Requiem for a Female Serial Killer—A Review

Charlotte Allen writes in Quillette:

Aileen Carol Wuornos was born in Michigan in 1956 and executed by lethal injection in Florida in 2002. She has been called America’s “first female serial killer,” but that wasn’t true by a long shot. Still, she might have been the first woman to kill (or be suspected of killing) a series of complete strangers—the victims of her homicidal female predecessors had been husbands, suitors, boarders, or children, old folks, or patients entrusted to them as nurse or caretaker. Wuornos’s seven victims (and there might have been more) were men between the ages of 40 and 65 who had picked her up as a hitchhiker on Florida’s highways—mostly along Interstate 75, which slices north-south through the middle of the state, then veers west to the Gulf Coast, where it abruptly swings eastward through the Everglades to greater Miami. The first of these killings, all of which involved multiple gunshots to the torso, took place in November 1989, and the last occurred in November 1990. She was arrested on January 9th, 1991, identified by her fingerprints (she already had a decades-long criminal record) and eyewitness reports that placed her in or near some of the victims’ posthumously stolen cars with her lesbian partner, Tyria Moore. Wuornos had been a prostitute off and on since her teens, and it is entirely plausible (although far from certain) that most of the men who picked her up had sex in mind. Wuornos had maintained that all seven victims had become violent and either raped or threatened to rape her, and that she had killed them in self-defense. Nonetheless, she became the 10th woman in America to be executed after the US Supreme Court allowed the death penalty to resume in 1976.

Thanks to the media and to her unique status among female killers, Wuornos became a celebrity de scandale even before she and Moore were definitively identified. Lawyers, writers, filmmakers, criminal justice reformers, save-a-soul evangelical Christians, and high-profile feminist activists all flew into the aura of the handcuffed, orange-garbed, man-killing, Death Row-dwelling Wuornos like gnats drawn to a porch light. Monster—the heavily fictionalized 2003 movie about Wuornos for which actress Charlize Theron won an Academy Award—was only one of several dramatizations, biographies, film documentaries, television episodes, songs, poems, and even an opera that have capitalized on the macabre fascination the doomed and doom-dealing Wuornos elicited. Monster was made with Wuornos’s cooperation, and it was in production even as her state-appointed lawyers were making last-ditch efforts to stay her execution on grounds of severe mental incapacity. The Last Resort Bar, the biker hangout in Port Orange, Florida, where Wuornos was arrested, is now a tourist attraction, with a mugshot of Wuornos sitting on the bar itself and a mural of her likeness painted on the wall.

One of those mesmerized was Phyllis Chesler, among the most famous of the “second-wave” feminists of the 1960s and 1970s and author of a new book about Wuornos entitled Requiem for a Female Serial Killer. Chesler recently retired as professor of psychology and women’s studies at the City University of New York. She is now under a social justice cloud because she protests honor killings and other female abuses in the Islamic world, and remains a forthright supporter of Israel, a pariah country these days on much of the progressive and activist Left. Thirty years ago, however, she was riding on the fame of her 1972 book, Women and Madness, in which she argued that many women diagnosed as psychotic or otherwise deviant—by an overwhelmingly male psychiatric profession—were simply asserting their independence against social expectations of their sex determined by men. If they engaged in destructive or self-destructive behavior, it was “a socially powerless individual’s attempt to unite body and feeling.”

So when, in late 1990, Chesler found herself watching a newscast describing the two mysterious armed women believed to be stalking the Florida roads for male prey, she concluded that Wuornos, still unknown to the public by name, was “a feminist folk hero of sorts.” She was Thelma and Louise avant la lettre—a woman finally giving as good as she got from men. A few months later, Chesler threw herself and as many allies as she could muster into Wuornos’s legal defense. (Requiem sometimes reads like a Who’s Who of second-wave feminism, with brief appearances by Chesler’s friends Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin, and Zsuzsanna “Z” Budapest, the Los Angeles fortune-teller who invented Dianic Wicca.) She left her apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and flew to Florida, where she ran up collect-call charges from the jail, scuffled verbally with Tricia (“Trish”) Jenkins, the veteran public defender in charge of Wuornos’s criminal defense team, and tried to scrape together the money to pay the travel expenses of experts and former prostitutes willing to testify on Wuornos’s behalf. She wanted the court to understand “how dangerous the ‘working life’ really is; how prostitutes are routinely infected with diseases, gang-raped, tortured, and murdered; and that Wuornos had been raped and beaten so many times that, by now, if she was at all human, she’d have to be permanently drunk and out of her mind.”

The defense Chesler proposed for Wuornos was a variant of the “battered women’s syndrome” theory that allows women routinely beaten by their husbands or intimate partners to claim self-defense if they kill their abusers. This defense is available even if the victim hadn’t immediately threatened violence or reasonably seemed to do so—the only circumstance that usually justifies the use of lethal force against another human being. Since the 1970s, courts have occasionally invoked battered women’s syndrome (also known as the Burning Bed defense, after the 1984 made-for-television movie starring Farrah Fawcett), either to expand the concept of self-defense to include killings that would otherwise be deemed premeditated, or to bolster a claim of temporary insanity: a wife driven mad by her husband’s savagery to the point that she thinks she has no recourse but to kill him. Chesler hoped to extend this concept still further to include prostitutes, on the theory that, like battered wives, they experience near-daily violence from their male customers. Wuornos told Chesler and others that she had been raped repeatedly since adolescence by men whom she had thought were friends or clients or boyfriends. “I think it’s time to expand a woman’s right to self-defense,” Chesler told Gloria Steinem, “to include prostituted women. It’s time to argue that any woman, prostituted or not, has the right to kill in self-defense.” Most prostitutes, she writes, “are on the front lines of violent misogyny every single day.”

The voluminous legal documents and interview notes that Chesler collected from Wuornos and those connected to her never did turn into anything substantial, although over the years she wrote a law review article expounding her legal theories and contributed a foreword to a 2012 collection of the Death Row correspondence between Wuornos and her childhood friend from Michigan, Dawn Botkins. Then, in 2019, a box of papers fell from a shelf as Chesler was renovating her apartment, and she decided at last to write the “damn book,” as she describes Requiem: a reconstruction of Wuornos’s homicides from Wuornos’s point of view and a memoir of Chesler’s own involvement in the case.

In January 1992, Wuornos was tried for the first of the killings. Richard Charles Mallory, 51, had been an electronics store owner in Clearwater, Florida, with whom she had hitched a ride northward to take her to the motel near Daytona Beach where she lived with Moore. At that trial, and in previous interviews with the police, she testified that Mallory had driven her to an isolated area near Orlando, and instead of engaging in the consensual sex-for-cash for which she had bargained, he had tied her up, beaten her, raped her brutally both vaginally and anally, and announced that he intended to kill her. At this point, according to Wuornos, she reached for a .22 pistol that she carried in her purse and shot him at least three times. She covered his body with a piece of carpeting and drove his 1977 Cadillac to her motel. A few days later she abandoned the car in a nearby wooded area, along with Mallory’s now-empty wallet and credit cards. She said she had killed him in self-defense.

The jury clearly did not believe her testimony, partly because an initial jailhouse confession (admitted into evidence over Trish Jenkins’s objections and made over the objections of a deputy public defender present during her questioning who had advised her not to talk) did not mention rape; partly because Mallory’s body had been completely clothed with his pants zipped and the pockets hanging out when it was discovered; partly because she had told conflicting stories about the other six murders (admitted into evidence to prove intent and a pattern of conduct); partly because items from Mallory’s car (some of which bore Wuornos’s fingerprints) turned out to have been pawned or left in a rental storage unit near Daytona Beach; partly because Wuornos’s account of the shootings didn’t match the forensic evidence; and partly because Wuornos’s volcanic temperament had made a shambolic mess of the trial. Taking the stand against her defense team’s advice, she alternately raged against her accusers and retreated behind the Fifth Amendment during cross-examination. The jury spent less than two hours deliberating before returning a unanimous verdict finding her guilty on a range of charges, including first-degree murder and aggravated armed robbery.

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