Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  The evening had gone pleasantly so far, but between Mallory’s paranoia and Aileen’s hair-trigger rages, something suddenly went very wrong. According to Wuornos, Mallory’s refusal to get undressed was proof that he intended to rape her. She opened the door and stood outside the car naked. Aileen confessed that she bent down into the car to get her bag off the floor in which she had a .22 handgun. Mallory was still seated behind the wheel of his car. Aileen recounted that as she picked up her bag, Mallory turned in his seat and grabbed at it, which further confirmed for her his intention to rape her.

  Aileen said that she wrenched the bag free of Mallory’s grip, drew her handgun, and shot him once through the chest as he still sat in the driver’s seat. According to Aileen she shouted, “You sonofabitch! I knew you were going to rape me.”

  Mallory staggered out of the car, attempting to run away. Aileen stated that she then ran around the front of the car to where he was stumbling away and said, “If you don’t stop, man, right now, I’ll keep shooting.” She then fired a second shot, which brought Mallory down to the ground. Hovering over Mallory now collapsed on the ground, she squeezed off two more shots into his chest.

  One of the bullets had passed through Mallory’s lung and punched a hole through his chest cavity, causing massive internal bleeding. Mallory apparently lived another ten to twenty minutes before succumbing to the wound. Aileen stood by as he died.

  Aileen stated in her confession:

  So, I said, “Well, since I’ve been talkin’ to you all night long, I think you seem like a pretty nice guy, you know, so okay, let’s…let’s go have fun. So I started to lay down and he was gonna, you know, unzip his pants. And I said, “Why don’t you take your clothes off?” My God, you know, I said, “Well, it will hurt to do it like that.” Then he got pissed, callin’ me. He said, “Fuck you, baby, I’m gonna screw you right here and now”…something like that.

  …And I said, “No, no, you’re not gonna just fuck me. You gotta pay me.” And he said, “Oh, bullshit.” And that’s when he got pissed. Now I’m coming back to recollection. Okay, so then we started fightin’ and everything else and I jumped out. He grabbed my bag and I grabbed my bag and the arm busted and I got the bag again and I pulled it out of his hand and that’s when I grabbed the pistol out. And when I grabbed the pistol out, I just shot ’im in the front seat.

  …And then when I shot him the first time, he just backed away. And I thought…I thought to myself, Well, hell, should I, you know, try to help this guy or should I just kill him. So I didn’t know what to do, so I figured, well, if I help the guy and he lives, he’s gonna tell on me and I’m gonna get it for attempted murder, all this jazz. And I thought, Well, the best thing to do is just keep shootin’ him. Then I’d get to the point that I thought, Well, I shot him. The stupid bastard woulda killed me so I kept shootin’. You know. In other words, I shot him and then I said to myself, Damn, you know, if I didn’t…sh…shoot him, he woulda shot me because he woulda beat the shit outta me, maybe I would have been unconscious. He woulda found my gun goin’ through my stuff, and shot me. Cause he probably woulda gone to get for tryin’ to rape me, see? So I shot him and then I thought to myself, Well, hell, I might as well just keep on shootin’ ’im. Because I gotta kill the guy ’cause he’s goin’ to…he’s gonna…you know, go and tell somebody if he lives, or whatever. Then I thought to myself, Well, this dir…this dirty bastard deserves to die anyway because of what he was tryin’ to do to me.

  So those three things went in my mind for every guy I shot…I have to say it, that I killed ’em all because they got violent with me and I decided to defend myself. I wasn’t gonna let ’em beat the shit outta me or kill me, either. I’m sure if after the fightin’ they found I had a weapon, they would’ve shot me. So I just shot them.137

  After waiting for Mallory to die, Aileen went through his pockets taking his money and identification and then dragging his corpse away and covering it with a scrap of carpeting and some cardboard. Still naked, she drove Mallory’s Cadillac away from the scene to another isolated spot nearby. She then dressed and finished her remaining beer. She kept what she thought was valuable and the rest of the items, like Mallory’s extra clothing, she flung into woods along the way and into a Dumpster. As the sun rose, she drove back to the motel where Ty was still asleep.

  Explaining Aileen Wuornos

  Years later when Aileen was waiting on death row, she would say, “It took me seventeen years to finally kill somebody…to have the heart to do it…a rapist or anybody. But I finally got really stone-cold and said, you know, enough is enough.”

  There is a certain melancholy logic in Aileen’s confession—a meeting of Mallory’s paranoia with Aileen’s own long-standing rage. There is a string of accounts going back to her childhood of how Aileen’s mood would suddenly shift from friendly to menacing. Although Aileen had not hurt anyone seriously for many years, she had scared a legion of people with her sudden rages—from her own stepsister to friends, lovers, and casual acquaintances. It was only a matter of time before she hurt somebody.

  Once she killed, however, she crossed into a whole new cathartic territory—she was in a sense reborn as a monster. However voluntarily she pursued murder in her life, Aileen nonetheless had been used and abused sexually since the age of eleven—that is an indisputable fact. Whatever violent fantasies she might have kept in check during her rages were finally unleashed into reality and there was no going back. She had become a killer and one more or less murder would never change that. Whatever had restrained her from taking life until that point was rendered meaningless.

  The morning of the first murder, she made no mention of the attempted rape to Ty when she returned to their motel room nor did Aileen have any marks or bruises on her according to Ty. In fact, Aileen on no occasion ever told Tyria that she had been raped or assaulted when she was roadside hooking. It was only thirteen months later, when she was confessing to police, that she first claimed she shot Mallory because she became afraid he intended to rape her.

  In their psychological analysis of Wuornos, Stacey Shipley and Bruce Arrigo argue that she is a perfect case study of attachment disorder–triggered psychopathy. Her rages, parasitical behavior, inability to form attachments, and grandiose narcissisms rise like monsters in the night from her dysfunctional childhood. These behavioral traits lead to further alienation from her peers and abuse, which further deepened and amplified her behavioral disorders. Her sexual behavior as a child exposed her to even more victimization. By the time Aileen was in her midteens she had been thoroughly abused, used, and conceivably raped numerous times—a Cigarette Pig from the age of eleven. The fact that Aileen Wuornos did not kill anyone until she was in her thirties is somewhat of a miracle, actually, and might even argue for some sort of deep inner spark of goodness in the woman.

  As Shipley and Arrigo argue:

  She was socialized to modulate her own emotions through detachment and to control her environment through aggression and violence. In spite of the abuse she endured, Aileen learned to identify with the aggressor. The world was made of two kinds of people: victims and offenders. She chose the latter category. Her rigid internal working model of herself and the world she inhabited did not allow for anything in between. She no longer would be the victim.138

  Deborah Schurman-Kauflin writes about the female multiple murderers she surveyed:

  Within their lives, they had felt powerless against a parade of horrible events, and in order for them to restore a sense of balance (at least in their minds), they used the murders of other people like many people use a cigarette…They crave it because it calms them down, for within it, though they know it is bad for them, it serves as an immediate source of pleasure. And to the female multiple murderer, controlling another human being to death serves the same purpose. They are seeking a calm in their lives that they will never have, and deep down, they truly know it will never “fix” their lives.139

  We will never really know wh
at happened with Richard Mallory. Did he actually attempt to rape Aileen? Many will, of course, say yes, that even if she had agreed to have sex with him, was naked, and then suddenly refused at the last moment even for a reason as trivial as that he did not want to take his pants off, it was rape. No means no.

  Others might say that even if that is rape, it is not the kind of rape that would justify killing. Mallory was not making an unexpected unilateral sexual advance. They had agreed to have sex. The issue was not whether they were going to have sex, but how—whether Mallory was going to take his pants off or just unzip.

  Aileen’s Defense—“I Thought I Gotta Fight or I’m Going to Die.”

  None of this would be an issue, however, by the time Aileen went to trial for the murder of Richard Mallory a year later. Her defense had changed radically as did her account of her encounter with Mallory.

  According to her courtroom testimony on January 25, 1992:

  I told him I wouldn’t have sex with him. “Yes, you are, bitch. You’re going to do everything I tell you. If you don’t, I’m going to kill you and have sex with you after you’re dead just like the other sluts. It doesn’t matter, your body will still be warm.” He tied my wrists to the steering wheel, and screwed me in the ass. Afterwards, he got a Visine bottle filled with rubbing alcohol out of the trunk. He said the Visine bottle was one of my surprises. He emptied it into my rectum. It really hurt bad because he tore me up a lot. He got dressed, got a radio, sat on the hood for what seemed like an hour. I was really pissed. I was yelling at him, and struggling to get my hands free.

  Finally, he untied me from the steering wheel and put the rope around my neck. He’s still saying all kinds of jazz about what he wants to do to me. He told me to turn toward him, lie down, and spread my legs. And I guess he’s going to zipper fuck me. He had his clothes on. He was holding the cord around my neck like reins. I thought, I gotta fight or I’m going to die.

  I jumped up real fast, and spit in his face. And he said, “You’re dead, bitch. You’re dead.”

  I grabbed my bag and whipped my pistol out toward him, and he was coming toward me with his right arm, and I shot immediately. I shot at him. He started coming at me again. I shot. He stopped. I kind of pushed him away from me. He kind of sat up on the driver’s seat. I hurriedly opened the passenger door, ran around the driver’s side, opened the door real fast, looked at him and he started to come out. And I said, “Don’t come near me, I’ll shoot you again,” or something like that. “Don’t make me have to shoot you again,” something like that. He just started coming at me and I shot him…He fell to the ground.

  Despite efforts by the defense to exclude from the evidence Aileen’s videotaped confession from the previous year, which was radically different from her claim now, the jury got to see the evolution of Aileen’s defense from having shot Mallory because he did not want to take his pants off after her agreeing to have paid sex with him to now his outright anal rape of her after tying her hands and threatening to kill her. Moreover, it wasn’t just Mallory—all seven of Aileen’s victims were nothing but rapists she had shot in self-defense. Not only was Aileen defending herself, but they deserved to die. This was a particularly reprehensible defense because it instantly reduced all of the victims to the lowest denominator of rapist and raised Aileen to the height of victimhood.

  “Everywoman’s Most Forbidden Fantasy”: Feminist Martians to Aileen’s Defense

  The case of Aileen Wuornos and her “self-defense from rape” claim attracted a radical fringe of feminists like flies to a turd and there was no bigger fly than Phyllis Chesler, a professor of women’s studies and psychology at City University of New York (College of Staten Island), an author and an “expert witness” on battered women who kill their male aggressors. As one reviewer of Chesler’s ideas states, “This isn’t feminism for cowards.”140 Indeed it isn’t.

  Chesler offered herself to Aileen’s attorney as an “expert witness” in the phenomena of female-perpetrated murder in self-defense against rape and lobbied the media on behalf of Wuornos, writing an opinion piece for the New York Times entitled “A Double Standard for Murder?”141

  When Chesler was smartly turned away by Aileen’s lawyers, she bulled ahead anyway and made contact directly with Wuornos, eventually meeting with her and bolstering her assertions with the assurance that she is the victim and that her righteous self-defense against rape has led to her being falsely accused of being a serial killer by the phallocentric heteropatriarchal oppressors of all women.

  Chesler published an account of her role in the case in her book Notes of an Expert Witness.142 Chesler tells us that as soon as she had heard, even before Aileen was identified and arrested, that Florida police were seeking two women suspects in a series of highway murders, she thought the story…

  …sounded diabolically whimsical as Orson Welles’s 1938 broadcast on the Martian invasion. What was Everywoman’s most forbidden fantasy and Everyman’s worst nightmare doing on television? Was this some kind of joke? Perhaps these women were feminist Martians on a mission to avenge the Green River killings or the Montreal massacre.* If not, did female serial killers really exist on earth?143

  According to Chesler, women could not be serial killers because, “Serial killers are mainly white male drifters, obsessed with pornography and woman-hatred, who were themselves paternally abused children.”144 (Emphasis in the original.)

  This, of course, is nonsense. Most serial killers are not drifters (only 35 percent are migratory) and many male serial killers were maternally abused, the single greatest contribution to their hatred of women. For example, Edmund Kemper, who would eventually kill eight women, including his mother, was disciplined by her at the age of eight by being forced to sleep in a dark cellar for eight months, his only exit a trap door in the floor on which she would stand a kitchen table.145 Henry Lee Lucas’s prostitute mother, Viola, would insist that both Henry and his legless invalid father watch her having sex with her customers. If they refused, she would beat them with a club. The only thing Lucas loved in his childhood was a pet mule, but when his mother found out about his affection for it, she forced him to watch as she shot it dead. She then beat Lucas for how much it was going to cost to haul the dead animal away.146 Ottis Toole, who would partner with Lucas and who is suspected to have murdered and decapitated Adam Walsh, the son of John Walsh, the host of America’s Most Wanted, was dressed as a girl in petticoats and lace by his mother. Eddie Cole, who murdered thirteen victims, was dressed as “Mamma’s little girl” by his mother and forced to serve drinks to her guests and lovers. At least seven serial killers when they were boys, including Charles Manson, are known to have been tormented by their mothers by being dressed as girls. When Jerry Brudos’s mom discovered nocturnal seminal stains on his bedsheets, she forced him to wash them by hand and sleep without sheets while they dried on the line for the neighbors to see. Brudos was forced to live in a garden shed, when his mother decided that her favorite older son needed a room all for himself. Joseph Kallinger’s mother refused to allow her adopted son to play outside, flogged him with a whip, beat him with a hammer, threatened to cut off his genitals if she caught him having erections, and selected his wife for him. In every serial killer’s life, Mom is always there with him.

  Chesler proclaims that, “99 percent of mass, sexual, and serial murder” is committed by men.147 I don’t know about mass and sexual murder, but according to the most extensive study on serial homicide in the U.S. between 1800–1995, 83–85 percent of victims had been killed by male serial killers only.148 That means women are complicit in 15–17 percent of all serial homicides—nearly every sixth serial killing! While men commit a large majority of serial homicides, women’s contribution to the death toll is not nearly as insignificant as Chesler claims. So much for Chesler’s claimed “expertise.”

  It is not Chesler’s ignorance in the face of her claim to expertise that is so daunting.149 What makes Chesler so offensive is her blanket denigratio
n of the victims that Wuornos murdered. Chesler is no different from those who devalue the lives of prostitute victims “because they were worthless whores who asked for it by cruising the streets” or those who would claim “that prostitutes deserve to be raped—it is an occupational hazard,” when she proclaims that Wuornos was a victim simply because, “The men she killed all fit the profile of johns, those who frequent prostitutes.”150 Tell that to the family of the preacher Peter Siems whose body has never been found, the Bibles in his car flung out the window by Wuornos. Or to the widow of former police officer and child abuse investigator Dick Humphreys, who was never late without calling her. Or the daughter of David Spears, whose graduation gift Wuornos spent on beer and cigarettes after murdering her father. What “profile of johns” did these victims have according to Chesler? She never says. That they were all males perhaps?

  Yes, preachers and cops sometimes pick up prostitutes. But with the exception of one victim, none of these men had arrests on their records for picking up prostitutes or any other criminal offenses. It is entirely unclear how Aileen got into their cars in the first place. Humphreys, the former police officer, for example, had a mark on his body consistent with that from a barrel of a handgun being pressed hard against his side. Aileen was not dressed provocatively as a prostitute: She wore grungy cutoff jeans and a T-shirt and hitchhiked, propositioning men once inside the car. She could have just as easily been posing as a motorist in distress. In fact, the profile of the preacher, the ex-cop, and the police reservist, was precisely of the type of male who would stop and assist a person by a roadside appearing to be in distress, especially a woman. Chesler should be ashamed of herself. At least Aileen Wuornos was fighting for her life when she slandered her victims. What was Chesler’s excuse?