By Michele Yeo
“Aileen Wuornos, the real Aileen Wuornos, is not a serial killer…I turned into one but my real self is not one.”
Aileen Wuornos said this during a 1997 interview. That Wuornos murdered seven men in a 12-month period over 1989 and 1990 is not up for debate; she confessed to the crimes and was executed for them, only the third woman to be put to death in Florida, in 2002. But what’s never been clear is exactly why she did what she did or who she really was. Now, more than 30 years after her killing spree, a new documentary, Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers attempts to answer those, and other questions.
“I think, as with so much in life, it’s just not that simple and I think she is a contradiction of so many things,” says director Emily Turner. Told through archival footage and interviews including several with Aileen herself, the documentary offers another look at the enigma that is Wuornos. “We really didn’t want to make, like, an apology piece for her,” explains Turner. “We really wanted to look in the face of what she’d done, and how calculated, and you know, how she lied, and all of those things. But I think, to really grapple with this story and all of those contradictions, is to look at some really uncomfortable truths. Because I don’t believe it to be binary and simple.”
There’s certainly no dearth of content on Aileen Wuornos. There have been several documentaries on her including two films by acclaimed director Nick Broomfield and, of course, the 2003 film Monster which won Charlize Theron an Academy Award for her portrayal of Wuornos. Turner says despite the passage of time and existing films, documentaries, and books, there is still an appetite for information about one of the world’s only known female serial killers.”The Broomfield films are incredible, but there’s something about where we are now at this point in time, it’s kind of interesting like, 30 years,” says Turner. “That’s an amount of time where people kind of feel reflective and the world has changed so much now and is more aware.” There’s also a generation of audiences that didn’t experience the Wuornos case in real time. “There’s a younger audience that may not know this story. Although there has been a kind of resurgence in her and an interest in her, and almost like she’s kind of gained this sort of icon status. And that’s interesting, too, because I think she’s often so misunderstood,” says Turner. “She’s such an anomaly isn’t she? Like so rarely do women kind of kill in this way.”
Renewed interest in Wuornos isn’t completely surprising, there has been a surge of content in recent years looking back at crimes from the ‘90s and early 2000s like the Menendez brothers, the Laci Peterson murder, and the OJ Simpson case. “I think that’s the kind of privilege of working for Netflix is that you know you’ve got this audience that’s young,” explains Turner. “I think young people are interested in the human stories and true crime, and so the opportunity we have is that there are people that, you know, as a young audience, who don’t know this story at all. And I think we’re interested in them because they just reveal so much about all of us, don’t they?”
The longstanding debate around Wuornos is whether she was a murderous monster or a victim – a victim of circumstance – she’s the product of a brutal childhood and adolescence – and a victim of her own victims. At one point Wuornos, a sex worker at the time, maintained all of the murders were committed in self defence, a claim she later walked back saying on the stand at a post conviction hearing in 2001, “I killed those men. I robbed them and I killed them cold as ice. And I’d do it again, too. I know I’d kill another person ’cause I’ve hated humans for a long time.” It’s just one of her many contradictions. “I remain confused about how to feel about her,” says Turner. “It would be so much easier to just write her off as some sort of cold-blooded killer but actually the more uncomfortable truth is that there was kind of immense potential in her…I don’t want to diminish the horror of what she did but underneath there was a human. For me that’s even more disturbing and upsetting to reckon with.”
Also disturbing is some of the language used to describe Wuornos in the documentary’s archive footage from the early ‘90s. One police investigator is on record saying of her status as a sex worker, “I honestly don’t know how anyone could be attracted to that she was vile,” and “it kinda baffles me she got any customers at all.” It’s hard to imagine police would feel comfortable speaking so freely in present day, even if they thought that way. Inherent misogyny was definitely a common theme in the coverage and treatment of Wuornos at the time. “That’s what was so intriguing for me about this story,” says Turner. “Ostensibly it’s about a true crime story, but actually, once you start looking into it, it’s almost like a Trojan horse. There’s so much that this case tells you about the world as it was, and the mirror it kind of holds up to the world that we’re in now…I think what I always have to understand as a filmmaker is what our purpose is. Like, why are we doing this? And it feels even more relevant a story to tell than when we started two years ago. The world has changed even more and it feels like she’s just almost like a Shakespearean tale.”
Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers is now streaming on Netflix.
