Aileen ’lee’ Wuornos

Aileen ’lee’ Wuornos

Florida -- October 2002 -- If Aileen 'Lee' Wuornos isn't strapped to a gurney next Wednesday morning in Starke prison, Florida, a lethal cocktail of heartstopping chemicals flowing into her veins, she will be disappointed. Lawyers have long fought to save her from execution, yet Lee, the hitchhiking prostitute with six death sentences who confessed to killing seven men, has battled equally hard to speed things up and go to meet her maker.

Last summer, the Florida Supreme Court found her competent, allowing her to drop all further appeals, fire her appellate lawyers and get on the fast track to execution. Execution "volunteers" are a rarity. Then, as a female serial killer, Lee is also a rarity.

That was clear when police slapped on the handcuffs in 1991 and multiple murder charges followed. Then 35, with a 29-year old lesbian lover, she killed like a man. Predator-style, she systematically shot to death and robbed men after flagging them down for lifts on the Florida highways and once in their cars, offering sex.

Lee, now 46, certainly fit the FBI's serial killer criteria, having murdered strangers at least three times in separate locations, with a cooling-off period inbetween. Generally women, even multiple murderers, target intimates. So-called 'Black Widows' kill spouses and lovers for monetary gain; 'Angels of Death' murder babies, the elderly or the infirm. (By contrast, mass murderers or 'spree killers' murder several people in one fell swoop as in the school massacres).

Poison is often the favoured weapon. Again, gun-toting Lee was different. Previously, the serial killers the FBI profilers studied were all men whose crimes shared a common underlying sexual motivation. Usually, they killed to fulfill their fatally entwined sexual and violent fantasies.

Despite her overt rage—she screamed obscenities at jurors in court—we don't know if Lee got a sexual thrill from murder although as a prostitute, her crimes have a sexual element. Apparently, she did share male serial killers' enjoyment of power and control. But she was primarily a robber who killed. She carried Windex along with her gun in her "kill bag," ready to remove fingerprints and carefully cover her tracks.

She claimed self-defense but pumped nine bullets into Charles Carskaddon alone. And she ruthlessly fired into the backs of fleeing victims. I began investigating Lee's life in 1991 and learned that she fantasised about being a hero to women. She expected her self-defense claims to be accepted and "almost fell over," she said, when she heard she was labelled a serial killer.

A few months ago she finally confessed what police, prosecutors, jurors and I deduced long ago—there was no self-defense, her victims did not hurt her, she killed in cold blood.

She says she seriously hates human life, "and would kill again." Since 1848 just one woman has been executed in Florida. Three were executed in Oklahoma in 2001; the most in the US in any year since l953. There are now 52 women in a total US death row population of approximately 3,600.

Governor Jeb Bush signed Lee's death warrant as America is embroiled in massive debate about capital punishment. Illinois Governor Ryan declared a total moratorium on executions there after the state released its 13th wrongly convicted death row prisoner. Abraham Bonowitz of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty says that 24 Florida death row prisoners have been exonerated and released from death sentences since 1973.

Earlier this year, Gov. Bush did stay some executions but by volunteering to die, Lee put herself in a different realm. A rationale Abraham Bonowitz insists should be inconsequential. "We don't believe prisoners in any way, shape or form should dictate what's happening to them," he explains.

Two decades of rough, transient living, massive alcohol consumption and harrowing prostitution preceded Lee's murderous rampage in Florida. But how did the innocent blonde child smiling out from her Michigan highschool yearbook pictures turn into one of the most vicious women of modern times?

Her doomed life path began in suburban Troy, Michigan and resembles a precariously stacked pile of dominoes, each domino upping the odds of catastrophe.

First there's the controversial nature v. nurture issue. Uncannily, Leo Pittman, the career criminal father she never met, also committed a capital offense, kidnapping and raping a 7-year old girl. He didn't get the death penalty but hanged himself in prison.

Lee's teenage mother Diane abandoned her twice before she was two years old—what experts deem the