“I want the world to know that I killed these men, cold as ice. I’ve hated humans for a long time. I killed them in cold blood, truly in a horrible way”.
The phrase by Aileen Wuornos, one of the best-known serial killers in the United States, is especially disturbing because it seems to reveal much more than a simple confession.
Wuornos was convicted of killing six men in Florida between 1989 and 1990 and confessed to a seventh murder. During the trial, she had maintained that several of the deaths occurred after her clients attempted to rape her and that she had acted in self-defense.
But over time, her story changed. She eventually pleaded guilty without reservation and described herself as someone who hated humanity.
Her personal history helps explain why specialists considered her case so complex. Wuornos was abandoned by her mother, raised by her grandparents, and later recounted suffering physical and sexual abuse during her childhood. Subsequent psychiatric evaluations determined that she had psychopathy, antisocial disorder, and borderline personality disorder.
That does not mean her childhood explains or justifies her murders. In fact, researchers have debated for years how much trauma, her psychological disorders, and other factors influenced her crimes.
Perhaps that is why the phrase is so unsettling: was she really describing what she felt, trying to construct an explanation for her actions, or both at the same time?
Wuornos was executed by lethal injection on October 9, 2002, at the age of 46.