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Tyria, the Confession, and the Question That Never Closed
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Aileen Wuornos claimed self-defense. Then she recanted. This chapter traces her Michigan childhood, the seven Florida highway killings, and the lover whose cooperation with police sealed her fate.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's the thing that stays with you about Aileen Wuornos. She said she killed in self-defense.
Aileen Wuornos was born in Rochester, Michigan in February of nineteen fifty-six. Her father was a convicted child molester diagnosed with schizophrenia who hanged himself in prison and never met his daughter.
In nineteen eighty-six, Aileen Wuornos walked into the Zodiac, a gay bar in South Daytona, Florida. She was thirty years old.
The first death was Richard Mallory. He was fifty-one years old, owned an electronics store in Clearwater, Florida.
Police had located Tyria Moore before they arrested Wuornos. They offered Moore immunity from prosecution in exchange for her cooperation.
Wuornos' self-defense claims were complicated from the start. She presented them in early statements, and they had a certain internal logic.
What happened to Wuornos on death row is harder to categorize cleanly. She spent over a decade waiting for execution.
A year later, in two thousand and three, Charlize Theron won the Academy Award for Best Actress for playing Wuornos in Monster. The film was a critical and commercial success.
Aileen Wuornos is the one female serial killer that most people can name without prompting. That says something about how rare female serial killers are in documented history and something about how completely her case entered the cultural record.
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