The story of Aileen Wuornos—who murdered seven men between 1989 and 1990 and was executed by lethal injection in 2002—has long been a fixture of culture, fictionalized on TV and dramatized for film, with Charlize Theron playing the serial killer in an Oscar-winning role.
Wuornos was a sex worker in Florida and confessed to fatally shooting seven middle-aged men over a period of 12 months in 1989 and 1990. She was convicted for just one of the murders in 1992 at the age of 35. More than two decades later, her motives remain unclear.
Now, a new Netflix documentary, Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers, out Oct. 30, traces her crimes and features a rare account from Wuornos herself, from a 1997 interview conducted by the artist and filmmaker Jasmine Hirst, who became penpals with Wuornos while she was in prison.
The conversation, filmed in prison, provides a glimpse at Wuornos’ state of mind at the time she committed the killings and forms the backbone of the documentary. Interspersed throughout the film are audio excerpts of interviews that director Emily Turner conducted last summer with law enforcement involved with the case and Wuornos’ family and friends.
Here are the major revelations from the interview and the leading theories about Wuornos’s motives.
Aileen Wuornos, in her own words
Throughout the interview with Hirst, Wuornos paints herself as a victim, describing a rough childhood raised by her strict, devout Christian grandparents.
She ran away from home at 15 and spent the next five years hitchhiking, sleeping under viaducts and in cow pastures. “I’m tough,” she tells Hirst. She claims that she was raped multiple times during this period.
Her childhood friend Dawn Botkins believes that Wuornos became a sex worker to make enough money to feed her brother who had also been living with their grandparents. While Wuornos always insisted that the man she was convicted of killing in 1989, Richard Mallory, raped and sodomized her, she says in her interview with Hirst that she lied about the sodomy.
“There’s only one thing I lied about; there was no sodomy,” she says, adding that she slipped with the cops and then was just “running my mouth” and “thinking about raped women, their problems, and my problems.” She says it was frustrating for her to have to “keep up that stupid lie throughout court.”
She says she doesn’t identify with the term “serial killer,” arguing that she turned into a murderer after abusing alcohol. As she puts it, “I turned into one, but my real self is not one.”
Aileen Wuornos’s motives
Despite her claims to not identify with the label of “serial killer,” Wuornos seemed to relish the attention that came with being associated with heinous crimes. “You guys are going to make millions off of this,” she whispers to Hirst, primping for their on-camera interview.
“It’s such a sad thing, that the first time in her life that she ever felt listened to or heard or felt like she was somebody was when she became a serial killer,” Turner says.
According to Turner, one theory behind what drove Wuornos to kill was that she had been so brutalized in her life that she acted out in revenge. Her sexuality was part of that; she was in a long-term relationship with a woman named Tyria Moore when she killed Mallory, even confessing the crime to Moore. “Having had so many really violent relationships with men, she decided she would try lesbianism,” Turner says. Sex work with men was just a way to make money and eke together a “meager existence.”
However, she warns, Wuornos is “an incredibly unreliable” narrator.
Wuornos’ true motive may never be fully understood. “There’s probably not one neat answer,” Turner says. “I want people to watch the film and come to their own conclusions.”
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