Original subtitles

[suspenseful tones playing]

[Taylor] We had never seen a killer like her before.

And time is of the essence. If we can't prove she did this,

she'll be out of jail and we'll have another victim.

At least for now, we had her in custody

at the Volusia County Jail.

Inside the suitcase that we recovered from the bar,

we found the receipt for Jack's Mini Warehouse.

Mike Joyner had shared that Aileen had mentioned to him

about a key.

This key was her whole life.

And she was very protective of that key.

So we go over to Jack's Mini Warehouse

with that key.

We had a camcorder filming the entire event.

It was a small unit.

Number 14, David Spears clothing.

[Taylor] And the key we recovered opened that unit.

When we got inside, it was obvious why she didn't want us

to have that key.

[Jarvis] They were all kind of little items

and tokens, handcuffs, flashlights, a Mexican blanket.

It was a treasure trove of evidence.

It didn't prove murder,

but it helped us tie the cases together.

But now our job was to find the second woman

that was identified via the composite sketch.

[Jarvis] And when the leads started coming in...

Tyria was the name that came up

four times.

We identified the second person in the composite sketch,

as Tyria Moore.

[Jarvis] Tyria Moore was Aileen's girlfriend,

and we tracked her down to Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Jolene.

[Taylor] Tyria Moore was six years younger than Aileen.

They had met in a bar in Daytona called The Zodiac,

and they had been a couple for four years.

[Loukia] The understanding is that Aileen did the killings,

and Tyria was not a participant.

I don't think that Tyria actively participated

in any homicide,

but I do believe that she had constructive knowledge

of the homicides.

How many? I don't exactly know.

We do know of at least one.

Aileen was a safety net for her, you know,

that they were dedicated to each other.

But Tyria knew this ain't good, you know, and she left.

[Taylor] We didn't know if Tyria would talk with us about

any knowledge that she may have concerning any of the murders.

[Taylor] She denied any involvement in any of the seven murders.

But we did have a witness placing her and Aileen

at the scene of the car crash.

And that car belonged to Peter Siems.

But it's not clear whether Tyria knew she was in

a homicide victim's stolen car.

- [loud crash] - [glass shattering]

Peter Siems was still missing.

Tyria was offered immunity from prosecution.

[Jarvis] And she agreed to work with us.

And part of that cooperation is going to be

to try and get Aileen to confess.

[Taylor] Aileen still had no idea we suspected her

of these murders.

She thought she was in jail on an old warrant.

[Jarvis] Tyria sent a letter to the jail to Aileen.

And she said, "I'm in Daytona.

The police are asking questions. I'm scared."

And she asked her to call her at the motel in Daytona.

[Joyner] We'd come out here and got a motel room by the interstate.

Our plan was to get Tyria and Aileen talking.

[Taylor] I mean, ultimately, the goal was to get

a full confession over the telephone via Tyria Moore.

Not all of the audio of these phone calls still remains,

but we do have transcripts of

exactly what they said to each other.

[phone ringing]

[Aileen] Hey, Ty.

Hey, Lee. What the hell are you doing?

[Aileen] Nothing. I'm sitting here at jail.

What are you doing there? Why are you in a motel?

I came down to see what the hell was happening.

[Aileen] They pulled me in on a warrant

for carrying a concealed weapon and a traffic ticket.

Shit.

There's been officials up at my parents' house.

I'm gettin' scared.

I don't think there's anything to be worried about.

[Taylor] The very first phone call

that we recorded, Aileen was very reassuring

to Tyria that the police have no evidence.

They don't have anything that connect me to these murders.

They listen to everything we say on this phone.

You hear me?

Everything.

I'm worried. I've seen some stuff

on the TV news.

I'm not one of those little suspects.

I'm getting really pissed off of them accusing me of things.

Are you OK, Lee?

I miss you, Ty.

Real bad.

[Taylor] Aileen's relationship with Tyria was intense.

Now, there is no doubt in my mind that

she loved her to the max.

And I think that that was a situation as to where

she would have done anything to protect Tyria more.

[Aileen] Listen, Ty, you've got nothing to worry about.

I'll call you later, OK? - [call disconnects]

[phone ringing]

I'd sit on the bed with a pad,

and when I wanted to ask her a question, I'd write it down.

What did you do with the storage unit?

[Aileen] Don't say nothing about the storage, OK?

[call disconnects]

[Taylor] When Tyria brought up the topic of the storage unit,

Aileen immediately shut down the conversation.

[phone ringing]

Aileen continued calling Tyria at the motel.

[Jarvis] Tyria pulled on her heartstrings.

She didn't want to get in trouble.

She was pleading with Aileen to confess

to the police what had happened.

Aileen, I don't want my life messed up

for something you did.

Something that I did?

Tyria, I didn't do anything.

[Tyria] You know damn well. I've heard it on the news.

[man coughing]

Tyria, is there anybody in that room?

[tense tones playing]

There's somebody sitting in that room listening.

There's nobody here, Lee.

Aileen was suspicious that

there were other people inside the room,

but Tyria managed to persuade her that she was alone.

[Tyria] They've been up at my parents again and they got my sister now

asking her questions.

What are they asking your sister questions for?

[voice shaking] I don't know, but this isn't fair!

My mom's calling me all the time.

She doesn't know what the hell's going on.

I'm not gonna let you go to jail.

You're gonna let me get in trouble for something

I didn't do? - Tyria, I said I'm not.

- Quit crying. - I can't help it.

- I'm scared shitless. - [Aileen] No, Ty.

Ty, listen to me.

If I have to confess, I will.

I love you.

You're such a beautiful person.

So innocent, such a lovable person.

I love you.

Ty, I want you to know I will always love you.

I don't give a fuck about nothing now.

It's over.

You could hear Aileen, she said, "Guard, give me

an investigator, I wanna confess."

And it was shortly thereafter, corrections officers then

took Aileen Wuornos to this interrogation room

where she met two investigators.

[Jarvis] Sections of the videotaped interrogation

with Aileen Wuornos are missing.

But we do have the complete transcript of everything

she said to investigators that morning.

- Morning. - Morning.

How you doing?

I came here to confess.

[Jarvis] First thing the detective does is

gets her a cup of coffee.

See, what does it say?

"If it feels good, do it. If it feels great, do it again?"

[both laughing]

[Taylor] It was just like she was shooting the breeze

over a cup of coffee with her friends,

laughing and joking and telling stories.

[Aileen laughing]

[Jarvis] I think she might have maybe read into that a little bit,

but kind of the coded message behind it when she laughed was

that she's accused of killing several men.

[Aileen] In my heart, I never would hurt anybody unless I had to.

I mean, I just,

I just don't have that in me.

Mm!

Did you put truth serum in this coffee?

[Taylor] "Did you put truth serum in the coffee?"

I think that instantly shows her ability to change her tone

in any situation whatsoever that she's faced with.

Aileen started to open up a little bit, talking about

her background and her lifestyle.

[Aileen] I would hitchhike, and a guy would pick me up,

and I'd ask them if they were interested in helping me out,

you know, to try to make rent.

I'm telling you, I've dealt with 100,000 guys.

The type of work she was doing would be very high risk.

You know, you get in a car, there's sex in the offing.

[as Aileen] Daytona Beach?

[Loukia] Is he gonna get rough with her?

Is she gonna be killed and rolled down some highway

into some embankment and gone, nobody ever sees her again?

And then I reached the point where I needed a gun.

And I was staying with this guy and I noticed he had some guns.

And I ripped off his .22, a nine-shot deal.

[Taylor] The admission that she had used a .22 caliber weapon,

that was very significant.

These victims had all been shot with a .22 caliber weapon.

And one of the detectives instantly says, "Let me

give you my jacket."

And that was just a situation where to continue the rapport

had to make her feel comfortable.

When the detectives told Aileen that they had been

to her storage unit,

I think that was kind of a shocker to her because

that was one of her most hidden secrets.

She didn't expect anybody to find that.

One of the items that was identified and recovered

from the storage unit was a Polaroid camera.

That was identified as belonging to Richard Mallory,

who was the first victim.

We had to go full circle back.

[as detective] Do you recognize this man?

Yes, I know who he is.

[Jarvis] Richard Mallory is 51 years old.

He owned an electronics repair shop

in New Port Richey, Florida.

He didn't have much in the way of family, friends,

a little life of solitude, I guess you would say.

He enjoyed patronizing prostitutes.

I want you to tell me from the beginning how you met

this man and what happened in the incident

between you and Mr. Mallory.

Cheers. [chuckles]

Hey, let's-- take it easy, you know?

Don't have to be so rough. [groaning]

No, get off me!

[indistinct complaining]

[tense music building up]

[breathing shakingly]

And I thought to myself, "Well, hell, should I

help this guy or should I just kill him?"

I figured if I help the guy and he lives, he's gonna tell

on me and I'm gonna get done for attempted murder.

So I thought the best thing to do is to just

keep on shooting him.

[Jarvis] She shot him once, and he was still alive,

and she could have left at that point.

He might have lived,

but she consciously decided that she was going to kill him.

So, you killed him to silence him.

Is that what it boils down to?

Yeah.

But it also was in bitterness of what he was doing to me.

[scoffs] I was like, "Hey dude,

"you're gonna rape me, you're gonna kill me,

"whatever you're gonna do, it's not gonna happen.

'Cause now I'm on the other end of the stick."

[Jarvis] That showed that she had the power now.

She had the control,

and she had his fate in her hands.

I thought to myself,

this dirty bastard deserves to die anyway

for what he was trying to do to me.

[Loukia] When she killed Richard Mallory,

she just wanted to

say, "I'm not going out this way.

"I'm not going out on my back

"with some guy on top of me.

I'm gonna turn this around and I am gonna blow you away."

[tense tones playing]

[Taylor] Aileen said Richard Mallory attacked her.

We have no evidence to contradict it.

When you look at her body language, what she's saying,

what we know from the crime scene evidence,

you have to say it's possible

that she killed him in self defense.

Was this the trigger

that started the killings?

Richard Dick Humphreys.

- Do you remember him? - Yeah.

Mr. Humphreys, there's no other way to put it.

He lived a very good life. He served his country.

He served as a police officer in Alabama.

He served as a protective investigator in Florida,

protecting children.

He was married for around 35 years to his wife.

They had a great relationship.

OK, so when I-- when I--

He had been shot multiple times.

One of the rounds was in the palm of his hand,

that would indicate that he was in a somewhat of

a defensive type posture with his hands up.

You have another gunshot wound that is what we call

a close noncontact gunshot wound that was directly

over the heart area on his chest.

The evidence wasn't consistent

that he was killed in self-defense.

I'm sitting here thinking, you know,

she was playing these guys,

she is trying her best to convince investigators

that he was the aggressor.

[Jarvis] In the midst of telling us about these murders,

she brought up her childhood and her background,

and we couldn't help but wonder why.

But we figured something in her story might give us

insight into why she did this.

[Aileen] See, I don't have any parents.

I raised myself ever since I was 14.

I don't have anybody, no family or nothing.

If I had a family, I'm...

sure I wouldn't be in this predicament, that's for sure.

It wouldn't have been a hooker or nothing.

[Jarvis] She had grown up in Troy, Michigan,

but at the age of five months old,

her mother abandoned her.

She left.

[Loukia] When your mother walks away from you,

you begin to ask,

"Am I not worth your time?"

And those things are hard to

reconcile.

She didn't know her father.

He was serving time, and then I believe

he killed himself in prison.

And her grandparents raised her.

Now, they didn't really wanna raise her.

They resented her.

The grandfather treated her very badly.

He had a home-built sauna in his garage,

and he'd lock her in there and just crank up the heat

to punish her.

Or he'd make her strip naked and beat her.

[Loukia] Her early childhood

was just crushing.

[Dawn] I stay loyal to all my friends.

[chuckles] Very much so.

We've developed our own friendship.

She never had that before.

[Dawn] First time I met Aileen,

we're 16.

You're crazy, spending all this money on me.

It's OK. You deserve it.

We'd go sneak to the mall, you know, skip school

and stuff like that. We'd have a ride.

Dawn, I'm gonna make you a beauty queen.

You're funny, Aileen.

[Dawn] She noticed I don't carry a purse.

I always put everything in my pocket.

She picked out this purse for me and got all this makeup

and hair stuff to go on this purse.

But she filled the whole thing up full of makeup,

stuff she thought I was gonna wear.

And she became my best friend.

This older man that lived in her neighborhood,

his name was Chief.

He would let all the kids come over and let them all drink

and stuff like that.

Aileen happened to get drunk one night.

But she passed out.

And he raped her.

And that's how she got pregnant.

It was terrible, because she had to go

to the unweds home away from school.

She has a child. She gives that child up.

I don't know how you come out of something like that

without support.

[Dawn] The grandpa kicked her out of the house.

So she slept in the woods. She really did.

So in the morning, she'd go into the gas station

because you could use their bathrooms,

and that's when she'd wash her hair and put her makeup on

and stuff like that.

Change her clothes, what clothes she did have.

She always had that book in her back pocket.

Her little Bible.

I can't imagine how hard that had to been.

I'm Loretta Valdez, but everyone here knows me

as Lori Mirranuck.

My first recollection of Aileen.

We were standing on the bus stop.

All of a sudden, this

young girl rides up on her bicycle.

And all of us became really quiet.

I guess you could say she was very socially awkward.

[Aileen] See you later, Dawn.

Everyone was very quiet

because she was, she just seemed so odd.

That's Aileen.

She's just come back from having a baby.

And we said, "What? A baby?

What do you mean she had a baby?"

It was such a shock.

[Dawn] The kids, you know, they were always saying

rotten things to her and making fun of her for having a baby

and living in the woods.

And they were just so horrible to her.

It was always,

she's strange,

nobody wants her around, which makes me sad

to say that now. It really does.

That feeling of exclusion made her go looking for acceptance.

So for her, it was, you know, "I'll have sex

with you for a pack of cigarettes,"

or, "I'll have sex with you for food."

And then that becomes a form of acceptance for her.

So she, you know, felt that

sexualizing herself was the answer.

[Taylor] From her early, mid-teen years,

she worked the roads and the highways

as a prostitute, performing sexual favors,

you know, for money.

She had to live. She had to eat.

[Dawn] She became a prostitute in order to feed herself.

Nobody else would feed her.

You know, that's survival.

I used to think,

"Wow, she's really a prostitute and all that,

but she carries a Bible with her."

[Loukia] She had enough hatred in her and enough anger

and saw men as aggressors, as predators, that she was

going to even the score for all those things

that happened to her in her childhood.

[Taylor] Peter Siems was a middle-aged white male.

He was then reported missing

to the Jupiter, Florida, Police Department.

On June the 7th, Peter Siems had

left his home in Jupiter, Florida,

and he was on his way to the state of Arkansas

to visit family.

[Aileen] This is the one in Georgia,

out in the woods.

This guy gave me a problem.

And so I whipped out my gun and I said, "Hey, I don't wanna

shoot you, you know?"

But he was trying to get my gun from me

and we're struggling with the gun and a couple of shots

go up in the air.

And so I ripped it away

and then I shot him immediately.

I went rifling through his things.

I don't know if he was a minister or not.

[as detective] He was a missionary.

[Aileen] Oh, God.

Why would he wanna do something like that to me

if he was so much into the Lord?

[Taylor] I think that's a very telling moment from her mindset,

if you wanna look at the deep, dark crevices of her mind,

killing someone that was a man of God.

That, I think, struck a chord with her.

Her story that she killed in self-defense is not credible.

Peter Siems, he'd been a man of God for many decades.

According to his family, he was the type of person that

would go out of his way to help someone if they looked like

they were in distress or they needed help.

And he would take the opportunity to share

the gospel with them.

To this day,

we've never found Peter Siems.

We have never recovered his body.

To claim that all seven of her victims tried to rape

and kill her, that every single killing was self-defense,

it was absolutely staggering.

I killed them because they got violent with me

and I decided to defend myself.

I wasn't gonna let them beat the shit out of me or kill me.

I thought, well, they're older men.

They probably don't have anybody anyway.

Their families, they'll say, "Oh, stupid bitch,

you killed my husband or whatever."

But they must realize that no matter how much they love

the people that died, no matter how much they love 'em,

they were bad.

Aileen's whole self-defense argument was now coming apart.

[Loukia] We're never really gonna know what happened when she got

in the car with them because they're not here

to tell their side of the story.

But I just never really believed that all seven of them

wanted to have sex with her.

I especially don't believe that it was the case

with Dick Humphreys.

Did she select them because of how they looked?

They were middle-aged men.

Or as some people believe,

did these men remind her of her grandfather?

And she wanted to kill her grandfather

for how she was treated as a child?

But the other possibility is that Richard Mallory

had such an impact on her that she felt she had to kill him

over and over again.

[gun shot fired]

[Aileen] I realize now how badly I've hurt some families.

But in my heart, I'm a good girl.

You'd have to stop and ask yourself, why all of a sudden

did she kill seven men in a one-year time span

if she hadn't killed anybody for the 10 years that she was

working as a sex worker?

I really, really can't believe

I'm here telling you guys this, but--

I don't think I should live. I think I should die

because I killed all those people.

I really,

really wanna get right with God.

Do you understand?

I'm putting myself on the cross.

If this was Western days, they'd put me

in a noose and watch. Let the town watch me die.

It's almost as if she was like holding herself out to be

the martyr, you know, for killing these guys that

she perceived to be evil.

And that she was willing to pay the price for that.

Not only did she confess, but also she eliminated

her girlfriend, Tyria, of any criminal culpability

in these homicides.

I don't want my girlfriend involved.

This is why I'm doing this.

She was my lover.

She loved me and I loved her.

I just wish to God I never was a hooker.

I just wish I never would have done what I did.

But I still say that it was self defense because most

of 'em were either gonna start to beat me up

or screw me in the ass.

By the end of the interview,

Aileen had confessed to seven murders.

[Taylor] Richard Mallory, it was possible in that first case

that she did kill him in self defense.

[gun shot fired]

[Jarvis] But it did not answer why

she killed six more men after that.

[Taylor] She was claiming that she killed these men

in self-defense.

Our job was now to disprove that.

[Dawn] My mom called me up.

"Oh my God, Dawn, you're not going to believe it!

Aileen's on TV."

So I turned it on, and it was saying how she killed

all these men. I said, "Holy shit!"

[Taylor] Was she the predator

or was she acting in self-defense?

Motherfucker!

[Taylor] That's a question for a jury to decide.

It was the biggest news story on the planet.

[Taylor] And now, she was about to become

the most notorious criminal in the world.

[Jarvis] Her girlfriend, the girl that she protected,

she was testifying.

She said that she had shot and killed a man that day.

This was the ultimate betrayal.