During an eleven month period in 1989-1990, Aileen Wuornos killed seven men in central Florida, becoming the first woman to meet the FBI criteria for a serial killer. Her primary motive seems to have been money that she needed to safeguard her relationship with Tyria Moore, her lesbian partner. She may also have harbored a deep seeded rage against men in general due to the unfortunate circumstances of her childhood.

Wuornos was born Aileen Carol Pittman on February 29, 1956 in Rochester, Michigan. Her mother, Diane Wuornos, was only fourteen when she eloped with Leo Pittman on June 3, 1954. Pittman was extremely jealous and made Diane a virtual prisoner in her own home, forcing her to keep the shades closed and the doors locked. Pittman, a small-time hood and budding sociopath, was also physically abusive, and beat Diane with alarming regularity. When Pittman was forced to join the Army to avoid jail time after a conviction for auto theft, Diane was finally able to make a clean break and divorced him in 1955.

Diane raised Aileen and her older brother Keith as a single parent for a time. But, for reasons that are still unclear, she abandoned them in early 1960, fleeing to Texas. Aileen and Keith were taken in by their maternal grandparents, Lauri and Britta Wuornos, who adopted them on March 16, 1960 and changed their name. A brief reconciliation with Diane failed a few years later and they never came face to face with their father Leo who hanged himself in prison in 1969 after being sentenced to life for raping a seven-year-old girl. So, for better or worse, it fell to Lauri and Britta to raise Aileen and Keith.

Lauri and Britta Wuornos were still raising two children of their own when they adopted Aileen and Keith. Barry and Lori would be presented to the newcomers as their brother and sister when in fact they were their uncle and aunt. Lauri Wuornos, the man who would have the greatest effect on Aileen during her formative years, was a serious man of Finnish descent who dressed in a suit and tie to go to his blue collar job. He was also known as an alcoholic with a temper who never went anywhere without a bottle of wine in tow.

Lauri apparently had one standard of behavior for Barry and Lori and a separate more stringent criterion for Keith and Aileen. Barry and Lori both would say that Lauri was strict but fair while Aileen and her playmates from that time period both described the beatings he doled out. One contemporary of Aileen’s remembered a beating Lauri administered with a leather belt as she was bent over a chair with her naked bottom exposed. Lauri was also known to verbally assail Aileen in a manner that would be considered inappropriate by today’s standards.

Barry always defended his father as being strict but firm, but it should be remembered that he left home for the Air Force when Aileen was eleven and was not present during some of the most contentious years. Britta, for her part, never tried to interfere with Lauri’s brand of punishment and was described as a quiet woman and a homebody.

Aileen exhibited a “Jekyll and Hyde” personality with a volcanic temper as early as the age of eleven. This was about the same time that she discovered the truth about her adopted parents, a development which further strained her already bad relationship with Lauri, who she now saw as her “mean old grandfather”. It was also at the age of eleven that Aileen began her incursion into the world of sexual activity, probably as an escape from her troublesome home life.

Aileen became known in her Troy, Michigan neighborhood as the “cigarette pig” or “cigarette bandit” because she would engage in sexual acts for a pack of her favorite 35 cent smokes. She had sex with many of the boys who lived nearby and, it is said, even with her brother Keith. Aileen had a crush on Keith’s best friend, Jerry Moss, but after getting sex, Moss would have nothing to do with her. His treatment of Aileen was not the exception but rather the rule. Keith, Jerry and others often threw rocks at Aileen when they didn’t want her around and she was generally ridiculed by most of the neighborhood kids because of her promiscuity.

Aileen graduated from accepting cigarettes for sex to taking money and drugs by the time she was thirteen and she often returned from her sexual forays with a fistful of money. But prostitution was not the only illegal activity she became involved in. She was caught shoplifting record albums from a Kmart store and Britta, who was employed there, was so humiliated that she quit her job.

Aileen became pregnant when she was just fourteen. It is not known who the father was, but many said it was Alfonse Podlack, an eccentric fifty-something whose home was the scene of underage drinking parties. Aileen would often ride along with Podlack on beer runs and she usually returned richer than when she left. Aileen first maintained that she had been raped, a theme that she would revisit with regularity in her adult years, but later named Podlack, Lauri, Keith and others as the father.

Aileen gave birth to a boy on March 24, 1971 at the Florence Crittenton Home in Detroit and the baby was adopted by an unknown local family shortly thereafter. Aileen went back to school but soon dropped out and ended up in a juvenile girls’ home where she learned how to play pool, a skill that would serve her well in the years to come when she became a “hustler”. Upon her release, she tried to go home but the unrelenting tension between her and Lauri soon caused her to leave home for good.

Over the next several years in the early to mid-seventies, she resorted to sleeping in abandoned cars and even in the woods, living in makeshift huts she called “forts” and turning tricks to survive. She occasionally stayed with family (such as her sister Lori and her new husband Erv) or friends but her bad temper and erratic behavior led to an inevitable return to the woods. It was also during these years that she became a heavy drinker and used her prostitution earnings to fund her binges. She also furnished beer for parties: a futile activity that she hoped would gain her the attention she desperately wanted.

The first in a series of Wuornos family deaths occurred on July 7, 1971 when Britta died of liver disease. After her death, Lauri was depressed (some speculated his mood was because he had murdered Britta) and committed suicide on March 12, 1976, just four months before Keith died of cancer at the age of 21. Aileen, then twenty, was at a crossroads and, over the course of the next decade, drifted further and further into a world of crime and alcohol abuse mixed with uncontrollable anger and increasingly bizarre behavior.

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