AILEEN WUORNOS INTERVIEW WITH A SERIAL KILLER

A NEW DOCUMENTARY REEXAMINES THE LIFE—AND DEATH BY CAPITAL PUNISHMENT—OF A SEX WORKER CONVICTED OF MURDERING SIX MEN

- CHRISTINA COULTER

Wuornos on trial in Daytona Beach, Fla., in 1992.

In January 1991 drifter Aileen “Lee” Wuornos, the 34-year-old suspect recently arrested for a string of murders along highways in central Florida, was heard on a taped phone call from jail as she told her girlfriend, 28-year-old Tyria Moore, that she would do anything for love. “Lee, [the police] are coming after me,” a frightened-sounding Moore says on the call. Wuornos answers, her voice straining with emotion: “I’m not gonna let you go to jail. Ty, I love you. If I have to confess everything just to keep you from getting in trouble, I will.”

That confession led to Wuornos’s convictions for six murders and, in 2002, her execution by the state of Florida. Dubbed “the first female serial killer” and a “hooker from hell” by the media, Wuornos gained notoriety on true-crime TV shows and in the 2003 film Monster, starring Academy Award winner Charlize Theron.

Now a Netflix documentary,