Aileen Wuornos

Aileen Wuornos

Biography
Aileen Wuornos, then known as Aileen Pittman, was born on February 29, 1956. She was born to teenage parents Leo Dale Pittman and Diane Wuornos, but soon after Aileen’s birth, her mother ran away and Aileen and her brother, Keith, were adopted by Lauri and Britta Wuornos, Aileen’s maternal grandparents. Aileen was sexually active at an early age, many times with her blood brother, Keith. When she was fourteen, Aileen got pregnant, and she delivered a boy on December 23, 1971. He was quickly put up for adoption. Britta died on July 7 of the same year of Aileen’s pregnancy due to liver failure. After her grandmother’s death, Lauri Wuornos threw Aileen out of the house and for two years Aileen worked as a teenage prostitute and she slept in the woods near her neighborhood. She began traveling throughout America by catching rides with johns, using many assumed names such as Sandra Kretsch. She was arrested on more than one occasion for charges of prostitution, assault, armed robbery, and drunk driving. While traveling, Aileen met lesbian Tyria Moore, and they soon became lovers. Unfortunately, even Tyria eventually turned against Aileen, just like everyone else in her life who she had ever loved.

Murder
In early December 1989, Richard Mallory, the owner of an electronics store in Florida, never showed up for work. On December 13, his dead body was discovered in Volusia County. He had been killed with three shots from a .22 caliber gun. On June 1 of the next year, another male body was found. The naked body was later identified as Charles Carskaddon, and he had also been shot with a .22 caliber gun. Later that month, the body of Peter Siems was reported missing, and his car was found abandoned, and the keys were gone. There was no sign of Peter. On July 4, the dead body of Troy Buress was discovered, and like the other men, he had been shot twice with a .22 caliber gun. Later that year, the dead body of Dick Humphreys was found in Florida, and about one month later Walter Gino Antonio’s lifeless body was also discovered. Both men had been shot with a .22 caliber gun. Seven unconnected middle-aged men had been killed with a .22 caliber gun in Florida over the period of about one year. It seemed as though these men had fallen into the clutches of a serial killer.

Earlier in the year, two women were witnessed climbing out of what later turned out to be Peter Siems’ car. One was said to have been blonde, the other had short brown hair. Sketches of these two women were printed throughout Florida in the newspapers. Over the next few weeks, the police received four tips that the two women in the newspaper were Tyria Moore and Lee Blahovec. The police traced the two women through motel reservations and they soon learned that Lee Blahovec had many pseudonyms, which included Lori Grody and Cammie May Greene. They also soon learned that this mysterious woman’s real name was Aileen Wuornos. In January of 1991, Aileen was arrested. The following day, the police traced and contaced Tyria Moore. She agreed to help the police. Tyria begged Aileen to confess so that she would be immune to prosecution as an accomplice to murder, and she even allowed the police to secretly tape a phone conversation between her and Aileen. On January 16, Aileen confessed six murders to the police. She denied, however, any knowledge of the death of Peter Siems, whose body was never found. However, Aileen claimed that she had acted in self-defense. She claimed that she was a prostitute and that all of these times, she had either been assaulted, threatened, or raped, and that she killed that men in self-defense. She claimed that she carried the gun in her purse for protection. However, the police found no evidence that she had acted in self defense, and she was put on trial for the murder of Richard Mallory. She was convicted and was sentenced to the death penalty. After this trial, Aileen confessed that it was not self defense, and she was given numerous more death sentences for her other victims. The following is an excerpt of a conversation between Aileen and Nick Broomfield, the creator of the documentary Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, soon before she died
Nick: “Was [the murder of] Mallory self defense?”
Aileen: “Yeah, and so was some others. But there’s nothing I can do about – All they’d do was give me an overturned sentence. They would never do me righteous… They’d only (explicit) me over some more.”
On October 9, 2002, Aileen Wuornos got her wish, and she was executed by lethal injection.

-page author: Anna
-photos courtesy of http://www.clarkprosecutor.org