Born in Detroit in 1956, Aileen Wuornos had an awful life from the beginning. Her mother left her in the care of a tremendously abusive father when she was just a toddler and when the father tired of Wuornos and her brother Kieth, the two children were sent to live with their grandparents. This situation proved no better when her grandfather resumed the beatings where their father had left off. By the time the traumatized girl was fourteen she had already given birth to a child that was immediately put up for adoption and was engaging in sex with Kieth. On top of all those troubles Wuornos was on her own on the streets before she could even legally drive a car.
Falling into a transient lifestyle of drugs and prostitution Wuornos became a very angry woman and that anger exploded in 1989. Before her eventual capture in July of 1990 she ahd successfully robbed and killed seven men in the state of Florida, most of whom had picked up the murderous prostitute along freeways in the hope of paying for her sexual favors. Instead they ended up shot and dumped naked, their money and cars stolen.
Police knew from the evidence that their killer was a woman and they were proved correct when Wuornos was seen fleeing the scene of an accident involving her last victim's car. Wuornos was soon identified and arrested and soon confessed to the killings but entered a plea of self-defense at her 1992 murder trial for the slaying of Richard Mahaffy, the first man murdered. With Wuornos' lesbian lover, who testified that Wuornos had admitted killing a man on the same night as Mahaffy's death, as the state's star witness, the female serial killer ws found guilty and sentenced to death. She subsequently pleaded no contest in five of the six remaining cases and garnered death sentences in each instance. She was never formally charged in the seventh slaying.
The time for her execution appears to be drawing near since Wuornos dropped all appeals in July of 2001. She has also abandoned all claims of self-defense in the killings, saying, "I killed these men in the first-degree. Robbed them and killed them."
10/13/2002-Aileen Wuornos was executed by lethal injection on the morning of October 9, 2002. Wuornos uttered what has to rank as one of the strangest last statement's ever, saying, "I'd just like to say I'm sailing with the Rock and I'll be back like Independence Day with Jesus, June 6, like the movie, big mothership and all. I'll be back."