Aileen Wuornos Research Papers

Something you don’t hear about every day is how a female could mastermind the killing of multiple men and fly under the radar for a year before finally being arrested, tried and eventually put to death because of her actions. The name of this notorious killer is Aileen Wuornos and her story is definitely one for the textbooks. She is known as America’s first female serial killer and the second female to be put to death in Florida. As with many killers you can see a pattern before the final breakdown occurs. This paper will give an overview of Aileen Wuornos puzzling life which lead to her destructive nature as a teen and then eventually as a cold blooded killer, which then in turn sealed her own fate as she was put to death.

The Early Years

Her absentee father was a few years older than her mother but she never met him as he was incarcerated at the time of her birth. He had been convicted of sex crimes against children. Her father was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Aileen’s mother walked out on her and her brother early in their childhood, which left them susceptible to a turbulent upbringing, unprotected and vulnerable. From the age of 4 to 14, the destruction began emotionally and physically. She endured being beat and raped by her grandfather, her brother and friends of her grandfathers. When she was 14 she became pregnant and went to a home for unwed mothers to have her son and put him up for adoption. When she returned to her grandparents house she was thrown out for good. During middle school she was known for trading sexual favors to her classmates in exchange for drugs, cigarettes and food. This is the first glimpse of prostitution, yet she’d say she was doing it for survival as she was homeless. Life didn’t get any easier, the criminal activity manifested with the help of abusing alcohol and crazy thoughts that were running through her

This is how the investigators finally captured her, while they had set up tip lines and empowered the media and papers to help run stories to raise awareness in the public and ask for their assistance in catching the dangerous criminal. A local pawnshop had items that Wuornos had turned in and it happen to have one of her thumbprints on a camera that belonged to one of the victims; Mallory. This thumbprint when run through the database matched a warrant for one of Wuornos’s aliases. Wuornos’s was arrested shortly after at a bar in Florida.

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