ABSTRACT
On the morning of 9 October 2002, a media frenzy surrounded the walls of Florida State Prison. Newspaper journalists and television crews had arrived the evening before, as Aileen Wuornos read the Bible and listened to an oldies radio station. Although they would not be direct witnesses to her execution, the media found it enough to be on site as the state took the life of the woman dubbed America’s first female serial killer. For many journalists, Wuornos’s death by lethal injection brought to a close a story which began in January 1991, following her confession to the murders of six men. In the 12 years between her arrest and execution, reporters and others attempted to make sense of the prisoner’s actions by piecing together the strands of her marginal existence. Wuornos’s own claim to have acted in selfdefence while working along Florida’s highways as a prostitute was buttressed by evidence exposing a life of abuse, violence, rootlessness and betrayal. Expert witnesses testified that Wuornos was mentally ill, and her lesbian relationship added a further salacious element to her story. However, these apparent facts lent themselves to competing interpretations. Depending upon the source, Wuornos was described as either a victim of society or an evil monster; an avenging angel or a madwoman. She was both ascribed full agency and stripped bare of it. Her crimes were at once contextualised and removed from the events circumscribing them (Hart, 1994; Kelleher and Kelleher, 1998; Kennedy, 1992; McWinney, 1993; Morrissey, 2003; Russell, 1992; Shipley and Arrigo, 2004).
