Guest Editors: Lenore Walker, David Shapiro & Giselle Gaviria

Florida, USA, 1990

Two women are being sought as possible suspects in the shoot¬ing 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 foot eight to five foot ten, with blonde hair. Sus¬pect #2 is also a white female, five foot four to five foot six, with a heavy build and short brown hair. These women are armed and dangerous and may be our nation’s first female serial killers. Investigators feel compelled to warn the public, particularly middle-aged white men traveling alone.

This news broadcast sounded unreal, almost mythical—as diabolically whimsical as Orson Welles’ 1938 broadcast on the Martian invasion. What was Everywom¬an’s most forbidden fantasy and Everyman’s worst nightmare doing on the airwaves? Was this some kind of joke?

It was not. For the first time in American history, a woman stood accused of being a serial killer—of having killed seven or eight adult male motorists, one by one, in just over a year, after accompanying them to wooded areas off Highway I-75 in Florida, a state well known for its sun, surf, and serial killers. What made this unique was that all the men were strangers, not husbands, not intimates.

Were these two women members of that radical feminist collective in Gainesville, the university town where a series of female students had been serially raped, mutilated, killed and ritually posed? Or were they apolitical swamp creatures, crim¬inal outlaws, perhaps prostitutes, finally driven mad by their lives on the Killing Fields?

I would soon find out. I got Ailee/Aileen (Lee) Carol Wuor¬nos to call me a few months after she was arrested. Once on the line, I knew I’d only have a few seconds to gain her attention.

“Lee, I represent a feminist government in exile. We know that you’ve been captured and we’d like to help.”

“Far fuckin’ out! You’re the Women’s Lib, right?”

“Yes.”

“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 killing women. I still had to hustle. Can you tell me why men think sex is so important? Why do they have to behave like animals, pant, pant. I can just live masturbating. Why can’t men?”

And that’s how it all began.

My book, Requiem for a Female Serial Killer, is about a female serial killer and about the way in which her badass deeds pried the world’s imagination wide open. Here was a “nobody” who became a “somebody,” a throwaway child who became the whore who shot down Johns. Someone anonymous who became famous, a kickass folk hero like Jesse James or Bonnie and Clyde.

Wuornos hit the ground running before either Thelma or Louise came to town. She fired some shots heard round the world, shots which we hoped would warn male serial killers that they might just end up dead if they continued to rape and murder women. Her bullets shattered the silence about violence against prostituted women, about what happens to them when they refuse to take it anymore.

No small feat.

Wuornos, the hitchhiking lesbian prostitute, was no longer prey; she had become a predator. She enacted the forbidden feminist longing for armed female assassins who would rescue girls and women from incestuous fathers and stepfathers, pe¬dophiles, sexual harassers, serial rapists, pimps, who traffic and force women into sex slavery in brothels and private dungeons.

Talk about women who run with the wolves! Wuornos nav¬igated America with a primeval cunning, a scavenging genius, without which neither wildlife nor prostitutes could survive: Not for a day, not for an hour. She was a feral child, a Wolf-Girl, a snarling loner, and she understood early on that mutilated fe¬male corpses litter the landscape all over the country and that they remain unclaimed and un-mourned.

Once, Wuornos had discovered such a corpse herself. In a letter to a childhood friend, Wuornos wrote that in 1973, when she was seventeen, she was hitchhiking outside of Chicago along I-80 when she smelled something real bad, a "foul odor" which she followed; then, she found a woman's pitiful headless, limbless torso. Wuornos writes that, although she frantically tried, she could not get a state trooper or even a trucker to pay the slightest attention.

Wuornos "got" it a long time ago: Women are treated like garbage, whether they’re alive or dead.

* * *

Oh, I had my reasons for getting involved. I wanted a jury to hear the truth about how dangerous the “working life” really is; how prostitutes are routinely infected with diseases, gang-raped, tortured, battered, robbed, and murdered; and that Wuornos had been raped and beaten so many times that, by now, if she was at all human, she’d have to be permanently drunk and out of her mind.

I was a bit younger in 1990, the year she committed most of her murders. Would I get involved now? I doubt it. Physically, I couldn’t do it. Would I still see Wuornos as a feminist folk hero of sorts? Yes, I would, or primarily as a dangerous, damaged, doomed, and demented woman—well, she was that, too.

Would I still be as sympathetic toward this volatile, trig¬ger-tempered, foul-mouthed child-woman, and would I still risk being seen as defending, or advocating for such an unsym¬pathetic woman?

Perhaps—for here I am, writing about her.

In the beginning, I viewed Wuornos as a prostitute who fought back—but I understood that she was no more a political actor than Valerie Solanas was. Solanas is the woman who shot the artist Andy Warhol (he lived)—and she also wrote a brilliant and slightly crackpot Manifesto, titled The Society for Cutting Up Men, which was translated into thirteen languages.

Wuornos and Solanas were embraced by a number of radical feminist leaders whom they promptly abused, wore out, and rejected. Both women were loners: fiercely literal, concrete, explosive, and anti-social. As teenagers, they both gave away babies to be adopted, worked as prostitutes, and were lesbians, bisexual, or asexual. After she was arrested, Solanas was diagnosed as a “paranoid schizophrenic” and warehoused in an asylum for the criminally insane. When they released her, she drifted off to San Francisco, never wrote again, and died in poverty.

Solanas did not become a serial killer.

I saw in Wuornos an opportunity to extend the right of rape/self-defense to prostitutes, most of whom are on the front lines of violent misogyny every single day. Life on the edge of the ledge does not necessarily make someone “nice.” I did not expect to “like” her. Our so-called first female serial killer was not required to be a role model for women who dress for success.

As far as I knew, serial killers were all men and they mainly killed women, as well as young boys.

Perhaps Wuornos is guilty of having turned the tables: If men don't want to be killed, they should stay away from prostitutes—or at least stop degrading, raping, and murdering them.

As Wuornos memorably said at her trial: “If men would keep their money in their pockets and their penises in their pants, there’d be no prostitution.”

I was so focused on exposing how violent prostitution is for the prostitute, so obsessed with arguing for a just trial for Wuornos (which I do not regret), that I could not, at the same time, allow myself to acknowledge that I might also be defending a serial killer.

And I was only began reading about serial killers and about prostitution after I became involved in her case. It was the darkest and most chilling reading I’d ever done.

I put whatever I’d written away in a box, kept it safe, thought about it from time to time, but mainly forgot about it. Then, in the summer of 2019, as I was renovating my apartment, that box literally fell off the shelf. I opened it and was amazed by how timely and important the issues raised by her case still are.

I resurrected my huge Wuornos archive and began reading thousands of pages of legal documents and the interviews I did with Wuornos both on the phone and in person.

I found our correspondence and am publishing some of our letters for the first time in this book.

I also organized the hundreds of interviews I did with the entire cast of colorful characters, including her biological moth¬er, the lover who testified against her, a multitude of Florida lawyers, former prostitutes, the team of experts I’d put togeth¬er and hoped would testify at her trial, and the feminists who worked at Florida’s shelters for battered women and rape crisis centers.

This book is about Wuornos, but it is also about my trying to get inside her head to see it both her way and my way, and to understand us both.

I still believe that her first murder took place in a violent struggle to save her life. As a prostitute with a prison record, she could not report what had happened to the police. After this first, traumatic kill, something—maybe everything—changed. She went on a murderous “spree” which lasted about a year.

In 1980, the late, great true crime author, Ann Rule, first wrote about serial killer Ted Bundy and then again twenty-one years later in a revised and updated edition. Bundy was, literally, “the killer beside her” as they both worked on a suicide helpline.

Bundy was handsome, charming, “likable,” well-spoken, and very smart. He had an uncanny ability to say exactly what people wanted to hear—and he planned his crimes very careful¬ly. His facade of “niceness” fooled Rule. She had a hard time be¬lieving that Bundy was the sadistic and prolific serial killer that he was. And she remained haunted by her friendship with him.

If Rule were still alive, I would tell her that Bundy’s “spiri¬tual” advisor, born-again Christian and anti-pornography cru¬sader, John Tanner, was the very man who would prosecute Wuornos as “pure evil” because she was a prostitute. He did not understand that prostituted women are the victims, not the aggressors.

I would tell Rule that I’m also a bit haunted by my time with another famous serial killer.

***

“Will you accept a collect call from Miss Aileen Wuornos?”

“Sure will, operator.”

“Hey, Arlene tells me she met with a lawyer-friend of yours. That’s great. But listen. I made a list of all the rapes for you.”

Lee tells me about being tied down, spread-eagle, and gang raped any number of times at parties even before she was raped and impregnated at thirteen. Once she began hitchhiking out West, some of the truckers who picked her up demanded sex for the ride, robbed her, held guns to her head, threatened her with knives. Lee learned to be quick to flee, and even quicker to hit back—and to hit first if possible.

She said: “I had a lot of willing sex before I was 13. But I was also tied down and forced into it a lot too. Maybe eight times. Then, I was raped when I was thirteen, that’s how I got pregnant. When I was fourteen, an elderly man, he was around fifty-eight years old, he ran the nudie theater in town, he raped me. That same year, a guy in the next town, he was around twenty-eight, he raped me too. When I was sixteen, two bikers from a group called ‘The Renegades’ raped me. Then, maybe two months lat¬er, two guys who claimed to be in the Mafia raped me.”

“Then, when I hitchhiked out of Detroit, lots of truckers, cops, and guys I was partying with raped me.”

I interrupt her. “Lee, maybe this is too hard to do when you’re in jail and alone…”

“Nah. Lemme tell you. Ya asked, didn’t ya? So, as I was say¬ing, when I was sixteen and a half, five guys at a party tied me to the bed and raped me. I passed out. When I was sixteen and three quarters, three guys dragged me out of another party and carried me into the woods. I passed out. When I was seventeen, I wasn’t raped, but it was close. It happened in Jeffersonville, In¬diana. This guy was a child molester. Maybe he murdered kids, too. He beat me severely. The cops could not tell if I was a man or a woman, my face was so swollen. It took two months to heal. When I was eighteen, a police officer in Lauderdale raped me in an abandoned house and he brought his buddies along. About six months later, I wasn’t raped, but two guys tried. I was beat and left on the side of the road. When I was nineteen, I needed a place to stay, the guy who put me up forced me to have sex with him.”

Wuornos takes a breath—I can’t—and continues. “Now, these here rapes comin’ up are from my hustling career. A lotta guys beat me out of money. They beat me all over my body. They used pain. It’s like they liked to hurt you. They called me every name in the book. Some threatened to kill me. Choke me to death. Stab me to death. Mutilate me. Cut off my head. Crazy jazz. What saved me was my calmness. That, and not rejecting them. Talking to them kindly changed their hearts. That’s why I survived. When I could, I ran the fuck outta there, or I took control by yelling.”

Run like hell and yell, Lee, yell.

In a matter-of-fact voice, Wuornos continues. “When I was twenty-nine, a truck driver raped me. He took my money, too. This took place in a motel. That same year, two black guys raped me at a party in Macon, Georgia. When I was thirty, a guy took me to a motel, where another guy was waiting. They both raped me. They robbed my money too. There were three more rapes, but I can’t picture seeing them. They happened in wooded areas when I was thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two. I was hitchhiking and hustling. Each time, the guys took my money. But it’s vague. When I was thirty-two, a guy tried to rape me but I talked him out of it. He dropped me off. From when I was thirty-three, I had eight rape attempts. (She is now talking about 1990, the year she’d committed most of the murders.) One UPS driver did not go through with it. He ran away when I defended myself with a gun.”

How many times has Wuornos been raped, gang-raped, nearly raped? Twenty times? Thirty times? Fifty times? More? What does Wuornos think rape is? To Wuornos, is having sex with a man only “rape” when he refuses to pay, or when he forc¬es her to do something she finds repulsive, like anal sex, some¬thing she didn’t agree to do beforehand? Maybe rape is simply what she’s being paid to do.

Maybe it’s “rape” only when the man threatens to kill her, when he ties her hands to the steering wheel of his car and she knows she’s no longer “in control,” that something is happening to her that’s a lot more than what she’d come to accept as some¬thing she could live through again without dying or jumping out of her mind.

In a 1992 letter to her childhood friend Dawn, she writes: “Let me tell you what can happen in a rape. Your hair gets pulled out, he shoves his penis fully erected down your throat and bruises your esophagus, as well as the roof and sides of the (inside cheeks) of your mouth...Also, telling you if you scratch my cock with your teeth your dead. Then he pulls your pussy hairs out, for additional pain, grabbs your ass real hard like (kneading dough) as he’s cramming his cock in you, same thing in anal screwing. Bites nipples, to also, nearly cutting them off...as he’s screwing you viciously, pounding as fast and as hard as he can...And also while this is going on, threats are being made, and dirty talk at the most provockativist provanity you could imagine. So rape is not just get on and get off. Society doesn’t understand this, nor cares, especially if you’re a hooker. There allowed to treat you like this, and also kill you.”

***

Jane Caputi, in a brilliant book titled The Age of Sex Crime, describes the serial sex murders of women, often prostitutes, as similar to a “lynching;” those serial killers who pose their victims afterwards in a parody of a “gynecological exam” (the Boston Strangler did this), or “spread-eagle with their legs apart and their knees up” (the Hillside Strangler did this), are signifying the patriarchal triumph over female humanity, and over women’s sexual and reproductive power.

Such male serial “lust” killers are therefore romanticized in books, articles, plays, operas, songs, and films. There are thousands of books and thousands of articles about Jack the Ripper. Ted Bundy, The Boston Strangler, Son of Sam, the Hillside Strangler, and the Zodiac Killer. They have, collectively, been written about and their stories filmed many thousands of times. The obscene fascination with murdered women, murdered prostitutes, seems to be unending.

Who are the real serial killers?

The FBI has characterized most serial killers as mainly (but not only) white men who had been abused by their families in childhood; who had often set fires or tortured and killed small animals; were bullied, and socially isolated.

Their motives were often sexual—they were fetishists, “partialists,” or necrophiliacs; angry, thrill- or attention-seekers, and/or they wanted money. They killed more than three people; they acted alone; they were mentally ill; engaged in petty crimes, were drifters, had trouble staying employed, took menial jobs. Many (but not all) tended to have low IQs (92.8), especially the “disorganized” or impulsive serial killers who were loners with few friends.

Are women serial killers too?

Well, doesn’t the FBI list above begin to sound like Our Girl Lee? Abused in childhood, bullied, socially isolated, she set a few fires, possibly had a low IQ (81-82), was mentally ill, had trouble staying employed, and was a drifter and a loner; she also engaged in petty crimes, and killed more than three people all on her own. But in her case, there’s even more.

She was impregnated via rape at thirteen and forced to give a child away for adoption. This is psychiatrically catastrophic for most women and something that male serial killers cannot suffer. In addition, like some male serial killers, Wuornos did not know her biological father or biological mother; was legally adopted but unwanted; had learning disorders and either Organic Brain Syndrome or a Traumatic Brain Injury; briefly took drugs, was a lifelong alcoholic and a criminal. Prostitution is illegal. So is buying and shooting illegal firearms and holding up a convenience store for $33.00.

There’s still more. When Wuornos-the-child was being beaten, and beaten badly, no neighbor reported it and no social worker, teacher, or police officer stopped it. When she was thrown out and had to sleep in the snow and in an abandoned car, and sell “sex” for cigarettes, beer, food, and drugs—not a single adult came to her aid. No social worker, and no school counselor, offered her any refuge, or took her for hearing and vision tests, something even her loving grandmother/mother failed to do. When Wuornos stopped going to school, no one came to find her.

And so Wuornos hit the highway—a loud, belligerent, incorrigible teenager but a rather attractive Scandinavian piece of ass. She managed to get herself married and divorced within months—she beat her wealthy, elderly husband and he took out a restraining order against her. She was arrested many times for Stupid Stuff: Driving Under the Influence, shooting a gun into the air while driving drunk, hitting a bartender, speeding, resisting arrest, assaulting men (!), trying to pass a phony check, holding up a convenience store for chump change.

Wuornos’s version of these events is very different. She couldn’t get a legit job because she had a record. She kept failing the tests to become a police officer or to join the military by 3-5 points, each and every time. Even when she’d gotten “physical” with boyfriends, she never understood why they took a hike. She belonged nowhere, she fit in nowhere. She made at least one serious suicide attempt and perhaps two more. In jail, she was written up for fighting and uncooperative behavior.

Here’s how Wuornos is different from other known female serial killers of men: she killed strangers on the highway of life—outdoors, not inside at home; and with a gun, not with poison. Other female serial killers only killed male intimates, and they did so for money, (insurance politics, real property), pure and simple.

Dubbed “black widows,” female serial killers married and killed men again and again, in order to obtain money. Their names are legion.

Most notorious was Belle Gunness, a first-generation Norwegian-American, known as the “female Bluebeard with a profit motive.” In 1900, Belle’s first husband died under suspicious circumstances; she received a life insurance payout. Belle married again—and sure enough, her second husband was also found dead under mysterious circumstances—another insurance payout. Immigrant men, lured by her ads for “partners” and “hired hands” went to work for Belle and were never seen again; so were wealthy bachelors who were interested in marriage. They came bearing cash and trunks laden with valuables.

Law enforcement believed that Gunness was responsible for at least twenty-five murders and was suspected of twice that number; she was accused of doing this mainly for money, but also for the “sheer joy of it.” Gunness literally butchered these men and then buried them on her Indiana “murder farm,” a fact that became clear when the police dug up their bodies. Gunness presumably died in a fire before she could be arrested, but people also contended that she had escaped.

Wuornos is quite the light-weight compared to Gunness.

Some female serial killers have lured girls into brothels with false offers of employment, where they immediately had them gang-raped, beaten, deliberately hooked on heroin and cocaine, forced to work as prostitutes, and later murdered. The punishment for rebellion was horrendous.

One egregious example took place in Mexico in the 1950s and 1960s. Two sisters, Delfina Gonzalez and Maria de Jesus Gonzalez, enticed and killed many hundreds of girls, all of whom “disappeared.” In 1963, the police found the remains of eighty girls, buried on the brothel grounds. Those who were still alive and whom they liberated were “nervous wrecks.” The sisters were sentenced to forty years; their collaborators were also found and sentenced.

Another kind of female serial killer are those who kill their elderly patients for their social security checks or for their insurance policies which they had signed over to their nurses. Their names are also legion, both in the United States, Europe, and around the world.

Some female serial killers had once been paid to find homes for out-of-wedlock newborns; they just killed them, one after the other, and kept the money.

Always, their motive for killing was money, as much as they could get. What was Wuornos’s relationship to money? Throughout her life, it seems that she thought she had “enough” money if she could pay for two days’ worth of beer, food, loud music, and a motel room. Wuornos was not thinking far ahead; she did not act as if she had a future.

But once she was jailed and saw how others were making money “off” what she alone had done—it unsettled her, obsessed her, especially now that she was “famous.” She was far more interested in “cutting deals” than in talking about a Legal Defense Team, or appealing her death sentences. She was utterly fixated on the “crooked cops” who allegedly were making movie deals even before she was arrested.

British author, Helen Zahavi, in her amazing novel Dirty Weekend, depicts an ex-prostitute, a quintessential victim, who lives in reduced, end-of-the-line circumstances in a dark basement apartment—an Invisible Woman, waiting to die. But suddenly, a man begins to talk dirty to her on her unlisted phone number, stalk her in a park, and death threaten her. But Bella (for that is her name) can no longer take being slut-shamed and treated like dirt by men and boldly, phantasmagorically, she kills him—and then goes on to kill six more such predators in a single weekend in Brighton, England. Seven men in all.

Zahavi first published this novel in 1991, the same year that Wuornos was out there killing men, at least three of whom were Johns. Zahavi also caught Hell for changing the acceptable narrative, the one in which the girl always gets to die at the hands of a leering, sex-starved male Monster.

What Johns do to prostitutes, what they pay to do, is a crime. It wrecks girls and women. I chose to see what Wuornos did as a protest against the men who both buy women and, in addition, also act as if our streets and workplaces are their private brothels. Enough. No more.

Zahavi’s work is gruesome, graphic, way over the top—and yet she is also darkly humorous. One almost giggles with nervousness. Are girls really allowed to take revenge/defend themselves? Zahavi closes with a warning:

“If you see a woman walking, and you want her. Think on. Don’t touch her. Don’t place your palm across her mouth and drag her to the ground. For unwittingly, you might have laid your heavy hand on Bella. And she’s woken up this morning with the knowledge that she’s finally had enough.”

In an interview with Court-TV, Lee said “It took me 17 years to finally kill somebody...but I got stone cold and said, you know, enough is enough.”

Wuornos is not unique in killing men for money, nor was she the first prostitute to have killed a John or a pimp.

There is a long history of prostitutes killing Johns or pimps—but only one John, not a series of them.

For example, in 1843, in New Jersey, Amelia Norman, a virgin, was seduced by Henry Ballard who impregnated her and another woman and set them both up in a brothel. He refused to pay any child support and, when Norman insisted, Ballard tried to have her arrested for prostitution. Norman stabbed Ballard (who lived); she was supported by abolitionist Lydia Maria Child and feminist Margaret Fuller. Author, Ann Jones, in Women Who Kill, wrote:

“When Amelia Norman stuck a knife into Henry Ballard, she ripped the familiar script to pieces. She did not take laudanum or slink off to die painfully in a whorehouse as seduced and abandoned maidens were supposed to do.”

In 1871, Susan B. Anthony defended a many-times-married prostitute named Laura Fair who’d killed her pimp, a John, or her lover—the record isn't clear. According to feminist author Kathy Barry in Susan B. Anthony: A Biography, Anthony visited Fair in jail and came away convinced that Fair had killed in self-defense. That same night, Anthony told 1,200 people that Fair had a right to "protect herself." The audience hissed, booed, stamped their feet, and advanced on Anthony—all in an effort to silence her. Anthony stood her ground.

Newspapers nationwide branded Anthony a "heretic." Within days, she'd lost most of her speaking engagements. Anthony said she felt "raked over,” and "so cut down.”

But that extraordinary woman, that Mother of Us All, only blamed herself for not having been strong enough. "Defending Laura Fair without speaking of what prostitution does to women," she said, "was like going into the South and failing to illustrate human oppression by Negro slavery.”

I did not see myself as a Susan B. Anthony: we'll not see her likes soon again, but our defense of Wuornos stood on historically solid feminist ground.

Lee is long gone—but she still lives on in my imagination and memory. I titled this book Requiem for a Female Serial Killer because this is my way of finally laying her to rest—by memorializing her life, her deeds, and her death. A Dirge of sorts, to mourn what can happen to a girl in this world, a horrifying and pitiful tale with an inevitably sordid ending.

Her story is complex, not simple.

Yes, Wuornos was a serial killer—but a very unique one. She was not exactly like male serial killers or like other female serial killers—nor was she like most abused women whose lives were similarly sordid.

She was an abused child, but here’s how she differed from other abused women.

Many such female victims try to re-enact their original trauma (incest, battery, rape, abandonment) in the hope that they can create a different ending. Most such girls tend to marry batterers who are also sexually abusive; they are unable to change this script. Wuornos eventually succeeded in changing the script.

Wuornos was raped and impregnated in the woods when she was thirteen. Her murder scenes were all in the woods. Did she unconsciously revisit that primal scene-in-the-woods—in order to achieve a radically different ending? Was this the way she reclaimed some power for herself? It’s entirely possible.

Then there’s this. She always punched up, not down.

For example, Ted Bundy killed a series of vulnerable girls and women who were smaller, younger, and not as strong as he was.

Wuornos was only 5’4” and weighed about 135 pounds. Some of her victims were more than six feet tall, and weighed more than she did. She physically wrestled with at least three of her victims. Wuornos liked going head to head and toe to toe with men; according to Tyria, Lee would never let a man “get one over on her.”

Wuornos killed grown men, some of whom towered over her, and weighed more than she did. They were an average of twenty years older than she was. Perhaps she figured she could take them down.

This is an interesting difference.

Wuornos sure was different: she tried not to take any shit lying down, she knew it hurt more that way. She'd been catching shit for so long, by now she saw it even when it wasn't there. It was her built-in early detection warning system and it worked, it helped her survive a lotta misfortune. Most women, if you beat them, they'll cringe, cower, placate, appease. Not Aileen. It only made here more aggressive, more demanding, more difficult, more dangerous. As if she were a man.

But Aileen was angry, not like a man, but like a woman, one who'd given a child up for adoption, one who'd been raped and beaten, one who drank way too much.

Some of Wuornos’s victims might have been innocent but two were cops, men in positions of authority, father-figures of some kind; one was a known whoremonger and pornography addict—just the kind of men who’d been messing with her since she was born. She certainly rewrote that script.

Perhaps I minimized the fact that Wuornos was serially killing men because I believed that she had done so in self-defense, and for a “crazy,” beaten-down, prostitute to have done this impressed the hell out of me. She was meant to die, horribly, not to kill anyone.

Wuornos was a female serial killer. But she was not a lust killer; Wuornos did not have orgasms as she shot men, nor did she pose their naked bodies in grotesque rituals of degradation.

Unlike most “organized” male serial killers, Wuornos was not strategic. She left a trail behind her that led the cops straight to her door. There was her brand of beer, her store-bought condoms, the items she pawned nearby under one of her many aliases, the driver’s seats pushed forward for a much shorter driver. Her killing “spree” took place in a short period of time. She did not plan ahead nor did she carefully dispose of evidence.

Many claimed that her victims were all innocent men, Good Samaritans who had stopped to help a poor hitchhiker.

If Wuornos’s victims were not Johns—then why were three of the men (Spears, Carskaddon, and Antonio) naked if they hadn’t agreed to have sex with her? Did Wuornos undress them after she’d killed them? I doubt it. Unlike male serial “lust” killers, she actually protected the corpses. Mallory chose to keep his pants on but both his pants and his belt were twisted off to the side. She still covered him with a carpet so that “the birds (would not be) pecking at his body.” In other cases, she pulled their bodies further back into the woods and covered them, too.

Why hadn’t I focused on her victims, or on their grieving widows, and other relatives? Would I do so now? Probably, yes; but perhaps not. I was led to this case by the smell of female blood, the sound of women’s arms and jaws being broken, with no rescue and even less justice in sight. I undertook this journey entirely focused on how blind the world is to what is done to prostitutes, our scapegoats for male lust and misogyny.

Wuornos had been out of control but also under attack all her life, probably more than any soldier in a real war. Read the Memoirs by former prostitutes, read the studies about them, and you’ll understand what I mean.

As an abolitionist, I do not view prostituted women with distaste or disgust. I see them as human sacrifices. I understand all the forces that track 98% of girls and women into the “working life:” Dangerously dysfunctional families, physical and sexual abuse, drug addicted, absent, or imprisoned parents, serious poverty, homelessness, being racially marginalized, tricked, or kidnapped into prostitution by a trafficker, sold by one’s parents, having too little education and few marketable skills, and having absolutely no other way to eat or to feed your children.

However, I do not view prostitution as an act of resistance any more than I view marriage as one. The proposed solutions (legalization, de-criminalization, etc.) will not abolish sexism, racism, poverty, war, genocide or rape. What will? Until we find that magic bullet, starving and homeless girls and women will do whatever they can in order to afford their anesthetizing drugs so they can endure their “work” and put food on the table. And men will keep taking their penises out of their pants.

I don’t think that Lee ever wanted to stop hooking. It was the only thing she did well and it alone afforded her the illusion of intimacy and affection. And then, one night, what men wanted, and how they treated her, became unbearable.

Many years have passed from the time I tried to organize a team of experts for Wuornos’s defense. In that time, Wuornos became something of a cult figure; by now, she has fans, followers, admirers.

Over time, grassroots fans were drawn to Wuornos as a woman who was meant to die an awful, anonymous death—but who instead turned on her tormentors, got even, and got famous.

Hit the jackpot.

Wikipedia, in its entry for her birthplace, Troy, Michigan, lists Wuornos as one of their Notable People, right along with a Hall of Fame baseball player, a Tony-Award-winning actor, an NHL defenseman, an MLB pitcher and coach, a rapper, and another high-profile female killer: Carolyn Warmus (!!). Go, check this out, it’s there.

******

Lee is at least two (and probably more) people.

She’s a Born Again Christian who finds Jesus on Death Row, reads the Bible cover to cover, again and again, and listens to Christian radio. In a 1993 letter to Dawn, Lee asks to be buried in “white jeans, a white T-shirt with Christ on it, some type of belt... earrings that are crosses, a cross necklace. Visible please... I’d like a cross in my hands a Bible tucked between my arm and rib cage.”

This is how she wants to be received in Heaven.

Lee also chooses to die via lethal injection—“because your laid out on this table as if your on a cross. Perfect way in my book for me to split in the name of Jesus.”

But being executed by her earthly tormentors requires other clothing. For this, Lee asks to be dressed in a black Harley-Davidson T-shirt, biker-style boots, and a military belt.

She also wants to be seen as a shit-kicking mercenary—someone who is going out as a renegade, at war with the ruling classes, proud and defiant, to her very last breath.

Lee is a religious Christian, a biker outlaw, a Marine, a much-sinned against child, a happy-go-lucky hooker, a wheeler-dealer, and a secretive serial killer.

On October 8, 2002, her next-to-last day on earth, Wuornos refuses the traditional last meal and only asks for a cup of coffee, black.

Her childhood friend, Dawn Botkins, is with her, as is filmmaker Nick Broomfield, who interviews her one last time. That interview clearly demonstrates that Lee is insane. On camera, Lee insists that she’d been “tortured” on Death Row, that “sonic pressure was crushing her head, (through) the TV or mirror (which) were rigged,” and that she had to “wash all her food because it was poisoned.” Lee says: “Now I know what Jesus was going through.”

By 1999, Lee was writing to Dawn about the lawyer whom Nick had found for her as being “mob connected,” part of a “revenge” plot, an “inside hit on me!” Or, she thinks, that Nick’s lawyer and the Capitol Collateral Regional lawyers are “fishy,” belong to the “CIA” or the “Mafia,” and are talking to her in code.

It is illegal to execute an insane or retarded person. Executing her probably helped get Jeb Bush re-elected as Governor.

If you had been on that jury, would you have voted to put her to death? Or to keep her in isolation for nearly eleven years, where she would inevitably become even crazier than she already was? Or would you have chosen to stash her in a state mental institution on heavy medication for life?

After Wuornos saved her own life in a violent struggle with Richard Mallory—I think she just snapped and became unleashed, or “liberated,” if you insist. No man was going to mess with her ever again. If a guy got rough with her, threatened not to pay her, or threatened to arrest her (especially if he wanted free sex anyway), or refused to pay her for sex (when she needed the money), or if he wanted something that she thought was “way outta line,” she just “blew him away.” These were now all capital crimes in her book. It was her own personal Affirmative Action program.

Here's an example of how rigid Lee was about “lines.”

On December 10th, William Reinauer was driving the Votran bus. Aileen seemed the same as ever to him, which, under the circumstances, was incredible since, on any given day, twelve to fifty cops were out looking for her; she was so hot you could fry an egg on her head in under 30 seconds, and there she was, as neat as ever, wearing her regulation sunglasses, her hair pulled back, in shorts and a tank top.

Reinauer was driving north. Aileen said she would go as far north as he went.

Then, Aileen informed him: "You turn off here, at Rosewood," and she prepared to get off. "No," Reinauer explained, "I go on up another half mile to the Senior Center.” The Ormond police had told the bus company not to stop on Melrose and Andrews anymore. Reinauer told Aileen, "I will let you off as soon as I make the turn.” Aileen exploded. “I want to get off right here.” "But, Reinauer explained, “I can't stop here," and he didn't.

Reinauer thought that Aileen was going to take a swing at him. He unfastened his seat belt. Reinauer was Ready. The turn actually saved Aileen a half mile of walking, but Aileen was furious because, even though she had to walk only two or three hundred feet, she had to do it from an unknown and unexpected location.

Aileen was cognitively rigid, she didn't like her routine to vary. Imagine what might happen if a John tried to get Aileen to do something new or different.

As I conclude the last chapter of Requiem, both on the page and in my life, I am strangely sad. Well, it’s a funeral, isn’t it? Both for her and for some of my own youthful dreams and illusions. I did not obtain even a smidgen of justice for her or for any other prostitute who continues to face violence and death every day. Wuornos was far too damaged to be saved, I could not save her, we could not save her, she was beyond earthly salvation.

Yes, I know she was a raging drunk, a foul-mouthed, obnoxious, unstable, contrarian—and a serial killer as well—and yet, now that I more fully understand what rape and prostitution can do to an adolescent and to a woman, and what a pitifully damaged child-woman she really was, I have more, not less, compassion for her.

When I completed Requiem, I left off, perhaps forever, continuing to grapple with the issues raised by her case.

Now, it is in your hands.