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Abstract
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Like the great, late Ann Rule (Rule, 1980), I, too, am haunted by my time with a high-profile serial killer.
I am talking about Aileen Carol Wuornos. There has never been a female--or male--serial quite like her, not before or since (Chesler, 1993; Chesler, 2020, Kester and Gottlieb, 2012; Russell, 2002; Shipley and Arrigo, 2004).
Wuornos was seen as a "monster," as an unacceptably "bad" girl (Fahs, 2014; Hart, 1993). Male serial killers (Caputi, 1987; Hickey, 1991; Larsen, 2003), who have been known to kill scores of girls and women are often glorified and portrayed again and again in books and films. Many people, especially women, including some feminists, found Wuornos too "hot to handle," not a good role model for a feminist movement under siege. There were, of course, many exceptions who were drawn to her as something of a folk hero, as their kind of outlaw.
No one, including myself, recognized exactly what kind of a killer she was. Although I had many phone conversations, exchanged letters with her, and visited her on Death Row, it still took me many years to profile her. There were no guides.
How many in-depth, literary portraits of women killers exist?
Have Austen, the Brontes, Eliot, Woolf, Colette, Wharton, Stein, Barnes, de Beauvoir, or Lessing ever given us a portrait of homicidal fury in female form? I don't think so, but neither have Doestoevski, Melville, Baudelaire, Zola, Dickens, Celine, Genet, Camus, Burroughs, Miller, Wright, Ellison, Mailer, or Capote. Few pre-feminist writers have ever dared to imagine the lives of women killers. Not one character comes to mind: no female Raskolnikov, Meursault, or Bigger Thomas. How could so many great writers have resisted this temptation?...
KEYWORDS: serial killer, female serial killer, Aileen Wuornos, prostitution, motive for murder, traumatic child abuse, violence
Language: en |