Women Serial Killers of the 20th Century (18 page)

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Introduction

Aileen Carol Wuornos was born on February 29th, 1956 and is probably one of the most notorious women serial killers of our time. Much has been written about Aileen; some of what has been written is true, and some of it is wrong.

What makes her stand out from most other women serial killers is that
Aileen killed with a gun, and her victims were strangers. The majority of women serial killers normally use poison and their victims are usually (but not always) acquaintances or family members.

Early Days

Aileen was born to Diane Pittman, nee Wuornos, and Leo Dale Pittman in Rochester, Michigan. Diane Wuornos had eloped and married Leo Pittman when she was fifteen-years-old on June 3rd, 1954. Her parents had not approved of Leo. In February of 1955, Diane had a son named Keith. In June of 1955, Diane became pregnant for the second time with Aileen. By this time, Dianne was deathly afraid of her husband Leo. Just months before Aileen was born, he was arrested and imprisoned for raping and attempting to murder a young girl of seven. Diane divorced him shortly before Aileen was born.

The Author Terry Manners says of Leo Pittman, in his book
Deadlier than the Male:

Leo Pitman

Leo, who never met Aileen, was thought to be a schizophrenic and hung himself in 1969 while in prison.

In January
of 1960, Diane, unable to and not wanting to cope with two children on her own dumped five-year-old Keith and four-year-old Aileen on her parents, Britta and Lauri Wuornos, in Troy, twenty-four miles north of Detroit, Michigan.

Four-year-old Aileen

Six-year-old Keith

The Wuornos family had immigrated to the US from Finland. Their house was an unattractive
, one-story, ranch-style home, situated among a cluster of trees on Cadmus Street, in a neighborhood of dirt roads. Lauri worked at the Ford auto plant in Detroit. Lauri and Britta formally adopted the children on the 18th of March in 1960 and changed their surname to Wuornos. They raised the children alongside their own: Barry and Lori. The children only found out their true identities when Keith was thirteen and Aileen twelve. They were both emotionally disturbed and distraught at the revelation.

The Wuornos Home

When Aileen was six, while playing with her brother Keith and firelighters, she became badly burned and received permanent scarring to her face. Aileen, as a child, suffered from violent temper tantrums that would come seemingly out of nowhere.

Lauri Wuornos

According to Aileen, her grandfather, Lauri, abused her sexually and physically from an exceptionally young age and whipped her with a willow branch right up to the time he kicked her out of his house, and her grandmother, Britta, was an abusive alcoholic. The young Aileen quickly learned to blank out any emotions. During her time at junior high school, Aileen began showing signs of poor hearing and vision problems. The school recorded her IQ as 81, which is in the range of low dull-normal. The school wanted Aileen to receive counseling and tried to improve her behavior by giving her a mild tranquilizer to control her fits of temper.

Blonde, brown-eyed Aileen was sexually promiscuous at a young age. By the age of ten
, she and her brother Keith, who was her closest companion, experimented sexually with each other. Aileen was a happy and willing participant in these activities. Aileen’s attention then moved on, and she would sneak out of her parent’s house and make her way to a meeting spot the neighborhood kids called “the pits.” Here, at the age of only eleven and having just entered puberty, Aileen exchanged sex with the older students at Troy High School for cigarettes, drugs, and money. The boys treated Aileen with no respect and would call her names and ignore her in public. One of her friends from the “pit days” was Dawn Botkins, who ended up being the one true friend Aileen ever had. Dawn’s older brother was the best friend of Aileen’s brother Keith. When she was fourteen, Aileen found herself pregnant. She claimed an older man raped her. It is speculated now that a man in the neighborhood, known as “the chief,” may have been the culprit.

The Chief

Her grandparents sent her to a home for unmarried mothers in Detroit. Here, she gave birth on the 23rd of March in 1971 to a baby boy who was immediately given up for adoption. Aileen was resentful for years afterwards that she had never even been allowed to embrace her son before he was taken from her forever.

When Aileen returned home, she dropped out of school and spent her days hanging around the streets, drinking
, and taking drugs. It was the time of the ending of the Vietnam War, and drugs such as marijuana, LSD, mescaline, and assorted pills were easily accessible. Her favorite music was Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and the Moody Blues. In July of 1971, her grandmother Britta died of liver failure. Aileen’s grandfather, no longer able to cope with Aileen or her brother, threw them out of the house. Aileen, now fifteen, took to prostitution to support herself through a bitterly cold winter in Michigan. She spent many nights sleeping rough in the woods in the snow near her home with a local cross dressing teenage transvestite. Other nights she would sleep in old abandoned cars and on, occasion, in a friend’s house. Occasionally, she would get lucky, and a client in exchange for sex would put her up for the night in a sleazy motel but for most of the time, it would be the woods. Troy’s climate during the summer is warm with temperatures tending to be in the 80s but during the winter it becomes extremely cold. She described this period of her life as a living hell. One wonders where the social workers where or why the close-knit community of Troy were allowing a fifteen-year-old child to live like this. This was supposedly a modern democracy, a caring Christian society, and not a third world country.

After two years
of living like this, she eventually began hitch-hiking around the country, supporting herself with petty crime and prostitution, trying to find a place to call home. She didn’t dress like a prostitute in high heels or leather skirts but wore more casual attire such as jeans or shorts and T-shirts. In Aileen’s mind, prostitution was the best that she could do, that is what she was adept at, and that’s what she could earn a living at.

Hitchhiking and
Prostitution

When she was seventeen and hitching, she stumbled across a headless, limbless b
ody of a woman. An image, she said, that constantly haunted her as she plied her trade along the United States highways. Treated as criminals in the United States, prostitutes if they disappear are far less likely than other people to be searched for by law enforcement officers, making them a favored target of predators.