The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (59 page)

Of course, many specialists—Newton included—believe that true serial murder always involves another element, specified in the definition put forth by the National Institute of Justice in 1988: the presence of “sadistic, sexual overtones.” Even when you add this ingredient, there’s a sizable number of women who fit the bill, from “Lonely Hearts Killer” Martha Beck, to the British sex killer Rosemary West (accused of the grisly torture and murder of ten victims, including her own daughter), to Elizabeth Bathory, the notorious “Blood Countess” of sixteenth-century Romania, reputed to have slain as many as six hundred victims for her own erotic delectation.

The problem arises when you try to find a female criminal who matches the model of the modern-day serial killer epitomized by
Jack the Ripper
—the lone psychopathic lust murderer, coolly stalking and snaring his victims, then butchering and mutilating them in a sex-crazed frenzy. Here, the issue becomes much more tricky. Indeed, it is virtually impossible to find a single woman in the whole history of crime who fits this mold. (As culture critic Camille Paglia puts it with characteristic bluntness, “There is no female Jack the Ripper.”) Beck and West, for example, were part of
Killer Couples
. And Bathory falls into the venerable—if thoroughly depraved—tradition of the evil
Aristocrat
, exemplified by monsters like Caligula and Gilles de Rais.

There is a solution to this puzzle. If you think of serial homicide as fundamentally a sex crime (as the NIJ definition suggests), it follows that female serial killers will differ from their male counterparts in roughly the same
way that the erotic nature of women differs from that of men. Just as male sexuality is phallic-penetrative, promiscuous, and fairly undiscriminating, a typical male serial killer will butcher whatever random stranger he can get his hands on. The average female serial killer, by contrast, generally needs to have a relationship with someone before she’ll kill that person. She derives her excitement not from violating a stranger’s body with a penetrating implement but from a grotesque travesty of tenderness and intimacy: serving poisoned food to a husband, for example, or smothering a child to death. Jane
Toppan
, a Victorian poisoner who climbed into bed with her many victims and achieved orgasm while embracing them during their death throes, exemplifies this pattern.

Keep in mind, too, that—though their crimes are less grisly—female psycho-killers are no less sadistic than their male counterparts. On the contrary, it can be argued that—for all the postmortem butchery they were subjected to—the streetwalkers slain by Jack the Ripper died a swifter and more merciful death than the victims of madwomen like Nurse Toppan, who were made to suffer the prolonged agonies of slow poisoning.

The single, if arguable, exception to this rule is Aileen
Wuornos
, the onetime Florida hooker who slew a string of male pickups between December 1989 and the following November. Some observers viewed Wuornos as a classic serial murderer—a cold-blooded predator who killed for the sheer joy of it, like David “Son of Sam”
Berkowitz
. Certain experts even worried that Wuornos represented the start of a frightening trend: the first of a new breed of female serial killers that would soon be terrorizing America.

Those fears proved to be unjustified. Wuornos appears to have been an isolated case. Indeed, not everyone regards her as a serial killer in the classic sense but as a pathetic, lost soul: a brutalized woman whose rage at the world—and the male sex in particular—exploded in an outburst of horrific violence.

Aileen Wuornos

Some people regard her as “the first female serial killer in history”—a coldblooded predator who stalked and murdered a string of victims over an extended period of time. Others (herself included) claim that she only killed in
self-defense, when threatened with violence and rape. Whichever of these views is correct, one thing is certain. Between December 1989 and the following November, seven middle-aged male motorists, driving the highways of central Florida, stopped to pick up Aileen “Lee” Wuornos and ended up dead.

Aileen Wuornos; from
Bloody Visions
trading cards

(© & ™ 1995 M. H. Price and Shel-Tone Publications. All rights reserved.)

Virtually from the day of her birth in 1956, Wuornos’s life was a nonstop nightmare of deprivation and violence, abandonment and abuse. She was the child of a teenage couple whose marriage had ended before she was born. Her father would eventually hang himself in jail after being arrested on child-molestation charges. One day when Aileen was only six months old, her mother left the infant girl and her brother with a babysitter, then telephoned to say she wouldn’t be coming home. Aileen was taken in by her grandparents but kicked out of their house when she was thirteen after giving birth to an illegitimate child (the consequence, she claimed, of rape). By the time she was fourteen, she was living a desperately brutalized life—sleeping in an abandoned car, hustling for drinks, drugs, and an occasional meal. At twenty, she married a seventy-year-old man, but their union lasted only a month (according to her account, she abandoned him because he beat her with a cane; according to his, he sued for divorce after she beat him up to get his car keys). Two years later, she attempted suicide by shooting herself in the stomach. After recuperating, she robbed a convenience
store at gunpoint, was promptly arrested, and spent thirteen months in prison. Other arrests—for check forgery and auto theft—followed.

In 1986, Wuornos met the love of her life—a lesbian named Tyria Moore—at a Daytona gay bar. Even after their sexual passion cooled, the two remained inseparable for the next four years. During that time, Wuornos’s rage and resentment toward men grew increasingly violent. She continued to hustle. Now, however, she carried a .22-caliber gun in her handbag when she worked the truck stops and roadhouses.

On November 30, 1989, Wuornos took a ride with a fifty-one-year-old electronics repair shop owner named Richard Mallory. The next day, his abandoned car was found in a stretch of secluded woods, along with his wallet, a half-empty vodka bottle, and a torn package of condoms. Twelve days later, Mallory’s bullet-riddled corpse was uncovered in a junkyard. Six more nearly identical killings followed.

After Wuornos and Moore were spotted driving one of the victims’ cars, Florida police were able to pick up their trail. Wuornos was arrested in a seedy biker bar called The Last Resort. Once in custody, she confessed to all seven killings, though she claimed she was acting in self-defense. Tried for the murder of Richard Mallory, she insisted that she had shot him after he choked and tortured her, raped her anally, and threatened to kill her. The jury was unpersuaded. Wuornos was convicted and sentenced to death. “I’m innocent,” she shouted when the verdict was read. “I hope you get raped! Scumbags of America!” During a subsequent proceeding—at which Wuornos was given three more death sentences—she hurled similar obscenities at the prosecuting attorney: “I hope your wife and children get raped in the ass!”

As Wuornos sat on death row, she appeared to grow increasingly unbalanced. Even while proclaiming her innocence, she sent a letter to the Florida Supreme Court, declaring, “I’m one who seriously hates human life and would kill again.” She fired her attorneys, stopped her appeals, and eagerly awaited her execution. She was put to death by lethal injection in October 2002. Her last words seemed to confirm the opinion of some observers that, by the end of her lamentable life, Wuornos had gone completely mad: “I’ll be back like
Independence Day
with Jesus, like the movie, big mothership and all. I’ll be back.”

From Beauty into Beast

2003 was a big year for Aileen Wuornos. True, she had been dead since the previous October, when her long-delayed execution finally took place. But fourteen months after she was killed by lethal injection, her sad, sordid, shockingly violent life story was immortalized in not one but two highly acclaimed movies: Nick Broomfield’s documentary,
Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer,
and Patty Jenkins’s drama,
Monster,
starring actress Charlize Theron.