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Born Into Damage: Aileen Wuornos Before the First Shot
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before the mug shots and the movie, Aileen Wuornos was a Michigan child sleeping in the woods, trading survival for everything she had. This chapter traces the abuse, the highway years, and the question of self-defense that the courts closed but history never did.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Most people think they know Aileen Wuornos. The mug shots.
Aileen Carol Wuornos was born in Rochester, Michigan, in February nineteen fifty-six. Her father, Leo Pittman, was already in prison by the time she arrived.
Florida in the nineteen eighties was a specific kind of environment for a woman in Aileen's position. Long highway corridors, transient populations, motels, and truck stops.
In November of nineteen eighty-nine, Aileen Wuornos shot and killed Richard Mallory. He was fifty-one years old, an electronics store owner from Clearwater.
The palm print in Peter Siems' abandoned vehicle gave investigators the thread they needed. By January of nineteen ninety-one, they had a suspect.
Aileen Wuornos was convicted of six murders. She was sentenced to death six times over.
Charlize Theron won the Academy Award for Best Actress in early two thousand and four for her portrayal of Wuornos in the film Monster. The transformation was physical, the performance was powerful, and the film brought Wuornos to a mass audience that might never have encountered the case otherwise.
The honest summary of Aileen Wuornos is that several things remain genuinely unresolved. Whether any of the seven men actually assaulted her before she killed them can't be established.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.