← America's Most Infamous Crimes with Katie Ring
America's Most Infamous Crimes with Katie Ring
Aileen Wuornos: The Story Behind America's Most Feared Female Killer Pt. 1
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- [00:07]
Katie Ring
This is Crime House. There's a story we tell ourselves about serial killers, that they look a certain way, that they act a certain way, and that most of the time, they're men. Aileen Wuornos changed that all she was a woman, a sex worker, exactly the kind of person you would expect to be a victim. The kind of person whose suffering goes unnoticed, whose disappearance barely registers, whose story gets filed away and forgotten. Instead, she became one of the most feared killers in American history. Between 1989 and 1990, she shot seven men dead along the highways and back roads of Florida. And when the police finally caught her, what they found forced this country to confront something it wasn't fully prepared for. Every crime tells a story about the people involved, the system that tried to stop it, and the nation that couldn't look away. Some cases are so shocking, so deeply woven into who we are, that decades later, we're still asking, how did this happen? I'm Katie Ring, and this is America's Most Infamous Crimes. Every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, I'll take you deep into the cases that have a lasting imprint on society and still haunt us today. I want to thank you for being part of the Crime House community. Please rate, review and follow America's Most Infamous Crimes wherever you get your podcasts and to get all episodes at once. Ad free. Subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. Before I get started, please be advised that this episode contains descriptions of physical and sexual assault, abuse and murder. So please listen with care. This is the first of our three episode series on Eileen Wuornos, one of the most notorious female serial killers of all time. Today, I'm starting at the very beginning, Eileen's childhood, the traumas that defined it, and the long grinding road that eventually brought her to the side of a Florida highway with a stolen gun.
- [02:06]
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- [02:58]
Katie Ring
like so many stories about serial killers, if you want to understand Aileen Wuornos, you have to start at the very beginning. Because almost nothing about her life from the very first day was stable or safe or kind of. The world that greeted Eileen when she was born was already stacked against her, and it never really stopped being that way. Every time there was an opportunity for something to go right, something went wrong. Instead, every time there was a chance for someone to intervene and change the course of what was coming, they either failed to act or actively made things worse. Eileen was born on a leap day on February 29, 1956 in Rochester, Michigan. Her mother, Diane, would always remember how difficult the birth was. She later even wondered if complications during labor might have left Eileen with some form of brain damage. Either way, the circumstances Eileen was born into were already complicated enough on their own, and they only got more complex. Diane was only 16 years old when Eileen came into the world. She already had one child, Eileen's older brother Keith, who'd been born just the year before. And as if being a teenage mother of two wasn't already an overwhelming situation, Diane's husband had abandoned her before Eileen was even born. She was a teenager alone with two babies under the age of two. Not only was raising two kids as a teenager hard enough on its own, it also came with a ton of social stigma. For a while, Diane tried to make it work, but after about six months, she reached a breaking point. She couldn't handle raising two very young kids on her own. So she made the decision to send Eileen and Keith to live with her parents, Lowry and Britta Wuornos, in the suburban town of Troy, Michigan. Lowry and Brita took Eileen and Keith and raised them as their own children alongside their two biological kids, a son named Barry, who was around 10 at the time, and a younger daughter named Lori. Growing up, Eileen, Keith and Laurie all believed they were full siblings. Barry was old enough to know the truth about the family arrangement, but he kept the secret out of respect for his parents wishes. But in a small, close knit town like Troy, secrets have a way of getting out. Word gets around, people talk. And by the time eileen was around 10 years old, she learned the truth that the people she'd always believed were her parents were actually her grandparents. This kind of revelation can have different impacts on children depending on Their environment. For Ted Bundy, it created a gulf between him and his mom that could never be crossed. For Eileen, though, it didn't destroy the relationship entirely. Even after learning the truth, she always considered Lowry and Brita to be her real parents in every way that mattered, and they considered her their daughter. But it did change how she understood her place in the family. She felt like Lowry and Brita had a deeper, more unconditional love for their biological children than they did for her and Keith. Sometimes she even felt like she and Keith were punished more severely than the others for breaking the same roles. And that perception wasn't completely off. By multiple accounts, Lowry was extremely strict. He would physically punish the children whenever he felt they'd misbehaved. And Eileen later claimed he frequently beat her with his belt. There is some dispute over the full extent of his violence. Some family members have different stories, But Eileen's account of being physically abused in that household never wavered throughout her life. To cope with what was happening at home, Eileen started using drugs by the time she was 12 years old. Marijuana, acid, cocaine. She turned to all of them looking for something that would dull the edges of the life that had already become very hard. And it seemed like physical abuse wasn't the only thing she was trying to escape. According to some accounts, Eileen was also being sexually abused. She suggested the abuse started around the same time as her drug use. And some reports have pointed to members of her own family as possible perpetrators, including her grandfather Lowry, and her once brother, but actual uncle Barry. There are also allegations of an incestuous relationship with her brother Keith. Every person in Eileen's family denied these claims, and notably so did Eileen herself at various points in her life, even when admitting to them might have served her legal interests. The full truth of what happened inside that household will probably never be known. But there is one tragedy from Eileen's childhood that nobody disputes and that no one has ever attempted to minimize or explain away. In 1969, when Eileen was 13, she was walking through her neighborhood in the rain when a stranger offered her a ride. Under normal circumstances, she might have said no. But the weather was miserable and the man told her he knew her grandfather, Lowry. But it was a trap. Once Eileen was in the car, the man raped her. She was 13 years old, a child. And when she returned home pregnant and traumatized and in desperate need of support, nobody believed her. Instead of offering her compassion, getting enraged on her behalf, or getting her help, Eileen's family shamed her for what happened. They treated her assault as evidence of Promiscuity rather than as the crime it was. And instead of getting her support, her grandparents sent her to a home for unwed mothers in Detroit. She was there for only a month or two before she gave birth at 13 years old, completely alone. The labor lasted an entire day. Eileen made the decision to give her son up for adoption, and when she came home after that, she was a different person. The combination of being raped, becoming a mother at 13, giving up her child, and then being disbelieved and judged by the people who were supposed to protect her took a toll that Eileen would carry with her the rest of her life. Her counselors at school noticed something was wrong and tried to intervene. They prescribed her sedatives, but the medication didn't make any meaningful difference. When they recommended therapy, the suggestion went nowhere. And at that time, without family support, a 13 year old girl couldn't pursue it on her own. So Eileen continued to deteriorate and attempted to take her own life. Things only kept getting worse for Eileen from there. Her classmates bullied her relentlessly, adding daily cruelty to an already unbearable situation. And she eventually dropped out of school altogether. The one real friend she had during this period was a girl named Dawn Botkins, who showed up for Eileen when essentially no one else would. Dawn was genuinely there for her, steady, loyal, and caring in a way that almost no one else in Eileen's world managed to be. But dawn was young too, and there was only so much a teenager could do for a friend, drowning in circumstances neither of them were equipped to handle. By the time Eileen was 15, she was largely fending for herself. She'd developed a habit of running away from home and spending time at a place the neighborhood kids called the Pits, a patch of woods that served as a hangout spot for teenagers who wanted to drink, use drugs, and escape their own lives for a few hours. For Eileen, it wasn't just rebellion. It was the only version of freedom available to her. Lowry and Britta's patience for her disappearances quickly reached its limits, though, and in 1971, they made a decision that would change everything. When 15 year old Eileen ran away this time, Lowry and Brita did something they hadn't done before. They filed a runaway child report with the police. They wanted her to face formal legal consequences for her behavior, and wanted the system to do what they apparently felt like they couldn't do themselves. But before any of that could play out, something happened that Eileen never saw coming. She had no idea her grandmother Britta had been sick. And while Eileen was hiding from the police. Britta died of cirrhosis of the liver at only 54 years old. For all of the complexity and pain of that household, Eileen had considered Brita her mother. And now, without warning, she was gone. While Eileen was sleeping in the woods, police allowed Eileen to attend the funeral, but that was all. There was no invitation to come home. Lowry made it clear that Eileen was not welcome back under his roof. The day after the funeral, Eileen was arrested and sent to an all girls juvenile detention facility in a neighboring town. She wasn't there long before she spotted an opportunity to escape during a field trip out to the country and she took it. The escape was short lived though, and when she was brought to court on the runaway charge, Lowry appeared before the judge and stated plainly that Eileen would move, never be allowed to return to his home. She was only 15 years old. She had just buried the woman who raised her. And she had been formally cast out by the only family she had ever known.
- [11:49]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
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- [12:19]
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- [12:51]
Katie Ring
When Eileen was finally released from detention around the end of 1971, she went back to the pits. But there was nothing exciting about it anymore. Winter was closing in. She was cold, she had no money, she had no shelter. And she was completely alone. This wasn't the loneliness of feeling like an outsider in her own home. This was the loneliness of not having any home at all. To survive, she turned to sex work. Finding clients who would pay for her company and staying in their homes or in cheap hotels when she could. But that came with constant danger and she was sexually assaulted again. With nothing left to hold her to Michigan, Eileen eventually decided to leave. In early 1972, at 15 years old, she started hitchhiking and searching for any version of life that was better than the one she was living. In those early days on the road, there might have been some moments that felt like a fresh start. But the world she was heading into was no kinder to her than the one she'd left behind. Over the next few years, she hitchhiked across the country, from New York to California, up into Canada and back down through the South. She had no fixed address, no safety net, and no one reliably in her corner. To support herself, she relied primarily on sex work. It was the only way she really knew how to make money. But it was never enough. So she also turned to petty crime, forgery, theft and disorderly conduct. She was arrested multiple times and built up a record that would follow her for the rest of her life. The years on the road were extremely bleak, and Eileen went through recurring bouts of severe depression. In her early 20s, she made multiple attempts on her own life, escalated her drug use, and experimented with various pills and hallucinogens. The world had never given her much reason to stay in it, and there were clearly stretches of time when she struggled to find one herself. And the losses kept coming. In March 1976, when Eileen was 20 years old, her grandfather Lowery, the man who'd raised her, most likely abused her, rejected her, and then kicked her out of his home. Died by suicide at 56. Eileen didn't go to the funeral, and however she felt about his death, she kept it to herself. Around this same time, Eileen was in Florida, where she met a 69 year old yacht club president named Louis fell. Despite a 50 year age difference between them, the two began a relationship and got married in May of 1976. Looking at it from the outside, the age gap is jarring. But understanding Eileen's history, her lifelong hunger for stability and a father figure, the psychology behind it makes sense. She needed something safe, and Lewis offered that. But unfortunately, she didn't find the stability she was looking for. And the marriage barely lasted two months. In July, Lewis filed for divorce, citing Eileen's violent and ungovernable temperature. And then that same month, July 1976, Eileen's brother Keith died of throat cancer. He was only 21 years old. Keith had been the only constant from the very beginning. The person who'd shared her original situation, who'd grown up alongside her in the same confusing household, who'd known her when she was still just a kid. And now he was gone too. These losses came in a swift and brutal succession. In 1978, Eileen attempted suicide again. But while she was physically recovered, it was a reminder of how low things had gotten and how little traction she'd found in the years since leaving Michigan. Despite having a biological mother still alive somewhere, Eileen had no interest in reaching out to Diane. Instead, she went back to the only life she knew. The road, the next city, the next stranger's car. After a few more years of drifting, Eileen eventually found her way back to Florida. She got involved in a new relationship, and by the time she was 25, she was deeply attached to her boyfriend. But her self confidence was essentially non existent. By that point. She'd been abandoned, rejected, and assaulted so many times that she developed an expectation that anyone she cared about would eventually leave. After all of that trauma, it was hard to believe she was worth staying for. One day, after mixing around 24 beers and four sedatives, Eileen came up with what she described as a plan to test whether her boyfriend truly loved her. Her logic was that if she got herself arrested and he came to bail her out, it would prove that he cared, that she really meant something to him, and that he would show up when it counted. So in 1981, 25 year old Eileen walked into a convenience store and robbed it at gunpoint for $61. She was arrested exactly as planned. But she was not granted bail this time. So her boyfriend couldn't even get her out if he wanted to. Eileen was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison, and she ended up serving just over a year. While Eileen was behind bars, she received a psychological evaluation. The psychiatrist who examined her concluded that Eileen was of average intelligence and that while she had some memory problems in a somewhat impulsive presentation, she didn't display signs of delusions or any serious thought disorder. And while the evaluation noted her substance abuse issues and her difficult history, it didn't lead to any kind of treatment plan. So she just served her time and was released. When she got out, not much changed. The next few years brought additional run ins with the law. Forgery, petty theft, and resisting arrest. A series of charges that added up to a portrait of someone continuously on the edge of stability, but never quite able to reach it. But something larger was building. And in the late spring of 1986, Eileen made a move that crossed a new line. On June 2, 1986, Eileen was hitchhiking near the Arkansas Texas border when she caught a ride with a man named Wayne Manning. He thought she seemed friendly and harmless, just someone looking for a lift. But after they'd spent nearly a full day together, Eileen pulled a gun on him. And tried to rob him on the side of the road. Other drivers noticed what was happening and called the police. Wayne decided not to press charges. He told himself she was just down on her luck and was somebody who needed a break. But he had no idea what she was capable of. And neither did she. After this incident, Eileen went back to Florida and settled near Daytona Beach. And it was there, at around 30 years old, that she met the person who would come to define the rest of her life. A 24 year old woman named Tyra Moore. Eileen would later describe Tyra as the love of her life. And in a lot of ways, the relationship was the most stable, consistent thing Eileen had experienced since childhood. They were genuinely happy together, but their lives were financially unstable in ways they could never really overcome. They moved around a lot, from motels to apartments to cheaper motels, always right on the edge of not being able to afford where they were staying. Tyra worked odd jobs while Eileen did sex work along the Florida highways, flagging down cars, negotiating with strangers and climbing into vehicles with men she had never met. It was dangerous and inconsistent, and during the rainy seasons, it was even harder to bring in enough money to keep them afloat. By the fall of 1989, their financial situation had become genuinely dire. To bring in more income, 33 year old Eileen started hitchhiking farther, going to different cities and stretching her usual territory to find new clients. The danger of her work had always been real. She'd been physically and sexually assaulted by clients more than once over the years, and with Tyra now depending on her, she decided she needed a way to protect herself. So she stole a.22 caliber handgun and started carrying it with her. She told herself it was for her protection, and maybe she did really believe that at first, but it would eventually change everything.
- [21:00]
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- [21:32]
Katie Ring
On November 30, 1989, Eileen was on the side of a Florida highway when a car slowed down and stopped beside her. The driver was a 51 year old man named Richard Mallory. Richard was a TV repairman from Clearwater, Florida, which is about three hours from Daytona beach that weekend. He'd come to the area looking for a good time. He was comfortable financially, was traveling alone, and when he picked up Eileen by the side of the road, he made a decision that would cost him his life. The two of them spent time together over the course of that evening, drinking, smoking marijuana and talking. And Richard ended up driving them down to an isolated service road near the woods. What happened next is something Eileen described differently on multiple occasions over the following years. We will be going more into depth on Richard Mallory in the next episodes, but for the purpose of this episode, we will go over what her first version of the story was. In the first version, Eileen said that things became tense when Richard started making demands about what he wanted from her. She said he became hostile and confusing. She thought he was trying to get free sex from her to get what he wanted without paying. Her instincts, she said, told her something was very wrong. So she pulled out her gun and accused him of planning to rape her and steal her money. Richard denied it, but she shot him anyway. He managed to get out of the car, but Eileen shot him again. When Eileen was sure he was dead, she went through his pockets and took his valuables. She also found a discarded rug, and she used it to cover his body. After covering the body, she got to work on the car. She sprayed Windex through the interior and wiped it clean of any fingerprints she might have left behind, then drove it to a crowded beach parking lot and abandoned it. It was a methodical cleanup, deliberate and careful, the work of someone who'd thought about not getting caught before. Within a few days, police discovered the abandoned car, but Richard Mallory was nowhere to be found, and Eileen was long gone. She made it back to Daytona beach on December 1st. By the time she got back, she was drunk and wanted to tell Tyra what had happened. Eileen sat down and told her she had killed a man and that it had happened after he tried to scam her and that she had no choice. Tyra told Eileen she didn't want to hear about it and changed the conversation. The day continued, and on the surface, everything seemed normal enough. But when Eileen sobered up, the fear set in. She was worried that Tyra might be scared of her now and that she might leave. To Eileen, losing Tyra was the worst possible outcome of any situation. So she walked the story back. She told Tyra she hadn't actually done anything and that she had just stumbled across a body someone else had hidden under a rug in the woods. And that was the whole story. But it didn't help. Tyra became distant over the next few days, and Eileen could feel the shift. She could sense the fear underneath Tyra's quietness. She later commented on it, saying sadly, she knew I'd lost my mind. Richard Mallory's body was discovered on December 13, 1989, nearly two weeks after Eileen had killed him. She'd done a thorough enough job covering her tracks that nobody was connecting the murder to a woman working the highways. There were no leads pointing in her direction, no witnesses who could identify her, and no forensic evidence linking her to the scene. So life went on as usual. But Eileen and Tyra's money troubles hadn't gone anywhere, and Eileen was already thinking about what she would do when the pressure got bad enough. Again, she had done it once, she had gotten away with it, and it wouldn't be long before she killed again. At the end of each episode, I like to take a moment to answer any questions you may have about the case and share my thoughts, so make sure to comment below.
- [25:21]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Eileen's childhood is one of the most harrowing origin stories we've covered on this show. How much does a background like that explain or even partially justify what she eventually became?
- [25:32]
Katie Ring
Most serial killers have traumatic upbringings, but for some reason, I find myself having more empathy for Eileen. And I'm not sure if that's just because she's a woman or because of the sheer volume of trauma she experienced at the hands of numerous men. No serial killer's childhood justifies their murders, but it does give us insight into their actions. Eileen grew up in the perfect storm of neglect, abuse and instability. She was abandoned by her parents, raised in a household marked by violence, reportedly sexually abused by one or multiple family members from a young age. She became pregnant as a teenager after being raped, and instead of support, comfort, or justice, they blamed her. They sent her away to have the baby all alone, without any support system. They also basically sent her to juvie and then when she was out, told her she wasn't welcome home. So she was left with nothing. No shelter, no food, no support. She turned to the one thing that people had told her, gave her her worth, which was sex work. She was then physically and sexually assaulted even more doing that work. That kind of prolonged trauma, especially in early development, can fundamentally shape how someone experiences trust, threat and survival. By the time she was an adult, she wasn't really operating from a stable baseline that most of us take for granted. She was living on the margins. Homelessness, sex, work, constant exposure to danger. And in this element, the line between self defense and aggression can blur, especially for someone already primed to see the world as hostile. So in that sense, her background helps explain the lens through which she may have perceived her victims and her actions and her justifications. But again, explanations have limits. So plenty of people endure horrific childhoods without committing this level of violence. And at some point, Eileen made choices that cause irreversible harm to others. So while her past may contextualize her actions, even complicate our moral judgment, it doesn't erase responsibility. I think the more uncomfortable truth is that both things can be true at once. She was the victim of profound systemic failure and a perpetrator of serious violence. So in the end, I think maybe the real takeaway isn't about excusing her or her actions, but about recognizing how early trauma, untreated mental health issues, and social abandonment can converge into something tragic, even preventable, long before it turns deadly.
- [28:02]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
We see a clear pattern of Eileen reaching out for help to her family, to school counselors, and being turned away or ignored entirely. What does that tell us?
- [28:11]
Katie Ring
For me, this is one of the most infuriating things about this whole case. Because her school counselors saw that something was seriously wrong and actually made recommendations. They suggested therapy, they tried medication, and they actually did try and intervene, but it went nowhere because the adults in her life didn't follow through and completely failed her. Unfortunately, that is a consistent pattern in cases like this one, where the system identifies the problem and simply stops. Someone fills out a form, someone makes a referral, and then kind of disappears because no one actually does the follow through. What I keep coming back to is that Eileen wasn't invisible and she wasn't a child who just slipped through the cracks without anyone noticing. People recognized that she was struggling. They just didn't do enough with what they saw. And in ways I actually find that more disturbing than if she had been completely overlooked. Because it tells you that the problem isn't always about missing the warning signs. Sometimes the warning signs are seen and acted on just barely enough that no one feels responsible, but not enough to actually change anything. And for me, it's really sad to think about how just one person following through and supporting her or believing in her could have changed her whole outcome.
- [29:26]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
The marriage to Lewis Fell, a 69 year old man she married at 20 years old, which collapsed in two months, is a strange episode in her story. What do you make of it?
- [29:35]
Katie Ring
I think the marriage definitely feels random at first glance, especially given the age gap. But in the context of her life, it makes more sense to me, she was living a hard and fast life and never really had any stability. Then suddenly here's a man offering structure, security and a way out of this survival mode she had been living in. And she never really spoke about the relationship in depth, and when she was asked about it or when she did, she was typically dismissive. So this is more speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised if at this point in her life she was just exhausted and wanted to try and see if she could make something like this work. But judging by how fast it all ended, I think that it was most likely a decision made out of desperation that she quickly realized wasn't really going to work for her. Or it also could have been something deeper, something more like self sabotage. Because when your baseline is chaos, stability can sometimes feel unfamiliar and even threatening. Trauma doesn't just shape what you go through, it shapes what you can sustain. And there were also clear imbalances with age, money and power. So even if it offered safety on paper, it wasn't necessarily an equal or healthy dynamic.
- [30:50]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
She gave one version of the Richard Mallory story in which she pulled the trigger because she believed she was about to be raped. How seriously should we take that claim at this point in the story?
- [30:59]
Katie Ring
I don't want to give too much away in this answer because there's information that we will discuss in tomorrow's episode that may shape how you view her story. But for now, I'll say this. Eileen had been raped multiple times in her life from a very young age. She also had to be hyper vigilant because she was doing work that put her in dangerous situations with strangers on a regular basis. And she had been violently assaulted by clients before. So when someone with that much experience with violence has a gut feeling that something is going to happen, it is usually pretty accurate. At the same time, her stories weren't also the most consistent and details have varied between different accounts. But again, there is something significant about Richard Mallory we will be getting into in a later episode, something the jury at her trial never even heard. And so once you hear those details about him, I think your thoughts on her version of the story may change. Thanks so much for joining me. For this episode, make sure to rate, review and follow America's most infamous crimes so we can keep building this community together. And to get all episodes at once Ad Free subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. Come back tomorrow for our next episode episode on Eileen Warnos.