Resulting in one of the most controversial death sentences ever to have been passed in the United States to this day, the case of Aileen Wuornos, convicted for killing seven men in Florida between 1989 and 1990, still garners significant attention and criticism.
Wuornos, born in Rochester, Michigan, in 1956, suffered an extreme situation of abuse practically since her birth and throughout her whole life: abandoned at almost four years old by her mother, her grandparents, both alcoholics raised her.
This severely changed her mind, quickly acquiring grave sociopathic and psychopathic tendencies.
After a lifetime of petty crime, she was finally arrested in 1991 as the main suspect in the murder of seven men.
After her trial, she claimed that all of them tried to rape her. Please keep reading and find out more on this story, one that shook the basis of the justice system and of our conception of justice itself.
10 /10 An Absent Father
Aileen Wuornos’ parents filed for divorce two months before she was born, sixteen and eighteen. The marriage had been hasty and violent, and both had exhibited alcoholism and violent tendencies.
During those two months after his divorce, her father, eighteen-year-old Leo Dale Pittman, was arrested and condemned to a lengthy prison sentence after being proven as a sexual offender against children.
He was later diagnosed with schizophrenia and committed suicide in prison when Aileen was thirteen years old. She never got to meet him.
9 /10 A Mother That Left
Aileen was born and raised by her mother, the then sixteen-year-old Dianne Wuornos, until she was four years old.
Dianne was also a very disturbed person who would frequently neglect her child severely and eventually abandoned her to the “care” of her grandparents, Lauri and Britta Wuornos when Aileen was four years old.
In reality, her daughter wasn’t going to experience any caring there at all: both Lauri and Britta were raving alcoholics and abusers, and she would, tragically, actually come to miss her mother’s neglect.