9: Aileen Wuornos: The Point of No Return

Summary

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UNMARKED: A True Crime Podcast

Episode: Aileen Wuornos: The Point of No Return
Date: February 11, 2026
Host: James Buddy Day

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Overview

This episode of UNMARKED explores the life, crimes, and legacy of Aileen Wuornos—the infamous serial killer executed in Florida in 2002. With rare interviews, first-hand insights from those who personally knew Wuornos (including her first attorney and a filmmaker who worked with her in prison), and exclusive archival material, host James Buddy Day journeys through the psychological, familial, and societal factors that contributed to Wuornos’s transformation into a killer. The episode questions not just Wuornos’s responsibility but how years of abuse, neglect, and systemic failure paved her path, culminating in a nuanced, empathetic, and unsettling portrait.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Retracing Wuornos’s World [00:03 – 01:45]

• Buddy Day starts in Florida, narrating his drive on I-95 to retrace Wuornos’s steps—motels, bars, and highways that were central to her story.
• He reveals efforts to contact individuals who knew Wuornos beyond her public persona, including her first attorney, Steve Glaser, and filmmaker Jackie Garou.

2. Perspectives from Wuornos’s Circle

Steve Glaser, Wuornos’s Attorney [01:27 – 05:27]

• Glaser recounts meeting Wuornos:

  “The question is, would I ever help Aileen Wuornos again? The answer is of course I would.” (01:27)

• He describes their bond as built on trust, emphasizing Wuornos’s desire for agency in her fate:

  “I did everything to make sure that Aileen would die the way she wanted to...she wanted to get to heaven. She believed the rapture was coming...” (05:27)

Jackie Garou, Filmmaker [05:42 – 09:17]

• Offers humanizing anecdotes, like Wuornos joking with Garou's young daughter.
• Details harrowing child abuse endured by Wuornos, revealing previously unreported elements:

  "The grandfather who she thought was her father, pimped her out for cigarettes. Nobody ever talks really about that." (08:52)
  "[He] would take her pants down and smell the belt and then hit her...then smell it again." (09:17)

3. Wuornos’s Early Life & Trauma [06:25 – 11:17]

• Born into instability in Troy, Michigan, Wuornos was abandoned, abused, and lied to about her parentage.
• Her father, Leo Pittman, was a convicted child abuser who died by suicide in prison.
• Wuornos experienced extreme abuse from her grandfather and multiple others, leading to a lifetime of psychological scars.
• By her teens, she was homeless, surviving through sex work, theft, and relationships marked by severe dysfunction.

4. Key Relationships: Tyra Moore [12:56 – 13:54]

• Tyra “Ty” Moore becomes Wuornos’s anchor and partner:

  “Tyra felt like when Aileen came in, Aileen would take her over. Aileen was really the guy in the relationship.” – Jackie Garou (12:56)

• Wuornos’s devotion to Ty is portrayed as absolute, with Lee supporting them through prostitution, often giving everything she earned to Ty.

5. Patterns, Motives, & Escalation [14:07 – 24:06]

• Wuornos’s methods and routines are detailed: hitchhiking, telling sob stories to get money, and targeting solitary male drivers.

  "She would hitchhike so the sun would be behind her so they couldn't see her face." – Jackie Garou (15:58)

• The murders begin with Richard Mallory, which Wuornos later claims was self-defense against sexual assault. Mallory, notably, had a documented violent history.
• There’s a shift from possible self-defense to clear premeditation and robbery:

  "She was cleaning up the crime scenes...she apparently knew how to get rid of some DNA." – Steve Glaser (25:20) "She had probably watched too many TV shows." – Steve Glaser (25:31)

6. The Victim Pattern and the Shift to Serial Killing [24:06 – 29:13]

• The initial gap between murders (nine months) gives Wuornos a sense of invincibility (24:06).
• Murders become more frequent and calculated, with Wuornos reloading her weapon mid-killing—a sign she is "operating" rather than reacting.
• Wuornos consistently brings cash, goods, and stolen items home to Ty, who finds the excitement appealing at first.

7. Police Pursuit and Arrest [27:39 – 35:53]

• Police connect Wuornos to the crimes via pawned items and witness sketches.
• Her arrest occurs quietly in the Last Resort bar—contrary to sensational media accounts.
• The media paints Wuornos as “America’s first female serial killer,” a claim explored and debunked:

  “She always put it this way, I'm not a serial killer. I killed, killed a series of men.” – Steve Glaser (34:53)

• Law enforcement themselves attempt to profit from the media frenzy around her case.

8. Tyra Moore’s Role and Betrayal [35:53 – 36:41]

• Wuornos tries to protect Ty by taking all responsibility, but Ty cooperates with police, testifies, and avoids charges.

  “She was obliterated by the fact that Ty would do that to her.” – Steve Glaser (36:16)

9. Trial, Execution, and Legacy [36:41 – End]

• Wuornos faces six death sentences but drops her appeals, requesting execution:

  "Steve, could you help me? I want to get to the electric chair as soon as possible." – Steve Glaser (37:53)

• The hosts reflect on systemic failures that shaped Wuornos’s tragic path:

  “They could have stopped it when she got pregnant at 14...so many checkpoints that every authority...just blew right through.” – Interviewer/Host (39:13)

• Final emphasis is placed on the absence of intervention and care:

  “No one cared about her. So the checkpoints were ignored.” – Jackie Garou (39:50)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Wuornos’s Remorse:

  “That’s a tough question because she’s asking God for forgiveness, so she is expressing remorse. What she said to me was different.” – Steve Glaser (01:51)

• On the Escalation to Serial Murder:

  “She wasn’t stopping.”
  “She wasn’t stopping.” – Steve Glaser and James Buddy Day (02:21–02:23)

• On Media Frenzy:

  "They were trying to get as much as they could because somebody said we have a female serial killer on our hands here." – Steve Glaser (35:27)

• On Systemic Failure:

  “How someone this broken moved through the world for decades without meaningful intervention. By the time the state finally acted, there was nothing left to save.” – James Buddy Day (38:58)

• On Wuornos’s Identity and Recognition:

  “She wanted to be recognized as somebody important because all her life she was never recognized.” – Jackie Garou (34:41)

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Important Timestamps

• [00:03] – Host retraces Wuornos’s journey through Florida
• [01:27] – Steve Glaser interviewed about representing Wuornos
• [05:42] – Firsthand accounts from filmmaker Jackie Garou
• [09:17] – Garou details abuse by Wuornos's grandfather
• [13:26] – Tyra Moore described as central relationship
• [15:54] – Glaser and Garou discuss Wuornos’s hitchhiking methods
• [18:45] – Wuornos’s trial testimony plays
• [25:20] – Discussion of Wuornos’s increasing criminal sophistication
• [31:23] – Ty leaves, then returns to Wuornos, describing the dysfunctional cycle
• [35:14] – Wuornos’s own definition of her crimes and victim types
• [36:59] – Judge sentences Wuornos to death
• [37:53] – Wuornos requests expediting her execution
• [38:50] – Jackie Garou reflects on Wuornos’s motives
• [39:13-39:51] – Closing reflections on failed interventions and Wuornos’s isolation

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Tone and Language

The episode is investigative and empathetic, seeking to understand Wuornos as a person shaped by profound trauma rather than pure evil. The language is candid but sensitive, incorporating both direct court and interview audio for a raw, unfiltered atmosphere.

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This summary presents a comprehensive, context-rich account designed to inform and engage listeners and non-listeners alike, highlighting both the facts and the complex humanity behind one of America’s most infamous criminal cases.

Transcript

[James Buddy Day]

I'm in Florida, driving south on Interstate 95 near Daytona Beach. Ahead, a flat and endless road bordered by walls of trees that swallow sound and light. This is the same corridor Aileen Wuornos moved through.

[Interviewer/Host]

What was she like?

[Bar Patron]

Just a regular customer? She was fine.

[Interviewer/Host]

But you got to know her quite a bit, right?

[Bar Patron]

Well, just talking to her in a bar. Just bar talk. I mean, it was nothing else.

[James Buddy Day]

I've been retracing her world. The motels she slept in, the roadside pull offs, the woods where men disappeared.

[Interviewer/Host]

What do you think everyone gets wrong?

[Jackie Garou]

Oh, well, you know, there is no wrong. I mean, everybody has an opinion and I mean, there are those that just think she was nuts, you know, just totally bonkers. I don't share that opinion.

[James Buddy Day]

For weeks I've been trying to reach the people who knew her differently, those who sat across from her when the cameras were off before the story was settled. One is Wuornos first attorney, Steve Glaser. Eccentric, controversial, largely silent for years. The day before I'm scheduled to leave Florida, he calls and agrees to talk. But he's across the state, more than 300 miles away. Seven hours later, I'm with him.

[Steve Glaser]

The question is, would I ever help Eileen Wuornos again? The answer is of course I would.

[James Buddy Day]

This is a man who heard Wuornos before the narrative, calcified before confessions, trials and headlines reduced her to a symbol. He was there for the things she never said publicly.

[Interviewer/Host]

Did she ever express any remarks or to you or did she?

[Steve Glaser]

That's a tough question because she's asking God for forgiveness, so she is expressing remorse. What she said to me was different.

[James Buddy Day]

Steve's perspective sheds new light on Wuornos, a woman he knew as Lee.

[Steve Glaser]

And she told me something very interesting, which nobody has ever heard before. And of course I can't tell you, but it would have gone on.

[Interviewer/Host]

You really think it would have gone on?

[Steve Glaser]

It would have gone on.

[James Buddy Day]

She wasn't stopping.

[Steve Glaser]

She wasn't stopping.

[James Buddy Day]

I'm James Buddy Day. This is unmarked. After a seven hour drive, we arrive at a campground north of Gainesville and pull up to a carefully kept site. Everything is orderly, intentional. And sitting by the fire is the former death row attorney for Eileen Wuornos.

[Steve Glaser]

My name is Steve Glaser. I've been an attorney for 29 years. I predominantly do criminal law. Almost 90% of my caseload is criminal. I do some family law. Did a lot of divorces when my kids were in college, but I won't touch them now. I graduated University of Florida, average student, ended up at the public defender's office in Ocala. Two years later, the strangest thing in the world happened to me. I meet Eileen Warnas.

[James Buddy Day]

Steve is a welcoming host. He jokes as we set up. He's easy and conversational, not guarded. This isn't a media hit. It feels like someone's speaking because he's decided to speak.

[Steve Glaser]

We caught up with him while he was camping on the Sunday morning. He didn't go to church.

[James Buddy Day]

If you've seen the coverage, news footage, court tapes, or the HBO documentary Aileen the Selling of a Serial Killer, you recognize Steve immediately. He looks much the same, older now. His beard has gone gray. But the large Afro, the glasses, the presence, it's all still there. He's warm, articulate, and disarmingly thoughtful.

[Interviewer/Host]

So what was Eileen like as a person?

[Steve Glaser]

I really liked her. I mean, we're two years apart. We grew up with the same music, same generational. You know, I think we really became friends.

[James Buddy Day]

Glaser tells me he spent countless hours talking with Wuornos in the years leading up to her execution.

[Steve Glaser]

We talked about a little bit of everything, everything from the Beatles to the murders. And I think the develop. The relationship we developed was one of trust. So she could tell me certain things that she wouldn't tell anyone. And I know things that I can't tell anyone because the confidentiality goes to the grave.

[James Buddy Day]

Between late 1989 and late 1990, Eileen Wuornos murdered at least seven men while working as a hitchhiking sex worker. Her victims were shot at close range with a.22 caliber handgun that she bought at a pawn shop. Their bodies were left in remote wooded areas across central and northern Florida, often near major routes like I95. Wuornos was convicted of six murders and confessed to a seventh and became the first woman executed in Florida since 1848. She was put to death by lethal injection in 2002.

[Steve Glaser]

And I did everything to make sure that Eileen would die the way she wanted to, when she wanted to. She did not want to live on death row. She couldn't. And she wanted to get to heaven. She believed the rapture was coming and she'd be part of it.

[James Buddy Day]

And Steve isn't the only person I found along my travels. Another is Jackie Garou, a fellow filmmaker who I've known for years. Jackie met Aileen Wuornos in prison and worked with her and nearly everyone in Eileen's life for years.

[Jackie Garou]

When she would call up, at that time, we had no cell phones. It was landlines. So when she would call me My daughter would answer the phone. My daughter was like 8. And she would say, hey, mom, it's the serial killer. And Eileen thought that was funny. She said, oh, she's so cute. And she had that embracing personality, right? As long as you did what she wanted you to do, okay.

[James Buddy Day]

In Eileen Wuornos's case, the best place to begin is Michigan, 1966. Wuornos is 10 years old. She lives in Troy, a suburb of Detroit. Born Eileen Pittman at the time, Troy sits on the edge of a region already hollowed out by economic instability and rising crime, part of a greater Detroit area beginning its long decline. She and her older brother Keith are being raised by Larry and Britta Wuornos, the people they believe to be their parents. Eileen's biological father was named Leo Pittman, a violent picture paranoid schizophrenic. At the time, Michigan and Texas authorities suspect him in at least one unsolved murder.

[Jackie Garou]

She didn't know her real father. Leo Pittman was her real father, and she never knew him. But she turned into him.

[James Buddy Day]

By the time Eileen learns who her father is, Pittman is already dead after being convicted of kidnapping a seven year old girl from a playground and sexually assaulting her father.

[Steve Glaser]

I think it was in early 61 or two or three went to prison as a sex offender and he ended up hanging himself in prison. I don't think Eileen had any relationship with her dad.

[James Buddy Day]

At 11, Eileen learns a destabilizing truth. The woman she thought was her sister is actually her mother. It's a profound rupture in identity. And in fact, Ted Bundy experienced a similar deception Raised by his grandparents. At one point, he believed his mother was his sister.

[Jackie Garou]

She had an emptiness within her. She hated herself basically of what she was, you know, I mean, she didn't understand why her grandparents, who she thought were her parents, hated her so much.

[James Buddy Day]

Both of Eileen's grandparents are alcoholics. Her grandfather, Larry Wuornos, a traumatized war veteran, is violent and abusive. Before puberty, Eileen begins showing signs of sexual exploitation. She allows and at times initiates sexual encounters with boys and adult men in exchange for cigarettes, alcohol, and spare change.

[Jackie Garou]

Actually, the grandfather who she thought was her father, pimped her out for cigarettes. Nobody ever talks really about that.

[James Buddy Day]

According to Jackie, who spoke directly to the men who abused Eileen, Eileen's grandfather would demand she go out and get him cigarettes. How she was to get them with no money was left unsaid. But if she failed, the consequences were severe.

[Jackie Garou]

He. He would hit her, but he would hit her in A very sexual way. He would take. He would take her, have her lean on a chair. He would take her pants down and smell the belt and then hit her with it and smell it again. So he was a bit of a wacko, too.

[James Buddy Day]

In 1971, at the age of 14, Eileen becomes pregnant. She leaves school and is sent to a Detroit maternity home for unwed mothers. The identity of the father remains unclear. Over the years, Eileen claimed she was assaulted by acquaintances, her brother and even her grandfather. But she confided in Steve Glaser about abuse by a friend of her grandfather's that began when she was a child.

[Steve Glaser]

Yes, I would say by now I have come to the personal conclusion that, yes, that is factual. That is something I can believe about her life story.

[James Buddy Day]

In 1971, Eileen gives birth to a boy, names him Keith, after her brother, and immediately places him up for adoption. A year later, her grandmother dies of alcoholism and her grandfather falls into depression and eventually suicide. From that point on, Eileen has no fixed address until her incarceration decades later. During these early years, her brother Keith dies of cancer, though sources report he shot himself. After his diagnosis, she's assaulted repeatedly, and she survives through sex, work, theft, and constant movement. By her early 20s, Eileen is suffering from from severe psychological trauma, paranoia, depression, and post traumatic stress. She attempts suicide after a failed relationship, moves around extensively. In 1982, she's convicted of armed robbery after holding up a grocery store with a.22 caliber pistol and serves time in prison. At one point, she marries an elderly, wealthy man named Lewis Fell. Though he's old enough to be her grandfather, the marriage is brief. Fell accuses Eileen of squandering his money and beating him with his own cane. So by 1986, about two years before the murders, Eileen, now using the name Lee, is 28 years old, and she's found her way to Florida. It's no coincidence that that serial offenders like Wuornos and Ted Bundy end up in Florida. They're not alone. Men like Paul John Knowles, Christopher Wilder, Gerard Shaffer all gravitated to the Sunshine State. Florida doesn't create serial killers. It absorbs them. It's a state with constant transience. Its highways and wooded back roads, its seasonal workers and forgotten people make it easy to arrive unnoticed and disappear again. For someone already damaged, already unraveling, Florida offers anonymity, opportunity, and above all time. In 1986, Wuornos frequents the Zodiac Bar, a gay bar in Daytona beach, where she meets a woman named Tyra Moore, known as Tyler. Ty is a Florida Transplant. Raised in Ohio, and she's only in her early 20s when she meets Wuornos for the first time. She has crimson hair and freckles.

[Jackie Garou]

Ty. Her parents were divorced, and she felt jilted by her father and not loved by her mother. And so Eileen came into her life. And of course, they called her Lee, but I still call her Eileen because that's her name, her birth name. Tyra felt like when Eileen came in, Eileen would take her over. Eileen was really the guy in the relationship.

[James Buddy Day]

This becomes the most significant relationship of Eileen's life.

[Steve Glaser]

Yeah, she really loved her. Eileen was just. This was the love of her life, and she would do anything for her.

[James Buddy Day]

For the next two years, Lee and Ty move around Florida. They're living in motels, sleeping on couches. Sometimes they even live in the woods. At one point, they rent a rundown trailer for several months.

[Jackie Garou]

Tyra was a heavy girl, really looked butch and didn't get too many dance offers, let's face it. And Eileen, just anything that she got, she gave to Tyranny just gave it to her.

[James Buddy Day]

Lee supports them through sex work, sometimes using the alias Cami Marsh Green.

[Jackie Garou]

I mean, if they needed money, she'd leave and hitchhike. She didn't kill all of them, Remember, she didn't kill all of them. She'd come home with $50. They would make potatoes and onions, and that's what they ate. They had to have money for beer. They drank. And that was something else that played a big part of this. It wasn't drugs. It was beer. They were drinking, like, cases of beer a day.

[James Buddy Day]

Eventually, they settle in Volusia county, living at the C. Sands Motel and becoming fixtures at a nearby biker bar called the Last Resort. Both places still exist. The motel has a different name now. Fresh paint, new signage. But the bones are the same. And the bar, it hasn't changed much at all. Entering the Last Resort. It smells like old beer that soaked into the wood and has never been replaced. There's oil in the air. Cigarette smoke clings to everything. And behind the bar, locals point out where Lee used to sit, where she used to drink, and where she'd wait out back. They show me a trailer where she sometimes crashed when they arrested her.

[Interviewer/Host]

She was sleeping in the trailer?

[Bar Patron]

No, she was inside there. She had slept there that night before.

[James Buddy Day]

The motel is a short walk away, just a couple of minutes, Close enough that the two places feel connected, like part of the same ecosystem. And both sit within a couple of miles of I95, where Lee was a fixture.

[Steve Glaser]

She was at the entrance of the highway, hitchhiking, just with. That's it.

[Interviewer/Host]

And then anyone would pick her up.

[Steve Glaser]

Anybody who chose to, yeah.

[Jackie Garou]

She would hitchhike. That the sun be behind her so they couldn't see her face.

[James Buddy Day]

We're now months before the murders begin, and Lee has a routine. She waits outside the i95 entrance. Once picked up by a single man driving alone, she uses a prepared story.

[Steve Glaser]

She was giving him the story that, you know, I'm trying to get down to Miami, get to my sister and my kid.

[James Buddy Day]

The story implies she needs money. It allows the conversation to glide into a proposition. And as we're talking, Steve recalls seeing Lee himself.

[Steve Glaser]

I used to own a truck with North American Van Lines and with the CB radio, you always know where there's a woman on the road hitchhiking. Okay? Always. I was coming back from Disney with my wife and daughter and I saw Eileen hitchhiking. She was right at the end of the turnpike. And I remember it because she was.

[James Buddy Day]

Caught A week later, on November 30, 1989. Lee is working along I95. There's a light rain and she takes shelter under a bridge. She has almost nothing with her. A dirty change of clothes, some loose cash, and a.22 caliber pistol she carries for protection. That evening, she's picked up by a man named Richard Mallory. Mallory is just under 6ft, around 170 pounds. But he's significantly larger than Lee at the time. He owns an electronics business called mallory electronics. On November 30, he leaves at 6:10pm driving his beige two door 1977 Cadillac Coupe de Ville. At some point, he meets Wuornos. Now we'll never know exactly what happened, but what we do know is this. Lee shoots Mallory several times. She hides his body in the brush and abandons his car nearly 20 miles away. For the remainder of her life, Lee will give multiple and often contradictory accounts of that night.

[Interviewer/Host]

What was your impression of what happened with Richard Mallory? And you can guide me through what you can and can't say.

[Steve Glaser]

We only know what happened by listening to Eileen. The question is, do you want to believe her?

[James Buddy Day]

This is the first murder she's known to have committed. And at times she'll claim it was self defense, the result of a violent assault by Mallory. This is Eileen on the stand during the Mallory trial.

[Eileen Wuornos (Court Testimony)]

I thought to myself, I gotta fight. I'm gonna die. This guy is gonna play with me and play with me and then he's gonna kill me.

[James Buddy Day]

To be fair, Mallory's past supports that possibility. He was known as a loner who frequented strip clubs. Mallory had a documented history of sexual violence. He served prison time, and his records note sociopathic tendencies. But Lee was also deeply mentally ill, paranoid, bipolar, and profoundly traumatized. So we're left with an unanswerable question. Did events unfold as she described them, as she perceived them, or as she later needed them to be?

[Steve Glaser]

I believe something really seriously wrong went wrong that night. And I don't know that she was tied to the steering wheel. I don't know that they dropped alcohol on her or whether what he did. But I always had the feeling that that was the spark. I think everybody has a feeling that that was the spark. But I would not take her at her word that all of that happened.

[James Buddy Day]

By then, Wuornos had already lived a lifetime of abuse, decades of assaults. She once said she'd been attacked so many times that she lost count.

[Jackie Garou]

I believe if a guy said, smelled or did something like Lowry Buu's the grandfather who she thought was her father. If they came close to being like him, she killed him.

[James Buddy Day]

Lee Wuornos story is about what happens when long term abuse, neurological vulnerability and systematic failure intersect in one person. And no one steps in until the damage spills outward.

[Steve Glaser]

Now she is mentally ill. She was mentally ill. But in Florida, the test for insanity is whether you know right from wrong. Okay, she knew right from wrong. So while she operated under a disability, mental disability, she was still understood what she was doing was wrong.

[James Buddy Day]

That distinction is critical. Responsibility is not in question. What is in question in question is how someone so visibly damaged moved through the world for decades without meaningful help.

[Jackie Garou]

I mean, there are those that just think she was nuts, you know, just totally bonkers. I don't share that opinion.

[Interviewer/Host]

I think, I think, I think she was definitely mentally ill, but she came by it very honestly. Like, you know, some people are born where they can't tell their imagination from reality legitimately. But that wasn't her. She, she was, you know, she was shaped. And that vulnerability just enabled society to shape her into what she became.

[Jackie Garou]

Well, there's another interesting side note to all this, since you're going in that direction, which is Eileen Wuornos. Ever met her real father, Leo Pittman? Not one. Not one phone call. And Eileen met him it. And he said, I didn't even know he was my father and until I was in jail. But she became just like him. He used copper folded bullets on a.22 and so did she.

[Interviewer/Host]

If she was born into a loving family, that, and that could have Been.

[Jackie Garou]

Yeah, yeah.

[Interviewer/Host]

She wouldn't have ended up as a serial killer. You'd never heard.

[Jackie Garou]

I don't. I think you're right. I think if she had been nurtured in another direction. Yeah, I agree with you.

[James Buddy Day]

You. On December 13, 1989, two weeks after the shooting, police discover Richard Mallory's body in the woods outside Daytona Beach. The autopsy reveals he's been shot three times with Lee's unregistered.22 caliber pistol. the time, Wuornos and Ty are using the Sea Sands motel as a base. They're coming and going, drifting in and out. And according to Ty's public statements, she keeps Wuornos secret in regards to the Mallory murder. She believes Wuornos claim that it was self defense.

[Eileen Wuornos (Court Testimony)]

We were sitting on the floor watching TV and she just come out and said I have something to tell you. And I asked her what. And she said that she had shot and killed a man that day.

[Interviewer/Host]

Is it your opinion? Was Ty more involved than she let on or do you think she just knew about it?

[Steve Glaser]

Oh, I think that she just knew about it and that's enough. I mean if you know about it and you do nothing to stop it, you're just as guilty under the law.

[James Buddy Day]

The following spring, on Friday, May 18, 1990, Lee is back out working along Inter Interstate 4 Mallory.

[Jackie Garou]

Between Mallory and the second victim there was nine months. So she got away with it. So Eileen never thought she was going to get caught. So when things got, you know, rough again, a rough patch, she went out and started killing again.

[James Buddy Day]

That afternoon she's picked up by a man named named David Spears, a construction worker driving from Sarasota to Winter Garden to visit his children and ex wife. Spears is last seen alive leaving Sarasota at 2:10pm About 40 minutes later, he picks up Lee near Route 27, less than 30 minutes from his destination. They pull into a wooded area hidden from the road. They. They drink beer. They undress. Spears body is later found nude except for a baseball cap. The autopsy reveals six gunshot wounds to the torso. And as she did with Mallory, Lee abandons Spears truck miles away. But in the case of the second murder, it marks an escalation. While it's possible to interpret the Mallory scene as self defense, the Spears crime scene reads differently. The victim is killed while vulnerable after being drawn into seclusion, undressed and robbed. That scene suggests planning, not panic. It marks a shift from reaction to control.

[Steve Glaser]

She was cleaning up the crime scenes and she apparently knew how to get rid of some DNA and things like that.

[Interviewer/Host]

So she was quite premeditated.

[Steve Glaser]

I would say she was quite premeditated. I would say that she knew what she was doing. She had probably watched too many TV shows.

[James Buddy Day]

Roughly 12 days later, on or about May 31, 1990, the pattern repeats. Wuornos is picked up by Charles Carskoden, a 40 year old construction worker and rodeo rider passing through Florida from Missouri. This time, the killing once again involves vulnerability, robbery, and overkill. Lee lures Karskoden into the backseat of his car and shoots him nine times. Now, the details matter here because Lee's.22 caliber pistol holds seven rounds. That means she stopped reloaded and continued firing after her victim was already mortally wounded. For Lee, something has shifted. She's no longer reacting. She's operating. The reload isn't about rage. It's about confidence. This is the moment in which many serial offenders begin to feel invincible. She keeps her victim's car. She drives it back to where she and Ty are staying and stashes it beside their room. Next, she pawns some of the victim's belongings at a local pawn shop.

[Jackie Garou]

Every time she killed somebody, she took the guy's goods, clothes, whatever he had, jewelry, and gave it to Tyra. She hacked very little.

[James Buddy Day]

These decisions will come back to haunt her, but not before she kills again. Just days later, Lee is picked up by Peter Siemes, a truck driver traveling through Florida en route to visit his mother in West Milford, New Jersey. His wife is in Europe at the time of his disappearance. He's driving a gray 1988 Pontiac Sunbird. The truth is, we'll never know what happened during this time encounter because his body has never been recovered.

[Steve Glaser]

She had said she had killed some guy up by the Florida Georgia state line. They flew Eileen from Fort Lauderdale, the prison death row. They flew her up to North Florida where the three officers that you know were escorting her. And we went around in a couple of police cars looking for the exit, looking for the body. So it's like now it's, let's go find the body. And we never did. But I would say that she had killed this guy in June and we were looking for the body in August, September. So at that time, all the corn is cut down, you know, the harvest. So we could not tell where the body was, but never found it.

[James Buddy Day]

After the murder, Lee keeps the victim sunburned. And a month later, on July 4, 1990, Lee and Ty spend the day drinking and driving. That night, they crash the stolen car near Orange Springs. Witnesses see the two women bloodied at the scene Later, Lee throws seams, keys and registration into the brush. But the abandoned vehicle is recovered by police along with physical evidence, and authorities are able to generate composite sketches of both women based on eyewitness accounts. Lee and Tai begin to see news reports at this time of the police investigation into the murders, including their descriptions, but it does not slow the violence.

[Steve Glaser]

She still worked her her little game on them. And then when somebody said, yes, let's do it, she took him far out off the highway.

[James Buddy Day]

One month later, on July 31, 1990, Lee is picked up by a traveling salesman named Troy Burris. After driving into a wooded area in Marion County, Lee shoots him twice with her.22 caliber handgun. She takes his money, and she leaves his body where it's found days later, on August 4th. Just a month later, on September 11th, 1990, Lee is picked up by Charles Richard Humphries, a retired Air Force major and former police chief. She lures him to a remote area of Suwannee county and shoots him multiple times. His remains are found the next day fully clothed, shot six times in the head and torso with clear evidence of a targeted and fatal robbery.

[Steve Glaser]

The fact that they had their pockets turned out so we know that she was rifling through their pockets. And in the end, she did say, I killed those men to murder and rob them.

[James Buddy Day]

After each murder, Eileen returns to Ty with her bounty. It's now a clear pattern of. Of robbery and murder.

[Jackie Garou]

And Tyra found it exciting, to be quite frank with you. I mean, she realizes now that she made a mistake, but she found it exciting until around the fifth one when she said, that's when I started thinking, I have to leave this girl. This is becoming, you know, a ritual that's going on. And they do start to argue. They argue, and Tyra tried to leave her a couple of times, you know.

[James Buddy Day]

By mid November 1990, Ty leaves Florida, traveling to Pittsburgh to spend Thanksgiving with her family, while Lee stays behind. By all accounts, Lee is depressed. She's alone. She drinks heavily during this period.

[Jackie Garou]

But each time Eileen would come and say, I'm going to change. I won't do it again, please. You know, you're my good side, I'm your bad side. And that's how she would convince. Just like a husband and a wife. It's love, it's habit. It's a ritual. It's everything. And so Tyra would go back.

[James Buddy Day]

On November 19, 1990, Lee is picked up by Walter Gino Antonio, a security guard and reserve deputy who stops for her in Dixie county after driving off the main road. Lee shoots him four times. She takes his vehicle and belongings and abandons the car. According to evidence and later testimony, Antonio is executed while on his knees. By this point, Lee only has a month of freedom left, though she doesn't know it. What began under a bridge on a rock, rainy night has become repetition, methodical, escalating, and increasingly detached. This is no longer about a single act or a single claim of self defense. It's about how Eileen Wuornos related to the world and how that relationship kept breaking down.

[Steve Glaser]

Part of the borderline personality disorder is that they will turn against bite the hand that feeds you. So. So I had a couple of visits at death row where she would yell at me and accuse me of making money off of her and things like that. And I just take it in stride. And then next time I see her, it was, oh, I'm sorry, Steve.

[James Buddy Day]

That cycle, trust, paranoia, rupture, apology wasn't confined to her relationship with Glaser. It defined her relationships with everyone. With Tai, with the men who stopped along the highway, with the systems meant to contain her. Wuornos could form attachments, but she couldn't sustain them. Every connection eventually curdled into a threat by the time law enforcement catches up. The story isn't about whether Aileen Wuornos could have chosen differently in a single moment. It's about how many moments, perhaps passed years really, where intervention might have mattered and never came.

[Jackie Garou]

She couldn't find happiness. The only happiness she got was people who paid attention to her. And the only way she got them was through prostitution.

[James Buddy Day]

By the following summer, police are closing in. They recover the items Lee had pawned from the third victim and are able to lift her fingerprints. Investigators now know Eileen Wuornos is responsible for the entire series. And unlike the mythology that would later surround her arrest, they don't have to hunt very hard. And after asking around, they find Lee exactly where she's always been. Drinking at the Last Resort bar. They wait for her to step outside and arrest her without incident. In the months that follow, Wuornos becomes a national obsession. Session branded as the first female serial killer, a label that's demonstrably false. There were, of course, others before her, including Sharon Kinney, who by that point had been wanted for decades.

[Jackie Garou]

She wanted to be recognized as somebody important because all her life she was never recognized. And she had that longing as a child all the way into adulthood.

[Steve Glaser]

She always put it this way, I'm not a serial killer. I killed, killed a series of men. She had a selection. She had A certain type of man that she would attack. It was always an older man, a big car. She also had this thing for getting men who were cheating on their wives.

[James Buddy Day]

But Wuornos fit a narrative the media just couldn't resist. And several officers even go so far as to try and push profit from her story.

[Interviewer/Host]

You understand that the police were trying to sell her story?

[Steve Glaser]

Yes, without a doubt. They were trying to get as much as they could because somebody said we have a female serial killer on our hands here. You know, can you imagine what would happen today? This is what, 20, 1992, roughly. Imagine what would happen today with CNN and, and CNBC and Fox. You wouldn't have heard anything but this.

[James Buddy Day]

Inside prison, Lee gives multiple contradictory accounts of her crimes. At first, she tries to take full responsibility, an anguished attempt to shield Ty from prosecution. But Ty ultimately escapes responsibility by doing the opposite. She cooperates with police, secretly records and testifies for the state.

[Steve Glaser]

She was obliterated by the fact that Ty would do that to her. But Tyria was the one who was about to go down for the murders or principal accessory after the fact. So like we do in the criminal world, you get one to flip on the other and that's what happened. And Tyria walks away.

[James Buddy Day]

Lee goes to trial first for Richard Mallory's murder, the case where her self defense claim is the strongest.

[Steve Glaser]

She went to trial on Richard Mallory's case. This was in Daytona. This was the best shot she had at winning because she did have at least a defense.

[Judge Blount]

The proper officers of the Department of Corrections of the state of Florida and by him safely kept until by warrant of the governor of the state of Florida, you, Eileen Carroll, warn us, be electrocuted until you are dead.

[Steve Glaser]

And the jury came back guilty. And then Judge Blount put her into the death chamber. At that point I had just about met her and she said, well, how many times can they kill me?

[James Buddy Day]

At one point, Lee befriends an eccentric ranch owner who legally adopts Wuorno. So in order to allow visitation, Steve Glaser is the one who facilitates the unconventional adoption. But after receiving six death sentences, Lee drops all her appeals. She offers a final confession, and she actively pressures the state of Florida to execute her.

[Steve Glaser]

She said to me, steve, could you help me? And I asked her what? And she said, I want to get to the electric chair as soon as possible.

[James Buddy Day]

Glaser himself becomes part of the spectacle, especially after appearing in the HBO Nick Broomfield documentary Eileen Wuornos, the Selling of a Serial Killer.

[Steve Glaser]

I was kind of dragged through the mud for what I did with her. You don't know me. I look like in the bottom of the barrel.

[James Buddy Day]

Eileen Wuornos was executed by lethal injection on October 9, 2002 at the Florida State Prison. She was 46 years old at the time of her death. Lee Wuornos wasn't a myth or a monster. Born in isolation, she wasn't absolved by her trauma, but she was shaped by it. She understood right from wrong. She was responsible. She was profoundly damaged long before she ever picked up a gun.

[Jackie Garou]

Everybody that was like her, her father slash grandfather, she killed him.

[James Buddy Day]

Lee's story isn't about excusing what she did. It's about asking how someone this broken moved through the world for decades without meaningful intervention. By the time the state finally acted, there was nothing left to save.

[Interviewer/Host]

They could have stopped it when she got pregnant at 14. They could have stopped it when she was ran away. They could have stopped it when she got arrested for armed robbery in the 80s.

[James Buddy Day]

They could have stopped.

[Interviewer/Host]

I mean, oh, there's so many checkpoints that. That every authority, government, agency, responsible person in her life just blew right through.

[James Buddy Day]

And.

[Interviewer/Host]

And then inevitably, she just resorted to violence to survive, you know?

[Jackie Garou]

Correct. You gotta. You nailed it. And nobody cared about her. Nobody cared about her journey.

[James Buddy Day]

Exactly.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right. Yeah.

[Jackie Garou]

No one cared about her. So the checkpoints were ignored. Yeah.

[James Buddy Day]

If you go to our social media channels, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, you'll see additional content about this episode. More phone calls, insights, interviews. And we'll be posting daily from the last decade of our true crime reporting. This season on Unmarked, you'll hear exclusive audio of interviews, calls and content. We're opening our archives one case at a time. Subscribe to Unmarked so you don't miss what we reveal next, including members, portals with full case files, trial and research. This episode of Unmarked is produced by John Nadeau and edited by Miranda White. Our additional producers are Jesse demaray and Steve McClellan.