Vanessa Richardson (29:17)
Two years before the Menendez brothers went to court, another infamous killer faced justice for her crimes. On January 27, 1992, 35 year old Eileen Wuornos stood in a Florida courtroom as the jury walked in to return their verdict. Eileen was on trial for the murder of Richard Mallory, a 51 year old man who owned an electronics shop in Clearwater, Florida. Prosecutors had claimed that Eileen killed Mallory and stole his car and wallet after he picked her up on the side of the road. Meanwhile, Eileen and her lawyers had insisted that she'd killed him in self defense when he tried to sexually assault her. Now both sides were about to find out which story the jury found more convincing. Evidently, they hadn't needed much time to think about it. The jury had only deliberated for two hours before reaching their decision. The judge read the jury's verdict and announced it to the packed courtroom. They'd found Eileen Wuornos guilty of first degree murder. Before the jurors could leave the room, Eileen decided, as usual, that she had to have the last word. As the jurors got up to leave, she screamed, I'm innocent. I was raped. Scumbags of America. Yelling at the jury like this was a bad idea because these were the same people who would later determine whether Eileen should receive the death penalty for her crime. Eileen Wuornos was born on February 29, 1956, and was abandoned by her mother at the age of 4. 4. Instead, she was raised by her grandparents in Troy, Michigan. But even though they took her in after her mother left, they didn't provide her with the love and support a child needs. Her grandfather regularly beat her with a leather belt for even the slightest infractions, and Eileen was treated differently from her grandparents biological children. This physical and emotional abuse was bad for Eileen's personal development. She fell behind in school and often started fights with her classmates. As she got older, she started offering boys at school sexual favors in exchange for cigarettes. This resulted in her getting pregnant at the age of 14 in 1970, although Eileen claimed she'd been assaulted by a friend of her grandfather's. Regardless, her grandparents were furious and sent her away to a home for unwed mothers for the duration of her pregnancy. But things didn't get better for Eileen after she had her baby and gave it up for adoption. When Eileen returned home, her grandparents kicked her out. At the age of 15, Eileen was homeless and had to learn to fend for herself. Over the next decade and a half, Eileen drifted back and forth across the country, hitchhiking, partying, at bars, and making a living through sex work. She was briefly married to the wealthy president of a Florida yacht club, but the marriage fell apart almost immediate due to her aggressive temper and alcoholism. She later inherited $10,000 after her brother's death, the equivalent of $55,000 in 2025. But she spent most of the money on a fancy car, which she totaled within a month. And she developed an extensive criminal record for public intoxication, assault, and even attempting to rob a convenience store while Wearing a bikini. By 1986, at the age of 30, Eileen wound up in Daytona Beach, Florida where she met a 24 year old housekeeper named Tyra Moore at a gay bar. The two hit it off immediately. Eileen had been through many short, dysfunctional relationships with men. That night, she began a relationship with Tyra that would last for the next four and a half years and end with I Eileen in prison. From 1986 to 1989, Eileen and Tyra were inseparable. The pair lived together in cheap motels and flop houses all over Florida, drinking at dive bars and having fun. Before the two women met, Tyra had been a housekeeper. But eventually she quit, which meant Eileen was supporting them through sex work. But times were tough. Sex work had been her entire career. But now that Eileen was getting older, she was having a hard time finding men who were willing to pay her for sex. At the same time, she felt insecure in her relationship with Tyra. The two fought whenever money got tight and Eileen worried that if she wasn't able to provide for her girlfriend, Tyra would eventually leave her. So in late 1989, Eileen found a new way to make money off lonely men in cars. Murder between 1989 and 1997, middle aged white men disappeared from highways and back roads all over Florida. First there was 51 year old Richard Mallory, who was reported missing in early December of 1989. His badly decomposed body was found rolled up in a carpet two weeks later in a wooded area beside a freeway. Investigators found he'd been shot multiple times with a.22 caliber pistol. Several months later, in June of 1992, more bodies turned up. 43 year old construction worker David Spears, who'd been missing since May, was found dead in a wooded area. He was naked and had been shot six times with a.22 caliber. A few days later, the nude body of 40 year old part time rodeo worker Charles Carskadden was found near a freeway. Police recovered nine.22 caliber bullets from his corpse. Later in the month, a retired sailor named Peter Siemes went missing during a road trip and was never seen again. Trucker Troy Burris disappeared while making a delivery on July 30, 1990 and was found dead in the woods not long after he was reported missing. He had two.22 caliber gunshot wounds in his torso. In September, ex police chief Dick Humphries was found dead, shot seven times. And a month after that, the naked body of trucker Walter Antonio was found on a remote logging road. He'd been shot four times in the head and back, all with.22 caliber bullets. These killings spanned multiple counties all over the state of Florida, which made the investigation complicated. But as detectives in different jurisdictions pieced together the clues, they gradually realized they were looking for the same suspect, Aileen Wuornos. Aileen didn't do a good job covering her tracks. She sold valuables belonging to her victims at pawn shops, where she was required to leave her name. And even though she often used aliases, she also had to give a thumbprint before she could get her cash. And she often drove her victims cars for several days after killing them. In the summer of 1990, Eileen and Tyra were spotted crashing one of those vehicles near the town of Orange Springs, Florida, which they then abandoned at the side of the road. When police recovered the car, they found it was full of blood stains. Even though Eileen left a long trail of clues, it took until early 1991 for police to catch up with her. About 14 months after her first murder, on January 9, two undercover cops tracked Eileen down at a biker bar in Volusia county, Florida, and placed her under arrest. At the time, police told Eileen she was being taken into custody for a minor weapons charge from several years before. They were hoping that if Eileen didn't know they wanted her for murder, she would slip up and incriminate herself further. And they were right. Once Eileen was behind bars, police tracked down her girlfriend, Tyra, who agreed to cooperate with police in exchange for immunity. Over the next several days, Tyra called Eileen repeatedly in jail, trying to coax her into confessing to the murders on a tape recorded phone line. At first, Eileen played it coy, refusing to give anything up over the phone. But when Tyra told her she was worried that the police would try to pin the murders on her, Eileen had a change of heart. On January 16, 1991, Eileen volunteered to sit down with detectives. With her lawyer from the public defender's office present, Eileen rambled for hours about the seven murders. Although her story veered all over the place, Eileen always came back to two central points. Tyra had no knowledge of any of the crimes, and all of the killings had been done in self defense. As Eileen explained, every man she'd killed had either assaulted her, threatened to kill her, or attempted to sexually assault her. However, her retelling of events didn't make a lot of sense. Her stories were full of contradictory details, like she was making everything up on the spot. And whenever she seemed to think she'd said something incriminating, she'd go back and change the details. In the end, her Confession made it very clear that she'd committed the killings and that her claims of self defense were weak at best. Throughout Eileen's confession, her public defender repeatedly urged her to stop incriminating herself. But she always pressed on and kept talking. At one point, her lawyer got frustrated and exclaimed to her, do you realize these guys are cops? Eileen replied, quote, I know and they want to hang me. And that's cool because maybe I deserve it. A year later, when Eileen had her day in court, her lawyers would do their best to try and save her from this fate. But Eileen didn't make it easy for them. Foreign. Wuornos was arrested in early 1991. She told police that all her killings had been committed in self defense. It was a bold claim, but now she and her public defender had a chance to prove the story in court. Because Eileen had killed her victims in different jurisdictions, all over over the state, she couldn't be tried for all the murders at once. Instead, her legal process began on January 13, 1992, when she went on trial for the murder of her first victim, Richard Mallory. The proceedings took place in Volusia County, Florida, because that's where Mallory's body had been found. Although she was only on trial for Mallory's murder, prosecutors were able to take advantage of a Florida law known as the Williams Rule to use Eileen's other six murders to make their case against her. Starting with their opening statement, prosecutors repeatedly reminded the jury that Eileen had killed seven men and claimed self defense every time. The prosecution argued that this pattern showed that Eileen hadn't really killed Richard Mallory to defend herself. She was a serial killer and he was her first first victim. But Eileen disagreed with this assessment and she was determined to set the record straight. Eileen's court appointed defense attorney had urged her not to testify in her own defense, but Eileen wanted to tell her side of the story of how Richard Mallory died. When she took the witness stand, Eileen spoke in detail about what happened that night. According to her, Mallory picked her up late at night on November 30 and she offered to have sex with him in exchange for money. They drove to a secluded area in the woods where the two spent the next five hours drinking, smoking marijuana and talking. Finally, at around 5am on December 1, Eileen started getting undressed. At that point, Mallory told her he didn't have any money and then tied her hands to the steering wheel and began to sexually assault her. During the assault, Mallory threatened to kill Eileen, like, quote, all the other sluts I have done. Fearing for her life, Eileen managed to get Free from her restraints and grabbed her purse where she had her.22 caliber pistol. She then leapt out of the car as Mallory chased her, and she shot him several times until he was dead. It was a harrowing story, but as prosecutors pointed out, Eileen was an unreliable narrator. During Eileen's cross examination, the prosecutors grilled her about the inconsistencies between the story she'd just told and the story she gave to police. In her confession, when talking to the police, Eileen had claimed that after driving into the woods, she'd grabbed her gun because she thought Mallory was going to sexually assault her. Then Eileen said she shot him multiple times, left his body in the woods, and drove off with his car. At no point in her confession did she state that Mallory assaulted or threatened to kill her. On the witness stand, Eileen grew increasingly agitated as prosecutors pressed her to explain the differences between her two stories, something she was unable to do. Her lawyers had to repeatedly warn her not to answer incriminating questions, and she ultimately invoked her Fifth Amendment rights 25 times. The jury was not swayed by Eileen's story. It took them just two hours to find her guilty of first degree murder. When she learned the verdict On January 27, 1992, she screamed and cursed at the jurors, calling them scumbags of America. The following day, the jurors Eileen had insulted returned to decide her sentence. Despite pleas from her lawyers to consider her abusive upbringing and difficult life circumstances, the jury voted unanimously to sentence her to death. Eileen hadn't shown any mercy to her victims, and the jury didn't show any to her. Even though Eileen had already been sentenced to death, she still had to stand up trial for her other six murders. As she faced down the prospect of several more lengthy trials, she found some help from an unlikely ally. Following her first conviction, Eileen was contacted by a woman named Arlene Prawl. She was a devout Christian who claimed that Jesus had come to her in a dream and told her to take care of Eileen. Prall would later legally adopt Eileen and began charging reporters large sums of money to interview her about her relationship with the infamous murderer. Prall used some of this money to help Eileen pay for a new lawyer to handle her next murder trials. Under the advice of her new lawyer, Stephen Glazer, Eileen pleaded no contest to the murders of Dick Humphries, Troy Burris, and David Spears on March 31, 1992. Essentially, she was saying that she didn't discriminate, dispute the state's charge that she'd murdered the three men. In Eileen's own words, she wanted to, quote, get right with God. As a result, there was no trial, and on May 15, 1992, a judge gave her three more death sentences, one for each victim. But Eileen wasn't just struggling in court. Her personal relationships were faltering, too. By that summer, Eileen had a falling out with her new friend, Arlene Prall, after learning how much money she'd been making by talking to the media about their relationship. Now she seemed to lose interest in fighting the remaining charges. In June of 1992, she pled guilty to the murder of Charles Carskadin, and in February of 1993, pled guilty to Walter Antonio's murder as well. For this, she was given two more death sentences, for a total of six. But Eileen still had some fight in her. At a sentencing hearing, when a judge applied the remaining death sentences, she turned to the prosecutors, cursed at them, threatened their children, and made rude hand gestures. Eileen spent the next night nine years on Florida's death row. During that time, she filed numerous appeals to the guilty verdict in her first trial, claiming that her lawyer had mishandled her case. But as time went on, it seemed like Eileen was less interested in proving her innocence and more interested in arguing with her lawyers. During this period, she fired multiple attorneys before finally giving up on the Appeals process in 2001. When her execution date was set for October of 2002, Eileen seemed almost eager to get it over with. Earlier in the year, Florida governor Jeb Bush paused the state's executions during a nationwide controversy over capital punishment. In response, Eileen wrote to him and the Florida Supreme Court urging them to let her execution continue. In her letters, she made it clear that she'd killed all of her victims because she wanted to, not because of self defense, saying, quote, I'm one who seriously hates human life and would kill again. For once, one of Eileen's arguments was effective, and Governor Bush allowed her to die. On October 9, 2002, Eileen was led into the death of death chamber at Florida State Prison to die by lethal injection. Before she was executed, prison staff asked if she had any last words in response, Eileen said, quote, I'm sailing with the rock and I'll be back like Independence day with Jesus. June 6th. Like the movie Big Mothership and all. I'll be back. Minutes later, Eileen Wuornos was gone for good. Looking back on this week in crime history, we can see the legal system at work. Sometimes it creates questions like if the Menendez brothers were telling the truth about being abused by their parents, and other times, it's more certain like the jury's definitive decision when it came to Eileen Wuornos. It can be clumsy and imperfect, but at the end of the day, our courts are the best tool we have to ensure the facts come out and every victim receives justice. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa Richardson and this this is True Crime this Week. True Crime this Week is a Crime House Original powered by Pave Studios. At Crime House, we want to express our gratitude to you, our community, for making this possible. Please support us by rating, reviewing and Following Crime House 24. 7. Wherever you get your podcasts, your feedback truly matters. And for ad free and early access to Crime House 24. 7/ exactly exciting bonus content, subscribe to Crime House+ on Apple Podcasts. We'll be back tomorrow. True Crime this Week is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson, and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the True Crime this Week team Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benidon, Natalie Povsky, Lori Marinelli, Sarah Camp, Truman Capps, Sheila Patterson, and Michael Langsner. Thank you for listening. Looking for your next listen. Hi, it's Vanessa Richardson and I have exciting news. Conspiracy theories, cults and crimes is leveling up starting the week of January 12th. You'll be getting two episodes every week. Wednesdays we unravel the conspiracy or the cult and on Fridays we look at a corresponding crime. Follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you listen.
