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Aileen told a very different story.
She didn’t deny the killings. She denied the meaning assigned to them. Again and again, she said she acted in self-defense, reliving moments she claimed were soaked in terror—men who raped her, beat her, threatened her life. To Aileen, each shooting was a desperate act by someone who had spent a lifetime being hunted, used, and discarded. She wasn’t proud. She was furious. And she was exhausted.
Aileen Wuornos was born into chaos. Her father was a convicted child predator who later died by suicide in prison. Her mother abandoned her and her brother when Aileen was still a toddler, leaving them with grandparents who were ill-equipped and, by many accounts, abusive. The home she grew up in offered little safety and no tenderness. By her early teens, she was reportedly trading sex for food, cigarettes, or shelter—survival masquerading as choice.
By fifteen, she was pregnant. Shortly after giving birth, the child was taken away for adoption. Aileen was soon thrown out of her grandparents’ house and began drifting, living on the road, hitchhiking, sleeping rough. The world taught her one lesson repeatedly: trust gets you hurt.
Violence followed her into adulthood. Arrest records, witness accounts, and her own words paint a picture of a woman who lived constantly on edge, shaped by fear and rage in equal measure. Prostitution became a means of survival. Men were both her income and her greatest threat. Every encounter carried risk. Every night was a gamble.
When the killings began, the legal system focused on the facts it could prove. Seven men were dead. Firearms matched. Confessions recorded. The context of her life—abuse, mental illness, trauma—was treated as background noise, not a central truth. The courtroom wasn’t built to untangle decades of neglect and violence. It was built to decide guilt.
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