For the first time in U.S. history, a woman stands accused of being a serial killer: of having killed six adult male motorists, one by one, in just over a year, after accompanying them to wooded areas off Highway 75 in Florida, a state well known for its sun, surf, and serial killers.

I first heard about Aileen (Lee) Carol Wuornos in December of 1990, when Florida newspapers and national media announced:

TWO WOMEN ARE BEING SOUGHT AS POSSIBLE SUSPECTS IN THE SHOOTING DEATHS OF EIGHT TO TWELVE MIDDLE AGED MEN WHO WERE LURED TO THEIR DEATHS ON THE FLORIDA HIGHWAYS. SUSPECT #1 IS A WHITE FEMALE, FIVE FEET EIGHT TO FIVE FEET TEN, WITH BLONDE HAIR, WHO IS TWENTY TO THIRTY YEARS OLD. SHE MAY HAVE A HEART TATTOO ON HER UPPER ARM. SUSPECT #2 IS ALSO A WHITE FEMALE, FIVE FEET FOUR TO FIVE FEET SIX, WITH A HEAVY BUILD AND SHORT BROWN HAIR. SHE MAY BE WEARING A BASEBALL CAP. THESE WOMEN ARE ARMED AND DANGEROUS AND MAY BE OUR NATION’S FIRST FEMALE SERIAL KILLERS.

This sounded as diabolically whimsical as Orson Welles’s 1938 broadcast on the Martian invasion. What was Everywoman’s most forbidden fantasy and Everyman’s worst nightmare doing on television? Was this some kind of joke? Perhaps these women were feminist Martians on a mission to avenge the Green River killings or the Montreal massacre. If not, did female serial killers really exist on earth?

Historically, women certainly have been convicted and executed2 for killing adult male non-intimates, often with male accomplices, but sometimes alone, for money, “thrills,” or revenge, in a drug-induced fit of rage, a battery-induced fugue state, and/or in death-defying self-defense. 3 Battered women have also killed male and family intimates, children, the elderly, and employers.4 In Europe and elsewhere, warrior queens and female soldiers and civilians have killed their male counterparts in battle and in self defense.5 In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, female slaves and prostitutes sometimes injured or killed their masters, pimps, or johns, to avoid being beaten, raped, or killed, or because they had been seduced-and-abandoned, beaten, prostituted, or raped.

However, according to contemporary studies7 and countless true-crime accounts of homicide and femicide,8 99% of mass, sexual, and serial murder, and about 90% of all violent crime, is committed by men. Women do not massacre adult or male strangers, all at once, in large numbers, nor do they stalk-rape-and-kill male strangers, one by one. When those women who commit 10% of all violent crimes do kill, nearly half kill male intimates who have abused them or their children, and they invariably do so in self-defense. 9 Until recently, such (battered) women were viewed as more deviant and “crazy” than their male counterparts. Indeed, for a variety of reasons, female victims who kill male intimates in self-defense have been viewed more harshly than men who, unprovoked, kill their wives and girlfriends, or who kill female non-intimates, especially prostituted women.

Most North American women prisoners have been convicted of petty economic crimes 11 and of primarily “female” crimes, such as prostitution. 12 Due to increased drug use and tougher drug penalties, more women are being imprisoned than ever before; however, women still comprise less than 6% of the North American prison population. 12 Nevertheless, this smaller and less violent population of female inmates (most of whom are young, uneducated, impoverished, African-American or Spanish-speaking single mothers) are, paradoxically, perceived as more violent than their more numerous and more violent male counterparts. Why?

Psychological Double Standards

Women are held to higher and different standards than men. People expect men to be violent; they are also carefully taught to deny or minimize male violence (“I don’t believe any father would rape his own child”) and to forgive violent men (“He’s been under a lot of pressure,” “He’s willing to go into therapy”). On the other hand, people continue to blame women for male violence (“She must have liked rough sex if she stayed married to him,” “She provoked him into beating her”).

Also, people do not expect and will not permit women to be violent—not even in self-defense. (In fact, most people consistently confuse female self-defense with female aggression.) In addition, people demand that women, but not men, walk a very narrow tightrope of acceptable behaviors—perfectly, and with a smile. 14 And, until very recently, both men and women experienced woman’s human nature (menstruation, menopause, pregnancy, aging, illness, odors, etc.) as unnatural, offensive, diseased. People still expect women to keep up an unnatural appearance—almost as a specifically female moral obligation . 15 Thus, most people are psychologically primed to distrust/dislike any woman who, in addition to being naturally imperfect, dares to commit other morally questionable acts. For women, such acts include having sex or children, for money, outside of marriage; or refusing to marry, bear, and rear a man’s children; or abandoning responsibility for a child in a way that only men are allowed to do.

For example, while many people, including journalists, seemed to “hate” battered wife Hedda Nussbaum, 16 surrogate contract mother Mary Beth Whitehead, 17 and teenage prostitute Amy Fisher, 18 they remained emotionally “flat” about Joel Steinberg, William Stern, and, at least initially, about Joey Buttafuoco. Many, both male and female, also enjoyed “hating” Imelda Marcos19 and Leona Helmsley20 with a passion unvisited upon Ferdinand Marcos, Michael Milkin,21 Ivan Boesky22 and Neil Bush25—all of whose white collar (and other) crimes were far greater than Helmsley’s. (Parenthetically, most people have felt enormous sympathy for Chief Justice Sol Wachtler, 24 little interest in his female victim, and utter revulsion for Bess Meyerson.25)

These psychological double standards of perceived violence result in a double standard of punishment. In a way, such double standards already constitute punishment, as they poisonously permeate and circumscribe a woman’s daily life. It doesn’t stop here. Studies document that women are often punished more severely for lesser, primarily “female” crimes, such as prostitution, than men are for the more violent “male” crimes of femicide and homicide. When women commit “male” crimes such as spouse murder or stranger murder, in self-defense, or when they protectively kidnap a child, they are usually punished more harshly than their male so-called counterparts.

According to the 1990 Florida State Supreme Court Gender Bias Report, “despite the perception that the criminal justice system is lenient to women...women [in Florida] are treated more harshly than similarly situated male offenders.” 27 Generally, whatever their crime, men in jail and prison have greater access to libraries, educational and rehabilitation programs, modern gymnasiums, etc. than do women; men’s jails are also more conveniently located for family visitation than are women’s jails.

To avoid jail overcrowding, male criminals are often plea-bargained into lesser sentences by prosecutors who fear they might otherwise be set free. Since women commit fewer crimes, there are fewer, less overcrowded, women’s prisons, and less motivation to plea-bargain women out in order to save jail-space. Thus, women often inadvertently serve longer sentences for lesser crimes in more ramshackle jails than men serve for more serious crimes in more modern jails. 29 According to the findings of the 1990 Florida Gender Bias Report:

1. Women convicted of crimes have fewer opportunities for rehabilitation, training, and treatment throughout Florida. 2. There are currently only two maximum security state facilities for women. Minimum security inmates thus must endure conditions designed for maximum security inmates. 3. Some women’s facilities fall below the requirements for exercise facilities and, in any event, are not comparable to those provided for men. 4. Women generally are imprisoned for less serious offenses than their male counterparts [and] have significantly limited access to alternative programs or rehabilitative treatment. Men have programs and alternative treatment centers throughout Florida. 5. In the county jails, overcrowding in the male population results in men being released. However, there is less overcrowding among women inmates. As a result, women serve longer sentences than men who have committed more serious crimes. 6. Women have limited access to trusteeships and work release programs in comparison to men, thus restricting the availability of early release for good behavior. 7. Women sentenced to work release by the courts nevertheless are often incarcerated because of the lack of work release programs or the shortage of openings in similar programs for women. 8. Women unable to participate in work release programs lack the opportunity to gain useful work experience. This results in less successful reentry into society after incarceration and more time spent incarcerated than similarly situated male offenders. 9. Men are favored in experimental and alternative programs around Florida. 10.The remote location of some jails for women restricts family visitation, access to counsel, and information.30

Another example: as noted, battered women who kill in self-defense account for about half of all women who kill. Even here, men and women are not “equal.” (Non-battered) men kill their female domestic partners three to four times more often than (battered) women kill their domestic partners/agressors. Battered women who kill in self-defense rarely “get off” and, to date, are rarely granted clemency; most are given long or even life sentences.

In comparison, minority/immigrant men are sometimes freed on the grounds that, in their culture, men are “obligated” to kill wives who want to desert their whipping-girl posts to go to work, go to school, or get a divorce. White male defendants have sometimes successfully claimed that their wives’ desire to “shop too much” or to leave the marriage amounted to unbearable sexual humiliation .

In addition, while men accused of murder often refuse to confess, women, who believe that the criminal justice system will “care about” the “truth,” are all too eager to “tell all,” especially if they’ve killed their batterers or kidnapped their children to protect them from paternal physical and sexual abuse. Women are routinely punished for their naivete and honesty, and/or for their inability or refusal to play courtroom “war games.”

Judges, jurors, Senate Judiciary Committee members, and We, the People, still value men’s lives more highly than women’s and feel compassion for male—but not for female—sinners. When a woman is accused of committing a crime (and even when the woman is the crime-victim ) , her story is rarely believed, by men or by other women, and even less so if she’s accusing a man of being the aggressor. That’s when she’s Anita Hill or Patricia Bowman; imagine what happens when she’s a prostituted woman, armed robber, child-beater, or cold killer. Few are “interested” in hearing her “excuses”: that she was a battered wife, a serial rape and/or incest victim, or that she killed in self-defense. What do we really know about women killers—especially those who kill male non-intimates?

Women Killers In Literature, Film, and the Social Sciences

Have Austen, the Brontes, Eliot, Woolf, Colette, Wharton, Stein, Barnes, Nin, de Beauvoir, or Lessing ever given us a portrait of homicidal fury in female form? I don’t think so, but neither have Dostoevski, Melville, Baudelaire, Zola, Dickens, Celine, Genet, Camus, Burroughs, Miller, Wright, Ellison, Mailer, Mishima, or Capote. Few pre-feminist writers have ever dared to imagine the lives of women killers and outlaws.

Not one character comes to mind: no female Raskolnikov, Meursault, or Bigger Thomas. How could so many great writers have resisted this temptation?

Perhaps it wasn’t challenging enough. Until recently and I’m not sure much has changed—women and men of color were already presumed guilty, inferior, even evil, by virtue of their gender and skin-color, and were supposed to be humbled and punished. There’s no story here. On the other hand, white men were presumed innocent, Godlike, heroic, both by birth and in the courtroom. Their descent into evil, redemption, or lack of it—now that’s a story!

This may be changing. Something’s up, it’s in the air, it’s a sea-change, and suddenly, or so it seems, we are being bombarded by celluloid images of women killing men: Barbra Streisand’s incest-victim prostitute in Nuts; the three women who stomp a man to death in the Dutch film A Question of Silence; and the battered wives and victims of rape in The Burning Bed, Sleeping with the Enemy, Mortal Thoughts, and Thelma and Louise. Superficially, nontraditional and career-women who kill men are also beginning to appear in Films such as Silence of the Lambs, Alien One and Two, Terminator Two, La Femme Nikita, Basic Instinct, Patriot Games, Passenger 57, etc.

In actuality, these images have feminist precursors. By 979-80, the pre-existing grassroots shelter movement forbattered women, and feminist lawyers and social scientists such as Angela Browne (1987),^5 Cynthia Gillespie : (1989),36 Ann Jones (1985),37 Susan Schechter (1982), 38 Elizabeth Schneider (1978),39 Diana Russell and Nicole Van den Ven 1976),40 and Lenore Walker (1979, 1989)41 began to focus on battered women who kill.

Earlier still, and at a more imaginative level, feminist writers began to portray heroic, or anti-heroic, women who kill: Monique Wittig’s fictionalized band of Amazon warriors, set in the future, in Les Guerilleres (1969),4 ^ and Manastabal, her lesbian feminist Archangel, who guides Wittig through a surrealistic Purgatory of abused women in Across the Acheron (1985);44 Nawal el Sadawi’s Firdaus, a prostituted woman who kills her pimp in Woman at Point Zero (1975);45 Joanna Russ’s Janet Evason, an advanced extra-terrestrial who kills heroically and in self-defense, in The Female Man (1976);46 Marge Piercy’s Connie Ramos, a time-traveler and ideological warrior, in Woman on the Edge of Time (1976);47 Suzy McKee Charnes’s warriors in MotherLines (197 ); 48 Sally Gearheart’s lesbian feminist warriors in The Wanderground (1976);49 Kate Millett’s Gertrude Baniszewski, who, in real life, led a gang of teenagers in the torture-killing of 16-year-old Sylvia Likens, in The Basement— Meditations on a Human Sacrifice (1979);50 Margaret Atwood’s Ofglen, an ideological warrior who mercifully kills a male comrade to spare him a slow and agonizing death in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985);51 Jeanette Winterson’s Dog Woman, who is given to killing Puritans with an ax during the reign of Charles the Second in Sexing the Cherry (1989);52 Helen Zahavi’s Bella, an ex-prostitute, “no one special,” but someone who, once she’d “realized she’d had enough,” proceeds to kill at least seven sexually and murderously assaultive men, in The Weekend ( 1991 ); 53 and Diana Rivers’s band of lesbian feminist psychic-military warriors in Daughters of the Great Star (1992) 5 *. Andrea Dworkin’s Mercy, 55 first published in England in 1990 and in the United States in 1991, reads like something the visionary Cassandra might have written—had she escaped her life as Agamemnon’s slave-prostitute and turned military tactician, had she escaped from History and become an “avenging angel”:

We surge through the sex dungeon where our kind are kept, the butcher shops where our kind are sold; we break them loose; Amnesty International will not help us, the United Nations will not help us; so at night, ghosts, we convene; to spread justice... I am an apprentice: sorcerer or assassin or vandal or vigilante; or avenger; I am in formation as the new one who will emerge.

Women, including women writers, have been conditioned to be the social enforcers of the status quo, to challenge and condemn any woman (or man) who “steps out of line.” That women have begun to imagine and befriend women killers—and in print—is very promising. Writers need to create female heroes and anti-heroes, larger than life. Acts of radical compassion are required, acts that embrace other women, not just “nice” girls or “perfect” victims, not when it’s safe, but precisely when it’s risky.

Enter Aileen (Lee) Carol Wuornos—a prostitute and lesbian convicted of killing four men and accused of killing at least two more—a really “bad” girl.

The media and social scientists have described Wuornos as the first “female serial killer”; the FBI has classified her as such. But is this true? Is Wuornos indeed a female “Jack the Ripper,” “Hillside Strangler,” “Green River Killer,” or “Night-Stalker”? Eric Hickey, sociologist and criminologist, estimated that there has been an average of at least five serial killers each year in the United States since 1970. The vast majority are men (approximately 170 between 1970 and 1988). Hickey estimated that in the nearly 200 years between 1800 and 1988, a total of 34 female serial killers have existed—contrasted with an estimated 30 male serial killers on the loose as of the late 1980s. A disproportionate number of serial killing victims are women, a trend which Hickey says may be increasing.

Serial killers are mainly white male drifters, obsessed with pornography and woman-hatred, who sexually use their victims, either before or after killing them, and who were themselves paternally abused children. As adults, they scapegoat not fathers but mainly women, sometimes children, sometimes male homosexuals—who are seen as “feminine” or vulnerable. Serial killers may be responsible for the daily, and permanent, disappearance of thousands of prostituted and non-prostituted women, each and every year, all across the United States. 58 In addition, most sex-murderers who stalk, rape, torture, and kill prostitutes (and non-prostitutes, whom they view as prostitutes and as therefore worthy of death), are rarely ever found or convicted.

I don’t think Wuornos fits this description. Wuornos was not a pornography addict, she did not eroticize her hatred of women (or of men); she did not stalk women, or male or female prostitutes; in fact, she was a prostituted woman. The men she killed all fit the profile of johns, those who frequent prostitutes.

In addition, most serial killers don’t insist that they killed in self-defense—as Wuornos has. She said so at least 50 times during her three-hour, videotaped, psychologically manipulated confession on January 16, 1991, in which she also said that she believed she was going to be beaten or raped or killed by each of her victims.

People say that Wuornos could not have killed six times in self defense, that no one could—except of course men, in times of war. But Wuornos, a seriously abused child and a serially raped and beaten teenage and adult prostitute, has been under attack all her life, probably more than any soldier in any real war.

In my opinion, Wuornos’s testimony in the first trial was both moving and credible as she described being verbally threatened, tied up and then brutally raped, both anally and vaginally, by Richard Mallory.61 According to Wuornos, this is what Richard Mallory did to her on the night of November 30th, 1989:

I went to Tampa and made a little money hustling. I was hitchhiking home at night. This guy picked me up right outside of Tampa, underneath the bridge. So he’s smokin’ pot and we’re goin’ down the road and he says, ‘Do you want a drink?’ So we’re drinkin’ and we’re gettin’ pretty drunk. Then, around 5:00 in the morning, he says: ‘Okay, do you want to make your money now?’ So we go into the woods. He’s huggin’ and kissin’ on me. He starts pushin’ me down. And I said, ‘Wait a minute, you know, get cool. You don’t have to get rough, you know. Let’s have fun.’ 62 I said I would not [have sex with him]. ‘Yes, you are, bitch. You’re going to do everything I tell you. If you don’t, I’m going to kill you and [have sex with you] after you’re dead just like the other sluts. It doesn’t matter, your body will still be warm.’ He tied my wrists to the steering wheel, and screwed me in the ass. Afterwards, he got a Visine bottle filled with rubbing alchohol out of the trunk. He said the visine bottle was one of my surprises. He emptied it into my rectum. It really hurt bad because he tore me up a lot. He got dressed, got a radio, sat on the hood for what seemed like an hour. I was really pissed. I was yelling at him, and struggling to get my hands free. Eventually he untied me, put a stereo wire around my neck and tried to rape me again. ^3 Then I thought to myself, well, this dir... this dirty bastard deserves to die anyway because of what he was tryin’ to do to me. We struggled. I reached for my gun. I shot him. I scrambled to cover the shooting because I didn’t think the police would believe I killed him in selfdefense.^ I have to say it, that I killed ’em all because they got violent with me and I decided to defend myself. I wasn’t gonna let ’em beat the shit outta me or kill me, either. I’m sure if after the fightin’ they found I had a weapon, they would’ve shot me. So I just shot them. 6 ^

Apart from her own testimony, the jury never got to hear any evidence about violence toward prostitutes in general, or about Mallory’s history of violence toward women in particular, that might have helped them evaluate Wuornos’s much-derided claim of self-defense.

Violence Against Prostitutes

There is a suppressed, forgotten, and/or unrecorded history of violence against prostituted women both world-wide and in North America. Prostitutes have long been considered “fair game” for sexual harassment, rape, gang-rape, “kinky” sex, robbery, and beatings; their homes have been destroyed, they have been taunted, even killed, for “sport.” 66 According to historian Timothy J. Gilfoyle,

After 1820, physical violence against prostitutes [in New York City] increased dramatically....Drunken, disorderly, and delirious males often became incensed when a prostitute or madam denied them their heart’s desire....The increasing frequency of these attacks during the 1830s reflected, in part, the growing perception that prostitutes were fair game for the aggressions of frustrated males. The most threatening form of assault was “the spree” or “row.” Fueled by male camaraderie and substantial quantities of liquor, gangs of rampaging drunks moved from one saloon or brothel to another, becoming increasingly obnoxious and violent at every stop.... Many sprees evolved into scenes of sadistic terror.^8...Just as some white men terrorized black proprietors of small businesses, oyster shops, churches, and theaters, others found the increased economic and social power of prostitutes threatening....Efforts to limit accessibility, in the mind of the brothel bully, violated custom and male prerogative....In 1836, for example, John Chichester and his politically connected gang attacked at least three bordellos. Entering Jane Ann Jackson’s Chapel Street brothel with bats, they destroyed windows and shutters and threatened to cut Miss Jackson’s throat. Chichester’s consorts then broke into Eliza Ludlow’s » house and forced her to serve brandy; they concluded their guzzling by tossing the glasses in the fire. Then they “abused the inmates of the house,” burned a rug, broke a bench by hurling it at a prostitute, and threatened to toss one woman out the window.69...Just as lynchings in the American South later in the century extended psychological control far beyond their immediate victims, brothel riots probably imposed similar behavioral constraints upon prostitutes.

A 1991 study by the Council for Prostitution Alternatives,71 in Portland, Oregon, documented that 78% of 55 prostituted women reported being raped an average of 16 times annually by their pimps and 33 times a year by johns. 72 Twelve rape complaints were made in the criminal justice system and neither pimps nor johns were ever convicted. These prostitutes also reported being “horribly beaten” by their pimps an average of 58 times a year. 73 The frequency of beatings by pimps ranged from once to daily, or times per year; the frequency of beatings by johns ranged from 1 to 400 times a year. Legal action was pursued in cases, resulting in two convictions for “aggravated assault.” Fifty-three percent were the victims of sexual torture at the hands of both pimps and johns; nearly a third reported being mutilated as a result of this torture. 74 Legal action was sought in eight cases and only once was a pimp convicted. The 1990 Florida Supreme Court Gender Bias Report stated that “[prostitution is not a victimless crime.... Prostitute rape is rarely reported, investigated, prosecuted or taken seriously... [ajlmost all young prostitutes have run away from sexual and physical abuse in their homes. ..[and]. ..are most often the victims of coercion.” 75 According to Philippa Levine, who studied street prostitutes in Florida,

[t]he same dangers attached to prostitution wherever I looked. In every [Florida] city and town I heard grim stories of violence and coercion, of rape and murder, of non-payment and forced sex, of hunger, pain, disease, and desperation. ...[W]e should not forget the still unsolved murders of young prostitutes in Pensacola, the crack-addicted street-walkers of Tallahassee, the heroin-addicted HIVinfected woman whose prostitution charges made headlines in Tampa (in 1988] and whose name was disclosed by the media with little care for her health or dignity. 7^ 99 PATRIARCHY ...[T]he [Florida] police confirmed that they knew of no [prostitutes] who had not had bad experiences with customers. Intimate transactions with strangers constitute danger in themselves, all the more so when one considers that almost all street prostitution is conducted in parked cars controlled by those customers. Women spoke of jumping out of moving cars in preference to facing weapons, of being driven to lonely areas against their will, of non-paying clients whose violent behaviour forced them to comply with unanticipated desires. One interviewee described one horrific night when three separate clients threatened her with a knife.

Research has also indicated that street and juvenile prostitutes suffer bruises, broken bones, and very poor health as a result of multiple beatings and rape.78 According to Eleanor Miller, “The beatings and sexual assaults female hustlers received at the hands of their ‘men/ their ‘dates,’ their wivesin-law, former ‘women’ of their ‘men,’ and other street people as well as the police, were numerous and often brutal.” Underage girls are often introduced into prostitution by family intimates who either rape and then begin selling them, or “only” rape them, often from the time they are seven or eight years old; in so doing, they fatally break their spirits, and drive them out of the house and into the arms of waiting pimps and johns, often by the time they are twelve or thirteen years old. 80 According to Susan Kay Hunter, Executive Director of Council for Prostitution Alternatives,

Suicide is common among victim/survivors of prostitution: 75% of women victimized by escort prostitution have attempted suicide and prostituted women comprise 15% of all suicides reported by hospitals.8 *

According to a 1981 study, 78% of 200 street prostituted women, the majority of whom were under 21 years of age. 100 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense reported being victimized by forced perversion an average of 16.6 times each woman; 70% were victimized by john rape (when johns went beyond what was agreed on) an average of 31 times; 74% were victimized by non-payment an average of five times; 65% were victims of violence an average of nine times; 41% were victimized in some other way such as being forced into sex for no pay with police, beaten by police, or beaten by other prostitutes. 82 Additionally, 65% of these young streetwalkers were physically abused and beaten by customers an average of four times—because they “got off on it, enjoyed it and thought it was part of sex,” or because the customers hated prostitutes or hated women in general. 8 ^

Prostituted women often make headlines when their headless and mutilated bodies are discovered. To date,

At least forty-eight women, mainly prostitutes, were killed by the Green River Killer; up to thirty-one women [were] murdered in Miami over a three year period, most of them prostitutes; fourteen in Denver; twentynine in Los Angeles; seven in Oakland. Forty-three in San Diego; fourteen in Rochester; eight in Arlington, Virginia; nine in New Bedford, Massachusetts, seventeen in Alaska, ten in Tampa. Three girls, ages 3, 4, and 6, [were] sold in Suffolk, New York. Three prostitutes were reported dead in Spokane, Washington in 1990, leading some to speculate that the “Green River” murderer of 48 women and girls had once again become “active.” ...[W]omen in prostitution are dying quickly. One authority cited in the Canadian Report on Prostitution and Pornography concluded that women and girls in prostitution suffer a mortality rate 40 times the national average.

Wuornos’s public defenders, Trish Jenkins and Ed Bonnett, chose not to use any of the pro bono expert wit101 PATRIARCHY nesses I’d gathered together who were ready to testify for the defense in the first trial. In my view, such experts were needed to educate the jury about the routine and horrendous violence against prostituted women, including Wuornos, the long-term consequences of extreme trauma,85 and a woman’s right to self-defense.

If the people on Wuornos’s jury had been allowed to hear from such experts, perhaps, just perhaps, they’d have been better able to understand that, as Wuornos has said, she lived “on dangerous ground at all times,” and that she killed Richard Mallory in self-defense. 87 For example, in addition to Mallory’s drunken sadism, Wuornos’s early childhood and the fact that she was serially raped and abused all her life—predisposed her to both deny and to overreact to all subsequent abuse.

We know that Wuornos never met her father, Leo Pitman, a man who was imprisoned for molesting one child and who possibly murdered another, a man who committed suicide in prison when Wuornos was 13; that Wuornos’s teen-age mother, Diane, abandoned her when Wuornos was a toddler; and that her maternal grandparents took her in. Wuornos was physically, psychologically, and probably sexually abused, as well as seriously neglected at home. She was badly scarred in a fire when she was nine; her life-long hearing impairment was never corrected. We also know that Wuornos was raped, presumably by a stranger, when she was 12, impregnated, and sent to a home for unwed mothers, where she gave birth to a son she surrendered for adoption.

We know that Wuomos’s maternal grandmother was an alcoholic who died of liver failure in 1971, when Wuornos was 14; that Wuornos finally ran away from home shortly thereafter; and that in her first year as a runaway, she was reportedly beaten and raped at least six times by six different men. 102 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

We know that Wuornos’s grandfather killed himself in 1976, the year her brother Keith died of cancer, and that Wuornos tried to commit suicide, at least once seriously, by shooting herself in the stomach. Like many female victims of serious childhood abuse, Wuornos became an alcoholic, a prostitute, and a petty thief. She supported herself as a prostitute as she drifted between Michigan and Florida from to 1991. Wuornos spent time in reform school in Michigan and in jail in Florida.

Let’s assume that Wuornos’s attorneys decided not to use any pro bono experts. What else might they have done? If a prostituted woman (or anyone) alleges rape and selfdefense, and there are no eye-witnesses other than the accused, it is appropriate to review the murdered man’s past history of violence toward both prostitutes and non-prostitutes.

Shortly after the Mallory homicide, and a month before Wuornos’s arrest, Mallory’s former girlfriend, Jackie Davis, gave a grim portrayal of Mallory to investigator Larry Horzepa. Mallory, Ms. Davis recounted, had served ten years in prison for burglary, suffered from severe mood swings, drank too much, was violent to women, enjoyed the strip bars, was “into” pornography, and had undergone therapy for some kind of sexual dysfunction. 90 A search of Mallory’s business revealed that he was erratic in business, heavily in debt, in trouble with the IRS, and had received many hostile letters from angry customers. 91 (Ultimately, Judge Uriel Blount did not allow Jackie Davis to testify about Mallory’s past violence toward women.)

However, the prosecution did not share Davis’s information with the defense for more than a year. The prosecution revealed this information on January 10th, 1992, three days before Wuornos was to stand trial for Mallory’s murder. On January 10th, Judge Blount denied a defense motion for the 103 PATRIARCHY admission of this testimony at trial and for a continuance to allow the defense to find and question Davis anew.92 In myview, the absence of such corroborating evidence was absolutely damaging to Wuornos’ self-defense claim.

Chastity Lee Marcus, a Tampa-based exotic dancer, prostituted woman, and member of the Sons of Silence Motorcycle gang, was interviewed by the police as possibly the last person to have seen Mallory alive. 93 Marcus described Mallory as a drinking and partying man who thought nothing of paying $600 (or the equivalent in VCRs) to have sex with two prostitutes at once: herself and her friend “Danielle.”

Neither the defense nor the prosecution questioned Marcus, Mallory’s ex-wife, or another ex-girlfriend, Nancy Peterson, about Mallory’s violence toward them or toward other women. Neither Jackie Davis, Chastity Lee Marcus, nor Nancy Peterson ever testified for the defense.

It is true that Wuornos’s public defender, Trish Jenkins, asked for a continuance at the last moment, in order to question Davis. However, on October 15, 1991 —two months before the trial started—Jenkins herself had deposed Officer Lawrence Horzepa about Jackie Davis.96 Perhaps Jenkins forgot about this deposition. In a series of meetings with Jenkins, held in April and May of 1991—nearly seven months before the first trial—feminists, myself included, had asked Jenkins and her investigator, Don Sanchez, to look into Mallory’s past. 97 They never did. A routine computer check would have revealed that Richard Mallory had done many years in Patuxent Prison, in Maryland, as a sex offender. In Mallory’s criminal record he was described as an “impulsive and explosive individual who will get into serious difficulty, most likely of a sexual nature.... Because of his emotional disturbance and his poor control of his sexual impulses, he could present a potential danger to his environment in the future.” 104 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

I eventually hired Marion County ex-police officer Brian Jarvis, who had initially worked on the Wuornos case, to conduct a computer search and a series of interviews about Mallory. NBC private investigator Jack Kassewitz also learned of Mallory’s criminal record and on November 10, 1992, NBC-Dateline aired the above findings. NBC also revealed that the defense had failed to call a number of “friendly” witnesses."

It is not clear whether the prosecution had ever done a thorough computer check on Mallory, or whether they actively suppressed the results. Prosecutor John Tanner admitted, on camera, that the prosecution’s preparation had been “incomplete.” 100 He also admitted that “we may have to try the case again.”

The Psycho-Pathology of Woman-Hatred

Wuornos may have had sex for money with a “guesstimated” quarter of a million men. Did the six johns she killed demand something that so terrorized and outraged her that she “snapped”? Or was it just the first of the six, Richard Mallory, john number quarter-million-plus-one, who sent her over the edge?

Was a quarter-million johns all Wuornos could take before she cracked, or, dare I say it, experienced a momentary flight into sanity? Was a quarter-million johns all Wournos could take before she decided that “enough was enough”?

Was it anything like the Dutch film, A Question of Silence, 102 in which five women, strangers to each other, are shopping in the same store on the very day each woman, finally, has had enough of being treated like a “woman” by men? In a rather dreamlike sequence, three of the women spontaneously stomp to death the 250,001st man who treats them with contempt; and they do so without exchanging a 105 PATRIARCHY word. After the women are arrested, they maintain an uncanny silence.

The prison psychiatrist, a “happily married” woman, hopes to save them by finding them insane. To her consternation, she can find nothing wrong with them. They are all ordinary, rather “nice” women who are not insane. With considerable anguish, the psychiatrist acknowledges that there is a war going on against women and that during war, atrocities are committed—usually by the stronger, occupying force; more rarely, by the occupied themselves. Perhaps, she thinks, women are only insane when they put up with the daily atrocities committed against them, or when they deny that such atrocities are really happening. Improbably, the psychiatrist joins the silent, imprisoned women and their silent female supporters—none of whom expect justice or understanding.

A Question ofSilence is a surrealistic feature film.

Wuornos’s story—especially since her arrest on January 9, 1991—is far more surrealistic.

Despite widespread media attention, the state of Florida treated Wuornos the way it treats all its female prisoners very badly. As a pre-trial detainee, Wuornos was entitled to the presumption of innocence. She was, instead, punished before her first trial. She lost more than 40 pounds and appeared to age ten years within ten months. Wuornos was kept in solitary confinement—intermittently, and sometimes without her clothes (presumably as a way of preventing her suicide). She was also verbally abused and threatened by prison guards and other inmates, deprived of daylight and exercise, allowed no safe, monitored medication for withdrawal from her long-standing alcohol addiction, and denied all contact visits. Wuornos did place numerous collect phone calls to Arlene Pralle, the Born-Again Christian “Good Samaritan” who first began writing to her in February of 106 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense 1991, and who legally adopted her in November of 1991.

Wuornos was kept in jail at an eight-hour-round-trip distance from her public defender, Trish Jenkins. Therefore, their visits were not as frequent as Wuornos might have wished (or needed). 103 In addition, although Wuornos could not hear or see very well, her frequent requests for a hearing aid and for glasses were denied, as was permission to see a gynecologist for painful, heavy bleeding. Trish Jenkins finally ordered a gynecological consultation in December of 1991, but only after I called some Florida newspapers about Wuornos’s (routine) mistreatment in jail. 104 I suggested that Wuornos’s mistreatment was a sadistic and calculated attempt to destroy her capacity to participate in her own trial and, perhaps, to drive her to suicide. I questioned whether Wuornos could receive a fair trial on these grounds alone.

Wuornos decided to confess only after repeated entreaties by Tyria Moore, her lover, who was, early on, herself a suspect in the police investigation. Moore cooperated with the police by taping a number of phone calls from Wuornos in jail in which Moore begged Wuornos to protect her. During her videotaped confession, Wuornos kept explaining that she was only confessing in order to save Moore.

In her videotaped confession, Wuornos was visibly distraught, confused, and rambling. Her police interrogators created a false sense of camaraderie with her by frequent inquiries as to her comfort and by cozy small talk. Wuornos seemed to have no clear understanding of where she was, whether she was talking to police officers or lawyers, why exactly she needed a lawyer, or what exactly a lawyer could do for her. Despite the fact that she was going through alcohol withdrawal, scared, and pressured by Moore into confessing, Wuornos continued to insist that the killings were done in self-defense. 106 The absence of skilled legal counsel—even 107 PATRIARCHY after Wuornos said she wanted counsel—was woefully apparent. Late in the session, counsel finally arrived.

Some of the events Wuornos attempted to describe to the police in her confession on January 16, 1991 had happened more than a year before; any clear recollection she might have been able to conjure up was distorted, manipulated, or not properly “heard” by her interrogators. As a result, Wournos omitted important details. Her later, more detailed account at trial, describing the horrific abuse she suffered at Mallory’s hands immediately preceding his homicide, was viewed as “inconsistent,” “contradictory,” or as a series of “lies.”

The Media Connection

Even before Wuornos was arrested, local, national, and international media, including Hollywood and network TVfilmmakers, became part of the drama. The most (routinely) brazen manipulation of Wuornos (and of her case) commenced. For example, right after her arrest, Wuornos’s first public defender, Ray Cass, helped Wuornos negotiate a deal with Hollywood filmmaker Jacqui Giroux—the only person who visited Wuornos immediately following her arrest. Three Marion County sheriffs—Major Dan Henry, Sergeant Bruce Munster, and Captain Steve Binegar—together with Wuornos’s ex-lover, Tyria Moore, allegedly sold their version of the story to CBS/Republic Pictures. 107 (Tyria Moore was granted immunity in exchange for her testimony against Wuornos.) 108 Arlene Pralle and Wuornos’s third attorney, Steve Glazer, negotiated with and pocketed the relatively small amounts of money paid by the media to interview Wuornos on Death Row. In a phone conversation, Glazer himself confirmed to me that Montel Williams, BBC, and Geraldo Rivera each paid between $7,500 and $10,000 to interview Wuornos on Death Row. 109 Glazer also persuaded 108 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense Wuornos to withdraw her lawsuit against Giroux and to renegotiate (or “upgrade”) the contract instead.

Although the media proved as much hero as villain, Government by Geraldo, if not translated into a series of legal motions, is at best useless and at worse harmful. For example, Wuornos’s original judge, Gayle Graziano, replaced Wuornos’s first public defender, Ray Cass—who Wuornos charged had negotiated with Hollywood producer Jacqui Giroux for the movie rights to Wuornos’s story. At Wuornos’s request, her new public defender was a woman: Trish Jenkins of neighboring Marion County. This replacement (of a man and by a female lawyer in another county) was ultimately used by the prosecution to force Graziano, reportedly a feminist, into recusing herself.

Another example: According to a number of people I interviewed, Giroux allegedly began offering contracts for $5,000 to the people in Wuornos’s childhood if they spoke only to Giroux—and presumably not to any other media person. 112 For this and other reasons, some Michigan residents who knew how badly Wuornos had been abused during childhood allegedly did not cooperate with Wuornos’s public defenders at all, or in a timely fashion. When Giroux allegedly tried to intercede, it was too late. In any event, Trish Jenkins did not call anyone to testify for the defense from Michigan or elsewhere.

Double Standards for Serial Killers?

Do we have different standards for evil, violence, and insanity: one for men, another for women? Or is Wuornos simply too evil, for a woman? As such, is her punishment a warning to other women that female violence, including selfdefense, will never be glamorized or forgiven, only punished—swiftly and terribly?

One reporter I spoke to about the Wuornos case kept 109 PATRIARCHY needling me for not being cynical enough: “C’mon, Wuornos is not entitled to the kind of lawyer that William Kennedy Smith or Mike Tyson had. Get real!” But what does it mean that Jeffrey Dahmer, accused of torturing, raping, killing, cannibalizing, and dismembering 15 young men, mainly of color—none of whom attacked him—was able to command a private lawyer, some well-known national experts, his father and stepmother, and continuous live TV in the courtroom? In addition, skinheads apparently demonstrated on his behalf in Chicago (“He got rid of the filth” they chanted), and a growing number of women supporters filled the courtroom, some of whom reportedly formed a Jeffrey Dahmer Fan Club.

Or, let’s look at another Florida serial killer: Ted Bundy, who killed at least 30 (and possibly 100) women. 114 Several lawyers, including Atlanta lawyer Millard Farmer and North Florida lawyer Brian T. Hays, offered to defend Bundy pro bono in Florida; Dr. Emil Spillman advised him on jury selection pro bono; at one point, no fewer than five public defenders assisted Bundy, who insisted on representing himself.

Even more interesting is that the State of Florida offered Bundy a life sentence without parole, a plea bargain Bundy refused. Jenkins et al. tried to arrange a similar plea for Wuornos but James Russell, the Dixie County Prosecutor, thought Wuornos deserved to die and refused to agree to a plea bargain.

Considering its complexity, Wuornos’s first trial was exceptionally brief: it took only 13 court days. The State had estimated that the trial would last from three to six weeks.

Judge Blount, who was coaxed out of retirement to replace Judge Graziano, granted all of the prosecution and denied most of the defense motions. In deference to the State’s motion, the jury was allowed to see excerpts from Wuornos’s videotaped confession—minus her repeated statements that 110 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense she killed in self-defense. Under Florida’s Williams rule, the jury was also permitted to hear similar fact evidence from the six other alleged murders. (Under the same Williams rule, Judge Mary Lupo, presiding in William Kennedy Smith’s 1991 Palm Beach rape trial, did not allow the jury to hear any of the other allegations of rape against Smith. 1 ) Judge Blount did not grant the defense a change of venue despite the enormous local, pre-trial publicity, which included Wuornos’s televised confession. (Ted Bundy did get a change of venue, from Tallahassee to Miami, for similar reasons). Judge Blount felt that he could seat an “impartial” jury even if they’d seen or heard about the confession—and he did so in a day and a half!

Given the gravity and the notoriety of the case, the prospective jurors might have been polled individually; none were. Further, only jurors who said they believed in the death penalty were seated. (This is routinely done in Florida. )

During the guilt/innocence phase of this bifurcated capital trial, Wuornos herself was the only witness for the defense. As previously noted, early in the trial preparation, feminists, myself included, contacted more than 50 experts, approximately ten of whom agreed to testify for the defense, pro bono or at minimal cost. These included a psychologist, a psychiatrist, experts in prostitution and violence against prostitutes, experts in child abuse, battery, rape trauma syndrome, lesbianism, lesbian battery, female alcoholism, and the psychology of adoption. None of these experts—and no other experts with similar information—were ever called by the defense. Three weeks before the trial, Trish Jenkins called one of these experts for the first time, but never called her back. 119 As previously noted, Wuornos was the only one who took the stand on her own behalf, a dubious strategy considering her vulnerability to impeachment.

The prosecution’s legal theory was replete w T ith misogy111 PATRIARCHY nist stereotypes: lead prosecutor John Tanner, a Born-Again Christian, had been Ted Bundy’s deathrow “minister” and had tried to have Bundy’s execution delayed. 120 In his opening and closing arguments, Tanner portrayed Wuornos as a “predatory prostitute” whose “appetite for lust and control had taken a lethal turn,” who “had been exercising control for years over men,” and who “killed for power, for full and ultimate control.”

In the penalty phase of the trial, the jury heard from defense psychologists Elizabeth McMahon and Harry Krop, two experts more experienced in testifying for male killers than for female killers on trial. According to McMahon: “Lee [Wuornos] is such a classic textbook example of a borderline personality .... she calls almost everybody a ‘fucker.’ I don’t know that Wuornos can get a sentence out without that . . . she is a child, developmental^ and emotionally.” 122 Krop also diagnosed Wuornos as a “borderline personality” suffering from “organic dysfunction in the brain cortex.”

The defense presented no family members or friends in mitigation. Many of Wuornos’s childhood relatives and friends either were never asked to testify for the defense; were asked but never called; or allegedly were, in their view, paid to keep silent by Hollywood producer Jacqui Giroux.

When men are accused of crimes, even terrible crimes, their families invariably back them. The wives of the “Big Dan” gang-rapists in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the Kennedy women, Mike Tyson’s adoptive mother, the families of the young men accused and exonerated in the gangrape of a St. John’s University student, and those of the gang-rapists of a young woman with an IQ of 64 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, all stood by their men.

Even Ted Bundy had enormous emotional and secretarial/public-relations support from his mother, Louise, and from his 32-year-old “fiancee” Carol Ann Boone, whom he 112 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense would marry and later impregnate. Both Louise and Carol Ann testified for Bundy. Scores of young women attended the trial and openly flirted with Bundy in court.

Impoverished (and non-impoverished) women do not usually have anyone willing to speak for them, nor do they routinely have “supportive” families. They’re lucky if they don’t die at the hands of a family intimate. Often, the families of female outlaws are the ones who turn them in and testify against them. Wuornos’s lesbian ex-lover, Tyria Moore, was the star prosecution witness against her. Wuornos’s uncle, years her senior, with whom she’d been raised as a sibling, and whom she hadn’t seen for at least 20 years, testified for the prosecution . He claimed that Wuornos had never been abused at home and therefore had no “reason” to kill anyone.

Wuornos did have the support of Arlene Pralle, the woman who contacted Wuornos after her arrest and who is now her legal mother. Pralle accepted countless collect calls from Wuornos in jail, and facilitated countless telephone interviews between Wuornos and the media by inviting the journalists most attentive to Pralle, to her home, and then putting them on the phone with Wuornos.

Although Pralle “meant well,” her own need to talk, mainly about herself, and about her love for both Jesus and Wuornos, posed grave dangers to the defense. For example, the telephone calls could be taped or the prosecution could read “all about it” in newspapers and magazines. At first, Pralle insisted that Wuornos was a “good” person and that she couldn’t have killed in cold blood; Pralle also said she expected Jesus to perform a miracle. Once Wuornos was sentenced to death, Pralle publicly supported Wuornos’s desire to die and to “go home to Jesus.”

Pralle and Wuornos engaged in a folie a deux, a “you and me, babe, against the world,” which both women must 113 PATRIARCHY have experienced as supportive, even thrilling, given the intense media attention being focused on them. (Like Wuornos, Pralle was also abandoned by her biological mother and had seriously attempted suicide.) However, the fact that a “traditional” woman stood up for Wuornos is as moving as it is bizarre.

Wuornos also had the (questionable) support of Steven Glazer, Pralle’s own lawyer, who helped Wuornos achieve four more death sentences, and who, as previously noted, charged the media for Death Row interviews with his client, disbursing the money to Wuornos, Pralle, and to himself.

Jury deliberation in the Wuornos case was surprisingly brief: on January 30, 1992, her jury of five men and seven women needed only one hour and 31 minutes to find her guilty, and only one hour and 48 minutes to recommend the death penalty. (In Ted Bundy’s case, the jury took seven hours to find him guilty and seven and a half hours to sentence him to death.) On January 31, 1992, Judge Blount, who could have overridden the jury’s recommendation, ordered that Wuornos die in the electric chair for the murder of 51 -year-old ex-convict Richard Mallory. She was immediately taken to Death Row at the Broward County Correctional Facility for Women.

If the state of Florida could, it would electrocute Wuornos once for each man she’s accused of killing. (She has so far been sentenced to death five times.) But what are Wuornos’s true crimes?

Wuornos stands accused of being a man-hating lesbian, a description that could not endear her to the sheriffs, wardens, lawyers, judges, or jurors in an area of Florida where the local abortion clinic was burned right down to the ground not once, but twice in the years between 1989 and 1991; where crosses have been burned with alarming regularity on the lawns of African-American families; and where residents 114 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense were responsible for the third largest individual, out-of-state contribution to David Dukes’s most recent gubernatorial campaign. Someone like Wuornos has little support in the state known as the “Buckle of the Death Sentence Belt.”

Is Wuornos guilty of being a prostitute? Or is she guilty of not having killed herself—the way all “good” sexual abuse victims and prostituted women are supposed to do? Or

shades of “Thelma and Louise” and the backlash against clemency for battered women who kill in self-defense—is Wuornos guilty of daring to defend herself in a violent struggle with a man and, by example, encouraging other prostitutes (and non-prostitutes) to do likewise?

A Woman’s Right To Self-Defense

As previously noted, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both prostituted and non-prostituted women, and slaves, sometimes injured and killed violent male non-intimates in self-defense. 127 From 1970 to 1992, both prostituted and non-prostituted women have charged rape and battery or attempted rape and battery and claimed they killed in selfdefense. 128 Only a handful have been believed.

In the early 1970s, grass-roots feminists, civil rights activists, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Southern Poverty Law Center focused on three cases in which women of color had killed violent male non-intimates in selfdefense. I am referring to the cases of Yvonne Wanrow,129 Joan Little, 130 and Inez Garcia.

Joan Little was a black woman who killed a white jail guard who attempted to rape her in the jail cell in which she was incarcerated for a burglary conviction. She was represented by Morris Dees and acquitted in 1975. Inez Garcia was raped, and she shot the man who held her down later that same day. She was convicted, but her conviction was overturned on appeal. 115 PATRIARCHY

At this time, I will discuss only the decision of State v. Wanrow,^! j n which the Supreme Court of Washington affirmed the reversal of the conviction of Yvonne Wanrow for second-degree murder and first-degree assault with a deadly weapon.

The facts of Wanrow were as follows: On the afternoon of August 11, 1972, Yvonne Wanrow, a Colville Indian woman who was a single mother and an artist, left her two children at the home of her friend, Ms. Hooper. After playing in the neighborhood, Ms. Wanrow’s son returned to Ms. Hooper’s home and told her that a man had tried to pull him off his bicycle and drag him into a house. A few months prior to this incident, Ms. Hooper’s seven-year-old daughter had suffered from a venereal disease, contracted after being molested by a man whose identity she would not reveal to her mother. A few minutes after Ms. Wanrow’s son told his story to Ms. Hooper, the decedent, William Wesler, appeared at Ms. Hooper’s house and stated through the door, “I didn’t touch the kid, I didn’t touch the kid.” 134 At that moment, Ms. Hooper’s daughter, seeing Wesler at the door, identified Wesler as the man who had molested her. Ms. Hooper’s landlord then informed her that Wesler, a six-foot-two-inch white man who had been committed to an institution for the mentally ill, had molested another child who had previously lived in the same house. 135 Ms. Hooper immediately summoned the police, who arrived shortly thereafter and advised Ms. Hooper to wait until Monday to get a warrant for Wesler’s arrest.

That evening, Ms. Hooper called Ms. Wanrow, related the incident, and asked her to spend the night. Ms. Wanrow arrived sometime after 6 p.m. with a pistol in her handbag. Still afraid to stay alone, Ms. Hooper and Ms. Wanrow called Ms. Wanrow’s sister and brother-in-law, Angie and Chuck Mitchell, who agreed to spend the night. At approximately 116 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense a.m., Chuck Mitchell, without informing the women, went to Wesler’s home with a baseball bat and accused Wesler of molesting children. Wesler then suggested they all discuss the incident, and together with a third man, Wesler and Mitchell returned to Ms. Hooper’s home to straighten out the problem. Wesler, however, was the only man to enter the house.

Wesler, then visibly intoxicated, entered Ms. Hooper’s home and refused to leave when asked to do so. Confusion and shouting followed, and a young child—one of eight then staying at the house—awoke crying. Testimony indicated that Wesler approached the child, stating, “My what a cute little boy,” and Ms. Hooper began screaming for Wesler to get out. 136 Wanrow, five-foot-four-inch with a broken leg and using a crutch, went to the door to ask Mitchell for help. When Ms. Wanrow turned around, Wesler was standing directly behind her. Startled by her situation, Ms. Wanrow testified as to having shot Wesler in what amounted to a reflex action.

At trial, Ms. Wanrow argued that she had acted in selfdefense. The jury was instructed that in evaluating the gravity of the danger to Ms. Wanrow, the jury was to consider only those acts and circumstances occurring “at or immediately before the killing ....” 137 Ms. Wanrow was convicted of second-degree murder and first-degree assault with a deadly weapon.

In affirming the reversal of Ms. Wanrow’s conviction, the Supreme Court of Washington held that the trial court had erred in limiting the jury instruction on self-defense. Instead, the jury should have been instructed to evaluate the justification of self-defense “in light of all the facts and circumstances known to [Ms. Wanrow], including those known substantially before the killing.” 140 The court stated that the jury should have been instructed to consider Ms. Wanrow’s knowledge of Wesler’s reputation for aggressive behavior, 117 PATRIARCHY despite the fact that Wesler’s reputation was based on events which had occurred over a period of years and that Ms. Wanrow had received this information several hours before the incident. This information would aid in the “critical determination of the ‘degree of force which...a reasonable person in the same situation... seeing what (s)he sees and knowing what (s)he knows, then would believe to be necessary’.”

In addition, the court held that Ms. Wanrow’s actions were to be judged against her own “subjective impressions [of danger] and not those which a detached jury might determine to be objectively reasonable.” 142 In recognizing the special circumstances which often accompany a woman’s assertion of self-defense, the court acknowledged that “women suffer from a conspicuous lack of access to training in and the means of developing those skills necessary to effectively repel a male assailant without resorting to the use of deadly weapons.” 142 With respect to the delivery of jury instructions, the court cautioned that the persistent use of the masculine gender leaves the jury with the impression the objective standard to be applied is that applicable to an altercation between two men. The impression created—that a five-foot four-inch woman with a cast on her leg and using a crutch must, under the law, somehow repel an assault by a six-foot two-inch intoxicated man without employing weapons in her defense, unless the jury finds her determination of the degree of danger to be objectively reasonable—constitutes a separate and distinct misstatement of the law and, in the context of this case, violates the respondent’s right to equal protection of the law. [Ms. Wanrow] was entitled to have the jury consider her actions in the light of her own perceptions of the situation, including those perceptions which were the product of our nation’s ‘long and unfortunate history of sex discrimination.’ Until such time as the effects of that history are eradicated, care must be taken to assure that our self-defense 118 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense instructions afford women the right to have their conduct judged in light of the individual physical handicaps which are the product of sex discrimination. To fail to do so is to deny the right of the individual woman involved to trial by the same rules which are applicable to male defendants.

Since the Wanrow decision, a number of articles on feminist jurisprudence have appeared, attempting to further clarify the circumstances under which a reasonable woman can argue self-defense, especially after she has been sexually and physically assaulted, or has killed to avoid being assaulted or killed. 145 In 1978, Elizabeth Schneider, who was Wanrow’s lawyer in the successful appeal to the Washington Supreme Court, and^co-author Susan Jordan, commented on the Wanrow case, noting that the [circumstances under which women are forced to defend themselves [are] entirely different from those which cause men to commit homicides, [and] the woman’s state of mind is different as well. Presenting the individual woman’s perspective in the trial means educating the judge and jury about the incidence and severity of the problems of rape, wife-assault, and child abuse and molestation.... It also means educating them about the lack of judicial and social alternatives available to women in these situations and combating specific myths, for example, that a woman who kills a man is insane or that women enjoy rape.

State v. Wanrow is an example of successful implementation of this strategy.

In a landmark decision, [the Wanrow court]... acknowledged the threat to equal protection inherent in the failure to include a woman’s perspective in the law of self-defense....

According to Schneider and Jordan, despite the fact that women are targets for male violence, and tend to be shorter and to weigh less than men, women are not socialized to defend themselves, generally have no experience of combat, tackle sports, or street fighting, and are actually dissuaded 119 PATRIARCHY from using violence against men as a cultural imperative. Thus, at this point in history, when women perceive themselves to be in mortal danger, perhaps they should be/are entitled to use weapons as the only way to exert comparable force against a male assailant.

In 1982, Catharine Mackinnon also commented on Wanrow. She wrote:

Wanrow is an exceptional woman because she fought back. She, therefore, receives the benefit of the history of all women who have not, presumably because they were disabled from doing so. It seems that you have to behave more like a man to get the berefi of being considered as a woman.... Wanrow, in this light, is not about fighting back, although that is what its result supports, It is more as if the state will help keep women from being walked on so long as we struggle while down, but it may not support us if we stand up. 14**

Mackinnon does not think the Washington State Supreme Court went far enough in establishing a “subjective” standard for a reasonable woman’s right to self-defense. Mackinnon concludes that

The reasonable woman’s subjectivity is equivalent to women’s point of view under conditions of sex discrimination. The Wanrow court thus uses a subjective test to place the jury in the defendant’s immediate surroundings but goes well beyond traditional notions of subjectivity (without becoming objective) in attributing to her a consciousness for acting that first sets her in the concrete historical context of gender and then attributes the meaning of that context to her mentality and physicality.

Since the Wanrow decision, many women have alleged rape self-defense; few have been believed (e.g., Shirley Mae Thomas v. State, 578 South Western Reporter, 2nd Series 120 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense 1975 (Texas); Commonwealth v. Lamrini 467 N.E. 2nd 1984 Mass 1984; Commonwealth v. Carbone, 574 Atlantic Reporter, 2nd Series Pa. 1990). An increasing number of articles on feminist jurisprudence have also tried to clarify, further, the circumstances under which a reasonable woman can argue rape/battery self-defense.

Burning questions remain. They include: Does a woman have the right to kill to prevent herself from being raped? In the past, courts have refused to impose the death penalty on rape 151 or to hold that forced sex constitutes “great bodily injury” to trigger penalty enhancement 152—despite the fact that the consequences of rape are often life-long and extremely debilitating. If a woman only has the right to use whatever force, short of homicide, necessary to prevent rape, how can she know exactly how much or how little force to employ to make her escape? How does a woman know that a rapist will stop at rape ? Does a woman have the same right to “heat-ofpassion” and rage to protect her bodily integrity and “honor” that men do? Does a man’s Fourteenth Amendment right to use deadly force to prevent burglary or other invasions of his home and castle cover a woman’s right to prevent any unwanted invasion of her body? Is a woman’s “right to equality” a right to have inequality taken into account?

From about 1967 on, in addition to fighting for women’s right to abortion and to equal pay for equal work, grassroots feminists focused on the sexual objectification of women, and on issues of sexual violence toward women, such as stranger-rape and sexual harassment on the job and on the street. Only after a decade were feminist activists able to expand their focus to include marital rape, date rape, domestic battery, and incest. During the 1980s, it became clear (to feminists working in the area) that most prostituted women were also incest victims, that many battered wives were treated as if they were their husbands’ or boyfriends’ prostitutes, 121 PATRIARCHY that both wife-batterers and serial killers of women were addicted to pornography, and that all women, whether they were prostitutes (the so-called “bad girls”) or non-prostitutes (the so-called “good girls”), who dared to kill in self-defense were treated as if they were prostitutes, i.e., demon terrorists from hell who deserved no mercy.

As yet, no radical feminist equivalent to the Center fo* Constitutional Rights or the Southern Poverty Law Center exists, nor does even one overarching graduate/medical/law school program committed to centralizing, summarizing, and updating the relevant research and training of expert witnesses in this area. The media often decides which cases the nation will follow, not feminists, who are increasingly without resources, exhausted, and under seige.

The Battered Woman’s Syndrome Defense was developed by feminists to help explain to juries how, for example, a woman could stay with a batterer, refuse to report him, and then one day kill him when he is sleeping—and claim “selfdefense.” However, this approach is highly controversial among feminists. 153 Critics say: If a woman defends herself in order to save her life, why view (or explain) female selfdefense as a form of “diminished capacity,” as “temporary insanity,” or as “post-traumatic stress syndrome”? Either the woman’s life was being threatened—or not; either, as a reasonable women, she believed her life to be in danger and she acted in self-defense—or she didn’t. Why view a woman’s exercise of a legal right as a psychiatric disability ? 154 Perhaps the (battered) woman who finally kills to escape being tortured has experienced a sudden “flight into mental health,” and should not be viewed as psychologically “disabled” for having stood up for herself.

Although I will not go into this here, it is my understanding that the Battered Woman’s Syndrome Defense does not necessarily suggest a psychiatric disability—although the 122 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense Defense is often perceived as such. Theorists, such as Schneider, Jordan, Walker, and others, have suggested that this defense is meant to educate the jury about how widespread anti-woman domestic and sexual violence is and about what the normal human (female) response to prolonged violence is.

Given what we now know about how often prostituted women are raped, gang-raped, beaten, robbed, tortured, and killed, Wuornos’s claim that she killed six out of hundreds or thousands of violent johns, in self-defense, is plausible. Wuornos’s claim certainly merited far more thought and consideration than the deliberate neglect it received from those who heard and tried her case.

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As disappointed as I was in Jenkins’s defense of Wuornos, Jenkins and co-counsel Billy Nolas and William Miller look radiantly efficient compared to her next and current lawyer, Steven Glazer of Gainesville. Glazer, a civil lawyer, was originally recommended by Trish Jenkins not as a defense attorney, but to handle Wuornos’s adoption by Pralle.

I phoned Glazer for the first time on March 1, 1992. He told me he was not interested in having me or any other pro bono expert testify for the defense in upcoming trials two through six, nor was he interested in handling Wuornos’s appeal of the Mallory conviction or in a future campaign for clemency. Glazer said he was only interested in how much money I was willing to pay for the right to interview Wuornos on Death Row, that his client had empowered him to do this and no more. Glazer told me that Dolores Kennedy, together with Robert Nolin, who have since published On A Killing Day (and who ultimately never got to interview Wuornos), had offered $10,000 cash up front with an additional per123 PATRIARCHY centage of the paperback monies.

Glazer further told me that because he saw a “career” for himself in attracting criminals with stories to sell, his association with Wuornos would definitely be a “good advertisement.” He added that he needed the money the media was willing to pay to interview Wuornos in order to fund his fight against the state of Florida if and when, despite the recent Supreme Court ruling overturning New York’s Son-of-Sam law, 158 Florida officials tried to interfere with Wuornos’s ability to profit from her crimes and to assist her in her criminal cases as best he could. Also, Glazer pointed out, money was needed to pay for Arlene Pralle’s visits to Death Row and to save Pralle’s heavily mortgaged horse-farm.

When I called Glazer a “pimp,” he hung up on me and instructed Wuornos to cease communicating with me—which she did from mid-March to mid-June, 1992 and again from mid-August to October, 1992.

In March of 1992, shortly after our conversation, Glazer had Wuornos plead “no contest” in Marion County in three additional trials. In open court, Glazer likened himself to the “Dr. Jack Kevorkian of the legal world,” and asked Judge Thomas Sawaya to “assist him in helping his client to commit suicide.” 161 (What next? A lawyer who offers to pull the switch? A lawyer who scalps tickets for front-row seats in the execution chamber?) Wuornos was sentenced to death three more times.

Wuornos is confined to a cage on Death Row by a legal order; I’m confined at home, often in bed, by Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome. I have imaginary conversations with her almost every day.

Lee: you hit the ground running before either Thelma or Louise came to town. You're the real star of that movie; it's about you, about what you've done, about what to do, when men, truckers for example, or police officers in unmarked 124 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense cars: you know, ordinary married men, the mainstay ofyour profession, start making those sounds and faces at women, any women, it’s nothing personal, some women even take it as a compliment, and with one hand on the wheel, the other somewhere out ofsight, say: “ Wanna sit on my face, suck my cock, let me fuck you in the ass, ” as they follow the teen-age hitchhiker, or the mother of teen-agers, it makes no difference: whether the hitch-hiker's own car has broken down, or whether she’s just been dumped on the highway by her boyfriend for refusing to put out, or whether she’s just been raped by the previous man-in-a-moving-vehicle, or whether she’s just out riding to clear her mind. There’s no law against trying, is there?

You probably don’t know what I’m talking about; you were behind bars when Thelma and Louise were on the lam.

Talk about women who run with the wolves! You’ve navigated North America’s vast, frozen tundra, with a craftiness, a cunning, a scavenging genius, without which neither wild life nor prostitutes could survive: not for a day, not for an hour.

Often, you’ve been shown “grinning like a damn foo 1 ” as if you’re at the Mad Hatter’s tea party with a lampshade on your head. You’re the Queen, yelling “off with his head.’' And you’re smiling, as they say, “inappropriately.” You know: that smile women smile when we’re embarrassed by insults, and scared: as if our compliance, our willingness to act as if we’re not in danger, will keep us safe. You’ve had lots ofpractice in this area.

I visited Wuornos in July of 1992.

“Far out, man” she said. “You’re from the Women’s Lib aren’t you? Tell the women out there that I’m innocent. Tell them that men hate our guts. I was raped and I defended myself. It was self-defense. I could not stop hustling just because some asshole was going around Florida raping and 125 PATRIARCHY killing women. I still had to hustle.”

Her voice was Joplin-husky and surprisingly sweet, even girlish. (Did I expect her to sound like a man?) Well, honey, that’s a real hefty swagger she wore on TV, and the way she tossed her hair around: most women do it out of nervousness; she seemed to do it out of defiance, to intimidate: the waymale lions toss their manes.

She said that jail didn’t “bother” her, that she could “take it,” that the daily verbal abuse was nothing: “Hey, whore, show us some tits ’n’ puss”; “Here’s a little present just from us guys: our come, all nice and wet in this envelope, with your name on it”; “We’ll put you in solitary forever if you do any weird lesbian shit in here: bark at the moon, bitch, if you don’t like it”; “I’m going to enjoy watching you fry, real nice and slowly, once for each guy you killed.”

The heartlessness of these words would kill me. My life has rendered me unfit to survive her jail cell; her life has groomed her to do so.

“I need you guys real bad,” she answered. “The public defender has 47 other capital cases and no time for me. I’ll pay you back if you get me a lawyer who has time for me. I’ll sell my life story for 30 million dollars and I’ll set up a foundation for abused women. Hey, man: I’m going through living hell for defending myself.”

And then, with wonderment, she said: “I can’t believe there are women out there rooting for me!”

Well, not so fast. Yes, many women, actually a surprising number, have said: “It’s about time women started shooting back,” and “Good for her. Those men must have done something to provoke her: they’re johns, they deserved it.” Some feminists (and anti-death penalty advocates) have urged meto do everything I can for her. But most women, including feminists and lesbians, see her as too unsympathetic a victim to bother with: unstable, uncooperative, a loser, a real pain-in126 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense the-ass, and just plain nuts.

Know: that I don’t romanticize her. How could I? She’s as conventional as most (abused) women are. For example: she’s quite the “Golly gee whizz” kind of “good ol* gal,” when she talks about how some of her best friends are johns, and about how she believes in Jesus, always did, and that He’s coming too. She “enjoyed” the sex-for-money with men, she’s proud she was able to “please” her dates/customers/johns. She’s an outlaw by default, not by choice.

The women who kill violent men are all “good girls” who’ve bought into the very system that I dream of destroying. When they realize they’ve been tricked (talk about “tricks”!), had, taken, left for dead, and that no one will help them, they’re invisible anyway, maybe that’s when they kill the man who’s been breaking their bones for years; the one hundredth john who’s taking his knife out and threatening to cut their face/breasts/anus/vagina; the man who’s just walked out with custody of their kids, the deed to their home, and a new wife on his arm.

As THE (so-called) FIRST FEMALE SERIAL KILLER, she’s made headlines, not for what has been done to her, but for what she’s done. Her bullets shattered the silence about violence against prostituted women, about women fighting back: and about what happens to them when they do.

No small feat.

I doubt she was avenging the billions, no trillions, of other women who were killed at birth, or abandoned, starved, beaten, genitally mutilated, sold into marriage, pornography, or prostitution, raped, impregnated, sterilized, impoverished, all against their will, or killed: simply because they were women, or prostituted women, or lesbians.

But even if I thought she’d led the equivalent of a slaverevolt, planned a raid on Harper’s Ferry, left the Massa’s House in flames behind her, this is not something most 127 PATRIARCHY women can do. Our fear of certain, further, punishment is too great.

For example, unlike her, I didn’t buy a gun. Instead, I clipped and filed all the grisly notices of our dead: I mean to have them engraved on a vast memorial tombstone or stitched into a quilt, like the parents of murdered children do. I’m angry, don’t think I’m not, but I just can’t go out and kill someone. I’m a “girl.” We turn our terror and our anger against ourselves, not against others.

So here’s what’s troubling me. How could she, a “nobody,” have summoned up enough grit and righteous rage to save her own life? (Is that it, she had nothing to lose, she knew no one would save her but herself, so she did that and got arrested for saving her own life?)

Wuornos is led into the room by two guards. She is unsteady on her feet, a bit ungainly, not that tall.

I remember how she looked when she was first arrested. Spirited, defiant, drunk, the swagger and the smirk: all gone, all gaunt, not an ounce of flesh on her bones. She is more ghost than human.

Wuornos’s blond hair is pale, and pulled back into a thin pony tail. Her face is taut, her features bony, inexpressive: no energy to waste on “expressiveness.” Survival in prison demands that she contract everything: movements, even dreams, in order to conserve energy, call as little attention to herself as possible.

She has great dignity. She has come from some truly faraway place to meet me, she is jerky in her motions, but gamely, she’s trying to smile. As if it’s a social occasion. We hug hello: briefly, carefully.

I’m always amazed—although I shouldn’t be—when those with no formal education, no money, no health, no friends in high places, and nothing to hope for, absolutely rise to the occasion of their 15 minutes of fame: and with extra128 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense ordinary eloquence and grace. Mary Beth Whitehead, in the Baby M case, for example, was almost regal in how she handled both the media and our little demonstrations outside the courthouse. Whitehead was well-spoken and, of course, loved the opportunity to “shine.” No crime, by the way.

Wuornos has been in jail for two years now, a lot of the time in isolation. She says she was “railroaded” because she’s a prostitute and “expendable,” and they’d just “bend, twist, distort” any new evidence, so she’d rather die and “go home to Jesus” than keep living (if that’s the word for what you do on Death Row). “It’s all over” she says. Wuornos doesn’t want to go to Chatahoochie (“I’m not crazy”), and she doesn’t want to stayon Death Row, so she’s decided to die.

You don’t have to be crazy to come to this decision.

Wuornos is emphatic. Despite what she’s written: that she wants me to find her a lawyer, and a private investigator, and to reassemble the team of pro bono experts I’d gathered for her first trial, she’s changed her mind again. She grows more animated, angry, and, trigger-finger pointed, orders me to “Forget it. All I want you to do is help me expose the corruption, the crooked cops, the media deals, the capital gains off a capital crime. Tell the world what’s going on. That’s all. I’m not concerned about any more trials.”

In a not-yet-released 1993 BBC documentary Aileen Carol Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer, Wuornos describes Arlene Pralle, the woman who adopted her before the first trial and Steve Glazer, the lawyer who performed the adoption and who helped Wuornos plead “no contest” or “guilty” in trials two, three, four and five, as “the moneyhungry people. That’s their main purpose—money and to see me die. Steve and Arlene are doing a lot of lying in the media. Their motive was just to make money. I’ll [expose them) later, just before I go [die].... They convinced and connived me not to contest. Arlene started it and Steve just fell in. Arlene told 129 PATRIARCHY me ‘I just can’t take it, all these trials, you’re killing your new adoptive mother.... [In a death penalty state] why not go for it and be home with Jesus?’ They’re not on my side, they’re not very lawyerly or motherly, but it’s too late.”

On camera, Glazer is shown taking money from BBC film director Nick Broomfield for the right to interview Wuornos, Arlene, and himself; Broomfield says that Glazer is talking about “selling film rights to Wuornos’s execution to the highest bidder.”

How can someone like Wuornos keep fighting back? She held on, as best she could, did her best, actually acquitted herself nobly in the first trial, and it didn’t matter, nothing mattered, the “scumbags of America,” as she called the jury, convicted her anyway.

I ask her if anyone ever helped her when she was a child, sleeping in abandoned cars and living on the street, or later on. She says: “I raised myself. I did a pretty good job. I taught myself my own handwriting, and I studied theology, psychology, books on self-enhancement. I taught myself how to draw. I have been through battles out there raising myself. I’m like a Marine, you can’t hurt me. If you hurt me, I can wipe it out of my mind and keep on truckin’. I took every day on a day-by-day basis. I never let things dwell inside me to damage my pride because I knew what that felt like when I was young...”

A child is being beaten... how to intervene? What to do when no one ever intervened and now it’s much too late, the damage is done, the child is a woman, and the woman only knows that she must sell (her body, and now her life-story, her death), in order to live and to be of value. By now, she hates having to sell, hates not being able to sell, hates the seller, hates the buyer; she’s weary, cynical, heartbroken, used up, and is, by now, simply not capable (if she ever was) of doing something: anything, that will turn out right for her. 130 A Woman’s Right to Self-Defense

Wuornos has been waiting, wanting, trying to die for a long time. Now, she means to finish what the men, and We, the People, have started. Her destruction.

In late October and early November, 1992, Glazer called and asked me to find a competent lawyer for Wuornos. He admitted that although he “meant well” and would “do anything to help Lee,” he might not have done “right” by his client, and that he had a heart condition that required surgery.

Christopher Quarles, of the Marion County Public Defender’s Office, filed the state-level appeal of Wuornos’s first conviction in October, 1992. (This appeal was re-filed in January of 1993.) Steven Glazer, however, never filed notice that he or his client wished to appeal the second, third, and fourth death sentences. Chief Assistant State Attorney Ric Ridgway, who prosecuted Wuornos, said that Glazer’s failure to file the appeals could lead Wuornos to claim Glazer was “ineffective.”

Ridgway said that he doesn’t know whether Wuornos wants to appeal, but that her counsel inadvertently has prevented her from exercising that right.

“Glazer, evidently, was operating under the impression that this court would appoint the public defender’s office to handle the appeal,” Ridgway wrote in his motion to force Glazer to appeal.

Glazer said he got a phone call from Tallahassee about a month ago asking for Wuornos’s paperwork.

“[Lee] doesn’t want to appeal, but she doesn’t have a choice,” Glazer said. “I told the judge my client has ordered me not to appeal, that’s why the judge appointed the public defender because it seems like I have a natural conflict.”

In November of 1992, just after asking for my help in obtaining another lawyer, Glazer pled Wuornos “guilty” in the fifth case in Dixie County—and renegotiated (or “upgrad131 PATRIARCHY ed”) her contract with Hollywood producer Giroux. 164

From the start, people consistently asked me if Wuornos was “crazy.” (Never if she was “guilty”; most were convinced she was.) It probably wouldn’t be hard to diagnose Wuornos as a “borderline” or “multiple” or “addictive” personality. But, according to most recent studies, such diagnoses are simply ways of stigmatizing Wuornos for the consequences of being an incest, child abuse, and serial rape victim .

Everyone in Wuornos’s life—her family of origin, her childhood neighbors, her teachers, the home for unwed mothers, the Michigan juvenile and Florida adult correctional facilities, her lesbian lover, and the entire cast of “serial killer” characters: the prosecution, the defense, the private lawyers, the judges, the juries, the investigating police officers, Hollywood and the media, even We, the People—conspired, through acts of commission, omission, indifference, and negligence, to deprive Wuornos of the most minimal justice.