Original subtitles

Seven men dead,

bodies discarded like roadkill on Florida backroads.

The seven men that were killed by Aileen Wuornos

goes back to November 30th 1989.

This woman who killed seven men in less than a year.

The first ever female serial killer.

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

Aileen didn't know that her girlfriend was...

working with the police and cooperating with them.

And she said that she had shot and killed a man that day.

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

Does a part of us support what she's done

because of what has been done to her?

It is the sentence of the law and the judgement of this court that you,

Aileen Carol Wuornos, be electrocuted until you are dead.

Lee, I've been doing this work a long time.

And I've sat across from people who had no regard for what they've done.

You're not that person.

You don't know what kind of person I am.

I know your grandfather raised you when your father killed himself

in a federal prison cell.

I know that your grandmother...

...died of alcoholism when you were 16 years old.

I know that your grandfather committed suicide in 1976,

same year your brother died.

That you've been on your own since you were a child.

I know that you gave birth at 13.

That you were beaten so badly on those roads...

...that you were unrecognisable.

That you were raped and raped again.

And the people who were supposed to be protecting you...

cops, social workers, didn't.

So why are you trying to send that person to the electric chair?

Seven men are dead, Lee.

I don't know anything about that.

All of the men had been shot with a 22-calibre weapon,

and they were shot multiple times.

We also noticed that there were items taken from each victim,

and we compiled a list of all the items that were taken.

This helped us to draw things together at this point,

as we were working through the investigation.

Aileen didn't know that her longtime girlfriend

was working with the police and cooperating with them.

All of that does make things very complicated and very complex,

much like the rest of the case.

In December 1990, before Aileen's arrest,

Tyria Moore reportedly became suspicious

after seeing news reports about murdered men,

whose details matched Aileen's activities.

Aileen and Tyria had similar ways of life.

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.

So the phone calls that Tyria helped coordinate

with law enforcement to get Aileen to confess

were very problematic.

I'll tell them everything, Ty. I'll take the heat.

I don't want you to get in trouble.

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 would have confirmed every... every assumption...

that Aileen had about people,

and how she was viewed as disposable.

And how she couldn't trust anybody because any relationship she was in

or got involved with would lead to abandonment,

betrayal, or hurt in some capacity.

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, was provided with a public defender.

She waived having an attorney present.

And she gave a lengthy statement to police investigators.

After the arrest, and going into the trial,

there was a lot of things going on.

There were motions made, there were hearings that were held.

There were psychiatric exams being made.

But ultimately, when we got to trial,

the evidence that was provided...

showed the truth in the matter,

and that showed that she was guilty of...

killing Richard Mallory.

So going back to the first victim, Richard Mallory.

He was a... convicted sex offender,

and he had a prior history of sexual violence.

That fact, and that detail,

was omitted from the trial.

Richard Mallory, he liked the beach. He liked drinking.

He enjoyed going to some of the strip clubs in Tampa,

and he enjoyed...

...at times, patronising prostitutes.

The first victim, Richard Mallory, was, indeed,

a sexual predator, a sexual offender himself.

It seems likely he did attack...

Aileen in the way that she said.

And if he did, then it will have...

terrified, shocked, horrified Aileen enough...

to have triggered this whole...

spree-killing rollout of murders

against every man that she came into contact with then.

I want to talk to you about Richard Mallory.

He'd 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?

I do think that the consideration of...

Richard Mallory's prior history...

...and the likelihood that Aileen was acting in self-defence

in that first murder, I do think that she...

genuinely was under threat, and under attack,

and reacted.

Her story was ignored, and it was not believed:

interpreted by media and by the general public as just a...

a lie, and just a story that she was weaving to try to feign innocence.

But at no point was she saying, 'I didn't do that.'

She said, 'I was acting in self-defence.'

You're saying it was self-defence?

You want to talk about self-defence?

Let's talk about the 17 years on those roads before 1989.

The men, the punches, the rapes...

the blood and teeth loosened: let's talk about all of that.

This woman, without any identity,

was suddenly being given this...

almost celebrity identity and will have absolutely revelled in it.

Aileen Wuornos was referred to in media as the...

queen of serial killers and the first female serial killer.

Headlines and titles like this did shift the...

narrative and shift the...

the focus to the sensational side of everything.

Aileen was becoming something of a celebrity,

a feminist symbol, a martyr figure...

representing the many women

attacked by men, particularly men that they know.

This will have been something that I think Aileen...

absolutely revelled in,

somebody who had never been...

treated as in any way valuable or precious,

who was now being looked up to.

The interesting thing for me is that its brutal treatment,

but also this sexually dysfunctional context that they're raised within.

I mean, we saw it... We see it with Rose West, for example,

that seems to produce female serial killers,

which is different from the...

the underlying factors that we see with male serial killers.

What is a serial killer?

It really had people questioning the definition.

But now Aileen hit the headlines

to take the crown as the queen of the serial killers.

The highway killer. The damsel of death.

Aileen has... has, by this point,

fully absorbed the 'first female serial killer' label.

It will have set the scene

for the jurors' perception of Aileen, there is no doubt.

But not just that, it will have impacted Aileen's self-perception,

and therefore, presentation, in court.

Which further will have built into how she was perceived.

Let me tell you what the label...

'America's first female serial killer' did.

It functioned not as a descriptor...

but as a verdict delivered before a single jury had deliberated.

And she just came out and said, 'I have something to tell you.'

And I asked her, 'What?'

And she said that she had shot and killed a man that day.

Following her conviction for the murder of Richard Mallory,

the remaining cases against Aileen did not go to trial.

Instead, a series of pleas would swiftly solidify her fate.

She was convicted and sentenced to death

in the death of Richard Mallory.

Now, keep in mind also that she only went to trial on one case.

This is really the first time that...

the public saw a woman as the perpetrator.

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

such a core narrative of turning the tables,

of redressing the wrongs that have been done to her

in her early days.

I think it forces us as human beings to take a side.

So after Aileen was finally arrested,

and the trial ensues,

the commodification of Aileen persisted.

Now into Aileen's life comes Arlene Pralle,

a born-again Christian horse farmer

who had seen Aileen's photograph in a newspaper

and written to her in prison.

In November 1991,

Arlene Pralle formally adopted Aileen.

Arlene was 44, Aileen was 35.

She became Aileen's legal mother,

stating she wanted to give Aileen the family she'd been missing.

She spoke of dreams, Jesus and divine adoption.

For a woman who had spent her whole life discarded,

and begging for a mother,

Aileen may well have embraced the sudden spiritual guidance.

But Arlene's sudden arrival raised eyebrows.

She will have served as the mother figure

that Aileen has needed her whole life.

There are some psychological needs,

emotional needs, that are fundamental to being a human being,

that we continue to feel...

...their deficiency, their lack, even if we've never had them.

And I think that's what's going on here.

Arlene steadfastly maintained that her only goal

was to provide Aileen with unconditional love

and spiritual salvation.

After her first conviction, Aileen fired her public defender

and hired a new lawyer, Steve Glazer.

Around Florida, they called him Dr Legal:

a television attorney, better known for advertising

than capital murder defence.

So at the time in Florida, you could only...

be tried for one murder... per case at a time.

But all of these other cases were thrown into the mix,

which did sway the perception of...

of her self-defence claim.

Even though the first victim, Richard Mallory,

she did claim self-defence and the history that he had...

sexual violence and assaults in his prior arrests

and his prior run-ins with the law.

There was...

a lot that was hard to believe when all of these other murders,

these six other murders, were added to the mix.

And I think that that was a very important part of swaying

the perception of the case and affected the trial.

What happened next...

remains one of the most controversial moments in the Wuornos case.

Aileen changed her plea from not guilty to no contest.

I think it's clear that Aileen is somebody who...

is somewhat separated from the world and reality.

I think it's clear that Aileen is somebody who...

has an absence of identity

that allows that gap to be filled

with any other identity given to her,

such as that of the famous female serial killer.

Aileen said she wanted to avoid a trial

so she could hasten a date with the electric chair.

Her Attorney explained...

'She's pleading no contest to get right with herself and God.'

In March 1992,

Aileen entered no contest pleas to three more murders:

those of Dick Humphreys, Troy Burris...

and David Spears.

Months later, she added a fifth plea,

this time, pleading guilty to the murder of Charles Carskaddon.

With these mounting convictions,

the legal convictions culminated in a final guilty plea

for the murder of Walter Antonio...

...leaving Aileen Wuornos with a total of six separate death sentences.

Of all seven victims,

Peter Siems was the only individual whose body was never recovered.

The one that she did not plea to was Mr Siems,

the man whose body had never been found.

Most of the bodies of the men that she had killed had been...

...somewhat hidden, but not...

a lot of time went into the hiding of them.

One was covered with a tarp,

but it was in an area that it could be found in.

Others were found in wooded areas.

Others were found in areas that were a little more travelled,

so it doesn't make sense that this one gentleman...

would be hidden any more than the others.

While Aileen was in prison, she had a lot of pen pals,

and there were a couple of girls that she was writing to in Australia

named Jasmine and Judy.

And she described to them what she did with Mr Siems' body.

And she said she had left it on the side of the road,

with his ID and all... right next to him,

so that he could be easily identified and properly buried.

Well, I think if you look at the other six...

victims that had been killed by her,

that wasn't the case, and I don't suspect that she changed it

just in this one instance.

I suspect that, yes, she did...

hide the body somewhere.

It just hasn't been found, and over time, given the...

...region in Florida that it is, there's...

alligators, there's wildlife,

there's a lot of things that could happen.

While Aileen was on death row,

investigators took her out...

on a couple of different occasions to attempt to locate Mr Siems' body.

They figured that maybe by driving her around,

going in the areas that she had been travelling,

going in the areas that she said she had travelled with him,

they would be able to find him, so they were going off different exits,

from Interstate 95 and Interstate 75,

and they were looking in different areas that she would describe.

But in the end, they were unable to find his body.

And we've tried to find Mr Siems' body.

I'm still in contact with his family,

and we still have nothing to go on with that.

So, um... I don't suspect that she...

did something different like she was claiming.

It sounded more like she wanted to...

...make it sound like she was a better person for not hiding his body.

They were decent men.

Were they?

What are you saying?

I'm saying a decent man...

doesn't pick up a female hitchhiker on a Florida highway at night,

with only one thing in mind.

A decent man keeps his hands to himself.

A decent man hears the word 'no', and the sentence ends there.

Are you saying that all seven men were...

I know exactly what men do.

You want to make these men into saints because they're dead.

Dead men are always saints.

The living ones, the ones I met on those roads,

they're something else entirely.

Some of them may have picked her up for sex,

but not all of them, definitely not all of them.

Six men dead,

one missing, presumed dead.

The six shot with the same High Standard .22-calibre revolver.

Look at Mr Humphreys. Model citizen, given his background.

He was married for 35 years, happily married.

When his body was found,

there was no signs of any type of sexual activity...

...involving him.

And he had been shot not only in the back,

but there was a final shot that went right to his chest, close range.

There's nothing there to indicate that there was any type

of a sexual relationship between them.

As you weigh in on each individual victim,

you have to look at the circumstances.

What were the circumstances? What was the victimology?

What were the conditions? How did they meet?

There was less sympathy toward these victims

because they were men.

I think the reality, though, is there was...

such a lack of emphasis on the victims in this case

because of how sensational Aileen was to talk about.

Because she was such a strange case

that it really shattered the mould of what we understood

serial killers to be, and I think the emphasis was just on that.

I don't think that the fact that the victims were men

is why there was a perceived lack of sympathy,

because if you turn the tables and it was seven women,

prostitutes or sex workers,

who were victimised by a man,

you would see a similar apathy.

You might even not hear about that case at all.

There's a lot going on to unpack with the victimology,

but also the perpetrator in this case.

Because again, it's just so different from what we understood,

and what we're... what we're used to as a society.

And we're used to women being the victims.

We have all agency.

And we have all the human ability to...

identify the suffering of others.

And those human abilities...

mean that in some ways, whatever the background,

we have the ability to step away from the path of action...

...that Aileen, I think, was...

was set up for by her early life.

Look.

I've been sexually abused many times since I was a child.

Not a teenager, a child! Write that down!

By 2001,

she had reversed her position of self-defence almost entirely.

She had changed her story...

later on, that would say she robbed them,

and she killed them so they couldn't identify her.

She had these two stories.

Initially, the self-defence, and she was the victim.

And then, no, she was the... the person that killed them.

Even if that were the case, for one of the investigations,

that wouldn't make sense for seven men and killing seven men.

The inconsistency that we see is to be expected

when you understand Aileen's perception of authority,

conception of authority, is not going to be a normal one.

She has no reason to trust authority.

She doesn't see authority in the same way that other people would.

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.

I think what's happening is that in the early days of...

her police interviews,

she's really responding to her immediate feelings,

to the individual in front of her.

There's no truth in Aileen's worlds.

There's no understanding of... of authority as something...

...to be trusted.

So I'm not surprised that we see this level of inconsistency.

Whereas from the police's perspective,

this moving between explanations is out and out lying,

indicates you are a liar, indicates that you are guilty.

You can see the logic of how she got from point A to point B.

Not that you can justify it, but you can understand it.

And you can see how society and culture really failed this woman,

time and time again, from the time she was a young girl,

to the time that she was executed.

And I do think there's something to be said about her story shifting,

because a lot of people who hear about the case

and know about it will bring up that her story changed over the years.

The best way to describe Aileen

was that she could be fine one moment,

and then something would trigger her,

and she would change.

She'd be a violent, nasty monster.

The ability to go back and forth like this,

to be the life of the party one moment

and to be violent the next moment the way she was...

...is definitely an issue that could be raised with her mental health.

Any suspicions or thoughts that she was mentally ill

were confirmed by this point.

She was clearly experiencing significant psychosis.

Reporting that there was sonic pressure coming from televisions,

that prison guards were poisoning her food.

It's evident she was experiencing significant mental illness

and was not receiving any sort of treatment

that she really deserved to have.

All of this put together does produce somebody who...

is not functioning as a normal,

emotionally healthy individual, that's certainly true.

There's a factor, too, with her mental illness.

She was analysed to have borderline personality disorder.

And a lot of that is characterised,

historically, with your environment.

And to us now, looking at this case,

I think it is remarkable that given all...

all this incredible, complex psychological backstory

to Aileen Wuornos,

that she was deemed...

fit to stand trial for execution.

Trial being over and with everything being done,

the only question is: would she be executed?

And that's a... that's a tough decision for a state to bear.

You know, whether somebody's going to be executed or not.

You have to make sure everything is correct,

the appeals are heard,

and every avenue is completed.

It is the sentence of the law and the judgement of this court

that you, Aileen Carol Wuornos,

be electrocuted until you are dead.

On death row, waiting to be executed,

she does turn to religion.

God forgives everything. That's the whole point.

Even you know that.

Lee, seven men are dead.

One was a missionary.

One investigated child abuse.

One was driving to marry his fiancee.

One was driving to see his kids.

One was driving to get money to save his farm.

One called his mother every day.

You're telling me God forgives that?

I'm telling you. God forgives everything,

including whatever was done to me.

Including 17 years on those roads.

While her psyche continued to splinter,

Dawn Botkins, an old childhood friend,

came back into her life,

refusing to allow Aileen to meet her fate in total solitude.

Dawn became her closest friend once again.

So this is a letter that Aileen wrote Dawn Botkins,

who is the executor of her estate,

and ended up with everything after Aileen's execution...

with the instructions of,

'I don't care. Do whatever you want with it.

Sell it, and live off the money'.

Dawn did basically that,

and has been parcelling off stuff of Aileen's...

more or less throughout her life.

This is just one of the many letters that they exchanged.

This is actually a letter that Aileen wrote to Dawn

on Halloween in 1995.

What irks me...

is these people think they've written to a ninth-grade dropout...

who did nothing but drugs...

...and is worthless and needs to die.

The cops labelled me this...

on the fact that a number of men were killed.

I'm guilty of shedding their blood...

but forced upon.

I am sad about their death.

Very sad. But I don't want anyone to know it.

Because then their stupid,

ignorant asses will think I'm crying because I feel guilty.

Society is the ones who are guilty...

...all the way.

Aileen's final day with Dawn Botkins...

...when they shared a KFC supper,

and Aileen was reportedly calm...

I think tells us about...

the level of turmoil that this woman has been through her whole life.

Because now, finally, that turmoil has been removed,

albeit from an imminent execution.

But somebody taking that decision,

taking that turmoil away from her, is what she needs:

is the only thing that affords her this peace.

And this peace that seems to be personified by Dawn Botkins,

as well, at the same time.

This sense of calm comes upon her...

...now that she no longer has...

battles of the world to rage against.

People in positions like Aileen, who are facing execution,

they have spent their whole life in turmoil, in trauma.

And suddenly, that is removed from them.

And this leaves a great big hole...

that they fill in different ways,

with dramatic illustrations,

with distorted understandings of religion.

This all allows them to...

deal with the emptiness that's now their existence.

She 'fessed up to everything, basically, under the guise of...

she'll be forgiven and revokes all of her appeals.

But that really just, to me, at least,

signifies that she was suffering from a lot of mental illness

that was not addressed.

That she had basically given up

and wanted to die, genuinely.

Back in 2000, the Florida statutes were rewritten,

making lethal injection the standard procedure.

It was a change born out of necessity,

after the system saw too many botched gruesome scenes in the chair

that nobody could justify.

Aileen chose death by lethal injection.

We know that Aileen requested the execution be brought forward.

For us to understand that, and whether she meant that,

we would need to look at um...

the consistency with which she made those requests.

We would need to look at the circumstances

under which she made those requests.

Were they reactions to some particular triggering event?

Before Aileen's execution, she was filing appeals.

And she wrote the state to revoke all of the appeals

and just terminate all pending appeals of her case.

Because she did attempt to get appeals for a retrial,

...claiming that she had an unfair trial.

And she revoked all of that, saying,

'I just want to be done. I want this to be over. I'm done'.

So that goes to show that she had given up by that point.

Nobody was gonna help her. And that is just tragic.

Because she, at no point,

received any help that she deserved,

or needed, or should have had at any point.

And she couldn't even get a fair trial,

on top of everything.

Was she just persistently, consistently...

requesting the execution happen?

Or was there more going on around her at this time?

Governor Jeb Bush signed her death warrant in September 2002.

The execution was set for October 9th,

nine-thirty in the morning.

Her last meal...

was just a black coffee.

She was taken to the room for her execution, by lethal injection,

at Florida State Prison, Raiford, Florida,

on October 9th, 2002.

Strapped to the gurney,

two 16-gauge needles were inserted into Lee's arms...

...tethered to an invisible execution apparatus.

The first drug, sodium thiopental,

flooded her veins.

Next came a saline flush,

followed by pancuronium bromide,

a powerful muscle relaxant designed to paralyse her respiratory muscles.

Finally, a massive dose of potassium chloride was injected...

...a searing, burning salt wave

that causes agonising muscle contractions.

The moment it hit her heart, it stopped it.

Aileen Wuornos was pronounced dead

at nine forty-seven in the morning.

She was 46 years old.

I don't believe she should have been executed.

I do think that she needed a tremendous amount of help,

and support and treatment.

Which may be in a long-term capacity,

even to see what would have happened.

Because I am personally curious what would have happened

if she had anybody who cared about her in her life.

The scale of the abuse and abandonment that...

Aileen has gone through must give us a context

to understand what she went on to do.

Her ashes were returned to Michigan.

Dawn Botkins, her lifelong friend,

scattered them on her farm, under a walnut tree,

among rocks and strawberries and living things.

Aileen had asked for that once in a letter.

'Plant a walnut tree for me, or a red oak.

Both are beautiful once fully matured.'

Dawn kept her word.

I do think that she was treated unfairly.

And even Aileen, before her execution,

in one of her final interviews,

she does bring up the fact that Hollywood...

producers were trying to make a movie.

Less than two years after her execution,

that materialising into reality.

The movie Monster, when it came out, I wanted to go see it,

because I wanted to see how they were portraying this.

I knew what the truth was, and I knew how the investigation went.

Charlize Theron playing Aileen Wuornos...

was a cultural kind of reawakening of the case.

And ironically, it was,

again, another way to exploit her,

and the entire case as a whole...

with Aileen being the commodity.

It was the first time that people got an inside look into...

what she was like as a person and what her life was like.

Most people who I've talked to, who have seen the movie,

say, like, 'Aileen's story is so sad,'

and that is a general takeaway.

So I think that... if that was more...

more so emphasised before she was executed,

clearly, we would have had a different perception of the case.

I went in to see the movie Monster.

And I went to a matinee, sat down in the theatre, and...

there was this family that came in:

a husband and wife, and two little girls, maybe five,

maybe six years old.

They go and they're sitting up behind me, and I'm thinking to myself,

'Why would you bring children to a...

violent movie like this?'

I was suspect... You know, I was expecting to see a violent movie.

And about five minutes into it,

they're walking out, and I... the only thing I can figure is

they thought it was Monsters, Inc., and it turned out to be Monster.

The film Monster did give us a different perspective

on this first female serial killer.

Showing the young girl,

the young woman, who had been...

brutally and ruthlessly and repeatedly...

abandoned and abused her whole life.

She was...

a killer.

I mean, there's no better way to describe her. Aileen was a killer.

Right from the beginning, there was not enough...

focus on the families and the victims.

Most of the family members and a lot of the investigators

have passed on now: we've been over 35 years removed from it.

But I still do have some people that I keep in contact with.

They didn't deserve the treatment they got in the media...

...when they were naming their loved ones as...

johns picking up prostitutes.

I think that was very unfair to the families.

With the grieving process they had to go through,

it would have better served everyone...

to be put in a more actual light than they were.

Really so important to this.

And Aileen's not.

She's just not the...

...important piece.

Tyria was not given any kind of witness protection.

After her testimony, she went back to her life

the way she knew it and the way she wanted to live it.

And to my knowledge,

I don't think she's been involved with the law ever since.

She has led an obscured life to this point.

Very low profile,

I think, trying to distance herself from it.

And I can't say I blame her for that.

Not something you really want to be known for.

So she's had a very low profile since then, and...

...and no contact since after the court cases.

I'm not gonna say no more.

Tyria Moore... the woman you love...

...she's agreed to testify against you.

No.

No.

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