Original subtitles

[Aileen] I'm gonna go ahead and tell the world

what's really happening.

I have to tell the truth.

It's seven counts of first degree murder,

but there's something else that needs to be told.

I had face-to-face contact with Aileen Wuornos,

and she wanted to talk.

[Dawn] I told him,

"Wow, I just heard on TV what you just did."

I said, "Holy shit!"

[Mike speaking]

You would never tell by looking at her

in the backseat of that car

that she had just killed seven people.

She said, "Will you kneel down and pray with me first?"

We just said we loved each other.

I stay loyal to all my friends.

On that first visit in death row,

I was afraid.

When those doors slammed, they slammed.

She was very paranoid.

You never know when she's going to turn on you.

[phone ringing]

She felt like the only way out for her

was to shoot her way through Florida.

She did terrible things, but she wasn't a monster.

[David] To shoot someone in the heart,

that's about as evil as it gets.

[Mike] If a man ever tells you that he's not scared,

he just told you a damn lie.

[gunshot blasts]

[Loukia] I've been asked to do interviews before,

but I've never actually done one.

I think it's important to go back and remember.

[suspenseful music playing]

[Loukia] It felt like that.

It just felt like something,

you know, sinister was happening.

These men started to show up deceased.

Weeks and weeks and weeks would pass,

and then there would be somebody else who was killed.

And that's where the whole mystery was.

Nobody could really figure it out.

It was because those cases weren't pieced together.

[David] I remember receiving a call from dispatch

to respond to a location

in the very southwest part of the county.

I was homicide detective

with the Marion County Sheriff's Office.

I've worked multiple homicides, very violent.

In this case, two young boys

riding a bicycle in this large undeveloped subdivision,

they smelled something.

They looked around to see where this odor was coming from.

They could see what appeared to be a person by a culvert.

You examine every square inch of that body.

The person was on his side.

The pants pockets were pulled inside out.

He was shot multiple times.

I noticed a gunshot wound to the chest,

basically at the heart.

Could that be the coup-de-grace shot

that put him out of his misery?

Two detectives from the next county south

responded to our crime scene.

They had taken a report of a person the day before

who never had come home from work.

And visually, they said, "That's Mr. Humphreys."

He was from a town called Sylacauga, Alabama.

And he was a retired police chief.

[Loukia] He had taught hostage negotiation.

He was, you know, savvy,

and he was shot and killed.

How could somebody get to him

when he had that much experience?

It just did not make sense to me.

The offender had a hitchhike and got a ride.

Maybe Mr. Humphreys didn't perceive

this person as a threat.

Then his guard was let down.

On Mr. Humphreys' right side, we found a circular impact-type

injury, a bruise.

As if somebody slammed the gun into his side.

It made me think this person he trusted with a car ride

planned to kill him

from the moment they got in that car.

[gunshot blasts]

When we found him, there was no vehicle.

We didn't know where it was.

Several weeks later,

we ended up going to a pretty desolate

part of Central Florida.

A couple guys that were near a lake were fishing.

They found some debris, some items.

We went to that location and we found the vehicle.

Immediately, that becomes a secondary crime scene.

We found Mr. Humphreys' tobacco pouch.

We found his tobacco pipe.

Probably one of the biggest pieces of evidence we found

was a spent .22-caliber shell casing.

When we looked at all these details

from the Humphreys scene,

there was something very familiar about them.

Other cases around Florida were unsolved involving white males,

middle-aged, who were likewise shot

with a small caliber weapon, a .22.

There's a similarity here.

But, you know, that wasn't the only clue.

They were all shot multiple times.

They were robbed of their personal effects,

their vehicle.

There were just too many similarities to dismiss.

I'm Brian Jarvis.

I worked as the supervisor over our major crimes unit.

At the same time, in August of 1990,

just to our north in Alachua County,

they had the killings of five students

in their dorm rooms at the University of Florida.

That was Danny Rolling.

We were involved in that case.

[news reporter] Fear and hysteria

gripped Gainesville and its young residents.

The Rowling case was frightening.

I mean, cut one woman's head off.

People were buying guns.

The fear was tremendous.

And now we didn't know, but we definitely were looking

at the possibility of having another serial killer

in our county.

We decided to call in all of the agencies

from Central Florida

and get together and discuss our open cases

and what might be tied in.

[David] We've identified six victims

across Florida over the past year.

They may be connected.

All of them were middle-aged men in their 40s to 50s.

All were shot with a .22 caliber pistol.

All of them were found in the middle of nowhere

with their cars stolen.

These are ruthless, cold-blooded executions.

They were middle-aged men driving alone

on major roadways.

The killer may be posing as a stranded hitchhiker.

We're in the South and, you know,

it's the gentlemanly thing to do.

You pick up a hitchhiker, the next thing you know,

they're pulling out a gun.

Once inside the vehicle, they produce a gun

and order the driver to a remote place,

often deep in the forest at night,

somewhere no one can help them.

In December 1989, the remains of Richard Mallory

was found.

His body had been wrapped

in what appeared to be old scrap carpet.

After the death of Richard Mallory,

there weren't any more killings for six months.

There was a hiatus.

And on May 19th, David Spears, the second victim, was claimed.

On the 31st of May, Charles Carskaddon was shot

nine times using a nine-shot revolver,

which means it was emptied out on him.

The amount of shots being fired were increasing,

and the time between the killings was decreasing.

So, whatever was happening, whoever this was,

there was a certain amount of rage

and intensity that was increasing.

This could be someone killing out of pure rage

or the thrill of terrifying their victim.

But what was the big kicker?

We have also found strands of long, blonde hair

in some of the vehicles.

This suggests that the serial killer

could be a woman.

In the United States, we had our share

of serial killers.

Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer,

they're all male.

Well, it was highly unusual to have a female serial killer.

[Loukia] I remember getting on the phone,

I think it was with Brian, and I was like,

"Is this serious? Are you guys-- ?"

And he just said, "Yes."

[suspenseful music intensifying]

[gunshot blasts]

[Brian] Peter Siems left Jupiter, Florida,

to visit some relatives.

At the time that he left, he had a number of Bibles

that he'd placed in his car, and he was going to hand them

out along the way to people he thought might need them.

He was a missionary of sorts. He was very Christian.

He never arrived at his destination on July 7th,

He was reported missing.

[David] As fate would have,

on a remote road close to the Ocala National Forest,

a woman happened to witness something.

Two women were seen walking away from the vehicle,

arguing with each other.

And who did that car belong to?

It was registered to Peter Siems.

They were driving a dead man's car.

[David] The Ocala National Forest is just really huge.

It's desolate.

There's just sand roads everywhere.

And for someone that was truly running from justice,

they could take safe haven in the Ocala National Forest.

The investigators at the time had the wisdom

to actually take the witness

and sit down with our forensic artist.

My name is Beth Smith, and I am trained

as a criminal composite artist and a skull reconstructionist.

The witness described to me how the blonde woman was acting,

and that she was acting, you know, very belligerent,

and she seemed to be the one doing all the talking.

She was the alpha female.

[huffs] The best way I can describe their descriptions

is a woman with a hard life.

She wore it on her face.

And that was how it was presented to me.

She looked tired. She looked disheveled.

And her hair was not well kept.

And her teeth weren't the greatest.

And the other woman was heavier.

She had a ball cap on, but she had a real full face.

So that was the two real distinct differences

between the two of them.

And she said, "That's who I remember seeing."

That's her.

[Brian] We have a difficult decision to make.

If we release the sketches to the public,

the killer or killers may see themselves on the news and run.

Initially, we hesitated.

We didn't want to scare them away.

And there's also a lot of panic in Florida

because of the killings at the University of Florida.

So, if we released them,

were we going to add to that panic?

And we waited.

And then we had our seventh victim.

Walter Gino Antonio.

We need to get some help in solving this case,

and the public was the way to go.

So, we just, we can't take a chance anymore.

We all came to a conclusion

that we would have to release the composites.

It was like a media firestorm.

Serial killings seem to have become a brutal fact of life.

The main suspects are two young women

who play damsels in distress along the roadway

and then become dames of doom.

Police have been able to put together

these composite sketches of the two women

they believe are responsible for the killings.

Witnesses across the state have spotted the duo

in their murder victim's stolen vehicles.

This man helped fix a car driven by the two.

He says he's glad he's alive.

You know, I'm glad that I didn't take them nowhere.

You know, like if I didn't get their car fixed,

they might have took me down the road

and done me in or something, you know?

It's just, it's scary in a way

because, uh, knowing somebody running around

doing something like that--

[Loukia] I thought it was maybe somebody like Manson.

Or I thought, you know, maybe it's somebody like Ted Bundy

or John Wayne Gacy. I just thought it was a man.

I was surprised they were women.

And I felt like one of them was in charge.

I felt like, um,

just the way that they were sketched

or maybe because one of them

was taller physically than the other,

I felt like that person would have been in charge.

I didn't necessarily think

they equally were doing the killings.

I felt there was a leader and a follower.

Every newspaper, it seemed, around the world

wanted to write this story.

Florida police are afraid those two women

have already crossed the state line.

They're working with Georgia cops to track them down.

It was the biggest news story on the planet,

and we were in the middle of it.

Surely someone is going to know who these two people are.

We had an onslaught of people calling,

and it was so many calls that came in in a very short time

that detectives, we took turns at managing the tip line.

You had people that would call in something they dreamed about.

Thank you, ma'am.

You would have someone that

would self-identify as a psychic.

[sighs quietly]

Unbelievable.

And you had other leads that came in.

"I know who these two are."

Ocala PD.

The names were Tyria,

and then you had the name of Lee.

The more these two names pop up on the tip line,

the more certain we are that we're getting closer.

What happened was, when I looked at the printout,

it showed that this name was repetitive.

[David] "Lee and Tyria, Lee and Tyria,"

over and over again.

And as we tracked down people who said they knew these women,

we were finally able to get a real name for Lee.

And that name was Aileen Carol Wuornos.

We identify the second person in the composite sketch

as Tyria Moore, Aileen's girlfriend.

Are these two females killers? Is one of them a killer?

You have to keep your mind really open.

[Brian] Aileen had a lot of aliases,

but there was a consistency

in the type of location she would frequent.

And they seem to be the ones

that we would refer to as biker bars.

So we started searching the bars

that we thought she might hang out in.

[David] We have undercover investigators that are assigned

to frequent some of these biker bars.

And one of those was The Last Resort in Port Orange.

Mike Joyner, he was by far the best undercover officer

probably in the state of Florida.

He was that good.

[Mike] They just called me and said,

"Go to the last drug bar in Volusia County."

My job was to find her.

We have a serial killer.

Or we believe we do.

[David] We put a surveillance van across the street

with undercover personnel also inside,

filming and listening on headphones.

[over radio]

Our undercover guys were all wired up.

[over radio]

[David] Only a very small portion of the audio from the wire

still remains,

but we do have hundreds of pages

of transcripts that reveal her actual words.

[Mike] The first thing I thought when I walked in

was her.

If a man ever tells you

that he's not scared

or he's never been scared...

he just told you a damn lie.

Aye.

[rock music playing]

Hey.

You want a beer?

Two beers.

Aileen seen that money,

and she was gonna take it close to me

'cause I had all that money in my pocket.

What's your story?

Well, I'm from Georgia.

Two guys ripped 70 kilos of coke off me

and to be honest with you,

I'm down here to kill them.

I've seen some shit.

Oh yeah?

Everybody has to do what they got to do.

"Everybody has to do what they gotta do."

Didn't phase her.

But when I was a little girl, I always wanted to be a nun,

and then when I got older, I wanted to be a missionary.

[both laughing]

I'm gonna put on my song.

And that was the only song she would play in that jukebox.

"Digging Up Bones."

She had a suitcase and a pocketbook

that I wasn't going to let it get out of my sight

because I honestly thought she had the murder weapon

in the suitcase.

[Aileen sighs]

[Aileen speaking]

[young Mike speaking]

[young Mike speaking]

[Aileen speaking]

[David] Can Mike engage in enough conversations

to where maybe a slip of the tongue

and we have some admission

as to one or several other homicides?

[Aileen laughing]

[Aileen laughing]

[young Mike, indistinct]

Hi, what's up?

It's just that I'm...

so fucked up and so hurt.

Why you hurting so bad?

I lost someone I was in love with.

Five years we were together.

Like, five years!

[young Mike speaking]

[Aileen speaking]

[young Mike speaking]

Two weeks.

[Mike] She was distraught

because her girlfriend had left her.

What's wrong with you, hm?

I said, "You're fucked up in the head.

"Something wrong with you.

"You act real jolly and happy and good luck,

"and then all of a sudden you get depressed.

What's wrong with you?"

Listen, why don't you and me go somewhere more fun?

You bring that money with you and...

I'll show you a good time.

Will you now?

[Mike] When she told me that,

I knew I was the next victim.

[Brian] One of the patrons at the bar that night

noticed Aileen.

She called the police and said,

"You know, there's a girl in there

that looks like that drawing that everybody's looking for."

[David] The next thing you know,

a police officer walks inside the bar.

He actually walked right up to her

and he asked her to step outside.

This was just a local officer who had no idea

that we were there

or that we had laid this trap for her.

What are you talking about?

Ma'am, can you step outside with me, please?

This is bullshit.

He pulled her off outside.

Time you best get that cop out of here.

[David] He could have blown everything.

[Aileen speaking]

[Brian] Tom Tittle, the investigator that was

in the van across the street,

he's working to get the phone number for Port Orange Dispatch

and say, "Look, you gotta get him out of the bar."

It could have blown everything.

In about five minutes, they got in the car and left,

and she walked back inside.

And I said...

What the hell was that all about?

They thought I was somebody else.

[young Mike] All right.

I ain't fixing to get in trouble with you, am I?

[Aileen] No.

All right.

[Mike speaking]

We just shot pool and...

I'd buy her beer and cigarettes.

But my job was to try to get enough information out of her

to convict her for these homicides.

And I asked her, I said...

"Girl, what you want them damn keys for?"

This key

is the story of my life.

[chuckles]

[keys dangling]

"That's the story of my life."

She used to hit me across the back with a pool stick.

[young Mike] What the hell is wrong with you?

Oh, I'm sorry, honey.

You know, every now and then, something just comes over me.

[chuckles]

I told her, "If you ever do it again,

I'm going to knock the cornbread shit out of you."

[David] She had a very short fuse.

She could turn in the flip of a switch.

If you've ever heard the phrase, like,

"sprayed like a cockroach,"

she could turn that quick and just become just violent.

Hey. [scoffs]

I was only playing, you know.

You ready to get a motel room yet?

She wanted me to take her to the motel,

and I thought that would be a bad move.

Let's have another drink.

If she ever got me in that motel room,

first off, she was gonna wanna have sex,

and then she was gonna shoot me

in the back of the head and take my money.

[young Mike speaking]

[Aileen speaking]

[young Mike speaking]

[Aileen speaking]

[young Mike speaking]

[Aileen speaking]

[young Mike speaking]

[Aileen speaking]

[young Mike speaking]

Aileen is not a one-man woman.

Whoever's got the most money

and whoever can give her the most fun...

...that's where's she going.

[young Mike speaking]

[young Mike speaking]

That weekend, there'd have been 100 bikers in here.

My fear was

that she was gonna meet another biker,

get on back of his bike and ride off,

and we'd never see her again.

And two weeks later, somebody would be winding up

alongside the road dead.

[young Mike speaking]

[Mike] Knowing that I had her in my grasp, in my sight,

I let her get away from me.

That murder would have been on me.

[young Mike speaking]

[Jerry speaking]

[David] We did not have the confession we needed,

but the stakes were too high.

The decision was made that we're going to arrest her.

[young Mike speaking]

[Brian] Mike used a ruse to get her out of the bar.

He was in the passenger seat of the truck.

[young Mike speaking]

[Brian] His partner waved Aileen out and said,

"Hey, Mike needs to talk to you.

He needs some directions."

So she hesitantly walks up to the trunk.

[young Mike speaking]

[Aileen speaking]

So now at this point,

Mike's engaging her in conversation.

We feared what could happen if she has a gun.

[young Mike] To this main road.

[Aileen] Turn left.

[young Mike] Go this way.

[Brian] We're talking about a person here

that's suspected of killing seven people.

[Aileen] You first turn--

[young Mike] If you turn right and go across it.

[Brian] Volusia County detectives, they zero in on her.

[detective speaking]

[detective speaking]

[Brian] It took her by surprise.

[young Mike] No, man. What for?

[detective] My name is investigator Josepha with the Sheriff's Office,

Volusia County Warrant Division.

- [young Mike] Yeah. - [detective] May I see some identification?

[young Mike] I ain't got none, man.

Mike was asked to misbehave so he could get arrested.

[detective speaking]

[young Mike speaking]

[detective speaking]

[young Mike] I ain't got none fucking identification, man.

I ain't got nothing.

I ain't got no fucking phone, man.

I ain't got nothing.

And he did, he put on a great act.

[Aileen speaking]

[detective speaking]

[Aileen speaking]

[detective speaking]

[Aileen speaking]

[detective speaking]

[Aileen speaking]

[detective speaking]

[Aileen speaking]

[young Mike speaking]

[David] So that she wouldn't be tipped off,

they said that they had an outstanding arrest warrant

from a 1986 case involving a firearm.

[detective speaking]

[Aileen speaking]

[detective speaking]

[Aileen speaking]

[detective speaking]

They put him in the back of the car with Aileen.

[detective speaking]

[detective speaking]

And the car had sight and sound in the back.

[Aileen speaking]

[young Mike speaking]

[Aileen speaking]

[David] Aileen became very suspicious.

That shows you how cunning she was,

how intellectual she was.

[young Mike speaking]

[Aileen speaking]

[young Mike speaking]

[Aileen speaking]

[young Mike speaking]

[Aileen speaking]

[Aileen speaking]

[young Mike speaking]

[Aileen speaking]

[young Mike speaking]

[Aileen speaking]

[Aileen speaking]

[young Mike speaking]

[Aileen speaking]

We were hoping that she might confess to something,

But she didn't.

[detective speaking]

[Aileen speaking]

We had a prosecutor in Daytona that said,

"You don't have a case."

We definitely had a lot of work in front of us.

We had her in custody, but only for now.

We had to prove that she murdered seven men.

And that she did it in cold blood.

[David] Aileen Wuornos was delivered to the Volusia County Jail

and placed into a holding cell.

What are you in for?

Hell if I know.

I was hanging out in a bar when suddenly a bunch of cops

pull me out and arrest me.

I bet they think

I'm one of those serial killers on the news.

[Aileen] What about you?

Stealing cars.

[David] Karen Collins was an undercover detective.

Her job was to engage her in conversation,

and hopefully a confession.

From around here?

[Aileen] Been in the area around seven years.

Just lost my home over Christmas and all.

Living on the streets ever since.

Hitching around town, doing men for money.

Sounds rough.

Got a storage unit in Daytona, one of those monthly rentals.

All my possessions are inside.

They've got the key to it.

Hey, they took my laces out.

They ain't taking yours out.

Why is that?

[David] Aileen instantly knew

that something wasn't right with this.

This was exposure to danger.

See you.

[David] We have to pull her out.

[Brian] Before Aileen will flip from calm demeanor

to angry, violent killer.

Given the fact that Aileen was already suspicious

of the shoestrings,

that would have made her even more suspicious.

[Loukia] When they said it was a woman,

it was a unique situation for David and Brian.

I was just like,

"What is this?"

They were like,

"We don't really know.

"We have not studied female serial killers

to be able to answer this question."

[David] This suitcase belonging to Aileen

that was taken out of the Last Resort Bar,

we opened it up.

Inside the suitcase, we found a receipt

for a storage unit in Daytona Beach

at Jack's Mini Warehouse.

Aileen kept saying that the key that she was holding

was a key to her entire life.

We sent officers out to the storage unit

that was listed on the receipt.

That key opened the unit.

We could not believe what we found inside.