Aileen Wuornos: Murders, Trial, and Execution

The Aileen Wuornos case centers on a Florida sex worker who shot and killed seven men along the state’s highways between November 1989 and November 1990, was convicted of the first killing in January 1992, accumulated six death sentences after pleading to four more, and was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison on October 9, 2002. Her prosecution turned on a self-defense claim the jury rejected, and the years that followed exposed problems with her legal representation, undisclosed evidence about one victim, and the investigators’ short-lived plans to sell their story to Hollywood.

The Seven Killings

Wuornos was working as a prostitute along Florida’s interstates when the killings began. Each victim was a man who picked her up; each was robbed and shot.

Richard Mallory, a 51-year-old electronics shop owner from Clearwater, picked her up on November 30, 1989. He was shot multiple times in the chest, and his body was found two weeks later in a wooded part of Volusia County.¹

David Spears, a 43-year-old construction worker, was found in Citrus County on June 1, 1990, shot six times. Charles Carskaddon, a 40-year-old part-time rodeo worker, was found in Pasco County a few days later with nine gunshot wounds.² Peter Siems, a 65-year-old retiree, left for New Jersey in June 1990 and was never seen again; his car turned up on July 4 in Orange Springs, but his body was never recovered.¹

Troy Burress, a 50-year-old sausage salesman, was reported missing in July 1990 and found in Marion County in August, shot twice. Charles “Dick” Humphreys, a 56-year-old retired Air Force major and former police chief, was found in Marion County on September 12, 1990, with gunshot wounds to the head and torso.¹ Walter Jeno Antonio, 62, was discovered partially disrobed in Dixie County on November 19, 1990, shot four times in the back and head.²

How Police Caught Her

The break in the case came from Peter Siems’s abandoned car. Wuornos and her girlfriend Tyria Moore crashed the vehicle in July 1990, and a witness gave police a description that led to composite sketches. Wuornos’s fingerprints were recovered from the car. Separately, Volusia County detectives traced items belonging to Richard Mallory to a pawnshop, where a receipt carried Wuornos’s thumbprint. A camera from Mallory’s car was found in a warehouse unit she had rented under an alias.²

Police arrested Wuornos on January 9, 1991, at a Port Orange dive bar called The Last Resort, using an outstanding warrant from a 1986 concealed-firearm charge to hold her while they built the murder case.³

Investigators then found Tyria Moore, who had left Florida for her parents’ home in Ohio, and secured her cooperation in exchange for immunity. Moore had lived with Wuornos throughout the twelve-month killing spree. On a recorded phone call arranged by police, she pressed Wuornos, who told her: “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.”⁴ A detailed videotaped confession followed.

The Mallory Trial and the Self-Defense Claim

Wuornos stood trial only once. In January 1992, she was tried in Volusia County for the first-degree murder and armed robbery of Richard Mallory. State’s Attorney John Tanner led the prosecution; Judge Uriel Blount presided.⁵

The state built its case around the videotaped confession and the physical evidence linking Wuornos to Mallory’s belongings. Prosecutors also introduced evidence from the six other killings under Florida’s “Williams Rule,” which allows testimony about similar crimes to establish motive, intent, and premeditation, and to rebut a self-defense claim.⁶ Tyria Moore was the prosecution’s key witness. She told jurors that Wuornos had confessed to the Mallory killing shortly after it happened and that Wuornos “didn’t appear to be hurt or upset in any way.”⁷

Lead defense attorney Tricia Jenkins, Chief Assistant Public Defender of the Fifth Judicial Circuit, argued that the confession had been obtained by exploiting Wuornos’s attachment to Moore. Against her lawyers’ advice, Wuornos took the stand and testified that Mallory had raped her, tied her to a steering wheel, and threatened to kill her. On cross-examination she invoked her Fifth Amendment right 25 times.⁵ She had used the phrase “self-defense” 16 times in her original video confession.⁸ But her account shifted over time. Her earliest statement described feeling Mallory was going to “roll her” and rape her, and a struggle over a gun; later versions described a prolonged and violent assault.⁹

The jury deliberated less than two hours before convicting her of first-degree murder and armed robbery on January 27, 1992. Wuornos shouted at the jurors: “I’m innocent! I was raped! I hope you get raped! Scumbags of America!”¹⁰

During the penalty phase, the defense presented evidence of childhood abuse, a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, and an IQ of 81. The jury voted 12 to 0 for death. The court found five aggravating factors: a prior violent felony conviction, murder during the course of a robbery, murder to avoid arrest, that the killing was heinous, atrocious, or cruel, and that it was cold, calculated, and premeditated. One mitigating factor was recognized: borderline personality disorder. Judge Blount sentenced her to death on January 31, 1992.⁵

Six Death Sentences

The four remaining prosecutions never went to a jury. On March 31, 1992, Wuornos entered no-contest pleas to the murders of Dick Humphreys, Troy Burress, and David Spears, and Judge Thomas Sawaya sentenced her to death on each count.¹¹ In June 1992 she pleaded guilty to the murder of Charles Carskaddon and waived a penalty trial; the death sentence followed in February 1993. She pleaded guilty to the murder of Walter Jeno Antonio in February 1993 and was sentenced to death again.¹²

No charges were ever brought over the killing of Peter Siems, whose body was never found, though Wuornos confessed to that killing as well.¹ Six death sentences stood.

What Went Wrong Around the Case

Three sets of problems trailed the prosecution and became the substance of every serious retrospective on it.

Mallory’s Undisclosed Rape Conviction

In November 1992, months after the trial, Dateline NBC reporter Michele Gillen discovered that Richard Mallory had served ten years in prison in another state for violent rape. The information had not been introduced at trial. Detectives had denied the existence of evidence corroborating Wuornos’s claims that Mallory had a history of sexual violence. The trial judge refused to admit the information during post-conviction proceedings, and Wuornos was never granted a new trial.¹¹ Later appeals argued that trial counsel had been ineffective for failing to uncover the conviction, which could have supported the self-defense claim. Courts rejected the argument along with every other post-conviction claim.

Steven Glazer

After the Mallory trial, Wuornos’s representation passed to Steven Glazer, a lawyer with almost no criminal defense experience. Assistant Public Defender Tricia Jenkins later testified that Glazer told her he was taking the case because he “needed the media exposure.”¹³ It was his first death penalty case and only about his twelfth felony case overall.¹⁴

The state’s Capital Collateral Office later catalogued his conduct. He admitted in a deposition to taking $10,000 on Wuornos’s behalf for a media interview and keeping $2,500 for himself. He requested $25,000 from documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield for discussing the case. He was filmed by Broomfield’s crew smoking marijuana on the way to visit her in prison. His phone number spelled “Dr. Legal”; his office answering machine played “Help.”¹³ Glazer advised Wuornos to plead guilty or no contest to all remaining charges, the strategy that produced the string of death sentences, and later called himself a “legal Jack Kevorkian” for facilitating what amounted to his client’s acceptance of execution.¹⁴

The Officers’ Movie Plans

In February 1991, three Marion County Sheriff’s Office officials involved in the investigation, Maj. Dan Henry, Capt. Steve Binegar, and Investigator Bruce Munster, publicly announced that they had hired an attorney to explore selling their story to Hollywood. They said any profits would go to a victims’ compensation fund.¹⁵ The three reportedly called off the plans a week later, and a subsequent State Attorney’s investigation found no evidence that contracts were ever signed.¹⁶ The episode became a central theme of Nick Broomfield’s 1994 documentary, which raised pointed questions about the officers’ motives.

Dropping Appeals and the Execution

The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the Mallory conviction on November 16, 1994. The U.S. Supreme Court declined review in April 1995.¹¹ Post-conviction litigation dragged on for years. Her attorneys argued ineffective assistance of counsel over the failure to discover Mallory’s rape conviction, the failure to call witnesses to her childhood abuse, and inadequate evaluation of her competency to stand trial. State and federal courts rejected every claim.

In the spring of 2001, Wuornos wrote to the Florida Supreme Court asking to fire her attorneys and abandon her remaining appeals. In one letter she stated: “I’m one who seriously hates human life and would kill again.”¹⁷ On April 1, 2002, the court unanimously granted her request, affirming a lower court’s finding that she was competent to dismiss her appeals and accept her death sentences.

Governor Jeb Bush signed a death warrant. He then issued a temporary stay on September 30, 2002, for a psychiatric evaluation of her competency. Three state-appointed psychiatrists examined her in a session lasting about thirty minutes and concluded she understood the nature of the death penalty and why it had been imposed on her.¹⁸ Bush lifted the stay on October 2, 2002.¹⁹

Outside psychiatrists who reviewed her records but did not participate in the state evaluation reached different conclusions. Glenn Ross Caddy stated in an affidavit that Wuornos was “almost definitely suffering from a long-standing delusional process.” An Ohio advocacy group called Florida Support tried to intervene as a “next friend,” describing her as “borderline psychotic.” The courts denied the effort.¹⁸

Wuornos was executed by lethal injection on the morning of October 9, 2002. She was 46. Time of death was pronounced at 9:47 a.m. She declined a final meal and asked only for a cup of coffee.¹⁰ Her final statement was: “I’d just like to say I’m sailing with the Rock and I’ll be back like ‘Independence Day’ with Jesus, June 6, like the movie, big mother ship and all. I’ll be back.”²⁰ John Tanner, who had tried the Mallory case a decade earlier, was among the witnesses. She was the tenth woman executed in the United States since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, and only the second woman ever executed in Florida.¹¹

Why the Case Still Draws Attention

Wuornos’s self-defense claim, shifting and imperfect as it was, sat on top of a harder question about how the legal system treats violence by sex workers who are themselves victims of violence. Legal commentators observed that juries tend to view a woman in prostitution as having forfeited any right to claim rape, which makes a traditional self-defense argument almost impossible to sustain regardless of the facts.²¹

Academic researchers turned to the case to fill a gap. Existing literature on women who kill had concentrated on “justifiable and excusable homicide,” such as women who kill abusive partners. Wuornos’s case prompted more systematic study of predatory violence by women, with analyses drawing on psychopathy, attachment theory, and predatory aggression.²²

The case entered popular culture through two Nick Broomfield documentaries. The first, Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1994), examined the conduct of investigators, attorneys, and associates who sought to profit from the case, asking whether the “serial killer” label had itself become a “commercial means of selling Aileen Wuornos and her story.”²³ His follow-up, Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, covered her final years on death row. In 2003, Patty Jenkins’s feature film Monster, based partly on personal letters Wuornos wrote to her friend Dawn Botkins over twelve years on death row, earned Charlize Theron the Academy Award for Best Actress.²⁴

Taken together, the trial evidence, the Mallory revelation, Glazer’s representation, the officers’ brush with Hollywood, the thirty-minute competency exam, and Wuornos’s own decision to end her appeals have kept the case in circulation as a reference point in arguments over capital defense, media influence on criminal proceedings, and the execution of mentally ill defendants.

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Gainesville Sun. Court Rejects Wuornos Appeals; Execution Today
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