Making a Monster

The Two Deaths of Aileen Wuornos

Breaking the Mold

America had only just begun systematically studying serial killers in the 1970s. The FBI created the Behavioral Science Unit in 1972, with founders including John E. Douglas, Robert Ressler and Roy Hazelwood. Eventually becoming the BAU “Behavioral Analysis Unit”, their goal was to study violent criminal psychology, identify behavioral patterns, and develop offender profiling techniques. This included interviewing and analyzing offenders like David Berkowitz, Edmund Kemper, Charles Manson, Richard Speck and many others.

Most offenders studied by the FBI were white, male, and sexually motivated. But in the late 80s, the serial killer mold was broken. Down in Florida, a female suspect for the murder of multiple men challenged the traditional narrative of a male serial killer. It felt like a cultural anomaly, a behavior that went beyond the established female image.

Her name was Aileen Wuornos. She faced lethal injection in 2002, but revaluation of her life reveals Aileen died twice; once as a victim, once as a monster.

Before the Murders

Diane Wuornos was fourteen years old when she eloped and married Leo Pittman, who was eighteen at the time. Diane became pregnant with Aileen at age sixteen, around the same time she filed for divorce with Pittman, who later would be arrested in 1962 in Kansas for luring, kidnapping and raping a 7-year-old girl.

Four years after giving birth to Aileen in 1956, Diane abandoned her daughter and son, Keith, who were legally adopted by their maternal grandparents. Lauri and Britta Wuornos, Diane’s parents, subjected Aileen to a highly volatile, abusive, and neglectful environment after adopting her in 1960.

Both Lauri and Britta Wuornos were severe alcoholics. Lauri, Aileen’s grandfather, was an aggressive drunk and performed frequent, brutal beatings, such as whipping Aileen for minutes at a time, forcing her to strip nude prior. Aileen claimed her grandfather regularly sexually assaulted and molested her throughout her childhood.

Around 11 years old, Aileen began trading sexual favors for food and cigarettes at school. Around this time, Aileen also learned that her real mother had abandoned her. Up until that point, her grandparents had concealed their identity and raised Aileen and Keith to believe they were living with their biological parents.

A few years later, an older man and friend of Lauri’s assaulted and impregnated Aileen when she was only fourteen years old. She was sent to a maternity home for unwed mothers in Detroit, Michigan, and forced to give the baby up for adoption after giving birth in 1971.

During the same year, Britta died of liver failure. Unable to tolerate Aileen after his wife’s death, Lauri kicked his granddaughter out of the house entirely. She was forced to drop out of school, live in the nearby woods, and turn to street prostitution to survive.

In 1976, Aileen Wuornos hitchhiked and relocated to Florida. She briefly married a wealthy 69-year-old yacht club president, though the marriage quickly annulled due to her volatile behavior.

Aileen permanently settled in Daytona Beach, Florida by the early 1980s. She spent her years drifting continually along major highways like Interstate 75 and Interstate 95, actively offering sex work as her main source of income.

The First Death of Aileen Wuornos

Studying serial offenders includes the deconstruction of their childhood; dissecting their adolescent life to understand what factors may have contributed to their future behaviors.

For example, Edmund Kemper - born in 1948 in California - was physically and emotionally abused by his alcoholic mother. This volatile environment led him to exhibit early psychopathic behaviors, including torturing animals, beheading dolls, and fantasizing about murder. Kemper would eventually commit a string of serial murders in the early 1970s and gain the title of “the Co-Ed Killer”.

David Berkowitz, or “Son of Sam”, was given up by his biological mother at two-weeks old and adopted by a couple who raised him in the Bronx. Discovering his adoption later in childhood left him with an intense, lifelong fear of abandonment, severe depression, and an inability to fit in. By 1975, his mental state collapsed into paranoid schizophrenia, including the delusion that a neighbor’s dog was ordering him to kill - sparking his 1976-1977 murder spree.

It’s apparent in the research of these serial killers that childhood trauma was almost always a consistent factor between individuals. And while this type of trauma early on doesn’t make all children serial killers later in life, it’s still important to acknowledge the truth in these similar cases, including Aileen’s.

The truth that abandonment, abuse, exploitation and survival on society’s margins psychologically destroyed these individuals long before the murders ever occurred. This dismantling of a child’s safety, the defacing of their innocence, and the demolition of their moral compass rendered these children already “dead” in the sense that their lives had been stripped away from them at an early age.

The Second Death

Aileen Wuornos in an Interview for Netflix’s 2025 Documentary

In 2001, Aileen Wuornos requested to drop her appeals and hasten her execution. She argued there was no sense in keeping her alive, stating “All I wanna do is go back to prison, wait for the chair, and get the hell off of this planet that’s full of evil…”.

Years prior in 1991, Aileen had been arrested by undercover detectives who located her at The Last Resort, a biker bar in Port Orange, Florida. She was a regular there, enjoying alcoholic beverages, shooting pool and scouting for potential male victims. She was initially taken into custody on an outstanding warrant for carrying a concealed weapon under the alias “Lori Grody”. But police has already suspected her in the string of highway murders, with fingerprint and pawn shop receipts linking her to the victims’ stolen property.

Aileen confessed to murdering her first victim, Richard Mallory, during a taped phone call organized by her former girlfriend, Tyria Moore, who had been secretly working with the police. She went to trial specifically for Mallory’s murder in 1992 and was found guilty of first-degree murder.

Aileen eventually confessed to the murders of several men, as seen below.

On her final year of death row in 2002, Aileen dropped her self-defense claims and came clean, admitting the murders were for money and out of a deep-seated hatred for humanity. She was executed by lethal injection on October 9, 2002, with her final words stating that she’d be back.

This was the second and final death of Aileen Wuornos.

Once As a Victim, Once As a Monster

Aileen Wuornos never experienced a “normal” life. She was abandoned by her biological mother and committed sex-offender father. She was raised by her maternal grandparents who were major alcoholics. Her grandfather physically and sexually assaulted her throughout her childhood. She was trading sexual favors for food at age 11, and was raped and impregnated by an older man at age 14. The same year, she was kicked out of the house entirely and survived the only way she knew how. She lived a transient lifestyle, using sex as her only means to survive.

Childhood abuse changes how a person thinks, feels and handles stress throughout their life. It alters brain development, emotional control, and relationship patterns long after the trauma ends. Scientific research shows that childhood abuse physically alters the brain’s structure, size and connectivity. Chronic trauma signals the body to produce a flood of the stress hormone cortisol, which disrupts normal brain development. Brain scans and neurobiological studies point to physical changes in the Hippocampus (memory and context), Amygdala (the alarm system), Prefrontal Cortex (impulse and emotional control) and White Matter Tracts (communication network).

There is an immense amount of research out there if anyone is interested in learning more about the physical changes of a child’s brain in response to trauma.

But refocusing our attention to the subject at hand, it’s very likely Aileen Wuornos suffered similar alterations to her brain due to the abuse in her early life. While this doesn’t justify her wrongs, it can help us to understand the psychological roots of her future behavior, including the reasons behind her crimes.

Individuals like Aileen Wuornos, Edmund Kemper, and David Berkowitz were all found guilty of committing horrible acts of violence and murder. They were also all victims of abuse, neglect, and mistreatment that no child should have to encounter.

Ultimately, these individuals suffered more than one death:

The first when they were stripped of a normal, safe childhood and made victims.

The second when they were executed by society as monsters.

Conclusion

The Last Resort in Port Orange, Florida, remembers Aileen Wuornos with memorabilia and a makeshift shrine located near the side-rear exit door. There’s a sign by the entrance boldly proclaiming the bar’s controversial slogan: “Home of ice cold beer and killer women.”

Remembering only the monster is easy. Monsters allow society to create distance — to separate “them” from “us,” to frame violence as something committed only by people born evil or fundamentally different. But remembering the victim behind the monster forces a far more uncomfortable reality into view: many violent offenders were once abused children, abandoned teenagers, neglected human beings, and victims of profound trauma long before they became perpetrators themselves.

To acknowledge that truth is not to excuse murder, nor is it to diminish the suffering of victims. Aileen Wuornos was responsible for horrific acts of violence, and the lives she took cannot be erased by her own suffering. But reducing her entirely to a monster oversimplifies both her life and the broader conditions that shaped it.

If society only remembers the final version of people like Aileen Wuornos, then it ignores the warning signs that existed long before the murders ever occurred. It ignores the abused child, the homeless teenager, the untreated trauma, the cycles of violence, and the social failures that slowly constructed the person she became. Remembering the victim alongside the monster forces us to confront not only individual responsibility, but collective responsibility as well.

Because the point is not to romanticize monsters.

The point is to understand how they are made.