Aileen Wuornos: I’m With Her

   TRIGGER WARNING: This entry mentions sexual abuse, child abuse, forced child abandonment, violence, killing, prostitution, addiction, & the death penalty.

   Aileen Wuornos, the woman the film “Monster” was talking about, was the United States’ most notorious female serial killer. After Aileen’s arrest, she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder, and she scored high on the psychopathy scale. However, her level of care for others makes it unlikely she was a true psychopath, in my opinion. The film altered a few details. In this post, we will stick to the facts.

   In the film, Aileen is both a dreamer and a sexual abuse victim who spent her pretty years prostituting herself in hopes of being discovered by a scout from Hollywood. Even in the film's context, her murders don’t seem so hard to understand. But is it really what happened? Actually, yes, it is.

   Born on February 29, 1956, in Rochester, Michigan, into a dysfunctional family, Aileen never got to know her father as he was arrested for pedophilic acts when she was just an infant. She would never meet him later either, as eventually, he killed himself in his prison cell. He had also been diagnosed, during his imprisonment, with schizophrenia. Her mother, after she divorced her father, dropped her and her brother off at their maternal grandparent’s place and disappeared. She was never coming back for them. Growing up, Aileen was regularly beaten, molested, and raped by her grandfather. 

    She started having sex and using substances at merely 11 years old. She became a prostitute at only 13 years old and was regularly mocked for her sexual behaviors by her brother, neighbors, friends, and family. They consistently referred to her as a “no good whore.” Eventually, at age 15, she got knocked up. We don’t know if her grandfather could have fathered the child, but he did force her to give birth and surrender it for adoption at a home for unwed teenage mothers, a traumatic experience that haunted Aileen. Around the same time, her grandmother died, and her grandfather beat her up and threw her out of the house. She continued her life of prostitution to survive. She did not finish high school or attend college and continued chasing her Hollywood dream.

   One might wonder how she avoided killing herself. Well, any child abuse survivor can answer that. She lived inside her mind. At an early age, pop stars on TV inspired her mind's imagination, and their presence alone brought her joy, joys she wanted to be able to give to other girls like her. She convinced herself being a star in Hollywood was her destiny. So she showed off her body sexually to everyone around her just in case they were a scout searching for talent. Even her start in prostitution was hoping to one day blow a talent scout who’d discover her.

   Expectedly, her dreams never came true. Her beauty faded, and she became a weathered woman living among the homeless. And she walked into a gay bar one day in 1989, intending to spend her last blow job money on a drink before she killed herself. These actions make perfect sense as a BPD person is often highly suicidal. But fate had other plans for Aileen that day.

   Tyria Moore is referred to within the film as Selby Wall. Selby Wall is a semi-fictionalized character and not a completely accurate representation of Tyria Moore.  Tyria Moore identifies as a lesbian in the closet looking for one night where she doesn’t have to hide. Tyria was attracted to Aileen because Aileen had an attitude and confidence that she didn’t. And Aileen was attracted to Tyria because Tyria showered her with love and affection. Aileen was 32 years old at the time, and Tyria was 18 making this an, in general, problematic relationship.

   Before the murders, Aileen was an alcoholic barfly who constantly got into physical fights at the bars. She hitchhiked her way to Florida, where she was married to a wealthy old man for nine weeks who was embarrassed of her as she was consistently getting arrested. At one point Aileen physically hit him with his cane, so he got a restraining order against her. She divorced him after her brother passed away from esophageal cancer, receiving 10,000 dollars from his life insurance policy. 

   Every one of Aileen’s victims was seeking her out for her prostitution services. They were all grown men in their 40s-50s. Aileen testified that the first client she killed raped her, and the rest tried to. Forensic psychiatrists didn’t entirely agree. The first part was likely accurate as her first victim was a previously convicted violent rapist on multiple accounts that had supposedly been “rehabilitated.” But it seemed unlikely her six other victims/clients had also tried to rape her. They concluded she was triggered back to her childhood by the first one who did rape her and became fearful of being raped again, causing her to shoot her other clients before they could even try it in the first place.

   Along the way, she was living and running with her lover Tyria. At one point, she attempts to get a job to buy her lover the life she wants and to quit the prostitution business. Unfortunately, nobody would hire an uneducated, homeless woman like her, so she returned quickly to prostitution. She treated Tyria like a princess. But every time Aileen killed a victim, Tyria panicked. She knew this couldn’t last forever. They will get caught. It was only a matter of time.

   Aileen felt she couldn’t lose Tyria. She even called her “The only good thing in her life.” But eventually, the cops began closing in. So Aileen sent her home after one last cry. She admitted she screwed up and couldn’t understand why, nor could she figure out how to fix herself. She begged Tyria to come back one day and help her because Aileen had helped her first. 

   Authorities arrested Aileen Wuornos on January 9, 1991 and Tyria agreed to testify against her in return for immunity. Aileen was happy for her, though. She loved her that much, which is classic for someone with BPD as well. We love fast and hard. It’s a passionate roller coaster romance. And we’d die for them. 

   Aileen can be labeled many things, a man-hater, a passionate lover, a sexual abuse victim, a child abuse victim, a homeless woman, a dreamer, a whore, a hopeless romantic, a misguided avenger, a PTSD victim, a survivor, a killer, a drunk, a dope fiend, a smoker, a thief, uneducated, unfortunate, raging, violent, aggressive, foul-mouthed, unrealistic, a feminist, a member of the LGBTQA+… but I for one think “Monster” is not one of them.

   In reality, she isn’t that different from many women with her life experience. The only difference is she let her trauma fantasies become real. The rest of us leave it in our heads. It’s not abnormal for a survivor of an assault to carry a gun just in case it happens again. But when paranoia rules and your line of work brings your trigger right to you, there’s that feeling of terror. You get stuck in your head and itch to pull the trigger. She did. And it got easier to do with each shot. If the first guy hadn’t raped her, she might have never fired a gun.

   Aileen Wuornos was found guilty on six counts (out of seven accused kills) of first-degree murder (they never found one of the bodies). The judge sent her to await her execution in a Florida State Prison in 1992, where they executed her by lethal injection on October 9, 2002, at 46 years old.

   “It was love beyond imaginable. Earthly words cannot describe how I felt about Tyria…”                                     -The Last Words of Aileen Wuornos.

May She Finally Have Peace.

-Anemone