I wasn't born bad. I tried to tell you, man.
They lied. They lied so bad to you all.
You killed seven men, seven strangers.
Does that not make you a serial killer?
I didn't kill them every day, did I?
Welcome to "very scary people."
I'm Donnie wahlberg.
Between December of 1989 and November 1990,
Aileen Wuornos unleashed her rage on the state of Florida,
brutally gunning down seven victims.
Wuornos' childhood was the stuff of nightmares.
Her father was a convicted sex offender.
She was abandoned by her mother as an infant,
and she was raised by her grandparents
in an allegedly abusive household.
Then at age 12, she was raped.
Wuornos said she was not born bad.
Was this hellish start to her life
the reason she turned into an angry, violent killer?
How would this cold-blooded murderer finally be stopped?
This is part 2 of "monster made."
How would you describe Aileen Wuornos?
She is probably as cold a person is I've ever met.
Aileen Wuornos was living in Florida.
She was making her living as a prostitute
on interstate exits and entrances in central Florida.
She was in a relationship with tyria Moore.
And she falls in love.
Then in 1989, something changed.
Something happened.
She became a killer.
Aileen Wuornos' first victim was Richard Mallory.
Then David Spears and Charles carskaddon.
- Peter siems. - Troy burress.
- Richard Humphreys. - And Walter jeno Antonio.
The victims were all white and older males.
Bodies were found on rural roads near the interstate.
She actually drove away
every victim's vehicle from the crime scene.
There were also additional items taken,
and those would be her trophies and her souvenirs.
It just took a long time to link these cases together.
I can remember sitting there thinking,
"how come we're not coming up with anything?"
They were needing a break, and they didn't realize
that the break had already happened back in July.
Back in July, there was a car crash
in orange Springs, Florida.
That involved a car that belonged to Peter siems.
Aileen and tyria were on their way over to Daytona beach.
Car goes off the side of the road.
She told tyria that they needed to leave immediately
because this was a dead man's car.
So the witnesses see this car crash,
and two composites were generated.
So let's put it out there.
Once she made her second kill,
her third kill, her fourth kill, Aileen felt more confident.
She feels comfortable she's doing enough
to get away with the crimes,
but when we release the composites,
and when we put that out there,
I believe that came as quite a shock to her.
When the sketches came out, tyria freaked.
She saw the sketches,
and it actually looked more like tyria
than it did look like Aileen.
Tyria Moore has stated that Aileen told her
what she had done.
Now, tyria says she was never at the scenes of the killings.
In a certain sense, I think tyria was like a mafia wife.
She knew, but she didn't want to know what was going on.
I mean, all the evidence was there,
but as long as it was not spoken out loud,
then we'll just go along with how things are,
and that worked okay up until the point
where Ty recognized herself in a sketch along with Lee,
and that was one step too far.
And that's when they split up.
So tyria went back up north where she had family.
And now, Aileen is without the love of her life
to run on her own, but the noose is getting closer.
Police are looking for these two women for questioning.
Meanwhile, those sketches are bringing in hundreds of tips,
- hundreds of phone calls. - The tips that came in,
in this investigation begin to focus over in Daytona,
and knowing that we had a list of property
from these victims that was missing,
we then began a very intensive effort to visit pawn shops
to see if we could identify any of these items
that could've been pawned,
and it was during that investigation
that some items had been located at a pawn shop.
There was a radar detector and a camera
that had been stolen out of Richard Mallory's vehicle
- when he was murdered. - And they find a pawn ticket
for Richard Mallory's radar detector and his camera,
and there's a thumbprint.
Florida, back then, had just passed a law
as to where any pawn transaction
had to bear a fingerprint of the person making the transaction.
So there was a thumbprint and the name cammie Greene,
that they thought this was an alias
and wanted to see if they could find out the actual name.
On December 21, 1990,
investigators came to the Florida department
of law enforcement crime lab.
We had run it through the automated fingerprint
identification system, and we did not make a match.
So I had told the investigators
that we could do a manual search,
looking at cards one by one by one to see if we could find her.
It's like a one in a billion chances, but we would try.
We were thinking we were going to have to physically look
at every single thumbprint on every single card.
I took out one stack and started flipping through it,
and in less than 15 minutes, we identified her.
We were screaming and hollering and jumping up and down
because we still could not believe we had done this.
Then the investigators were able to pull a mug shot,
and then they had a face to go with the name,
but the problem was, they didn't know where she was.
They had her in sight.
All of a sudden, she would hitting me with a pool stick
and just go off.
Once the name of Aileen Carol Wuornos was laid on our plate
and leads that she was spending her time in Daytona,
that's where our investigative efforts were shifted.
So what we did is, we took as many undercover officers
as we could get together from all the different agencies
around central Florida and went over to Daytona beach
and saturated the locations we felt they might hang out at.
We would actually literally go from bar to bar to bar
to see if we could visually identify her.
One of the investigators from citrus county
- pretty quickly ran into Aileen. - They had her in sight.
They sent in two undercover cops who worked mainly drug cases,
who looked like bikers and bought her beers
and hung out with her.
I guess the best way to describe her...
She kind of, like, had a split personality.
She'd be fine.
We'd be shooting pool, drinking beer, and laughing,
having a good time, and all of a sudden,
she would hit me with a pool stick and just go off.
And you'd ask her, "why'd you do that?"
And she'd say, "hell, I don't know."
He wasn't asking her about murders or anything.
He was playing pool with her.
He was buying her cigarettes and just trying to get her
to let her guard down a little bit
and stall her long enough for us to put a plan together
to be able to take her into custody.
There was a lot of intense discussion
between law enforcement and prosecutors.
Cops want to get her off the street. They've ID'd her.
They're pretty damn sure that she's the perpetrator,
but the prosecution wants a nice, successful prosecution,
and they don't feel like they have the evidence for it.
At that point, we had a lot of uncertainties.
But we were up against a fear that
if we didn't stay on top of her,
and she got loose that we'd have another dead body.
We'd have to do something.
There's not much evidence, so how do you get this person
off the street before they kill again?
So a decision was made that night to go ahead
and arrest her on the outstanding weapons charge.
We didn't know where she kept the gun.
We didn't know how she'd react.
We didn't know what she'd do.
The plan was to have Mike walk her out front
to have a cigarette, and that's what we did.
So they walk out of the bar towards his truck.
Cops come up. They arrest him and her.
What's your name, pal?
Our desire was to put her in a safe place
and not risk someone else being murdered.
But when we took Aileen into custody,
we did not have a prosecutable case at the time.
They don't have any chance at all, had very little evidence,
and they had no direct witnesses.
What happened at this point is, we needed a miracle,
and that miracle came in the form of tyria Moore.
Lee, it sounds like you've been betrayed by everyone.
That's right. I was.
I was... that's why I don't care
if I'm executed and leave this planet.
Aileen is now in jail, but they still don't have a case.
The only way they can get her is by a confession,
and they believe the only way they can get that confession
is to put pressure on tyria Moore.
Tyria and Lee had parted ways.
Tyria had left and went to Pennsylvania
to be with family and friends, and when Lee was arrested,
a very concerted effort was made to locate tyria Moore.
They realized that this is the love of Aileen's life,
and they can use this as a pressure point.
We were able to locate tyria up north.
The investigators came up with a plan in which tyria
was convinced that it would be in her best interest
to cooperate.
The way we enlisted Ty Moore's help
was to suggest the possibility that she could be arrested
as an accessory after the fact for these homicides.
They said, "if you agree to get a confession from Wuornos,
you won't face prosecution."
And she flipped immediately on Lee.
She willingly agreed to come back to the state of Florida
to cooperate in this investigation.
She's actually housed in a motel in Daytona
under the watchful eye of detectives.
She sent a note to Aileen in the volusia county jail
and said, "hey. I'm here in Daytona."
The police are asking questions.
"Call me," and we had a recorded line set up,
and we recorded somewhere around 13 or 14 phone calls
between the girls.
We wanted incriminating statements,
declarations made by Lee Wuornos to tyria that we could record.
We actually had questions that were scripted out
that we wanted tyria to communicate to Lee Wuornos,
which she did.
There is a lengthy tear-filled, sobbing conversation
in which Ty is imploring Lee to do the right thing.
And Aileen kept telling her, "I will protect you.
I will protect you."
She loved Ty with all of her heart.
It was emotional.
In a way, it was just heartbreaking.
Aileen cared for this girl. She cared a lot about her.
She wanted to protect her.
Maybe the only time she really found any solace in life
was with this relationship with tyria Moore,
and sadly, it was used against her at the end.
And it was at that point, the "wow" moment...
We knew we had the right person.
Everything was now coming together.
Aileen surprised me in her desire to protect Ty Moore
because you saw some humanity in her
in that attempt to protect her lover.
Aileen was a terrible person. She was a horrible person.
She was a bad person.
She was rotten from within her core,
but even maybe in the most rotten,
there are moments where there is some humanity left
in that person's soul.
When Aileen finished talking to tyria,
she contacted one of the correction officers
a the volusia county jail,
and she told the officer, "I want to talk to the police."
She didn't come across as a monster
or a killer during these conversations.
It was just like you're talking to a normal person.
It ended up helping to lead to her downfall.
Welcome back to "very scary people."
When investigators arrested Aileen Wuornos in January 1991,
they were certain she was the person
who had killed at least seven men across Florida.
Detectives had convinced her girlfriend, tyria Moore,
to help them, but they didn't have the proof
they needed to charge her with the murders yet.
After that telephone call, on January the 16th,
Lee Wuornos tells corrections officers,
"I need to speak with the detectives."
When Aileen came into the interview,
I think her main goal at that point
was to make sure she let us know that tyria wasn't involved.
They didn't have a case until they had the confession,
and she had just basically committed suicide to save tyria.
The love that she had for tyria was so intense and was so deep
that she was going to confess to all seven murders
and to basically eliminate any accusations
that could be focused on tyria.
But she's going to be the victim when she gives the confession,
so in her mind, "I'm a good person.
I'm confessing, but I had to do it."
She insisted during her confession
that everything she did was to defend herself.
She thought they were going to attack her,
or she felt threatened, and that's why she shot them.
She was claiming that in each case, she was the victim.
She was picked up for sex.
They were getting rough with her, you know, that she
was in fear of her life, and she had to kill them.
As time went on, she changed it to... she robbed them.
She wanted to kill them, so they couldn't identify her.
So trying to get something from her perspective
was kind of difficult at times because it changed so much.
Aileen stuck with the idea or excuse
that all of her victims raped or attempted to rape her,
even though circumstances didn't hold up with that.
When we look at the evidence, it doesn't support that.
Take, for example, the case involving Mr. Humphreys.
She claimed that she was defending herself...
...but the injuries that he had
were not consistent with that confession.
The locations of the shots were indicative
of a defensive position.
The first shot went through his right wrist
as if he had his arms up.
The second shot was in the right side of his torso,
which would mean he was starting to turn to run away.
The next shot was to the back of the head.
When he fell down, the gun was put right up to his body,
and we had a close contact wound to the chest.
So those things were indicative of this predator
going after him.
Lee didn't think any of that thing through,
and it didn't matter. She had made up her mind.
That was her story, and she going to stick with it.
When you think of this monster or this killer,
she didn't come across as a monster or a killer
during these conversations.
It was just like you're talking to a normal person.
I mean, to think that this person just killed seven people,
and she's sitting here talking back and forth with detectives,
just like a run-of-the-mill conversation...
We take great pleasure in announcing
to the successful conclusion of a 13-month-long investigation.
The persons charged in the homicides
is identified as Aileen Carol Wuornos.
Based on that confession...
We were able to recover the gun where she had discarded it,
...and we recovered a small briefcase
that Aileen carried around with her.
When we searched this, we found a receipt
for a mini warehouse in Daytona beach.
That really was the coup de grace.
We recovered her souvenirs from six of the seven victims.
That's important evidence
because it links her directly to their murder.
It ended up helping to lead to her downfall.
And now, we started putting these things together,
and as you look at the cumulative effect of it,
you have a prosecutable case.
He said, "you're going to do everything I tell you to do.
If you don't, I'll kill you right now."
Ripped a cord around me neck.
Aileen Wuornos claims that she was brutally raped by him
and when given the chance to break free
had shot him to death.
There is the possibility she's telling the truth.
This man was shot just... Just shot in self-defense.
Boom, boom, boom. You know, they weren't cut up.
They weren't sliced up, no 0.J. Jazz, you know?
All they were was shot and left.
If it was a horrendous crime, why didn't I shoot them between
the eyes, cut their penis off, stick it in their mouth,
you know, do all kinds of gross stuff?
All they were was shot and left.
Once it became clear that Aileen Wuornos
was the one responsible for multiple murders
and that Florida had a female serial killer on its hands,
the media coverage exploded...
Aileen Wuornos faces five murder charges.
...in part because it's so very rare.
There are very few female serial killers in general
and even fewer who commit their crimes in this brutal fashion.
Just hear you say... Do you... are you trying...
Are you telling me I can't have
- these lawyers to protect me? - No, ma'am.
You know, you had the perfect storm.
You had death, you had sex, money in the form of robberies.
So, I mean, what else do you need to make a story?
I'm in fear for my life in the volusia county jail,
and I'm tired of them... Trying to kill me there.
Aileen Wuornos' trial was exceptional in several matters.
There was a woman, Arlene pralle.
She was a Christian who believed that it was her mission
to help this woman in her time of need.
I want them to treat her like she's innocent
until she's proven guilty. That's what I want.
I want them to treat her like a human being.
One of the things Arlene pralle does is
she legally adopts Aileen so that she has some connection
that the court has to respect.
Wuornos occasionally smiled and glanced
to the back of the room, mouthing the words,
"I love you," to her adoptive mother, Arlene pralle.
And this was just part of the insanity.
You know, Aileen is 34 years old,
and now, she's being adopted.
Aileen Wuornos showed little emotion
as she was led into the courthouse
in deland, Florida, as jury selection began Monday.
The first case brought against Aileen Wuornos for murder
was the death of Richard Mallory.
She killed him out of greed.
She was no longer satisfied with $10 or $20 or $40.
She wanted it all.
You had a mountain of evidence against her
because you did have the police work that was involved.
You had the confessions.
You had the woman she was in a relationship
with who became a state's witness.
Wuornos alternately laughed
and wept as the tapes of her conversation
with her former girlfriend, tyria Moore, were made public.
But one of the most devastating parts of the trial
is when prosecution brings in tyria Moore.
Tyria wouldn't even look at Aileen, but it...
You could tell just by watching Aileen,
it was breaking her heart.
Time after time after time, she was raped.
Time after time after time, she was beaten up.
Finally, she armed herself.
Aileen Wuornos claims that she wasn't driven
to kill Richard Mallory.
She claims that she was brutally raped by him,
and when given the chance to break free of that incident,
she shot him to death.
She defended herself.
When the defense made the decision
to call Aileen Wuornos to testify,
it was electric in the courtroom.
Gee, I'm going to tell you right now.
I'm really nervous, and I'm really getting pretty shy
and embarrassed, and this is hard for me,
so just bear with me.
Aileen Wuornos' testimony was
effectively... They were going to engage in sex
but that he immediately became very violent.
I saw him coming toward me,
and just I was going to turn to look at him,
and before I even got a chance to turn and look at him,
he ripped a cord around my neck.
He said, "you're going to do everything I tell you to do..."
"...and if you don't, I'll kill you right now,"
and I said, "don't come out. Don't come near me. I'll shoot."
I'll have to shoot you again," or something like that.
"Don't make me have to shoot you again," or something like that.
He just started coming at me, and I shot.
And I don't know where I shot him, I just shot,
and he fell on the ground.
There is the possibility she's telling the truth.
After trial, we find out this amazing information
about Richard Mallory.
Mallory had been convicted of a burglary
with intent to commit sexual assault,
and it was deemed a psychological problem.
He went into some type of mental institute
and served some time there, so there was some speculation
that maybe he did get violent with her.
I think it's possible, and I think it's possible
that this was a trigger for the subsequent events.
Maybe Mr. Mallory did get rough with her,
and she retaliated.
Maybe she was trying to kill Richard Mallory
again and again,
and this is where the profile comes in
where the men were similar age, race.
So it might be an internal mechanism
that Aileen has where she's lashing out to kill these men.
Was her story believable?
It wasn't unbelievable if you separated it out by itself,
but there was no evidence to support Aileen Wuornos' claim.
In fact, when tyria Moore testified,
she saw no injuries whatsoever
when Aileen Wuornos came back to their hotel
with Richard Mallory's car.
Did she ever advise you that the man she had shot
- had done anything to her? - No. She didn't.
The seven women and five men deliberated for 91 minutes,
and then returned a verdict everyone expected...
Everyone except Aileen Wuornos.
The state of Florida versus Aileen Carol Wuornos.
We, the jury, find the defendant,
Aileen Carol Wuornos,
guilty of first degree premeditated murder.
When she was found guilty, she was shocked.
She never thought she'd be found guilty.
Lee went off on that jury, and she didn't give a damn,
- and she just vented. - She turns around.
Her eyes are wild, says...
I think there was the violent Aileen who did the murders,
I think there was the child-of-rage Aileen,
and I think there was the lover of tyria.
I think when she was found guilty, the raging came out,
and you could see it in her eyes.
Only manson scared me more.
I have been labeled a serial killer,
and I am no serial killer.
What I was, was a prostitute.
I was not out there to hurt anyone.
I didn't... had no intentions of hurting anyone.
What I did was what anybody else would do.
I defended myself, which everybody has the right
to defend themselves.
The jury voted 12 to zero for the death penalty.
Until by warrant of the governor
of the state of Florida, you, Aileen Carol Wuornos,
be electrocuted until you are dead.
Coming up, america's first female serial killer.
In just about 13 hours, she's scheduled to die.
I was among the journalists who was chosen to go in.
Wuornos gave a statement that people
are still trying to figure out to this day.
- Maybe you were just born bad. - Boy, I don't know about you.
I'm telling you, man. No. I wasn't born bad.
You guys got it... see? I'm trying to tell you, man.
They lie. They lied so bad to you all.
- You killed seven men... - Why look at the number?
...Seven strangers.
Does that not make you a serial killer?
See, I didn't kill them every day, did I?
After Ms. Wuornos was tried and convicted
by a jury of murder and sentenced to death,
she, through her counsel, decided to enter pleas of guilty
to the remaining five homicides that she was charged with.
I do not want a trial.
I don't know that she wanted to sit in the courtroom
in front of different sets of jurors
and hear them find her guilty and then sentence her to death.
I think in her mind, she was speeding up the process.
It was an inevitable conclusion
that she was just bringing forward.
She was sentenced to death for each of the crimes
that she had committed and admitted to.
And it just added to more death sentences
on top of death sentences for Wuornos
to the point where she ended up with six
before it was all said and done.
When the judge passed sentence, she started cursing them out
and giving them the finger, and she was just out of control.
I hope your wife and kids get raped.
There's no sense in having me tormented
for the rest of my life
when I don't deserve to be tormented
because I did what anybody else would do,
and so there's only clemency or the chair.
You make your pick, people,
because that's the only way it's going to be.
I represented Aileen Wuornos for only 3 months
from June of 2002 through September of 2002.
She felt that people were tampering with her food,
people were doing things in her jail cell
that were designed to send radio waves through her brain.
I'm so sick of hearing this, "she's crazy," stuff.
I've been evaluated so many times.
I'm competent, sane, and I'm trying to tell the truth,
and I'll take a polygraph on every single word
on those pages.
Wuornos had real contempt for the world
and at some point had contempt for life itself,
and she decided she had had it,
and she did not want to be on death row anymore.
She wanted to be executed.
Aileen's claim of self-defense, she renounced that story.
She said that none of these men did anything wrong,
that none of them tried to assault her or attack her
and that her stories of self-defense had all been lies.
I killed those men.
I robbed them, and I killed them as cold as ice,
and I'd do it again, too.
Lee wanted to have control over the situation,
and "I'm going to die, and I'm choosing to die," you know,
"it's my choice, not yours."
But there's no chance of this, in keeping me alive or anything
because I'd kill again.
I have hate crawling through my system.
Ultimately, governor bush had her evaluated by three doctors.
Those doctors found that she was competent for the execution.
Her appeals have been exhausted. She wants to meet her creator.
By the age of 15, Aileen Wuornos was a prostitute.
By the age of 35, she was a killer,
but Aileen Wuornos won't be making it to 55.
At 9:30 tomorrow morning,
the state of Florida is scheduled
to give Wuornos a lethal injection.
By tomorrow, I will know there will be no more pictures,
no more books, no more movies.
I won't have to see her wicked face again.
I wanted to get in touch with my friend Aileen
because she was my friend. I didn't care what she did.
I knew she was going to pay the price for it, rightfully so,
but it's got nothing to do with our friendship.
Well, why wouldn't I be the best friend
I could possibly be for the rest of the years of her life?
Our last night visiting, I took her barbecue chips,
I think, two candy bars. Well, she was totally a peach.
She was so happy that night.
We laughed the whole damn time.
Even the guards kept looking at us,
like "why are they laughing? The girl is being executed."
It was nothing sad. What would be the point?
She requested us to wake her up at 5:30, which we did.
Her attitude is pretty calm.
She's not quite as talkative as she has been in the past.
I was among the journalists who was chosen to go in.
The curtain opened, and there was Aileen Wuornos on a gurney.
Wuornos gave a statement that people are still trying
to figure out to this day.
She said, "I'd just like to say I'm sailing with the rock,
and I'll be back like independence day with Jesus,
June 6th, like the movie, on the big mother ship and all.
I'll be back. I'll be back."
She was calm. It was clinical.
It was almost like watching someone
in the emergency room getting an iv.
Her eyes slowly closed.
Her skin started to turn sort of grayish,
and that went on for 17 minutes
before she was officially pronounced dead.
There are a lot of people that sympathize with Aileen.
I feel that a lot of it is, they don't know the facts.
They don't know what really happened.
They hear what came out through the media, through movies.
The most well-known one was "monster,"
and that kind of made her look like a victim.
I was raped and beat to.
And was going to get killed, but I wouldn't...
I didn't want to lose you, you know?
And I all I could think about was over the rest
of your life, you'd think I'd stood you up.
It's, like, nobody really knew where this woman came from
and to end up the way she did.
There's no question that she had a horrible life,
and it clearly affected her in the worst possible way,
and she paid the ultimate price for that.
But there's a lot of people that have not had a fair shake
in the system in this country,
and they haven't turned into serial killers.
The fact that Aileen Wuornos received sympathy
is simply because she was a woman.
If she had been a man,
you and I would not be talking about this case.
It's a nightmare, a horrible nightmare that'll never go away.
It'll never go away.
I mean, she was actually an evil woman.
I never saw her be remorseful to anyone,
and I think all of that went away when tyria left.
Her only hope that she ever had in her entire life was tyria,
and even after the betrayal she felt,
she still loved her because it was unconditional,
and I think to the day she died,
she felt that way towards tyria.
Despite all of that and despite how much more it meant
to putting her away,
she was still the one that Wuornos loved
and never stopped loving until to her death.
Do you want to die? Do you want?
Oh, man. If I was to leave this planet,
it wouldn't be no big deal to me
because this is a wicked, wicked world, wicked world.
The investigation that led to the capture of Aileen Wuornos
was a collaboration of five different
counties' sheriff's offices
and the Florida department of law enforcement.
It took 13 months and cost $150,000,
but in the end, they got her.
After her execution, Wuornos was cremated
and her remains handed over to childhood friend dawn botkins.
Per Aileen's request, her ashes were spread underneath a tree
on dawn's property in rural Michigan.
So that, as dawn says,
"she could be near someone who loved her."
Thanks for watching "very scary people."
Good night.