FEW murderers have inspired such fascination and horror as Aileen Wuornos who shot dead seven men in a year.
But doubts are being cast on the reliability of the convictions, which led the 46-year-old Death Row inmate to be executed by lethal injection in Florida in 2002.
A new Netflix documentary titled Aileen Wuornos: Queen of Serial Killers tells how jurors thought victim Richard Mallory was an innocent man when in fact the prosecution knew he had a conviction for attempted rape.
Wuornos was only ever tried by a jury for the murder of Mallory and she always insisted that she shot him in self defence after he raped her.
The documentary also questions whether Wuornos, who was portrayed by Charlize Theron in the 2003 movie Monster, was mentally fit to stand trial.
One man who has championed her cause for over three decades is British film-maker Nick Broomfield.
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He met Wuornos on Death Row in 1991 and a year later released the documentary Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer.
Nick, who interviewed her again prior to her execution, believes she isn’t a ‘serial killer’ and shouldn’t have been executed due to her fragile mental state.
He tells The Sun: “Richard Mallory was a sexual offender. I think Richard Mallory definitely tortured her.
“I think once she killed him she just kind of went a little crazy.
“When we met her she thought, for some unknown reason, that we were members of a rock band that were performing that night in the prison.
“And I kept telling her, ‘No no, we’re here for you.’ I just thought she was very deluded.
“It was my opinion that by the time of execution she had really developed some sort of schizophrenic personality.
“She thought her mind was being controlled, she was certifiably insane but that didn’t seem to stop them executing her.”
State of fear
The slayings of seven men, where six of the bodies were found with multiple gunshot wounds, in Florida between November 1989 and November 1990 put the state in fear for who might be next.
The killer dumped the corpses, often naked, far from their vehicles and blonde hair was found at the scene.
When Wuornos’s fingerprints were found on items belonging to the first victim Mallory that had been pawned, she was arrested.
Wuornos, originally from Michigan, had previous convictions, including assault and armed robbery.
Despite mounting evidence linking her to all seven deaths, detectives felt they needed a confession.
They arranged for Wuornos’s female lover Tyria Moore, who was six years her junior, to get that admission of guilt on tape.
The Netflix documentary, which is streaming now, plays that recording in which Tyria tells Wuornos “I don’t know if I can go on living” if she is caught up in the case.
This emotional pressure persuaded Wuornos to confess.
The original judge in the case, Gayle Graziano, was unhappy about the way the police and prosecution were building their case by using Tyria.
She says in archive footage: “They ain’t looking for the truth, they’re p***ing on the system, she obviously loved this woman to her detriment.”
Graziano was then taken off the trial, because she thought “they knew I would give this woman a fair trial, they had no intention of that ever happening.”
They ain’t looking for the truth
Judge Graziano
The suggestion is that politicians were keen to secure a conviction of the “lesbian prostitute”.
That’s an opinion shared by Nick, who comments: “She became a sort of political weapon.”
The new judge allowed the prosecutor to mention the six other murder cases during the trial, even though the jury were only supposed to know about the Mallory case they were trying in 1992.
They were also not told that Mallory had a conviction for assault with intent to rape from 1957 and had spent a decade in an institution.
After his conviction, he had said: “I hope they give me the gas chamber. I was afraid I might do something sometime to somebody.”
And that is exactly what Wuornos told the jury had happened – that she killed him in self-defence after he’d raped and beaten her.
Fit to die?
Having been found guilty, the next question was whether Wuornos should face the death penalty.
Her defence team provided psychiatric reports which claimed she was mentally unstable and had a personality disorder.
But the judge sentenced Wuornos to death.
Nick, who corresponded with the killer up until the end, believes she was not mentally fit to be executed.
When he went to interview Wuornos in jail in 1991 she didn’t understand what was going on, despite him repeatedly explaining he was making a documentary about her.
She just decided we were her friends
Nick Broomfield
Nick recalls: “She attached this sort of weird glamour to us. When we arrived to film her or something she just decided we were her friends.”
He does, though, accept that Wuornos shot all seven of the men.
Nick says: “I think she was probably having to charge pretty rock bottom amounts of money to go off into the woods with these guys and you know it was just a convenient way of getting all their money.
“What she said to me for years was that she was just robbing them. She then murdered them so that they couldn’t identify her.
“But she clearly got a bit crazy after Mallory.”
Serial killer?
Despite that he doesn’t think she fits the definition of a serial killer.
Nick explains: “The definition of a serial killer is someone who has a particular way in which they kill people yeah and it’s almost like a fetish and they generally refine their method over these series of killings.
“Aileen didn’t have anything like that. I don’t see her as a serial killer, not for a moment.”
The State of Florida did see her as a serial killer, though, and wanted convictions in the other six cases.
In the Netflix documentary we see archive footage of Arlene Pralle, who adopted Wuornos following her arrest.
The deeply religious Arlene convinces Wuornos that she can go to heaven and the killer comes to believe that execution will get her there quicker.
Desire to die
Her new legal representative Steve Glazer supported the idea of Wuornos pleading ‘no contest’ to the other murder charges.
Nick recalls: “The thing that was strange was at a certain point when I was making the film she suddenly said ‘I’m guilty.’
“She just wanted to die, I think, being in prison was awful for her.
“She was mainly in a sort of solitary confinement. When she went out she’d get into fights with the other inmates and she wasn’t that strong.”
She just wanted to die
Nick Broomfield
Attempts were made to appeal against Wuornos’s death sentence.
Nick was contacted by a group of lawyers from New York who wanted to build a legal case for the Death Row inmate.
He helped them, but Wuornos preferred to listen to Arlene and Steve.
Nick remembers “she sort of adored Steve” and says “I think she had this idea that” she was “going to breed wolves together” with Arlene.
But Steve wasn’t a suitable lawyer in Nick’s opinion because his film Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer showed him puffing on a big joint.
Near the end, Wuornos dropped her appeals and was more fulsome in her confession than ever before.
She told the cameras: “I killed them cold as ice. I would kill again.”
Wuornos had sealed her fate and on October 9, 2002 was executed by lethal injection.
Nick, who was the last journalist to interview Wuornos prior to her execution, does think she “revelled in a bit of attention.”
But he believes the main reason she wanted to meet film-makers and reporters like him was for company.
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He concludes: “She was pretty lonely.”
Aileen Wuornos: Queen of the Serial Killers, is on Netflix now