Was Aileen Wuornos A Monster Or The Victim? (Born To Kill) | Our Life

[Music] eileen wuornos would terrorize florida as the highway killer she just simply pulled out her gun and pulled him off the road and killed him seven men in cold blood a hitchhiking prostitute that broke all the rules she is said to be the first female serial killer in a non-care giving capacity but was worn off driven to murder the kid said look at her she's already had a baby she's a prostitute nobody should hang out with anybody like that didn't realize that she was raped or was she born to kill i knew she was messed

up but never did i ever think she'd commit murder [Music] [Music] eileen wuornos was born on the 29th of february 1956. she was abandoned by her mother when just a baby she and her brother keith were adopted by their grandparents lori and britta juanos she would believe they were her real mother and father she and her brother both thought her own grandparents were her real parents and their mother diane a sister rather than their true mother and this place the kids if you like under a false pretext at some point they're going to find out

that this is not really the case eileen never met her natural father leo pittman was a career criminal and child molester convicted of the rape of a seven-year-old girl and a suspect in a child murder case she never really knew her biological father indeed eileen wuernos's natural father was a convicted sex offender and that does lead to all kinds of questions in relation to could there have been some kind of genetic predisposition developing here in relation to what would happen to eileen wuernos in her life [Music] karen gamble attended the same elementary school as the

young eileen i first met eileen when i was in first grade and from then on i fell behind but she went on but i remember her always you know in every school that i ever went to eileen went to school with me eileen was quiet girl and i knew that she was a troubled girl no one wanted to play with her when she was little i could i always felt sorry for her and but they didn't want to play with her because she would just sit on the little step by the back you know door

where you going to your class i think she was like withdrawn you know she was looked lonely scared [Music] eileen's home life was far from conventional although she was close to her grandmother britta laurie warnos was a heavy drinker who commanded a strict regime eileen would regularly suffer at the hands of the man she thought was her father i think he was real abusive to her the grandfather he was a mean real mean man larry held very very tight reins on the family his his own wife was was alcoholic alcoholism ran through the family and

was almost like a basically a daily way of life on a daily basis the strict regime that was imposed became militaristic it was quite you know vicious the beatings were very regular it was done in a ritual manner she would have to actually clean the strap that she was beaten with and she was beaten in quite a pseudosexual way this may have actually loosened her morals but then again they may have been fairly loosened already she did strike up a relationship with her brother which was sexual and was possibly detected to some degree by her

adopted father eileen was considered a wild child with a quick temper she didn't have a healthy relationship with anybody male or female there was never any sense of attachment emotionally to anyone there was never any sense of safety and security which most people and children especially babies need desperately her relationship with her brother was clearly dysfunctional but it was close given that she didn't really bond that well um particularly with her adopted father or other individuals and certainly not with people at school immediately her brother was the only consistent factor so she had someone that

throughout life she could rely on and being of a borderline type personality with flying moods and a need a desperate inner need for someone that was always going to be there predictably for her as a support keith fell into that role the young eileen warnos rebelled escaping through her bedroom window she would head to a wooded area known by local youths as the pits oh there was like three little lakes back there no homes back there and all of us kids could go back there and start the big bonfires and just party and have our

radios on kids would pull up at their cars and we would just party all night long here the pubescent eileen would remove her clothes and perform sex acts on young neighborhood boys her reward loose change and cigarettes the town in which she grew up is is white bred america so to speak you know where it looks very sweet and very nice and very quiet but for her to be doing that was highly unusual her sex was a means to an end cigarettes money a ride eileen mournos became known to the neighborhood kids as the sig

pig this was a young girl who was prepared to sell sexual services for cigarettes this young woman's self-worth this young woman's understanding of how she could survive in the world was almost totally determined by her willingness to engage in sexual activity inappropriately this was a a young woman who would have got no attention would have come to no one's notice would have been given no praise other than attention and praise and notice that came through the sale of sexual services to other people who would have used her for their own particular ends at 12 years

old eileen and her brother keith discovered the truth about their parentage [Music] upon being told that her grandparents were not her real parents and were in fact her grandparents the sense of deception and the sense that perhaps the whole world was possibly on some kind of conspiracy against her will have fitted very much into aliens experience of life at that point in time fellow teenager dawn bockins befriended the troubled eileen while the rest of the neighborhood saw her as a promiscuous troublemaker with a fiery temper dawn saw eileen's good side she was kind of quiet

but then she'd get drinking too much when she get drinking too much she just felt like everybody was after her all the time which they were they were always calling her names and stuff like that because a couple of times she'd get in fights with the kids so i would always just stand up for her you know just kind of protect her otherwise the kids would always be all over her in her quest for popularity and acceptance eileen was becoming ever more the outcast this approach of almost selling herself to gain favor with others and

to to attract young boys and to feel some kind of esteem that she's wanted had a contradictory effect on her social life she would desperately try and make some kind of social life for herself she would actually hold parties but those parties she would be the first person to be ejected because most people saw her as being cheap somebody that they would pay to have sexual activity with not someone they would have as a girlfriend or as a true friend one time well eileen went and got all these goodies and the beer and everything with

her money so she could have a party that night well all the kids went to the house to party and she was so happy that finally she's doing something all the kids are coming over because she's having a party they threw her out in the back of the party that she had gotten everything for and i was thinking poor thing i don't know they just treated her terrible buonos was performing poorly at school and frequently ran away from home often sleeping rough or hitchhiking [Music] selling sex had become the norm what i think we should

be talking about here is an inappropriate socialization of her as a child and in particular the sale of sexual services from the age of 10 really put her on a trajectory that would have been very difficult to reverse in the best of circumstances never mind the circumstances in which she was raised but eileen's dysfunctional childhood was about to get much worse the childhood of future serial killer eileen wuornos had been far from conventional [Music] the daughter of a sex offender abandoned by her mother raised by her grandparents and frequently beaten by the alcoholic grandfather she

thought of as her dad but in 1971 aged just 14 her life was about to take a new twist eileen gave birth to a seven pound baby boy i remember her and i and dawn being downstairs at dawn's house and she told us that she had a baby boy but not much you know she says she got to see him as soon as he was born but that was all given her age eileen's son was immediately taken for adoption she later claimed the pregnancy was the result of being raped that's when the kids said look

at her she's already been had a baby she's a prostitute nobody should hang out with anybody like that didn't realize that she was raped just months after eileen had given birth her grandmother britta who had raised eileen as her own died of suspected liver failure suddenly the one person she loved most and loved her unconditionally back had died and then when she died the father just went nuts and threw all the kids out of the house and she had no one and that's when eileen just she had no place to go kicked out of her

home eileen was forced to live rough sleeping in the woods at the end of her street and in a car on a neighbor's drive she'd go to the local gas station to wash her hair and clean up [Music] i think it's really important to say that there doesn't seem to be any point in eileen warner's life where she was living as you and i might live she lived rough she lived in the woods she lived in cars her entire life was dominated by her willingness to sell sexual favors this is a very difficult environment in

which to survive this is a very difficult environment in which to have a sense of self that's based on the moral universe that you and i inhabit this is a young woman who clearly is going to have a great difficulty in not only surviving in the type of community in which you and i would survive this is the kind of woman who's never going to prosper never going to achieve anything this is the kind of woman who is ultimately always going to die young by 15 years old wuornos had dropped out of school and began

a new life on america's highways she was really withdrawn terribly but i remember she would tell dohan and i oh i got to go you know and she'd go off hitchhiking by herself or whatever you know she would just take off and go eileen led a nomadic lifestyle prostituting and hitchhiking from one place to the next [Music] she found happiness of a sort among the hard-drinking lawless biker gangs of colorado [Music] because of the way that she was brought up wernos was always most comfortable in cultures that were on the margins of society she liked

to live rough in her car by the roadside she would run with motorcycle gangs that would allow her to escape a kind of history in the community in which she was raised in which she had a reputation as sig pig but it would also be a kind of community this community on the margins a motorcycle gang in which she could not only forget that kind of reputation that she once had but also where she could also live in the culture which would be less judgmental about her behavior almost encouraging or permitting of the behavior that

she had been socialized into engaging with it's the kind of living on the edge of our existence that became actually the totality of her existence [Music] in 1976 age 20 wuornos moved to florida the sunshine and golden beaches were an attractive alternative to the harsh michigan winters there she continued her life of petty crime and prostitution [Music] the sense of being free the sense of not being attached it may have appealed to her because she didn't stop doing it she continued to live that lifestyle for most of the years so obviously it appealed to her

in the sense of not having any attachments any responsibilities it may have been something that she thrived with in july of 1976 eileen learned that her brother keith had died of throat cancer although eileen and keith had geographically drifted apart he'd remained loyal keith had been down in the va hospital dying of throat cancer for some reason i was down there visiting him even though i was married i'd say to my husband i got to go visit keith take him cigarettes and candy whatever he was and then all of a sudden at the funeral here

comes eileen i said where have you been for this last year you know your brother was pretty sick she had no idea who was that sick eileen lived on the fringes of society in florida a chaotic life of long drinking binges punctuated by flashes of her now famously quick and violent temper whether it was by prostitution by threat by theft she'd been brought up with a history of shoplifting and she often used her volatile nature aggressive sudden turn to to to violence as a tool to make her way through this unfortunately this was inevitably going

to come undone and as she begot more ambitious and as she began to hit bigger targets the the weight of the law was thrown against her [Music] around 1 25 p.m on may the 20th 1981 a 25 year old eileen turned from petty crime to armed robbery an intoxicated warnos took a 22-caliber handgun into a convenience store held the clerk at gunpoint and demanded money she was promptly arrested by police and imprisoned for three years [Music] prison would be something of a learning curve really because she would have actually mixed with other criminals if i

know what ordinary criminals are really like and her more chaotic approach to crime was probably seemed a lot less organized she would have defended herself quite vehemently with her flying temper and ability to oscillate her moods but she would also probably found some solace in females and perhaps realized that her own sexuality was not 100 heterosexual in 1983 age 27 eileen was released and quickly fell straight back into a hitchhiking booze field life of crime from childhood she had progressively engaged in drugs alcohol to a very high extent and this became if you like her

daily fueling of her behavior and her sustenance often these would be probably used as currency for her prostitute behavior she would have been much of the time drunk and engaging with new individuals she would probably have found this to be a style of interacting of entrapping individuals by getting them to buy drinks to get them both drunk when she could actually come to our own by the end of the decade eileen's crimes would include murder [Music] by the 1980s future serial killer eileen warnos had been selling sex for more than a decade and has spent

time in prison for armed robbery on the fringes of society wuornos continued to prostitute herself to men but for companionship she now began to turn to women the idea that eileen perhaps had problems realizing her full sexuality was one that was probably buried um in the kind of time period she was she was she was trying to enact out go through the process of of what should be a relationship but having a sexual relationship with your brother having prostitution as a form of relationship with adults having sex for money as a child these do not

add up to being a proper relationship and i don't think that she'd perhaps suddenly turned lesbian halfway through her life i think the pressures of the kind of existence that she had made her realization of her sexual side orientated towards women far more coherent far more salient and i think that's what pushed her finally in that [Music] direction in the spring of 1986 eileen now known as lee met 24 year old hotel maid tyra moore it was instant love at first sight in the form of tyra moore you had someone who is less threatening someone

who offered the kind of stability without the kind of i want immediate sex and i will give you this for it broke the mold of the way that she'd been interacting with individuals and to some degree she would be craving someone to share her existence with there is a temptation to see the relationship that she forms with tyra moore as simply an acceptable lesbian relationship that's going to bring a form of structure to werness's life but for me that always seems a very shaky platform on which to build an understanding of what would then subsequently

happen to warn us right from the start i don't feel that warner's had the underpinning psychological infrastructure to form any kind of permanent relationship this was somebody who didn't know how to express affection how to express love how to give and take how to deal on a day-to-day basis with another human being in the way that you and i might engage on a day-to-day basis with other human beings one of the primary characteristics of someone with a borderline personality is their somewhat vacuous sense of self and they do need someone and will gravitate and once

they get hold of someone they will cling to them jealously and strongly and in a very focused manner eileen and tyra became inseparable living together drinking together and enjoying one of eileen's favorite pastimes firing handguns in the woods it was dominated by the most forceful nature of her personality even though tyru was far more consistent holding down a job and doing relatively normal things she was entranced and she was carried along by aileen's somewhat more itinerant existence i do feel there's also an element in which they normalize unacceptable behavior within that relationship by the late

80s eileen and tyra were living in a room at the budget fairview motel in daytona while tyra worked as a cleaner at the more upscale casa del mar now in her thirties with a lifetime of prostitution behind her eileen was beginning to lose her looks earning a living as a hooker was becoming increasingly difficult [Music] there was a lot of frustration because she wasn't able to earn as much as she was when she was younger and more attractive and she had the pressure from tyra moore to make more money more more she had to go

out more and uh she wanted to spend time with tyra and the only way tyra would spend time with lee is if lee had the money many of eileen's regular customers were in the military and with forces heading out to the gulf business was bad i think there was that high level of frustration and i think rather than striking out at the one person that she thought of as a family member she began to strike out at the guys that she picked up on november the 30th 1989 51 year old electronics engineer richard mallory picked

up eileen wuornos on the highway her actual normal way of engaging with with a male was one of getting drunk of offering herself as a prostitute of taking as much money and perhaps even stealing the odd item and being abusive but she would also habitually take into carrying a gun maybe marilyn made a slight move in a dominant way that alien didn't like but however it was configured aileen took that extra step and shot this guy then decided that she was going to make sure he didn't speak to anyone and made sure he was dead

six weeks later mallory's body was found dumped in woodland north of daytona beach heat and insects had taken their toll the body was badly decomposed [Music] using a 22 caliber handgun from her purse mournos had unloaded four shots into mallory's chest and back one bullet striking his left lung causing a fatal hemorrhage before fleeing the scene in mallory's cadillac wuornos stole mallory's possessions and covered his lifeless body with a piece of carpet i always feel that the the first in a series of murders tells us a great deal about how the pattern of murders will

develop over the next few weeks few months it can clearly be an accident that first murder but if the person isn't stopped as a result of that first murder what they begin to realize is effectively they breathe out they're holding their breath because they're expecting to be arrested and then when they're not they breathe out and for some killers by breathing out and not being arrested they interpret that as well let's do it again it's a little bit like taking a hit of a drug to which you become addicted it's similar to what happens in

the brain to need more and more and more until you just can't get enough [Music] in november 1989 after a life of abuse crime and prostitution eileen wuornos had picked up 51 year old richard mallory on the highway taken him to the woods for sex shot him dead and robbed him everybody has that breaking point and i think that she finally just snapped on june the 1st 1990 the body of 43 year old construction worker david spears was discovered by an illegal trash dump in citrus county naked but for his cap [Music] he had been

shot six times and robbed committing these murders alien had a massive advantage of surprise these individuals were guys they were in their own vehicle they felt empowered this was just a prostitute they picked up they would not have expected a gun to come from the back you do not expect a female serial killer june the sixth forty-year-old rodeo worker charles carskaden was found dead in pasco county he'd been robbed and shot nine times with a handgun we don't know if she felt that killing these individuals in florida and taking their cars and their money and

everything was just a continued pattern from what she had been doing since she was nine years old with no remorse no sense of anguish no sense that she needed to make up for these crimes it was just something she did the body of 65 year old part-time missionary peter symes was never found but his car was [Music] on the 4th of july 1990 two women were seen to abandon it after swerving off the road and crashing near orange springs [Music] these were men that were traveling on the highways and by ways of central florida you

know the rural interstates so to speak men that were typically older in the 50s and 60s men that were lonely and more desperate to seek the company of a woman the string of four murders left police baffled [Music] at first of course when you have these when they're scattered if they all incur occur in one community uh it's much easier to realize you're dealing with a serial killer uh in this case they were spread over better than 100 miles serial killers often operate in that fashion they won't kill sometimes in their hometown or in their

home area they may drive two hours or four hours or go away for the weekend to kill someone somewhere else and come back this is one of those incidents where where we we did find the first body in daytona beach but other than that we didn't realize we had a serial killer until we began to pool our resources there was a lot of pressure on law enforcement to solve this because here was this woman this prostitute they knew the circumstances they could see the pattern emerging and they could not find who this was back in

daytona eileen would pawn her victim's possessions sharing the proceeds with tyra and boozing in biker bars a favorite the last resort just a short walk from their motel al bulling is the bar's owner this was a place where she felt comfortable to relax and have a few drinks and end of a day's work with what i want to call it we sat down and talked and she played the jukebox at the time and if she got out of control allowed like anybody else you just told her mate quiet down she quieted down and really had

no problems with her whatsoever she never let on what she did we never asked what she did we could care less she started coming in with with ty at that time was her girlfriend and stuff like that and ty's just a typical woman just wanted everything in the world and erleen tried to give it to her and needless to say it didn't work out in july 50 year old troy buress a salesman was found dead in a wooded area in marion county he had been shot twice the ultimate aim was just to get rid of

the stuff to get money to get it to tyria to further their existence as a daily thing killing had just become a way of life on the 12th of september 1990 two teenage boys were riding bicycles aimlessly around the streets and cul-de-sacs of marion county it was 91 degrees and had been raining as they turned into a dead end they found 56 year old former police chief dick humphreys he was dead shot six times in the head and torso she was somewhat shambolic a very disorganized killer as we would call them she was disorganized in

her daily life she was not a great planner her idea of consequences were far too complex she could not control the chaotic lifestyle the chaotic way she committed crimes anyone who was perhaps more ritually involved with a murder would possibly have retained aspects and would have made the crime scene their own with aileen her killings were just purely and simply for profit [Music] in november the body of 62 year old police reserve gino antonio was found in dixie county naked except for his socks he'd been shot in the head and back four times with the

various law enforcement agencies pooling their resources they began to focus on the car belonging to peter symes that had been crashed and dumped in july became suspicious when they wrecked one of the cars from one of the victims and they were seen walking away by several passing motorists and people and so then we realized that car came from the killing scene a different jurisdiction but we it looked like it was two females probably and that put us on the right track [Music] [Applause] with the net closing in wuornos took her handgun and threw the murder

weapon from the bridge into rose bay but juanos had been careless on the 6th of december she had pawned a camera belonging to her first victim richard mallory although she'd used an alias she was required by law to provide a thumbprint and police were able to trace her true identity on january the 8th 1991 eileen was spotted by two undercover police officers they followed her to the last resort bar where she was drinking heavily it was a cold january night like in 91 she really had no place to stay so when he closed up the

bar i had some trailers sitting out here in the back and i said there's a couple of construction workers that are staying in the trailers they'll be here till the morning and if you need a place there's a old car seat out there you can take and lay down on and maybe the guys will let you stay in the trailer or something then the next morning she got up we went to the bar we opened up i was shooting pool with her for a couple hours and then a couple of these guys came in construction

workers and then she started shooting pool with them they didn't know if she had the gun with her or not so they didn't want nothing happening inside the bar so they waited for her to walk outside the bar and they arrested her and took her away and that was the last we ever seen about her was arrested on january the 9th law enforcement struck a deal with tyra moore granting her immunity if she would testify against her partner and convince eileen to confess eileen admitted to the murder of seven men although she claimed she had

killed them all in self-defense after warners was arrested she claimed that these men had raped her and it's perfectly feasible that warnos had indeed been raped in the past but it seems to me to be too coincidental that every one of her victims was trying to rape her that was a between the incident and trial invention her first statements to the police didn't indicate that at all she had not told her friend time or that she'd ever been attacked even if she were afraid to tell the police afraid they wouldn't believe her she surely would

have told her friend her lover never mentioned it she just simply pulled out her gun and pulled him off the road and killed him seven men in cold blood it's not unusual for a serial killer to confess to a crime and then backpedal oh they made me angry or they tried to attack me or i had to protect myself and then to go back and start confessing to another crime and then say no what i told you before is no i never told you that [Music] after 10 years on death row eileen wuornos changed her

story for the last time she stated that she had not killed in self-defense she had shot her seven victims in cold blood [Music] she is said to be the first female serial killer in a non-care giving capacity at her final hearing she testified that if she's ever let loose she would kill again that if she was let into the prison yard she would kill people that she doesn't like people [Music] i think elaine true to someone who was mentally ill just vacillated between you know on the one hand they were all self-defense on the other

hand if you let me out i'll kill again on the other hand the cops knew i was killing and they let me continue to kill because the cops had book deals with the hollywood interests so um i think towards the end she just wanted to die and indeed towards the end i think she waved all her appeals basically was what we call a volunteer [Music] on october the 9th 2002 eileen warnos was executed by lethal injection [Music] so was eileen mornos herself the daughter of a convicted sex offender a born killer or was she the

twisted product of a childhood of abuse and loneliness and a lifetime spent selling her body i mean she was raised by a person she thought was her father turned out to be a grandfather her father hung himself in prison her brother keith who died tragically in 1976 there's been some suggestion raped her and i think by the time she's out in the highways and byways of florida in 1991 doing these acts yeah she's unraveled at that point to call her evil i lean more towards she's just a product of her environment and her circumstances and

you know at a certain point it came to what it was i knew she was messed up but never did i ever think she'd commit murder [Music] eileen is different she may have been born to kill but also that her environment acted so devastatingly on her that the combination of being born and the environment is unmistakable leading to the murders [Music] she was hell-bound and she was on a course a roller coaster of a life which would ultimately end in some form of accident death or destruction to others she had so much going wrong in

her young life that it would have been very difficult indeed for her to have prospered in the world or indeed to have survived in our world the way that she was brought up the things that happened to her how she was always on the margins of society struggling even for something to eat and to gain something that would nourish her through selling sexual services seemed to me to write a script for eileen wernos that was impossible to put down until the very last act so whilst i'm not prepared to say that she was born to

kill i think in eileen warnos's case because of the script that she was handed she was socialized to kill eileen wuonos robbed and killed seven men the press would christen her the damsel of death but her best friend dawn botkins refuses to forget her good side poor eileen after her horrible life the teenager being bad twenties being bad thirties being bad then death row she wanted to go home to god that's exactly what she did i put her ashes right around her tree when we got home she wanted me to do that and this is

where she's at and her tree's getting bigger and bigger and bigger and i suppose she'll be here forever and it's quiet it's peaceful nobody attacking her nobody bothering her she's very happy this is exactly where she belongs no other place right here [Music] [Music] [Music] you