Sitting in jail after being arrested on suspicion of a string of murders along the motorway, 34-year-old Aileen “Lee” Wuornos made a poignant promise to her lover over the phone.
Her girlfriend, 28-year-old Tyria Moore, panicked as she admitted: “Lee, [the police] are coming after me.” Wuornos struggled to hold back her emotions as she replied: “I’m not gonna let you go to jail. Ty, I love you. If I have to confess everything just to keep you from getting in trouble, I will.”
That chilling declaration of love sealed Wuornos’ fate, leading her to be convicted for six murders. In 2002, she was executed by the state of Florida.
Branded “America’s first female serial killer” by the press, Wuornos inspired true-crime TV shows and even a 2003 film called Monster. But now the case is being revisited again – with “disturbing” new insight into the mind of the murderer and her dark past.
A new Netflix documentary titled Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers has released on the platform this week, with new footage from a death row interview with Wuornos.
The show’s director, Emily Turner, reveals: “Aileen said, ‘I’m going to talk to you about the truth of my crimes,’ and from watching this interview, a very different version of her comes through – contradictory, very human, at times quite disturbing.”
In one of her final interviews, Wuornos chillingly says: “The real Aileen Wuornos isn’t a serial killer. I was so lost I turned into one.”
‘Drifter’ Wuornos was abandonded by her parents when she was just four-years-old, leading her to be adopted by her grandparents in Michigan. She became pregnant at the age of 13 and her baby was adopted.
The killer was violently abused by her grandfather and in one interview, seen in the new Neflix show, Wuornos claims she was sexually assaulted by teenage friends, PEOPLE reports.
By the time she’d turn 16, Wuornos had ran away from home and became a travelling sex worker. “I’m hitchhiking, and I’m hooking,” she said. “I slept under viaducts, in abandoned homes, in cow pastures. I must have been raped, I’d say, about 30 times, maybe more.”
Her fortunes changed when she met Moore, a motel maid, at a Florida bar in 1986 – it was there where the couple’s intense four-year love affair began. “I loved her so bad,” Wuronos said. “[She’s the] only reason I carried that darn gun. I wanted to make sure that I got home alive – so I’d be another day breathing with her.”
Their romance didn’t last, however. Two years later, police started digging into the horrific deaths and robberies of men found shot near Florida highways. Six men were found murdered in eerily similar circumstances.
Witnesses claimed the saw two women driving one of the victims’ stolen vehicles, and investigators found a breakthrough when they lifted Wuornos’ fingerprint from a pawnshop item that belonged to one of the deceased.
The killer was arrested on January 9, 1991, and she was eventually convinced into making a confession by her lover Moore. Her girlfriend was working with the police to avoid going down as an accomplice, but Moore wasn’t accused of a crime herself.
Wuornos pleased not guilty at the trial for the murder of her first victim, Richard Mallory. She claimed that she killed him in self defence after he tortured and raped her, but the jury found her guilty.
She then pleaded no contest or guilty to five other murders and was sentenced to death.
The Netflix documentary hears from Wuornos’ childhood friend, Dawn Botkins, who recalls her last meeting with the killer the night before she was executed.
“She said she was definitely a serial killer. It was all the years of the abuse, and then she started drinking. Plus Ty [Moore]. Aileen kept saying that to me: ‘That was quite the love, wasn’t it? It was fatal.'”
