and he never arrived at his destination.

When we recovered the vehicle, our patrol officers...

found it on Interstate 75, in northern Marion County.

We then secured the vehicle, searched the area.

We found some personal property from that gentleman

off the side of the interstate.

And we transported the vehicle back in

to be processed for any evidence that...

we might be able to find.

When the vehicle was processed,

at the time, there was no forensic evidence that we could locate,

such as fingerprints or anything like that.

What the investigation would reveal was that somewhere along the way...

...he ran into Aileen Wuornos.

That does indicate that there was a thought process,

that there was a choice...

between targeting one victim versus not targeting somebody else.

Charles Carskaddon, 40 years old.

He was driving to Tampa

to pick up his fiancee and bring her back home to marry her.

His mother said he was a kind man.

His body was found off...

I-75, Pasco County.

June 6th. Shot nine times.

- Nine times? - Yes.

The third victim is Charles Carskaddon.

He had been visiting his mother in the St Louis area

and driving home from there.

He never arrived home, though.

A couple of the interesting things about these...

first three cases,

after the first killing of Richard Mallory, there was a break.

There was about a six-month break.

Which at the time...

...fell into the FBI description of serial killer.

Aileen is not seeing these men

in the way that somebody with a normal background would see them.

She is seeing them through the eyes of the...

11-year-old girl who was raped by her grandfather.

She is seeing them through the eyes of...

the young girl who was abused repeatedly.

A lot of this case exists

in a really uncomfortable territory of...

acknowledging somebody as a victim

who also was a perpetrator.

And holding those two truths at the same time is very important,

and something that you don't want to forget.

The fourth victim was Peter Siems.

He had been reported missing on June 7th of 1990.

He left his home in Jupiter, Florida,

and he was going to New Jersey to visit a relative.

And from there he was gonna go to Arkansas to visit another relative.

He never arrived at his New Jersey location.

Peter Siems, 65 years old. Missionary.

He worked for the Christ Is The Answer Crusade:

a 600-member evangelical organisation based in Jupiter, Florida.

- He was a man of God? - He was.

Real trusting soul.

- Yeah, real trusting. - What does that mean?

It means trusting a man...

on a Florida road to be a safe man to be in a car with?

Even if he carried a Bible.

His body was never found.

That so?

His family don't even get to bury him.

Victim number five was Troy Burress.

And this would be the first body that we had in Marion County.

Troy Burress was a truck driver for a local company,

and he was doing deliveries that day

that would take him from the Ocala area out to Daytona Beach,

and then up to Ormond Beach and back in.

He never arrived back home that night.

There was a couple that had come up from Cocoa Beach

looking to picnic at Lake George,

which is a popular summer area in Marion County.

But when they got there, it was so crowded, so packed, so full...

they decided to go someplace quieter.

And they travelled north on Route 19, about three miles.

They noticed something in the distance, in the brush,

that stood out because it wasn't green,

like the rest of the forest: it was blue.

When they went over and looked at it,

it was a pair of blue jeans.

And they had found Troy Burress's body.

Dick Humphreys was 56 years old.

Former police chief, Sylacauga, Alabama.

Before he died,

he was a child abuse investigator...

for the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services.

He was a cop?

He was a man who dedicated his life... protecting people.

His wife, Shirley,

she said, and I quote...

...'As soon as I saw their shadows in the door, I knew what it was.'

His body was found September 12th 1990...

I-75, Marion County.

He'd been shot seven times.

Now, his body was fully dressed.

He had no signs of redressing. He had no signs of undressing.

He had no signs of...

any type of sexual activity whatsoever.

But... his car had been taken.

When we recovered the vehicle, though,

we processed it, and we found a receipt.

Mr Humphreys smoked a pipe.

The receipt was for cigarettes.

Not likely that it belonged to him.

Maybe he deserved what he had coming!

He spent his life protecting children!

You're telling me he deserved...!

I am not telling you what anyone deserved! I don't know.

The seventh victim in this string of killings

was a gentleman that lived in Brevard County, Florida:

Walter Gino Antonio.

He had gone to Sarasota, Florida, for the weekend,

and he never arrived home.

His body would later be found in Dixie County, Florida,

which is the farthest north of any of the bodies we recovered.

And his vehicle would later be recovered

just south of Daytona Beach.

He, too, had been shot with the .22-calibre weapon.

I am telling you that a woman on a Florida road at night

does not know who she is getting into a car with.

She doesn't know if he's a cop,

or a criminal, or a saint, or a monster: she doesn't know!

But maybe she gets to find out the hard way.

When we're doing an investigation,

and we look at motive, we... look at hypotheses.

What is the possible motive, or motives,

that we have based on the evidence that we've collected.

It seems unlikely every man that Aileen has picked up...

...has been a predatory client.

In 1980s Florida,

the police would have dismissed...

any accounts from a sex worker of...

being attacked or violence against them,

all of which will have fed into Aileen's understanding of herself

as having nobody on her side.

of being completely alone and having to fight back.

Having to defend herself because she had nobody else.

That does play into the idea that she was acting in self-defence.

And was the threat real, or was it perceived?

It's almost irrelevant.

Because if it was... perceived,

it would have felt real to her.

The rage seemed to be building

by the number of shots that were being used.

They had similar characteristics.

The seats were moved forward, the licence plates removed.

Items were stolen from each individual.

How did you end up in these parts?

Hitchhiked. It was the thing to do.

Hippie era. Songs were written about it.

Though they never write about the frostbite, or the guys with guns.

Or the cops who tell you they're gonna put you in a motel

and then just... Well, you know.

I was 16 the first time I came down to Fort Lauderdale.

State Trooper approached me on the beach,

said he'd find me a room for the night.

What happened there?

There were four of 'em... in uniform.

And that's just one story. You want more?

I was raped at gunpoint by a trucker.

Raped at knifepoint by another one.

Beaten so bad outside Louisville,

a cop couldn't tell if I was male or female from looking at my face.

I ended up spending three weeks recovering

before I could hitchhike again.

- Why didn't you stop? - Stop and go where?

Back to Michigan?

Back in the late '80s, early '90s,

when Aileen was the news,

the view on sex workers was that of apathy.

If you are abused,

if you're beaten, if you're raped,

that is to be expected with that line of work, and that was just...

so be it, but that is a problematic way of thinking, obviously,

because these people are human beings.

What she's done also just feeds into such a...

such a core narrative of...

turning the tables, of redressing the wrongs that have been done to her,

in her early days, that I think it forces us,

as human beings, to take a side.

If the victims, for example,

had their cars taken and their wallets emptied out,

and personal property taken, robbery could've been that motive.

Could very well have been the motive.

In some instances where you have...

killings, or multiple killings,

sex is a motive.

So it depends on what you're dealing with, and in this case,

the evidence was leaning towards robbery as a motive.

I think at this stage, this is what she's comfortable with.

These are men that she has a...

an unconscious script in relation to.

She knows how to behave with them. She's comfortable with them.

They're familiar, and they're familiar because...

they resemble her father, they resemble her grandfather.

Six men dead, one missing, presumed dead...

in just 11 months...

...the six shot with the same high-standard .22 calibre revolver.

One thing in common.

One deadly mistake.

They all picked up a hitchhiking sex worker

on Florida's highways.

Seven men,

seven families destroyed.

They had friends, colleagues.

I never forgot that.

Tell me about Daytona before 1989.

Daytona was the best part.

Before everything went wrong, Ty and I had our routines.

I'd ride my bicycle 29 miles to Flagler Beach and back.

I'd pack four Mellow Yellows, a beach towel, a Bible...

find a deserted stretch of beach.

Lie out and read scripture, the ocean just crashing in around me

- That sounds peaceful. - It was.

That's the part people don't want to picture.

They want the monster.

They don't want the woman lying on a Florida beach reading her Bible.

We decided that we needed to meet with other agencies.

We met. We talked about this.

And we were putting together a plan.

July 4th 1990,

a woman in Orange Springs calls the Marion County Sheriff's Office.

She watched two women drive a car erratically on a lime rock road.

It was one of our victims' cars.

The car missed a curve, ran through a fence,

tore down a gate and crashed into a pole.

The women abandoned the vehicle.

Three separate groups of witnesses saw the two of them.

Sets of artist conceptions were produced.

These composite drawings that we were able to obtain

were instrumental...

in identifying who we were looking for later on down the road.

We also had something else in this vehicle.

We had a bloody palm print on the inside of the passenger door.

At the time, we didn't have any database to compare it to.

We didn't have any palm prints on file to compare it to.

But later on, this would come into play

as we were building the investigation.

In Volusia County, they found two pawnshop tickets.

One was for a box of tools...

and one was for a radar detector and a 35mm camera.

We recognised these items.

The radar detector and camera were taken from Richard Mallory,

who was the first victim.

The box of tools was taken from David Spears, the second victim.

When we released these composites...

...the fifth lead on the first day...

...named our suspects.

We knew she was armed with a weapon, at least for the killings.

We didn't know where that weapon was,

and we didn't want to take any chances.

So we took the time to plan out

the approach and the arrest.

This was always a concern of ours.

We wanted to try and get her before she could kill again.

We knew there was a big party that was gonna be going on

at the Last Resort the next day.

The undercover Officer stayed with her, he bought her cigarettes,

he played pool with her.

A plan was put together.

At some point in the evening, she left...

through the back door of the Last Resort

...and went to sleep on an old bench seat

behind the bar.

We figured when she got up the next morning, she'd go in for a drink.

We were right.

The undercover Officer...

pulled up in front of the Last Resort.

His partner was able to coax Aileen out of the bar

to come talk to this Officer.

And when she got outside,

everybody was in place and ready to take her into custody.

She was arrested on a warrant.

She was handcuffed. She was searched.

And she was brought back to the Volusia County Sheriff's Office.

Now, there were a couple of other things that occurred at this point,

one of which was that there was a small briefcase.

And when we talked to the people in the bar,

they had all mentioned that she had this briefcase.

She put it behind the bar. She'd be very protective of it.

She wanted to make sure nobody got near it.

We were able to secure this little briefcase.

What was inside was a roll of paper towels, a bottle of Windex,

and a receipt for a mini warehouse storage unit.

The paper towels and the Windex would confirm

that the interior of the vehicles were being wiped down.

Receipt for the warehouse,

we used that, we got a search warrant for the warehouse.

And we recovered the property...

of six of the victims.

The only victim that there was not property of there...

was Richard Mallory, the first victim, because she had...

pawned both of his items.

Following her detention,

investigators located Tyria Moore in Pittston, Pennsylvania.

Tyria has always denied she had anything to do with the killings.

She was made an offer:

full immunity from prosecution in exchange for cooperation.

Under police direction,

she made a series of recorded calls to Aileen, across three days,

to see if she would confess.

We recorded a number of phone calls between them.

As time went on,

Aileen was talking more and more about protecting her girlfriend.

In this most critical of circumstances...

she is telling her girlfriend, Tyria, that she is prepared...

to sacrifice herself: she values...

what she has with Tyria more than herself.

Aileen had contacted one of the Correction Officers.

She stated that she wanted to talk to the police.

She was brought in for an interview.

She was provided with a public defender.

She waived having an attorney present.

And she gave a lengthy statement to police investigators.

On January 16th 1991...

...Aileen confessed to the murders.

They wanted a confession, and they got one...

...because she loved Tyria Moore too much.

Aileen didn't know that her...

longtime girlfriend was working with the police.

The whole idea of betrayal, and the moral...

and kind of ethical implication of...

all of that is a factor with this case that...

does make things very complicated, and very complex,

much like the rest of the case.

Right from the very earliest stages of her life,

she's been abandoned.

She's been let down repeatedly.

And now here she is with Tyria,

the one person she thought she could rely on,

she thought she could trust.

And Tyria is sacrificing Aileen totally,

whereas Aileen is prepared to sacrifice herself completely.

She values Tyria more than she values herself.

What went wrong in 1990?

Money. Always money.

Ty's wages couldn't cover the rent.

- You need money. - I always needed money.

Who knows what they said behind closed doors?

Because Aileen did talk to...

Tyria after the...

after the first murder, after the second, third and so on.

The night of Richard Mallory's killing,

she brought his car back to the motel that they were at.

And Tyria saw this and knew about this.

So the phone calls that Tyria helped coordinate

with law enforcement to get Aileen to confess...

...were very problematic.

Legal, sure. But were they ethical?

Aileen and Tyria had similar ways of life.

They were, in essence, transients.

They stayed at low-cost motels.

She would go out prostituting to make money

so that they could have the things that they wanted or needed.

She did not start her killings until after these...

these two girls were together.

Tyria had an incentive behind...

getting Aileen arrested,

and helping the police,

giving her immunity from prosecution.

At this point, the one person...

that she thought she could rely on in her whole life,

the one person who she thought actually loved her,

is turning against her, is selling her out.

It does bring up a lot of questions about morals and ethics with...

somebody like Aileen, who is mentally unstable,

who trusted this one individual.

It's really complicated,

and I think it's a part of the story that is...

it's a grey area, like a lot of this whole case.

Was she involved in the killings?

That's always been a question that's asked.

Was she involved in the killings? We investigated her.

We looked at any possibility

she was involved in any of the other killings,

But there was none. There was no connection that could be made.

Tyria was somebody...

who had come into Aileen's life

and offered the first...

bit of attention, the first love,

that Aileen had probably ever experienced.

Aileen talks about how she felt for the first time

that somebody was actually interested in her, and that's probably true:

interested in her as a human being,

as anything other than a sexual object.

And now we have Tyria turning against her in her hour of need:

Tyria throwing her to the wolves.

There's certainly information to show that she was...

knowledgeable of the killings.

But as far as being involved,

there was discussion and the prosecutors made a decision that...

it would be better to use her as a witness than a co-defendant

based on the information that they had.

What I will tell you is this.

I was on those roads because I had to be.

And men came at me on those roads.

And I am not the first person to fight back.

Is that what happened? You fought back?

Aileen's explanations oscillated between...

denial and claiming her innocence...

through to talking about the crimes as self-defence,

through to a bravado about what she'd done

and giving it glamorous labels and terms.

Using dramatic terms around describing what she'd done.

So she moves from these very different explanations...

...eventually absorbing this notion of herself

as this notorious first-ever female serial killer.

It becomes part of her identity.

I do think that that shaped how we perceived this case

as a society and as a culture, and how she was talked about.

She was referred to and talked about as though she was this...

crazed, bloodthirsty, you know, man-hating lesbian.

And the reality is she was a victim.

What we don't know is what happened

in the first moments of Aileen's interaction with these men.

After Aileen's arrest, she claimed that she was the victim.

It was self-defence, this is why she was killing.

Even if that were the case for one...

of the investigations, that wouldn't make sense

for seven men and killing seven men.

The evidence is what we go by.

The evidence is how we view things,

and the evidence leads us to the truth.

And the evidence that we were seeing...

...led to these men being victimised, and being shot and killed.

For example, our sixth victim...

Mr Humphreys, had been shot multiple times in the back.

He had a bruise on the right side of his abdomen.

That bruise would later be shown...

as coming from the barrel of her gun.

So the evidence was not showing self-defence.

And that's what, ultimately, we have to look at when we get into court.

I personally don't think she had received a...

a fair trial.

There were certainly aspects of the trial that were legitimate,

but there was mainly a lot of stuff that was left out.

We know that the jury...

were never given the evidence about...

Richard Mallory, her first victim's...

prior convictions for sexual violence.

That fact and that detail

was omitted from the trial.

That's why I don't care if I'm executed and leave this planet.

Going into the trial, there were motions made.

There were hearings that were held. There were psychiatric exams.

But ultimately when we got to trial,

the evidence that was provided showed the truth.

Aileen Wuornos was referred to in media

as the 'queen of serial killers,'

and the first female serial killer.

This woman without any identity

was suddenly given this almost celebrity identity

and will have absolutely revelled in it.

She pled guilty to five counts of first-degree murder.

And the question now was...

was she a victim unravelling under severe mental illness?

Does a part of us support what she's done

because of what has been done to her?

Or a cold-blooded killer who deserved the ultimate punishment?

The evidence is what we go by.

The evidence is how we view things,

and the evidence leads us to the truth.

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