Aileen Wuornos is a serial killer who was convicted of murdering six men and was sentenced to death in the state of Florida. She worked as a prostitute and she originally claimed she killed these men in self-defense because they were going to rape her. Soon before her execution, she recanted that and stated that she murdered them in cold blood. Wuornos’s case fits with many criminological theories. Park and Burgess created a social ecology that shows pathology in a ‘disease’ model. According to Park and Burgess, pathology can be seen in residential instability, lack of sobriety, dysfunctional families and other ‘anormative’ behavior. Wuornos was abandoned by her mother when she was child and left in the care of her grandparents, and her grandfather …show more content…
Under Merton’s theory Wuornos would be an innovator because does have the goal of money but she way she achieves that goal is through illegal means, such as prostitution and eventually murder. She also fits under Agnew’s general strain theory (GST) because according to that theory, crime is a coping mechanism with life and their negative social relations. For the most part, Wuornos did not have many people in her life and those she did generally had a negative impact such as her grandfather. In addition, GST believes that the loss of positive support affects a person’s emotional state. Wuornos’s brother died of throat cancer before the killing started and she began to drinking more …show more content…
Based on the DSM IV’s symptoms of borderline personality disorder Wuornos demonstrates almost of all of them. She is impulsive, unpredictable, and demonstrates self-damaging behavior such as alcohol abuse, which physically destroyed her body. She had a history of unstable and intense relationships such as her relationship with her brief history with husband Lewis Fell and more notably with her relationship with Tyria Moore. Her relationship with Moore also demonstrates her possible uncertainty about her sexual orientation, which is another symptom for diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. It can also be noted that she demonstrated both inappropriate anger and inappropriate laughter from footage of her