Monster: Inside the Mind of Aileen Wuornos

^INTRODUCTION ‘YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY I KILLED?’

I spend my time trying to get into prisons when most are trying to get out.

I study court transcripts, scene-of-crime photos, witness statements and any document relating to an offender that I can get my hands on. I make it my business to talk with the next of kin, the police, attorneys, schoolteachers and friends. I interview law-enforcement officers, correctional officers, psychiatrists, psychologists and all those who work with these offenders. I talk to the victims’ parents and, finally, I get to interview the serial killers or mass murderers themselves.

From the USA to Russia to Singapore, San Quentin to Sablino to Changi, I visit these killers in the human warehouses they call correctional facilities, places where the stench of disinfectant and urine permeates every brick. I touch them and smell the same air they breathe. I sit with them, eat with them. Occasionally I witness their executions.

Collectively, in one space, they are no threat. Just extremely dangerous dead men and women walking, talking – respectful, chatty and cool. Alone with them in their cells – ‘houses’, in prison parlance – they metamorphose into different beasts; their evil tentacles of thought squirm into your brain. They become controlling, manipulative, sick psycho-beasts. Men such as Kenneth Bianchi and Michael Bruce Ross masturbate every day to the memories of their perverted crimes. I try to communicate and get inside their heads; I try to find out what makes them tick, what makes them do what they do.

My methods occasionally seem to bear fruit. Two homicides (Dzung Tu and Paula Perrera) were cleared up with Michael Ross on Death Row, Connecticut. One murder (Kimberly Logan) was cleared up, amongst other offences, with Arthur John Shawcross, serving 250 years to life in New York.

But I knew there were no crimes to clear up as I drove my rental car down the Dixie Highway to Sheridan Street West to meet Aileen Carol ‘Lee’ Wuornos at the Broward Correctional Institute, Pembroke Pines, Florida in May 1997. I had just spent time with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, based in the state capital of Tallahassee, and it was one of those days recently encapsulated by award-winning documentary-maker Nick Broomfield as having ‘… the promise of sunshine and good times. As the miles unwind, oranges appear on roadside trees and smiles become compulsory as the low-slung sun burns throughout the day.’

Unlike Nick Broomfield, who had spent some time trying to negotiate a visit with Aileen for his acclaimed documentary The Selling of a Serial Killer, my opportunity to meet her was offered out of the blue, and I was to talk to a woman whom the media had dubbed the ‘Damsel of Death’.

Thankfully I was only with Aileen Carol ‘Lee’ Wuornos a short while and, to be frank, that limited time in her company was more than enough for me. I guess it was enough for her too. However, I will say this: she was somehow different to any other cold-blooded serial killer, man or woman, I have met, with the exception of Douglas Clark, the Sunset Slayer, who is on Death Row at San Quentin State Prison, California. Both of them were foul-mouthed individuals, and there were certainly no crocodile tears from Aileen Wuornos. As with Doug, there were no mealy, whining, snivelling-laced-with-phoney apologies, no regrets from this brittle woman. Neither of these sociopaths tried the same, well-worn, sympathy-seeking manipulation process so often experienced by psychiatrists, psychologists, investigators and journalists who interview these killers. She looked as hard as granite and, using no fancy sound bites, she spoke her mind – fragmented as it may have been.

What fascinated me above all of the other issues that interested me at the time was not so much why Wuornos had killed – by serial-murderer standards she was small fry with a mere seven, or as I believe eight, victims to her discredit – but why the world’s public and media had been whipped into such an all-consuming interest in this particular creature. There are scores of examples of this homicidal breed with higher body counts who are of far more interest in criminological terms, and who might be the focus of similar amounts of mass hysteria. What was the crowd pull for the Aileen Wuornos circus?

Already motion pictures (such as Monster and Overkill) have been produced which purport to portray the more gruesome segments of her life and crimes. Many TV documentaries concerning Wuornos have been screened around the world. Apart from Jack the Ripper, it is possible that more books have been written about her than any other criminal, or serial killer, who has ever lived. Even police officers, bombarded and tempted by movie consultancy fees totalling $2.5 million, risked their careers in an effort to hike a ride on the Wuornos bandwagon; at least one top cop had to resign.

In life, and even more so in death, Aileen Carol Wuornos has for some reason found herself elevated to cult status. However, no movie has yet dared touch on Wuornos’s abused childhood, other than a passing, off-the-cuff reference. Hundreds of ordinary law enforcers were involved with the hunt for Wuornos and Moore, yet they have received no mention for the sterling work they carried out. More importantly, no one has put the spotlight on the glaring inconsistencies in the case. Only one person, as far as I can judge, has been brave enough to name names, and that is Nick Broomfield. I take up the baton from him.

If the story of Aileen Wuornos has any real value at all, it is not entertainment value. It is to expose a criminal justice system for what it was, and probably still is.

Nick Broomfield is not a psychiatrist, as he will confirm, yet he observed that Wuornos was all but insane prior to her execution, and I agree. One does not need to be a shrink to work that one out. Nevertheless, the Florida Department of Corrections stated that she was sane enough to die. My views on capital punishment are just that – my own views. What shrieks out at me is the fact that Wuornos was certainly sane when she committed her horrific murders. She knew the rules. She knew that in committing aggravated murder she might face the ultimate penalty, but she chose to break the rules without a tear of remorse. However, there is not a shred of doubt that her mind disintegrated during her final years. Does this absolve her? Is it some form of mitigation? Too often we consider the killer’s human rights – we hear so little of the rights of the victims and the next of kin, their lives wrecked forever.

This book tells Aileen Wuornos’s shocking story through her own eyes, and using her own words. These words have been taken from my interviews with her and from the extensive interview tapes taken at the time of her arrest. I have filled in the gaps with my reconstructions of how the events unfolded; I believe them to be as accurate as they can possibly be.

When one sets out to investigate the road to murder, well signposted as it may be, one finds diversions, small, seemingly insignificant dirt roads that can lead to unexpected discoveries. Aileen Carol Wuornos led her eight victims into such diversions where they expected something less than being blasted to death. This book will take you down those roads to a place where you will never look back.