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Details :
Category: Serial Killing
Location: United States
Date: 1989 - 1990
Crime: Wuornos was the subject of the popular motion picture, called 'Monster', for her string of seven killings in Florida while working as a prostitute. She was given the death penalty and died by lethal injection in 2002.
Biography: Born on February 29, 1956 in Rochester, Michigan, Aileen Carol Pittman never met her father. A convicted child molestor, he had left the home two months before Aileen was born. In January 1960, she was abandoned by her mother and subsequently adopted by her maternal grandparents, Lauri and Britta Wuornos. From a very young age, Aileen Wuornos engaged in sexual activity, becoming pregnant by the age of 13. Her baby was given up for adoption and by the age of 15, she was homeless and out on the street working as a prostitute. When she was 20, Aileen met a 70-year old businessman and they were married within a year. Nine weeks later, they were divorced after Wuornos was arrested for assaulting her husband with his own cane. Between 1981 and 1986, Wuornos was arrested several times and had subsequent stints in prison.
Her first murder was committed on November 30, 1989 when she shot a convicted rapist several times at close range and dumped his body in a wooded area near Clearwater, Florida. Then between May 1990 and November 1990, she shot and killed six more men all along the Highway's of Florida. Police eventually caught up to her when a bloody palm print of hers was found in one of her victims abandoned cars. She ultimately pleaded guilty to the killings after initially stating that all of the men had tried to rape her. In 2001, she withdrew her appeal against the death penalty sentence and in 2002, the State of Florida complied, becoming only the tenth woman to be executed since the ban on capital punishment was lifted in 1976.
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