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The story of Aileen Wuornos—who murdered seven men between 1989 and 1990 and was executed by lethal injection in 2002—has long been a fixture of culture, fictionalized on TV and dramatized for film, with Charlize Theron playing the serial killer in an Oscar-winning role.
Wuornos was a sex worker in Florida and confessed to fatally shooting seven middle-aged men over a period of 12 months in 1989 and 1990. She was convicted for just one of the murders in 1992 at the age of 35. More than two decades later, her motives remain unclear.
Now, a new Netflix documentary, Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers, out Oct. 30, traces her crimes and features a rare account from Wuornos herself, from a 1997 interview conducted by the artist and filmmaker Jasmine Hirst, who became penpals with Wuornos while she was in prison.
The conversation, filmed in prison, provides a glimpse at Wuornos’ state of mind at the time she committed the killings and forms the backbone of the documentary. Interspersed throughout the film are audio excerpts of interviews that director Emily Turner conducted last summer with law enforcement involved with the case and Wuornos’ family and friends.
Here are the major revelations from the interview and the leading theories about Wuornos’s motives.
Aileen Wuornos, in her own words
Throughout the interview with Hirst, Wuornos paints herself as a victim, describing a rough childhood raised by her strict, devout Christian grandparents.
She ran away from home at 15 and spent the next five years hitchhiking, sleeping under viaducts and in cow pastures. “I’m tough,” she tells Hirst. She claims that she was raped multiple times during this period.
Her childhood friend Dawn Botkins believes that Wuornos became a sex worker to make enough money to feed her brother who had also been living with their grandparents. While Wuornos always insisted that the man she was convicted of killing in 1989, Richard Mallory, raped and sodomized her, she says in her…
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