Aileen Wuornos was just another marginalised figure before she became the subject of tabloid obsession and a Hollywood cautionary tale. She was a poor woman by birth, and her life had left no place for tenderness. Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers, the new true crime documentary on Netflix, retells her story as a grim, complex portrayal of violence and the society that shaped her, hopefully without the sensational spectacle of the highly dramatised Monster anthology series. Let’s explore the real story of Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers on Netflix.
Born in Michigan in 1956, Wuornos’ life was marked by instability from the start. And that is not uncommon among kids who grow up to become serial killers. Abandoned by her parents and raised by abusive grandparents, she was homeless by her early teens. She survived through sex work and petty theft. By the late 1980s, she was drifting along Florida highways, where, between 1989 and 1990, she killed seven men. Wuornos claimed the killings were acts of self-defence (and that each victim had tried to assault her), but the courts didn’t believe her. In 2002, she was executed by lethal injection.
What makes Wuornos’ case endure isn’t just the brutality of her crimes, but the uneasy questions they raise. Was she really a predator or a product of her environment? A remorseless killer or a woman pushed past the limits of endurance? Netflix’s true crime documentary Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers reopens those questions with new archival material, interviews, and unseen footage.
Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers on Netflix, true story
The story of Aileen Carol Pittman starts on 29 February 1956, when she was born in Rochester, Michigan, to parents who were hardly older than kids. Leo Dale Pittman, her father, was a convicted child molester who lived in prisons and mental hospitals for the majority of his life before taking his own life when Aileen was thirteen. When Aileen was only six months old, her mother, Diane Wuornos, left her and her older brother, Keith, in the care of their grandparents, Laurie and Britta Wuornos, in Troy, Michigan.
However, “care” was hardly the appropriate word. Britta was mostly passive, unable or unwilling to step in, while Lauri, an alcoholic with a violent temper, regularly beat the kids. Aileen began exhibiting symptoms of psychological distress at the age of eleven, including outbursts of rage, fleeing from home, and having early sex, which was frequently allegedly forced upon her by older men.
After allegedly being sexually assaulted by a family acquaintance when she was 14, she became pregnant. Soon after the baby was placed for adoption, Aileen was kicked out of the family home. She was living in the woods close to her hometown by the age of 15, exchanging sex for food, cigarettes, and a makeshift home. Talk about grounds for a severe case of mental illness.
The making of a drifter
Wuornos’ life for the next twenty years was a protracted and depressing journey across the United States. She drifted from state to state under different aliases, picking up minor arrests for theft, armed robbery, forgery, and disorderly conduct. She survived in a world that offered her little more than peril as a hitchhiking sex worker along Florida’s interstates for the majority of her adult life.
In 1976, she married Lewis Fell, a wealthy 69-year-old president of a yacht club, but the marriage ended in a matter of weeks. It was dissolved after Fell accused her of domestic abuse. In a life with no normalcy, the episode was just another failed attempt at it.
Tyria Moore: Love and dependence
Wuornos met hotel maid Tyria Moore at a gay bar in Daytona Beach in 1986. After moving in together, the two developed a tumultuous but intensely reliant relationship. Moore ended up being Aileen’s closest relative. They were both supported by Wuornos’ sex work earnings, a situation that would ultimately turn into a dire financial trap.
By 1989, Aileen’s interactions with her clients became more tense as she became more in need of money and more suspicious. Later on, she would say that she started carrying a gun for protection after being attacked or raped by multiple men. The distinction between destruction and defence would become hazy in the aftermath.
The murders
Seven men were discovered dead along Florida highways between late 1989 and 1990; they were all shot several times and left in or close to their cars, with the scenes becoming more and more gruesome.
The first was the death of Richard Mallory, who owned an electronics store, in November 1989. According to Aileen, she had to shoot him in self-defence after he had attacked her. The bodies of construction worker David Spears, part-time rodeo hand Charles Carskaddon, and sausage vendor Troy Burress were found along rural roads during the course of the following year.
After that, there was Walter Antonio, a truck driver and former police reservist who was shot four times and left almost naked in the woods that November. Peter Siems, a retired merchant seaman whose body was never found but whose car bore Aileen’s palm print. And Charles “Dick” Humphreys, a retired Air Force major and child abuse investigator, was discovered dead in September.
Wuornos eventually confessed to all seven killings. But she insisted that she had protected herself from aggressive clients who had tried to hurt her. The evidence, however, painted a less clear picture: the victims’ possessions were found pawned under her name, and witnesses claimed to have seen her and her partner, Tyria Moore, driving the victims’ stolen vehicles.
Aileen Queen of the Serial Killers trailer
Trials and media frenzy
The case swiftly turned into a circus for the media. Tabloids were unable to ignore the anomaly of a female serial killer, and a lesbian one at that (LGBTQ+ representation in pop culture was not big then). Wild-eyed and defiant, her mugshot became a hideous cultural representation of “female rage gone wrong.”
She was found guilty of Richard Mallory’s murder in 1992 and given the death penalty. She was given five additional death sentences for the other killings over the course of the following two years. The jury viewed her as cold-blooded and manipulative, despite her attorneys’ efforts to blame her for mental illness and PTSD.
The final years and execution
Aileen was on Florida’s death row for over ten years. Her mental state clearly worsened during that period. She developed paranoia, saying that the media was “accelerating” her execution and that prison guards were contaminating her food.
Additionally, she caught the attention of filmmaker Nick Broomfield, who documented her decline and last interviews for his documentaries Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1992) and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003).
Aileen Wuornos was put to death by lethal injection at Florida State Prison on 9 October 2002. Her final remarks were characteristically enigmatic: “Yes, I would just like to say I’m sailing with the rock, and I’ll be back, like Independence Day, with Jesus. June 6, like the movie. Big mother ship and all, I’ll be back, I’ll be back”. Indeed, she might be, perhaps in a future season of Monster?
What is the release date of Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers?
The release date of Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers is 30 October.
Watch Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers on Netflix right now.
(Hero and Featured images: Courtesy of Netflix)
Note : The information in this article is accurate as of the date of publication.