Phyllis Chesler - Requiem for a Female Serial Killer

Aileen (age 20) with her husband. Lewis Gratz Fell.

Introduction:

Haunted by a Serial Killer

Florida, USA, 1990

Two women are being sought as possible suspects in the shooting deaths of eight to twelve middle-aged men who were lured to their deaths on the Florida highways. Suspect #1 is a white female, five foot eight to five foot ten, with blonde hair. Suspect #2 is also a white female, five foot four to five foot six, with a heavy build and short brown hair. These women are armed and dangerous and may be our nations first female serial killers. Investigators feel compelled to warn the public, particularly middle-aged white men traveling alone.

T his news broadcast sounded unreal, almost mythicalas diabolically whimsical as Orson Welles 1938 broadcast on the Martian invasion. What was Everywomans most forbidden fantasy and Everymans worst nightmare doing on the airwaves? Was this some kind of joke?

It was not. For the first time in American history, a woman stood accused of being a serial killerof having killed seven or eight adult male motorists, one by one, in just over a year, after accompanying them to wooded areas off Highway I-75 in Florida, a state well known for its sun, surf, and serial killers. What made this unique was that all the men were strangers, not husbands, not intimates.

Were these two women members of that radical feminist collective in Gainesville, the university town where countless female students had been serially raped, mutilated, killed and ritually posed? Or were they apolitical swamp creatures, criminal outlaws, perhaps prostitutes, finally driven mad by their lives on the Killing Fields?

I would soon find out. I got Ailee/Aileen (Lee) Carol Wuornos to call me a few months after she was arrested. Once on the line, I knew Id only have a few seconds to gain her attention.

Lee, I represent a feminist government in exile. We know that youve been captured and wed like to help.

Far fuckin out! Youre the Womens Lib, right?

Yes.

Tell the women out there that Im innocent. Tell them that men hate our guts. I was raped and I defended myself. It was self-defense. I could not stop hustling just because some asshole was going around Florida raping and killing women. I still had to hustle. Can you tell me why men think sex is so important? Why do they have to behave like animals, pant, pant. I can just live masturbating. Why cant men?

And thats how it all began.

* * *

This book is about a female serial killer and about the way in which her badass deeds pried the worlds imagination wide open. Here was a nobody who became a somebody, a throwaway child who became the whore who shot down Johns. Someone anonymous who became famous, a kickass folk hero like Jesse James or Bonnie and Clyde.

Wuornos hit the ground running before either Thelma or Louise came to town. She fired some shots heard round the world, shots which we hoped would warn male serial killers that they might just end up dead if they continued to rape and murder women. Her bullets shattered the silence about violence against prostituted women, about what happens to them when they refuse to take it anymore.

No small feat.

Wuornos, the hitchhiking lesbian prostitute, was no longer prey; she had become a predator. She enacted the forbidden feminist longing for armed female assassins who would rescue girls and women from incestuous fathers and stepfathers, pedophiles, sexual harassers, serial rapists and from sex slavery in brothels and private dungeons.

Talk about women who run with the wolves! Wuornos navigated America with a primeval cunning, a scavenging genius, without which neither wildlife nor prostitutes could survive: Not for a day, not for an hour. She was a feral child, a Wolf-Girl, a snarling loner, and she understood early on that mutilated female corpses litter the landscape all over the country and that they remain unclaimed and un-mourned.

Once, Wuornos had discovered such a corpse herself. In a letter to a childhood friend, Wuornos wrote that in 1973, when she was seventeen, she was hitchhiking outside of Chicago along I-80 when she smelled something real bad, a "foul odor" which she followed; then, she found a woman's pitiful headless, limbless torso. Wuornos writes that, although she frantically tried, she could not get a state trooper or even a trucker to pay the slightest attention.

Wuornos "got" it a long time ago: Women are treated like garbage, whether theyre alive or dead.

* * *

Oh, I had my reasons for getting involved. I wanted a jury to hear the truth about how dangerous the working life really is; how prostitutes are routinely infected with diseases, gang-raped, tortured, and murdered; and that Wuornos had been raped and beaten so many times that, by now, if she was at all human, shed have to be permanently drunk and out of her mind.

I was a bit younger in 1990, the year she committed most of her murders. Would I get involved now? I doubt it. Physically, I couldnt do it. Would I still see Wuornos as a feminist folk hero of sorts? Yes, I would, or primarily as a dangerous, damaged, doomed, and demented womanwell, she was that, too.

Would I still be as sympathetic toward this volatile, trigger-tempered, foul-mouthed child-woman, and would I still risk being seen as defending, or advocating for such an unsympathetic woman?

Perhapsfor here I am, publishing the damn book.

I put whatever Id written away in a box, kept it safe, thought about it from time to time, but mainly forgot about it. Then, in the summer of 2019, as I was renovating my apartment, that box literally fell off the shelf. I opened it and was amazed by how timely and important the issues raised by her case still are.

I resurrected my huge Wuornos archive and began reading thousands of pages of legal documents and the interviews I did with Wuornos both on the phone and in person.

I found our correspondence and am publishing some of our letters for the first time in this book.

I also organized the hundreds of interviews I did with the entire cast of colorful characters, including her biological mother, the lover who testified against her, a multitude of Florida lawyers, former prostitutes, the team of experts Id put together and hoped would testify at her trial, and the feminists who worked at Floridas shelters for battered women and rape crisis centers.

This book is about Wuornos, but it is also about my trying to get inside her head to see it both her way and my way, and to understand us both.

I still believe that her first murder took place in a violent struggle to save her life. As a prostitute with a prison record, she could not report what had happened to the police. After this first, traumatic kill, somethingmaybe everythingchanged. She went on a murderous spree which lasted about a year.