## C. Carr

# Making a Killing (Preview)

### March 1994

HOOKER-FROM-HELL AILEEN WUORNOS PLEDGUILTYTOSIXCOUNTSOF JOHN-ICIDE. BUT WAIT TILL YOU HEAR WHATTHECOPS, HER LOVER, HER LAWYER AND HER NEWLY ADOPTIVE MOTHER DID TO HER. C. CARR REPORTS.

BEFORE SHE HAD A NAME. SHE HAD AN IDENTITY: first female serial killer. In 1990, Honda police announced that they were trail- mg such a woman. who might he working with a partner, alter they discovered the bodies of six middle aged white men in remote areas of the state. They speculated that the killer posed as a damsel tn distress in order to lure men into giving her a ride; then she nibbed and killed them. From the moment she was taken mto custody in January l*W|. Aileen “Lee” Wuorno* became the prisoner ol that monstrous image. Few heard her side of the story—that she was a serial victim—and apparently even fewer believed it.

A psychologically damaged person with a lurid history of abuse that began in childhood, Wuornos is illcqu^ipcd to argue on her own behalf She emerged from the great Amcocan underbelly, a dnher from the age of fourteen, a bottom-of-the-barrel prostitute who worked the highways and an alcoholic who consumed as much as a case of beer a day. For four and a half yean before her arrest, she lived in various fleabag motels with a woman lover, the most stabk relationship of Wuomos’s life. The lover turned state's evidence at her trial.

Hard-bitten, unkempt, unsympathetic, Wuornos admitted to killing seven men. (One body has never been >

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Mirabella, March 1994, 72-73.