Serial Killer “Monster” Woman (?): Aileen Wuornos on Trial and on Screen

Abstract

The familiar moral fable of the serial killer, it is argued, purposefully creates anxiety and fear, but ultimately provides the viewer with reassurance, ‘usually by the imposition of the legitimate use of violent force’ (Christine Bell and Marie Fox, ‘Telling Stories of Women Who Kill’, Social & Legal Studies, 5.4 [1996], 471–494 [p. 479]). In the case of American serial killer Aileen Wuornos—often claimed in the press to be America’s first female serial killer—the legitimising force came in the form of seven death sentences and Wuornos’s execution on 9 October 2002 after ten years on death row. And yet, the validity of that most ultimate of all resolutions is called into question is delegitimised, in Nick Broomfield’s award-winning documentaries Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1992) and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003). This chapter examines the gendered narrative of Wuornos as a “monster” serial killer as explored through both the US media and the responses of the American criminal justice and legal systems and looks at these in comparison with Broomfield’s documentary analysis of Aileen the (victimised) woman.