Aileen Wuornos has resurfaced in the public conversation after being fictionalised in Netflix's Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, where she is played by Sarah Paulson. There is no real connection between the two women. Lizzie Borden was tried in 1893 and acquitted over the deaths of her father and stepmother in Massachusetts, while Wuornos was born in Michigan in 1956 and committed her crimes in Florida almost a century later. Producer Ryan Murphy has described the show's approach as a "fantasia of women vs. the system."
What Wuornos was convicted of
Wuornos was convicted of murdering six men in Florida between 1989 and 1990, and a seventh man, Peter Siems, was also linked to her, though his body was never found and she was never tried for his death. She did not deny the killings, but her explanations shifted over time. She said she acted in self-defence against men who attacked or tried to assault her while she worked as a sex worker along Florida's highways, while prosecutors argued the killings were linked to robbery. Her girlfriend at the time, Tyria Moore, later cooperated with police and encouraged Wuornos to talk during recorded phone calls, and her testimony contradicted key parts of Wuornos' self-defence account. A jury unanimously recommended the death penalty for the first murder, and she received further death sentences after pleading guilty or no contest to others.
The letters from death row
During roughly a decade on death row, Wuornos exchanged hundreds of letters with her childhood friend Dawn Botkins, later collected in the book Dear Dawn: Aileen Wuornos in Her Own Words. Many were not solemn at all. She wrote about religion, aliens, prison food and other inmates, and in one odd passage imagined partying with Jesus after death.
Her final letter
Her last letter to Botkins, dated seven days before her execution, had a very different tone. It was essentially a long thank-you to the friend who had stood by her. Written in her usual emphatic capital letters, she repeatedly thanked Botkins for helping her through everything, said she would try to relax before the end, and expected to see her at Starke, the Florida prison, and again someday on the other side. She told her she would be "forever remembered" by her, and added a postscript thanking Botkins' family for supporting and understanding their friendship and for standing by it.
Her execution
Wuornos died by lethal injection in Florida on 9 October 2002, aged 46. Netflix's series changes some details of her final hours. The show has her eating KFC as a last meal, but in reality she declined a meal and had coffee, reportedly spending much of her final morning reading the Bible. Her real final statement was also very different from the speech written for the series. She said she was sailing with the Rock and would be back, comparing it to the film Independence Day, with Jesus. She also reportedly asked for Natalie Merchant's song Carnival before her execution, a detail that did make it into the Netflix series.
