ABSTRACT
Aileen Wuornos, self-confessed killer of seven white, middle-aged men between 30 November 1989 and December 1990, presently awaits execution in a Florida prison. Arrested in January 1991 she was tried for the first killing and sentenced to death exactly a year later. Since then she has pleaded ‘no contest’ to the other murder charges and has accordingly been given six further sentences of execution. According to her trial testimony, she supported herself, and frequently her female lover, by prostitution, working the highways around the Daytona Beach area in Florida. She would pose as a hitchhiker and, upon getting a lift, would offer her services to the driver. During the year in question she shot seven of her clients to death in woodland close to Florida’s Interstate 75, where she had accepted the rides. Aileen Wuornos has claimed throughout the case that all seven shootings were a result of self-defence on her part; the men had attempted to rape her, and in two cases succeeded, and she had fought back.
