The True Story Behind Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers

by

Aileen Wuornos became well-known for murdering seven men in 1989 and 1990. Her story has been widely portrayed in movies and on television – Charlize Theron even won an Academy Award for playing her in a film. Wuornos was executed by lethal injection in 2002.

Aileen Wuornos worked as a sex worker in Florida and admitted to killing seven men between 1989 and 1990. She was found guilty of only one of the murders in 1992, when she was 35 years old. Even after over twenty years, the reasons behind her actions are still not fully understood.

A new Netflix documentary, Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers, premieres October 30th and explores the crimes of Aileen Wuornos. It includes a unique look inside her mind through a 1997 interview with artist and filmmaker Jasmine Hirst, who corresponded with Wuornos while she was incarcerated.

The documentary centers around a filmed conversation with Aileen Wuornos while she was in prison, offering insight into her thoughts and feelings around the time of the murders. Throughout the film, the director, Emily Turner, also includes audio from interviews she conducted last summer with police involved in the case, as well as 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

During the interview, Wuornos consistently portrays herself as someone who suffered, detailing a difficult upbringing with her stern and religious grandparents.

At age 15, she left home and spent the following five years traveling by hitchhiking, often finding shelter under bridges or in fields. She told Hirst she considers herself resilient, and revealed she was sexually assaulted on several occasions during that time.

Dawn Botkins, a childhood friend, thinks Aileen Wuornos turned to sex work to support her brother, who was living with their grandparents at the time. Wuornos maintained that Richard Mallory, the man she was convicted of killing in 1989, had sexually assaulted her, but she later told Hirst she had fabricated the claim about being sodomized.

She admits she wasn’t truthful about one thing: she never engaged in any sexual assault. She explains she misspoke to the police and then just kept talking, preoccupied with thoughts of sexual assault victims and her own struggles. She found it exhausting to maintain that false story during the trial.

She doesn’t consider herself a serial killer, explaining that her crimes happened as a result of alcohol abuse. She believes the person she became while drinking was a murderer, but that isn’t who she truly is.

Aileen Wuornos’s motives

You know, it’s strange. Aileen Wuornos kept saying she wasn’t a ‘serial killer,’ but honestly, she seemed to love the spotlight. I remember reading how, right before an interview, she actually told the reporter, Hirst, ‘You guys are going to make millions off of this,’ and she was fixing herself up for the camera. It was unsettling, like she was enjoying the attention even while talking about such terrible things.

It’s heartbreaking that she only felt valued and understood once she started committing serial murders,” Turner notes.

According to Turner, Wuornos’s violent past may have motivated her crimes, with her killings potentially stemming from a desire for revenge against those who had harmed her. Her sexual orientation played a role; she was in a long-term relationship with a woman named Tyria Moore at the time of the Mallory killing, and even confessed to Moore. Turner suggests that after experiencing numerous abusive relationships with men, Wuornos explored relationships with women. Engaging in sex work with men was simply a means of survival, allowing her to barely get by.

However, she warns, Wuornos is “an incredibly unreliable” narrator. 

We may never know exactly what drove Wuornos’ actions. According to Turner, there’s likely no simple explanation. She hopes viewers will watch the film and form their own opinions.

Read More

2025-10-30 19:06