Original subtitles

I robbed them and I killed them as cold as ice,

I have hate crawling through my system.

- They call her the damsel of death.

- She killed these men in cold blood

and knew what she was doing.

- Authorities call her the first true female serial killer.

- Her first killing, it was the pinnacle of rage.

It's like, that felt good.

Now I'm gonna do it again.

- All middle aged men, all shot multiple times

with virtually no remorse.

- She was the predator.

- In her mind, she needed to kill these people.

She was finally gonna get even.

- This is a wicked wicked world.

- You had two guys that were out

just a little ways off of I95 up US one.

They were in this very wooded, densely wooded area.

- They're looking for scrap metal

And they see this red carpet.

And there's a buzzard pecking away at the carpet.

As they got closer and looked,

they saw this hand sticking out of it.

- And they call 911.

- During the 80s and 90s,

central Florida was not highly developed.

- This crime scene.

You'd have to get there by vehicle or some other thing.

And there was no vehicle.

The body is covered up by a heavy rug.

It's obvious the individual who's dead

didn't put it over himself.

- In Florida, it's very warm.

It doesn't take long for decomposition to occur.

So once the tarp or the carpet had been removed,

As far as a possible cause of death, you just couldn't tell.

- The suspicion was we had a robbery homicide.

You see a human being that's been killed.

And you wonder, you know,

who is this person, who is gonna be grieving?

If anyone, for the person.

His autopsy revealed he had been shot four times.

And the weapon used was a .22 caliber weapon.

- Your priority is to identify the victim.

In this case, we were behind the clock.

The victim's been dead for a couple days.

- In cases like this, you ask yourself, how did he get here

and where did he come from?

And then, who did he meet along the way?

- No, I wasn't born bad.

You guys got it, I'm trying to tell you, man, they lied.

They lie so bad to you all.

- I was Aileen's best friend.

I think we're 15.

Aileen did write me for 12 years straight.

Just about every day.

At least 5,000 letters.

She was easy to get along with.

We'd done a lot of stuff together,

like going to the mall,

going to the pool hall, going to the racetrack.

She just wanted to watch the horses.

- I think Aileen always felt

that she was who she was because of her family.

She never met her father.

He killed himself in prison.

And when she was about four years old, her mother took off.

She was left in the care of her mother's parents.

And she referred to them as mom and dad.

- [Narrator] From my experiences

with my father, I hated him.

He was cold as ice all because of world war II.

He felt like I was the enemy.

- I don't think she felt anybody

truly loved her or wanted her there.

Especially the grandfather.

- The grandpa.

He just was a cold-hearted man.

I don't think he probably ever smiled a day in his life

and just took it out on the family.

- He was both physically abusive and also extremely verbally

and emotionally abusive to her.

Saying that if he had his way,

he would take the kids out,

shoot them and hang 'em from a tree.

Aileen did not have the kind of support,

love, affection that we hope most kids will have.

If she didn't have that family,

perhaps things would've turned out differently.

- So many people that get a hold of me say,

they look in her eyes and see such beautiful eyes.

I tell people you're crazy.

Those are sad eyes.

- In the very early stages.

We didn't know who this victim was.

But eventually this victim was identified as a white male,

51 years of age by the name of Richard Mallory.

Richard Mallory did VCR repair work.

His home was the Clearwater area, Florida,

which is on the entire opposite side of the state.

You're looking about 250 some miles.

- He was over six feet tall.

He was a loner, lived by himself.

Frequented strip joints.

Had friends that suspected that he

had been actually coming over to Daytona beach

for the purposes of going to a couple of the clubs.

- Once this victim was identified as Richard Mallory,

it struck a chord.

- And they started looking for Richard Mallory,

but had no idea where he was.

- There were no fingerprints found.

His car had been wiped down

by somebody who took some time to do it.

There was some blood on the front seat of the driver's side.

- The driver's seat had been pulled

to the forward most position,

which knowing what we know about Richard Mallory

he was a very tall individual.

So that tells you his vehicle got there by another person.

Despite everything that was found

with Richard Mallory's vehicle,

you don't have anything that would help you

identify who committed this crime.

- So the truth is we were following

a dead trail at that point.

- After Mr. Mallory's case goes cold,

bodies start being found throughout central Florida.

- [Reporter] David Spears, a construction worker

found nude, shot six times with a .22.

Charles Carskaddon, found nude, shot nine times with a .22,

and Peter Siems, a missionary still missing.

- All middle aged men,

traveling on a highway, shot with a .22 caliber handgun.

And we start to wonder, maybe there's more

to Mr. Mallory's death than simply

just a single homicide out in the woods.

- Troy was not the type of man to just up and disappear.

Troy was planning on coming down

to West Palm and see the kids.

I said, okay, be careful.

I love you, see you when you get here.

Well, he never showed up.

We copied photos of him missing and we put it all over,

up and down highway 40.

You're walking through woods.

And it was in the middle of summer,

and it was storming, and it was hot.

Ugh. It was just, yeah,

it was heart wrenching to think that he was out,

hurt somewhere and we couldn't get to him.

- There was a couple and they were

looking to have a little picnic.

They go down this dirt road,

They noticed a foul smell in the air.

And they're kind of wondering what it was.

And they looked around and they saw something kind of

covered up in the, in the distance.

And it was blue in color.

It was blue jeans

And there was a badly decomposed body

inside of the blue jeans.

- And the nightmare truly began from that moment on.

From that moment.

- [Reporter] December 13th, 1989,

the badly decomposed body of 52 year old Richard Mallory

was found in the woods, north of Daytona.

- Several bodies are found throughout central Florida.

But at that time,

it's not as if law enforcement

has any clue that they're connected.

- The call came in for a body out in the forest.

Even though he was badly decomposed.

It said the name Troy, on his shirt.

- We saw detective Tilley pull up in the driveway.

And he brought in Troy's wedding band to my mom.

Who would wanna hurt Troy?

He was a good man.

We figured it had to have been a stranger

because anyone that knew him, would never wanna hurt him.

Never.

He wanted a garden and he wanted to retire.

He was tired of driving.

But, that didn't happen, I'm sorry.

- The autopsy revealed that Troy Burress

had been shot numerous times with a .22 caliber weapon.

At the time that we're working, the Troy Burress homicide,

we didn't know about any connection

to any other homicides

because they covered almost the entire state of Florida.

- But months later in September of 1990,

we have yet another case.

- Mr. Humphreys, former police chief.

He had been shot seven times with a .22 caliber weapon.

And you think, doesn't that sound familiar?

We were thinking, we got a problem.

- [Narrator] Once I hit junior high,

there went my good old morals.

Skipping out the house, at least every three months,

once the age of 13 would arrive.

My rebellious butt kept saying freedom, as off I'd go.

- As Aileen got older,

she would sneak out her bedroom window

to get away from the abusive home situation.

And the grandfather's wrath.

- We all hung out at the pits.

That's like in between my house and Aileen's house.

We all used to go there and party at night

because there was no homes there.

After us kids would party and stuff like that,

she would get with certain ones and go into the woods.

And she would sleep with some

of the boys around for cigarettes

and get extra money or whatever.

- For the first time in her life, she felt wanted.

And she felt loved.

She was seeing that she could use her body,

her sexuality, to gain favors from others.

And she was enjoying the attention she was getting.

- Until she was raped and had that baby.

Just changed her whole life.

It was horrible thing for her to happen.

- She was raped by an older individual.

She said it was an acquaintance of the grandfather.

- [Narrator] I was 14 stuck in an unwed home in Detroit,

just before I had the little tike.

Only to then have to put him up for adoption, once born.

- Her grandfather blamed her for the pregnancy,

said it was her fault.

She was told that she could no longer stay at home.

- [Narrator] I remember winters when I was a runaway.

Sleeping in the snow, no money, no warmth,

no where to go, hungry as hell.

- She started getting with gentlemen and the rest of us

were all sleeping and she was out hitch hiking at night.

- She felt she's never been in control of her life.

The only things that, for the most part, she ever felt control

of was when she was working as a sex worker.

- It was never for pleasure, it was just a business,

but she gets paid for it so she didn't mind so much

cause it was her that was in control.

Now that makes sense, don't it.

- With these killings,

we noticed that there was a similarity and we thought,

wouldn't it be amazing if it was the same person?

But we don't know.

So what we had was the Florida

department of law enforcement.

They were our state investigators.

- In criminal profiling

we try to join the cases together.

So in September, all of the investigators

who had a similar case, all went to Marion county.

- For the first time in these series of cases,

we have all the key players in one place, in one room.

- One by one,

each of the investigators presented their case.

- [Man] Richard Mallory.

- [Woman] David Spears.

- [Man] Charles Carskaddon.

- [Man] Peter Sims, Troy Burress, Dick Humphreys.

- You could see, as you were going around the room,

with investigators laying out their cases.

It is apparent that we have

one single person committing multiple homicides.

- Okay, we got a serial killer.

- You try to conjure up in your mind, who is this person?

You try to assess your enemy, if you will.

How would they be in a situation where

their paths crossed with every one of these victims?

- The way some of those bodies

are found in the state of undressed,

it was believed that sex was a part

of some of these homicides.

- And they were killed with a small caliber weapon.

Well, who was killing these big men carrying a .22?

You had the driver's seat

that was pulled to the forward most position.

- There was something different about this crime.

And so I turned to my partner and I said,

are you thinking what I'm thinking?

And he says, yeah, I think I am.

And so I looked at the lead investigators and I says, well,

we think that your perpetrator is a woman.

- [Reporter] For a year, bodies kept turning up in the woods,

along Florida's highways.

- [Repoerter 2] The victims were all white males

and had their vehicles stolen

and was shot to death with a small caliber handgun.

- After Dale Henman had laid on the table,

have you thought about this being a female?

You had a couple jaws that drop on the floor.

- For me as a profiler,

the only way I could make those cases work,

is a man rode with somebody out into the woods.

A woman had made sexual advances towards him,

or was picked up as a hitchhiker,

and then he was killed.

- I don't know that I'd ever

heard of a female serial killer.

You will see male serial killers that will search for women.

But to be a female that was going after men, to kill them.

That was unheard of.

She was the predator.

- [Narrator] There, I was every day.

Oil all over me, black bikini on, radio jamming.

Enjoying every breath I took out there.

- Aileen saw herself pretty much as a vagabond.

So she ends up hitch hiking into Florida.

- A nice warm place, different people,

people that didn't know anything about her background,

and stuff like that.

Makes a lot of sense to me.

- She felt like she fit in somehow in Daytona beach.

- Aileen did meet an older man.

His name was Lewis.

He was a wealthy man and had a normal, nice life.

And they got married, and all that.

And she thought this is her ticket off the streets.

- I don't remember Aileen

ever saying that he was a substitute

for her father or grandfather.

But I think it was pretty obvious that was the case.

He would give her money typically freely,

but then it got to a point where one time

he refused and she got upset.

- Once we were married,

where he felt full control, he began to air it.

Come near to killing him one night.

Grabbed a 22 rifle, threw him on the floor and said,

I want a divorce within 24 hours for I'll kill you.

- It became pretty easy to get her riled up

to the point where she could become pretty violent.

- He divorced her and she was back hitchhiking again.

That's all that was to it.

It was her life, she was picking it out,

not somebody telling her what to do.

- So our next steps was look

at every case and compare all the evidence.

Maybe the person had made a mistake.

- We started with Peter Siems, the missing person.

We sent up a team of detectives

and started searching the area.

But we were never able to find him.

But they found that there had been two women

that had been seen walking away from the car.

- The females had removed

the license plate from that vehicle.

- When a car would come by,

two women would duck off the side of the road.

- They were absolutely females of interest.

- We were able to develop composite drawings

and we had an idea maybe of who was in that vehicle.

But if we release these composites

and these two girls are watching

the news, are they gonna flee?

We thought we could act quickly enough

so that nobody else would be killed.

And we were wrong.

It was almost immediately thereafter

that we had our seventh victim, Walter Gino Antonio.

Our goal is to save lives

And it was really weighing heavily on the detectives.

We felt we failed.

- How many more is she's going to kill?

She has blood, the taste of it, she's not gonna stop.

- [Reporter] Central Florida is being threatened

with news of yet another round of serial killings.

The police say for the first time in criminal history,

these killers may be murdering with a feminine touch.

- They call her the damsel of death.

- Authorities call her the first true female serial killer.

- The fact that it was women just blew me away.

And then I saw the sketch.

I don't know, I just stared at it.

I just stared right into their eyes and wondered

if that was the last face Troy ever got to see.

- We had hoped to get leads in.

And we did.

We had thousands of leads that came in.

- The phone literally rang off the hook.

The nucleus of these leads was in Volusia County

and Daytona, Florida area.

- One of the calls that I received was from a woman

that said that she knew a couple of girls that hated men.

The person that called this lead in

gave us the name of Tyria Moore.

- So who is this person?

- [Narrator] My life has been a struggle.

On the road until 20, married 60 days, 28 found Tyria.

- All her life, I think Aileen wished she had stability.

Somebody that cared for her,

and she just never had any of that

until she started hanging out with Ty.

- Tyria was the first time that I think

Aileen was really in love.

But despite this great romance,

Aileen would go to bars a lot, she was drinking a lot.

That was the only way that

she could make everything disappear

and not have to think about what her life was like.

- [Narrator] I've been raped violently in life.

The drunker I got as I reflected back to rapes, that was it.

The wilder my thoughts became with hatred,

all bitterly built up.

- She's choosing to hitch hike be the prostitute,

but she needed the money.

I'm sure she knew all the dangers of it.

She'd been doing it her whole life.

- I think that she may have had some flashbacks

as to what's happened to her when she was younger,

her violence had been escalating over the years

and it was easier for that anger to come out.

- [Narrator] The slightest spark

of provocation led to bastards.

I had enough.

- I think she got to a point

where she just didn't really care.

She was going to take advantage of people,

just like they've taken advantage

of her all of her life.

- I never hated men.

But now I do.

- When Peterson's vehicle was crashed,

two people walked away,

but there was certainly never any indication

that any of these crimes were perpetrated by two people.

- So now all efforts are out to find the other female.

We go to the pawn shops and see if anything's being pawned

from our homicide victims, with these different aliases.

And one alias that kept coming up in all of the leads,

turned up at two different pawn shops.

The items that had been pawn were 35 millimeter camera

and a radar detector.

And those were the two items taken

from the vehicle of Richard Mallory.

- Back then Florida had a pawn shop law in effect

as to where you had to leave a thumbprint.

- We run that thumbprint from that pawn ticket.

- There was a positive match.

- She had a criminal history

and so they had fingerprint records.

- Bingo.

- Finally, we have a name.

Aileen Wuornos.

So where is she?

- We decided to invite as many undercover officers

as we could from central Florida

to come over to Daytona beach.

Saturate the bars and try and find her.

And it only took a couple days before

one of our undercover officers ran into her

in the Last Resort bar.

We couldn't take a chance on her killing again.

We had to act quickly.

- The undercover officer told Aileen that he had a room key

and that they could go over there and party at the motel.

- We still had to make sure we got her

into custody without anybody be getting hurt.

- She was most likely armed

and she already had killed seven men.

- There is no way we can let her out of our sight.

- [Reporter] If the regulars at

the biker hang out near Daytona, didn't know the woman,

the undercover deputies watching

the Last Resort certainly did.

They were on the trail of Aileen Lee Wuornos.

- The high sign was given to draw her outside

to go ahead and take her into police custody.

- Never stopped.

- When you make that arrest,

that's where you feel the relief.

That's where you know you've done your job.

You can never bring back the life of a victim.

You could never stop the hurt

of the victim's family and loved ones.

- But you know that everybody who was gonna be

a potential victim of hers is now safe.

It's a happy feeling of relief.

And I think all of us shared it.

- The cops come to my house and said,

do you know Aileen Wuornos?

I said, oh hell yeah.

And they're like, she killed seven men.

I said, holy cow, for real?

I thought she'd be the one dead.

- Now the biggest challenge of this

entire case, it was before us.

We had to have a confession.

- When you have two people involved,

one could be turned against the other.

So, it became a very easy endeavor to lean on Tyria Moore.

- She agreed to work with law enforcement

to contact Aileen.

She was ultimately not prosecuted as a result of this.

She sent Aileen a letter at the Volusia County jail

asking her to call her at this motel.

- Hi.

- [Narrator] Through my years on the road as a teen

and then in Florida, I faced a lot of male abuse.

Fending for myself, alone.

No one else to help me.

The final year became too much.

- [Narrator] In one set frame of mind,

bent with revenge and set to kill,

a Cadillac pulled over to give me a ride

with Richard Mallory inside.

- Richard Mallory picked me up

around 10:30 at night on I4.

He mentioned along the way, a dislike for various women.

So with that, the fire was fueled.

- They started getting ready to have sex.

And he said something along the lines of,

well, you're gonna do what I tell you.

And I can only speculate that there were some level

of flashing back to what she went through

when she was younger, when she felt

that she had no control over the situation.

And in this case, she actually did have control

because she had a gun in her purse.

- We've seen instances of rage with her.

We've seen her become violent.

This was the pinnacle of that violence.

And it's like, that felt good.

Now I'm gonna do it again.

- After Mr. Mallory, she felt that

she was finally gonna get even

with all the men who have hurt her throughout her lifetime.

- I think after Richard Mallory,

it was very easy for her to do.

That made her feel like a queen bee.

I think she thought she was all that and a bag of chips.

Nope, she'd become a murderer is what she did.

- I've been framed by the law enforcement

as a serial killer.

What I was, was a prostitute, and I defended myself.

- Aileen not only claimed self defense.

She testified, on the witness stand, that she was a victim.

Highly unusual for a suspect to do.

- He said, you're going do everything I tell you to do.

And if you don't, I'll kill you right now.

I thought to myself, I gotta fight.

I just gotta fight for my.

- In her mind, she may have believed

that she needed to kill these people

or something could have happened.

But I don't think there was evidence

that her life was in danger.

- She fully expected to be found not guilty.

In her mind, she felt she was a victim.

- We, the jury find the defendant

Aileen Carol Wuornos guilty.

- She was able to rationalize

that she's been a victim all of her life.

All the way to the death penalty.

- During the time that Aileen Wuornos spent on death row,

she had a lot of time of reflection.

- From when I went to see her on death row

many years later, Aileen's mental state changed.

She eventually admitted that

her self defense claim was completely fabricated.

- Then I killed those men.

I robbed them and I killed them as cold as ice.

There's no chance in keeping me alive

or anything cause I'd kill again.

I have hate crawling through my system.

- She had resentment toward men and society in general.

I think she was just ready to get

out of this life, out of this world.

- Oh man, if I was to leave this planet,

it wouldn't be no big deal to me

cause this is a wicked, wicked world.

Wicked world.

- She's a murder.

But it did take a lot of crap to get her there, didn't it?

- She's gotten a raw deal outta life.

But that is not to say that she had a right to kill anybody.

- A lot of people say the system failed her,

but I think that everybody makes a decision in their life.

I didn't feel sorry for her.

I felt sorry for the families of the victims

that had to live with what had happened.

- She took my dad's life and many others.

I just wished he wouldn't have been

such a great guy to stop and help her out.

You know?

Cause he'd be here today.

- Oh, of course.

Don't you?