Revisiting Aileen Wuornos in Light of #MeToo
Fifteen years out from her execution, we still have a lot to learn
Director Nick Broomfield has made two documentaries about the so-called first female serial killer: Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1992), and the follow up eleven years later prior to and including to Wuornos’s execution, Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003). Both approach their subject from a place of empathy; like any true journalist, Broomfield is trying to get at the truth of what happened to Wuornos and whether or not she’s been ill-served by the criminal justice system. Both documentaries were shocking for the level of corruption and abuse they uncovered. But watching them now, it’s impossible not to draw comparisons to a multitude of scandals that have come out since then, everything from the #MeToo movement outing sexual harassers to sex abuse scandals within churches and politics. I have no intention of using one woman’s story to further my political agenda. But anyone who has ever been terrorized by someone in power, whether it be a family member, a church leader, or someone in law enforcement, will find it impossible not to sympathize with Aileen, even if you don’t condone how she played the hand she was dealt.
For anyone unfamiliar with her story (or the Charlize Theron film Monster, which is based on Wuornos’s life and details her crimes and arrest), Wuornos lived in Florida and supported herself and her girlfriend Tyria Moore by working as a prostitute. In the late 1980s, when Wuornos was in her early 30s, she shot and killed seven of her johns. She was caught after stealing and wrecking a car belonging to one of her victims, and she confessed to the murders a week later, after police offered Moore immunity in exchange for eliciting a confession from Wuornos. Wuornos’s betrayal by her lover is one of the best known aspects of the case — it made it into the fiction film, and it’s one of the elements that makes the Wuornos character so sympathetic and the film so painful to watch. And yet it’s only the tip of the iceberg, the first domino to fall in a long chain of betrayals and abuses. In his first doc about Wuornos, Broomfield shows the courtroom footage of Wuornos while the prosecutors played the tape of her phone call with Moore, in which Moore tearfully complains about the police harassing her and her family, and Wuornos assures her she won’t let Moore go to prison, finally promising (after much prompting from Moore) to go confess and get it over with. And there’s video footage of Wuornos doing that very thing immediately afterward, seemingly relaxed but also regretful, telling the officer, “I wish I’d never gotten started on the whole business.” This is also the first of many times she will refer to what she’s done as self-defense. She would later describe in court the horrific assault she suffered at the hands of Richard Mallory, her first victim, breaking down in tears as she recounted the events that led to her shooting him.
This is a good time to mention that I’m not interested in serial killers on their own. I do find criminal investigations and police procedurals fascinating. But investigations into the minds of serial killers, at least in fiction, often get reduced to mental illness and simply stop there, as if the line from mental illness to unrestrained mayhem is a straight one. It’s reductive, offensive to non-murderers who have a mental illness, and narratively boring. What’s fascinating about Aileen is how little her own mental illness played into her trial and the media hoopla surrounding it. She was actually examined by psychiatrists for the defense and found to be suffering from borderline personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder, with the psychiatrists concluding that she was mentally unstable. It didn’t matter: Wuornos was sentenced to death anyway. The process of determining whether someone is mentally fit to stand trial and whether they should be sentenced to an institution or to prison (or death) is notoriously murky, and Aileen is far from the first or last person with a mental illness to be executed in the United States. But it’s fascinating to watch the news coverage of her trial, reproduced by Broomfield in both documentaries, which completely omits any mention of her mental state. In their version of the story, Wuornos is avaricious and a sexual deviant, or at the very least a woman of loose morals, seducing men and then gleefully murdering them and running off with their money and her lesbian lover. In their defense, Wuornos saw herself in much the same way, as a sort of gay Bonny and Clyde, according to her friends at the time. There was no narrative in place for female serial killers the way there was for male ones. So instead of focusing on her mental illness or her horrific childhood, the way we might for a male serial killer now that we have so many to choose from, the media latched onto the fact that Wuornos was a prostitute and a lesbian, some sort of unholy alliance of the two types of women it only knew how to deal with in the broadest possible stereotypes.
Wuornos’s sexuality is understandably a point of much discussion. Broomfield’s main question for the men in Wuornos’s life who he interviewed focus on whether or not she hated men, and if so, whether it was possible for her to continue having sex with them. He interviews one of her former regulars who had given a story to a tabloid about the sexual fantasies Aileen had reported to him (he claims the paper exaggerated his story and misquoted him). The fantasies themselves are unsettling in light of Aileen’s crimes, but not overly salacious on their own; they involved being tied up in the woods and raped by a man wearing a hood. What’s more enlightening is the man’s response when Broomfield asks him if he thinks Aileen hated men. He doesn’t seem to have given her mental state much thought, even though by now Wuornos had been sentenced to death. But he speculates that she “took it however she could get it” and “didn’t care one way or the other” whether she was having sex with a man or a woman. Like many people, he assumes the only reason a woman would become a prostitute is because she’s trying to monetize her own nymphomania. And the idea that Wuornos’s history of dating women would indicate a sexual preference of any sort is totally incomprehensible to him and to many of Aileen’s other friends of both sexes. One of Aileen’s childhood friends (a woman) explains to Broomfield, in a state of amused exasperation, that homosexuality “didn’t exist” before the 1980s, presumably in response to some question about whether Wuornos had always preferred women. The idea that having one’s sexuality repressed might in any way trigger or aggravate a mental illness doesn’t seem to occur to anyone; to them, Aileen is simply a sexual deviant who wants sex more than women are supposed to and doesn’t care who it’s with or what the circumstances are.
Immediately after Wuornos’s first death sentence, she fired her public defender and hired stoner lawyer Steve Glazer. It’s easy see Glazer’s appeal to someone like Wuornos, who already felt harassed and railroaded by the criminal justice system: in the TV ad Broomfield includes in both documentaries, Glazer is chubby and approachable, styling himself as the defender of the downtrodden. Around the same time, Wuornos also began corresponding with a woman named Arlene Pralle, a born-again Christian somewhere in middle-age who raised chickens and wolves on a farm with her husband. By the time Broomfield interviewed Pralle and Glazer, Pralle had written to Wuornos extensively and convinced her to let Pralle legally adopt her, so she was Wuornos’s legal guardian. Arlene Pralle is one of the most terrifying characters I’ve ever encountered in a film. She has wide childlike eyes and a small trim physique, and she tells Broomfield with apparent earnestness about how she saw Wuornos on the news and looked into her eyes — “I read people’s eyes,” she adds in complete seriousness — and knew there was no way she could do the things she was accused of. At the same time, she and Glazer demand twenty-five thousand dollars out of Broomfield in exchange for an interview with Wuornos. Wuornos is on death row at the time and can have no possible use for that kind of money, and when Broomfield points this out, Pralle and Glazer tell him that Wuornos wants them to have the money in exchange for their trouble. Broomfield settles for ten thousand and gets his interview with Wuornos, although Pralle would eventually refuse to speak to him without Glazer present.
What makes Arlene Pralle so terrifying is that she does all this in the guise of being a good Christian who is concerned about Wuornos’s salvation. Wuornos is arguably no worse off after Glazer and/or Pralle sell her story to Broomfield (it’s unclear who actually gets the money we see Broomfield handing to Glazer; either he pockets it all, or Pralle is lying when she says she never received it). But they don’t stop there. Without telling Wuornos first, Glazer changes her plea during her second trial to guilty. At this point she was still claiming, somewhat reasonably, that all her killings were in self-defense; and having fired her public defender and sought out better representation, she had a reasonable expectation that her second trial would go differently then her first. Instead Glazer simply pleaded guilty on her behalf and accepted the additional death sentences. Broomfield explains that Glazer was totally out of his depth as a trial lawyer in a murder case, and that his inexperience led him to take Wuornos’s anguished remarks about wanting to die literally. This might be true, but Glazer’s remarks about wanting Wuornos to confess her crimes and get right with God also line up eerily with Pralle’s. They both claim to care about Wuornos and want what’s best for her, which makes it all the more stomach-turning when Glazer intentionally throws a case that could have saved Wuornos’s life and overturned her first conviction. Both Pralle and Glazer (who is Jewish and presumably doesn’t believe in the afterlife) use their alleged concern for Wuornos’s salvation as a pretty transparent cover for quickly disposing of Wuornos once they’ve made all the money they can off her. It’s telling that the confession they convince her to make is of premeditated murder, not the self-defense she’d been claiming up to that point; therefore the only possible punishment is execution.
It’s hard not to draw comparisons between this and the violence being done to women all over the world in the name of religion, from women in the Middle East being executed after being raped because they’re “unclean,” to the cults in the US, like the one actress Allison Mack procured women for, that serve as a front for sex trafficking, rape, and child abuse. Even organizations that explicitly forbid rape and sexual abuse, like the Catholic church, often protect the sex offenders within their ranks, disregarding the suffering of their powerless or voiceless members in favor of maintaining the illusion of structural integrity. Wuornos spent her entire childhood being abused by her grandfather, who raised her after her first adopted mother died (her father was in prison for child abuse when Wuornos was born, and she never met him or her real mother). She left home at the age of fifteen and slept in abandoned cars or in the woods, and this was in Michigan in the middle of the winter. It’s no wonder she took matters into her own hands when one of her johns assaulted her: she’d never had anyone or anything to appeal to for help when things went south. Pralle and Glazer used Wuornos for financial gain and then discarded her, doing their best to ensure that Wuornos would be permanently silenced as soon as possible. As unbearable as it is to think about, it’s in keeping with the church’s historical position toward its powerless members.
On top of all this, we know Wuornos’s girlfriend Tyria Moore agreed to get a confession out of Wuornos in exchange for immunity, but there’s also a strong suggestion that she formed an agreement with some of the police officers investigating the case to cut them in on any movie or TV deals she made regarding her and Wuornos’s story. One of the detectives working on the case tried to look into why Moore was never charged with a crime despite being present for at least some of them and being a clear accessory to Wuornos’s crimes. He was warned off the case repeatedly, coming home one day to find a note tacked to his front door warning him to keep his mouth shut. A week later his wife arrived home from the grocery store to find their house broken into and burgled; the only things missing were the files on the Wuornos murders. He was eventually demoted to traffic duty and left the police force for several years. Everyone in Wuornos’s life, from her girlfriend to her lawyer to her adopted mother, seemed to see her as a paycheck. She went from selling her body to anyone with a few bucks to spare, to essentially allowing her friends and family to pimp out her life story to the highest bidder.
While Wuornos clearly has anger management issues and begins to suffer from paranoid delusions the longer she spends on death row, it’s striking that she never seems to see herself as a victim or blame anyone else for what happened to her. The only place she ever points the finger is at cops and politicians, who she plausibly claims railroaded her and used her case as a platform for their reelections. Jeb Bush was governor of Florida at the time and was in fact running for reelection on a law-and-order ticket, and Broomfield shows taped interviews with him in which he reiterates that Wuornos deserved to be executed and had accepted her sentence. Wuornos’s manner of speaking is so disorganized and frenetic that it takes a moment to realize the sanity of what she’s saying; her advice to follow the money (always relevant) sometimes comes right before an assertion that her food has been poisoned and that she had to “wash” it before eating it. She’s surprisingly canny about the way Pralle and Glazer exploited her, and yet she doesn’t seem to bear them any ill will. She sounds nothing like a stereotypical male serial killer (if there is such a thing); she has no grand plan, no manifesto, no voices in her head telling her to kill. All she wants is to be loved, and failing that (and life does seem to have failed her pretty spectacularly on that point), to be left alone. It doesn’t seem like much to ask. But law enforcement, religious institutions, and everything else run by men are historically terrible at leaving women alone, especially if those women are poor, have a mental illness or physical disability, are LGBTQ+, or are people of color. Wuornos fit three of the four, so her life was almost destined to be an uphill climb. But that doesn’t make anything that happened to her inevitable. If we’ve learned anything from the #MeToo movement, it’s that sexual assault and abuse are both more widespread than we’d ever thought before, and also preventable. We can actually give men consequences for their actions. We haven’t erased violence against women or solved the problem of why it happens, but we’re starting to make progress. And that’s why it’s important to revisit the stories women like Aileen Wuornos who society failed, so that we don’t forget why we’re doing this and what we have to lose.
