Serial Killer, Interrupted

Most serial killers are male. But Aileen Wuornos, the subject of Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers on Netflix, challenged that stereotype by murdering seven men in Florida in a 12 month period between 1989 and 1990. Wuornos is already the subject of multiple films including Nick Broome’s 1992 Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer, Monster starring Charlize Theron in 2003 and the 2021 horror-thriller feature Aileen Wuornos: American Boogeywoman with Peyton List of Cobra Kai fame in the titular role. All three films offer valuable insights but Emily Turner’s new feature-length documentary Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers incorporates never-before-seen interview footage of Wuornos while benefiting from 35 years of hindsight. The result is an immersive portrait of a woman, a criminal controversy and a portrait of early 1990s America.

The time period is relevant to both the film and an understanding of what happened to Wuornos. As America emerged from the post-Reagan era, something new was in the cultural wind. This was the era of Thelma & Louise, Riot grrrls and Third Wave feminism. The popular music industry was intent on marketing a new wave of female artists (Indigo Girls, Sara McLachlan, Tracey Chapman). Female action heroes, still a novelty at the time, would find their footing in shows like Xena: Warrior Princess, Star Trek: Voyager, and La Femme Nikita. As the culture was awakening to the creative potential of women and the tinkle of glass ceilings was heard echoing across the corporate world, Aileen Wuornos seemed like the perfect, perverse true crime offering for a nascent “girl power” era. It didn’t hurt that she had what the film calls “the energy of a famous person.”

Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Emily Turner
Starring: Aileen Wuornos, Steve Binegar, Jasmine Hirst, Jacqueline Giroux
Running time: 103 mins

This was definitely in the forefront of Steve Glazer’s mind. Afforded a fair amount of screen time in the Broome documentary, the shambling, unkempt, pot-head attorney is revealed as a man intent on making money not just by representing Wuornos but also by benefiting from her story. Even greater revelations of this profit-driven justice are made in Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers. Even before Wuornos had been formally charged, it transpires, three of the detectives investigating her case had hired an attorney between them to field calls from interested production companies. When this came to light, all three were fired. But they would not be the last ones seeking to capitalize on the novelty of a female serial killer.

The Wuornos story was a boon for print and television media. Following her arrest in 1991, Wuornos was the subject of extensive and continuous media coverage at the local, state and national level. In 1991 and 1992, during her arraignment and criminal trial, she was the topic of news articles with lurid headlines like “Damsel of Death” and “Highway Hooker” (Wuornos made her living as a sex worker plying her trade with truck drivers and working men traveling the Florida Highways). The lure of publicity was not lost on major media outlets like 60 Minutes and celebrity journalists such as Geraldo Rivera. Snippets of both print and visual media figure prominently in Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers.

Jasmine Hirst, an Australian artist and filmmaker who corresponded with Aileen Wuornos for eight years finally met Wuornos in 1997, when Aileen expressed a desire to tell her story to Hirst. The resulting footage from that interview forms the core of the film. Hirst, herself an artist specializing in the theme of female sexual assault, felt a kinship with the much abused Wuornos. Molested as a child, Wuornos endured sexual violence as an adult working the highways of Florida. With surprising candor, she opens up to Hirst about the motivation behind her murders. Her frankness is at once disarming and chilling.

Wuornos maintained throughout her trial that her motivation for killing Richard Mallory, a 51 year-old electronics store owner from Clearwater, was self defense. In the gruesome court testimony videotaped and shown in Aileen, Wuornos describes in graphic detail a violent sexual assault she suffered at his hands. Wuornos maintained that all of her murders were motivated by the same cause – a sexual assault perpetrated upon her as the result of a prostitution transaction gone wrong. Of the 300 or so clients Wuornos estimated to having serviced over this time period, the possibility that seven of them violently assaulted her is entirely believable.

But during the course of her visits with Hirst, Wuornos frankly admits that portions of her initial testimony were false. Mallory’s murder seems indeed to have been self defense but, while this may have been how her career as a killer began, her motive soon morphed into a quest for revenge. Wuornos admits to having specialized in hunting the sort of men “who would do that kind of thing.” Wuornos exalts in the confession, expressing her pleasure at having finally unburdened herself of the truth per the tenets of her newly found Christianity. She leaves the final interview ready to meet her maker.

Wuornos’ execution and the events that follow furnish a sad coda. Reporters rush to the roadside to film the white hearse as it proceeds to the death house to collect her remains. Even in death, Wuornos’s body was sold as a commodity – this time as a photo opportunity, a sensational headline, a grim trophy to the efficacy of the Florida legal system. Wuornos may have killed, but her killings were the actions of a woman repeatedly used and discarded throughout her life. It is difficult to feel sympathy for a serial killer. But Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers provides enough in-depth context to make that possible.