SERIAL KILLER: Aileen Wuornos Pt. 2

Aileen Wuornos was dubbed America’s first female serial killer—and she wanted the world to remember her name. In Part 2, we follow her journey from captured killer to death row inmate, exploring her obsession with legacy and her volatile final days. Killer Minds is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. For ad-free listening and early access to episodes, subscribe to Crime House+ on Apple Podcasts. Don’t miss out on all things Killer Minds! Instagram: @killerminds https://www.instagram.com/killerminds/ | @Crimehouse https://www.instagram.com/crimehouse/ TikTok: @Crimehouse https://www.tiktok.com/@crimehouse Facebook: @crimehousestudios https://www.facebook.com/crimehousestudios X: @crimehousemedia https://x.com/crimehousemedia YouTube: @crimehousestudios https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Vanessa Richardson?

  Hi, everyone. Before today's episode, there's another show I want to tell you about. It's called What the Fact with Connor Tomlinson from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum and Carter Roy. Every week, they take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Plus, Connor's infectious energy that'll make you realize history is the most fascinating thing on earth. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen, or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  This is Crime House.

• 0:42Vanessa Richardson?

  We may want the truth to be black and white, but the reality is, it's not that simple. The way one person experiences a situation might be different from how someone else remembers it. And when it comes to murder cases, getting to the core facts can be extremely tricky, especially when the person at the center of an investigation keeps changing their story. That's what happened with Eileen Wuornos. Although she admitted to killing seven men in Florida between late 1989 and 1990, the details she provided kept changing. And there was nobody there to set the record straight, because the only ones who really knew what happened were dead.

• 1:39Vanessa Richardson?

  The human mind is powerful. It shapes how we think, feel, love, and hate. But sometimes it drives people to commit the unthinkable. This is Killer Minds, a Crime House original. I'm Vanessa Richardson.

• 1:55Tristin Engels?

  And I'm Dr. Tristin Engels. Every Monday and Thursday, we uncover the darkest minds in history, analyzing what makes a killer.

• 2:03Vanessa Richardson?

  Crime House is made possible by you. Please rate, review, and follow Killer Minds. To enhance your listening experience with ad-free, early access to each two-part series and bonus content, subscribe to Crime House Plus on Apple Podcasts. A warning: This episode contains depictions of abuse, sexual assault, and murder. Listener discretion is advised. Today, we conclude our deep dive on Eileen Wuornos, a serial killer who carved a path of destruction along the highways and backroads of Florida in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She left seven victims in her wake, leading to the terrifying revelation that even in

• 2:48Vanessa Richardson?

  the modern age, many people were unaware that serial killers are not always men.

• 2:55Tristin Engels?

  As Vanessa goes through the story, I'll be talking about things like how Eileen was able to deceive people so effectively, her reliance on questionable relationships, and her final spiral into what seemed like a break with reality.

• 3:10Vanessa Richardson?

  And, as always, we'll be asking the question: What makes a killer?

• 3:21Vanessa Richardson?

  Between late 1989 and May of 1990, 34-year-old Eileen Wuornos took the lives of three men as she hitchhiked across Florida. Her victims, Richard Mallory, David Spears, and Charles Carskatten, were all middle-aged men who were traveling alone when they picked her up. Eileen's stories about what happened before she killed her victims have been wildly inconsistent over the years, but the end result was always the same. After getting into the men's cars, she convinced them to drive into the woods where she murdered them and stole their valuables. Afterwards, Eileen always covered her tracks.

• 4:03Vanessa Richardson?

  She made sure to vary the locations of her murders and dropped her victims' cars far from the crime scenes to cover her tracks. However, in June of 1990, she started to become careless. That month, she killed her fourth victim, a retiree named Peter Seems. But instead of getting rid of his car, she held on to it. Eileen even let her girlfriend, 27-year-old Tyra Moore, drive it around. But on the 4th of July, the women crashed the vehicle. Eileen was in a hurry to flee the scene before the police could arrive and question her. But she got scraped up during the wreck and ended up leaving a handprint on the car door handle.

• 4:45Tristin Engels?

  This seems careless, not just because of the handprint, but because she took Peter's car to begin with and has been driving it around. A lot of times, serial killers do become careless, especially if they are psychologically unraveling or emotionally impulsive. Some may have a subconscious desire to be caught. But in Eileen's case, was it carelessness or something more? I think there are a few things that can explain this. Firstly, her decision to keep the car may have been an impulsive one driven by survival needs. It also could have been a way to establish meaning from Peter's death. Because Eileen, although more nuanced than most, would likely be categorized as a mission-oriented serial killer. And they target a particular group of people that they view as undesirable.

• 5:29Tristin Engels?

  But Peter didn't fit her target demographic, because as far as we know, he wasn't predatory or threatening. So she didn't have moral justification for what she had done. So keeping his car may have been a way to establish meaning for this, because the car became useful for her and Tyra. It could also have been a way to pretend as if nothing happened to balance out her moral injury. But then she leaves the bloody handprint. Now with borderline personality disorder and likely complex PTSD, Eileen already struggles to pause between thought and action. She was in a car accident, there were witnesses. This is going to activate her threat response, and she went into flight mode. So to her, she was in crisis, and that reduces rational thought,

• 6:12Tristin Engels?

  disrupts attention to detail, memory encoding, and awareness, more so than someone without such an extensive trauma history. And this car accident happened out in the open. She'd been very meticulous about covering her tracks when she would lead people into the woods. But this was unexpected, it was uncontrolled, it was unplanned, and she had to act fast.

• 6:34Vanessa Richardson?

  Well, this time Eileen had left behind enough evidence for the police to catch her. But they didn't know they were dealing with a serial killer yet. And because they still hadn't found Peter's body, they treated it like a missing persons case instead of a homicide, making the investigation a little less intense. Which meant they didn't follow up on the handprint. And once Eileen realized nobody was coming after her, she claimed another victim. In late July 1990, a few weeks after her car wreck, Eileen crossed paths with a man named Troy Burris. Fifty-year-old Troy worked as a refrigerated truck driver for a sausage company. He wasn't supposed to have anyone in his work truck.

• 7:18Vanessa Richardson?

  But on July 30th, somewhere along his route, Eileen caught his attention, and he let her in. As they were driving through the Okala National Forest, Eileen convinced him to pull off into the woods. As with each of her victims, it's not clear what happened once they were alone. In one interview, Eileen claimed Troy attacked her. But in another instance, she said she simply saw an opportunity to steal from him. Either way, Eileen shot Troy twice in the torso, stole his money and valuables, and left his body in the woods. Like Eileen's other victims, Troy was discovered partially undressed. However, it's unclear if that was because they actually had sex,

• 8:02Vanessa Richardson?

  or if Eileen manipulated the crime scene to make it look like they did, or if this was an attempt to get rid of evidence. Regardless of what happened, when Troy failed to come home that night, his wife called his work to report him missing. His boss immediately drove along Troy's delivery route to see if there was anything suspicious. On his way back, he found Troy's empty truck idling at an intersection halfway between Daytona Beach and Okala.

• 8:33Vanessa Richardson?

  Troy's boss had driven past that same spot only an hour earlier. He'd missed Eileen by just a few minutes. And when a family on a picnic found Troy's body a few days later, she was saved by another twist of fate. The humid Florida summer had caused his body to decompose very quickly. Because of that, the two 22 caliber bullet wounds in Troy's torso were confused for a single shotgun wound. This made it harder for police to connect his murder to Eileen's other crimes, where she used the same type of gun. After Troy's death, the next month passed without incident. With the extra money Eileen was bringing in from selling her victims valuables,

• 9:18Vanessa Richardson?

  she and Tyra had finally found some stability. But according to Eileen, Tyra had no idea where that money was coming from. And although Tyra wasn't asking too many questions, Eileen still had to be careful. To play it safe, Eileen rented a storage unit where she kept items that were too suspicious to pawn off. However, that meant her income stream eventually dried up. And by the summer of 1990, she was ready to seek out a new victim.

• 9:51Vanessa Richardson?

  56-year-old Charles Richard Humphries, who went by Dick, had enjoyed a long and varied career. He'd been a police chief and an Air Force major before landing his current job as a social worker investigating child abuse. The hours were long and intense, so on the night of September 10, 1990, Dick and his wife turned in early. The next morning, Dick drove to Sumterville, about an hour from his home in Crystal River. Around 4:00 PM, he called his secretary to say he was finishing things up and would head home soon. Somewhere along the way, Eileen Wuornos flagged him down.

• 10:31Vanessa Richardson?

  Dick's family said he just wasn't the kind of guy to drive past someone who seemed like they needed help. Based on his career, that seems likely. And unfortunately for him, Eileen had perfected the art of looking like a damsel in distress. Out of all her victims, Eileen has been the most tight-lipped about Dick Humphries. But whatever happened that night, she wasn't able to get him into the woods. Unfortunately, that wasn't enough to save him, because at some point, Eileen got Dick alone, and then she killed him. When Dick didn't come home, he was reported missing. The next day, police found his body in a housing development.

• 11:13Vanessa Richardson?

  He was fully clothed, killed by six .22 caliber bullet wounds.

• 11:19Tristin Engels?

  Eileen is a skilled deceiver in many ways. And I think for her, lying was more of a survival instinct as a result of a fragmented identity. In her life, she had to become whoever and whatever she needed to be in order to survive. So in a sense, it's second nature for her to emotionally improvise. Storytelling became adaptive. She also unfortunately learned early on that telling the truth was unsafe. So rather than be protected after reporting her sexual assault as a child, she was blamed, shamed, shipped off, and shunned. I feel that Dick's death seems to be due to displaced rage rather than reactive survival, and that's because of what Dick represents.

• 12:01Tristin Engels?

  He was a former police chief and currently a social worker investigating child abuse, and both of those systems represented protective failures and abusive power to someone like Eileen.

• 12:13Vanessa Richardson?

  What about the fact that Dick had all his clothes on? Does it lend more credence to the idea that sex was involved in her other murders? Or if not, why wouldn't she want to make it look like this was a sex work transaction gone bad?

• 12:25Tristin Engels?

  Yeah, so the fact that Dick was fully clothed is very telling. Eileen appeared to me, like I said, mission oriented. Her victims were men she perceived as predatory or abusive toward women. As I mentioned earlier, this killing seemed to stem more from displaced rage than a sexual encounter gone wrong. Dick was a former police chief and child abuse investigator, and those are two roles tied to institutions that she felt failed or harmed her in some way. So because of that, she didn't need to fabricate a narrative of self-defense to justify his murder. In her mind, it was already justified. And that, to me, explains why she didn't want to make this look like a sex transaction gone bad, because she didn't need to.

• 13:06Vanessa Richardson?

  Well, even though Dick Humphries murder didn't resemble Eileen's other victims, it actually led to a major breakthrough. As a former police officer, his case had a lot of eyes on it. Departments across Florida started sharing more information with one another, and they realized a lot of men had turned up dead over the past year in similar circumstances, alone in the woods with their cars miles away. Not only that, almost all of them had been killed using the same kind of gun, a 22 caliber pistol, which made them wonder, were they dealing with a serial killer?

• 13:45Vanessa Richardson?

  As investigators grappled with that terrifying possibility, they knew they had to warn the public. The story became front page news, and advisories went out that middle aged white men traveling alone should be careful. With the media finally catching on, Eileen laid low for about a month, but she couldn't help herself, or she just really needed money. Either way, she went back on the road. And on November 5th, 1990, 34-year-old Eileen ran into a man named Bobby Copas at a truck stop. Eileen told Bobby her car had broken down and she desperately needed a ride to pick up her kids at daycare. Bobby offered to help, but he had to stop at the bank to deposit some checks first.

• 14:30Vanessa Richardson?

  Once Eileen saw he was carrying cash, she propositioned him for sex. When he said no, she got upset, and Bobby noticed there was a gun in her purse. While they were chatting, Eileen had mentioned she'd been putting off making a phone call, so Bobby stopped at a crowded truck stop and told her to go take care of it. He hinted that once she was done, he'd be interested in her services. But the moment she stepped out of the car, Bobby locked the door. Eileen was furious. Bobby claims she pounded on the door screaming, "I'll kill you like I did all them other old mother effers."

• 15:11Vanessa Richardson?

  Before she could do anything else, Bobby sped off, but he had no idea what she'd been talking about, or that he'd just escaped the clutches of a serial killer, so he didn't report his encounter to the police. And Eileen moved on to her next target. Just two weeks after she'd failed to rob Bobby Copas, Eileen flagged down a man named Walter Antonio. Sixty-year-old Walter was a security guard in Florida, and even though he was close to retiring, he was thinking about a career change. He'd gotten a lead on a trucking job in Alabama and thought it sounded like fun. So on November 18th, Walter drove north from Florida to Alabama, but at some point along

• 15:56Vanessa Richardson?

  the way, he saw Eileen and decided to give her a ride. Eileen said she was drunk when Walter picked her up, and she flat-out offered sex in exchange for money. That sounded good to Walter, so he drove them down a seldom-used logging road. But when they stepped out of the car, Walter flashed his security guard badge and said he was a cop. He told Eileen that if she didn't have sex with him for free, he'd arrest her. Eileen didn't believe him. She said that when she called Walter out on it, he got aggressive, and that's when she pulled out her gun and shot him. She was so drunk, she had no idea if he was already dead when she rifled through his pockets. To her, it didn't matter.

• 16:41Vanessa Richardson?

  She took his valuables and sped off. Walter's body was found in the woods the next day, but his car was missing. Eileen ditched it a few days later in Brevard County, three hours away from where she'd killed him. She also kept a gold chain, a ring, handcuffs, and a billy club. Eileen gave Tyra the ring and put the rest of Walter's things in her storage unit, which by now was becoming increasingly full with each life she took.

• 17:12Tristin Engels?

  I think Eileen's compulsion to steal things from her victims was partly for survival because she would sell them when she needed money. But it was also a form of ownership. She was flipping the script and reclaiming her power. And I say that because of what she chooses to take. So in this case, Walter was a security guard who, according to Eileen, abused his power. Alleging that he would arrest her is not something he's capable of doing because as a security guard, he doesn't have the authority to do that. Instead, it seems he's trying to use coercive control and fear to make her believe that he can arrest her, so he could assault her. The handcuffs and billy club were tools of control he had, and taking those specifically was symbolic in itself.

• 17:57Tristin Engels?

  She wanted to remove his power and reclaim it for herself in every way possible. Most serial killers do keep trophies or mementos that they use to relive the experience for personal gratification. But I think in Eileen's case, they're more like souvenirs intended to validate her experience and serve as a reminder that she survived it and that she's no longer the victim. And in some cases, she even gifted some of these souvenirs to Tyra as another sort of indication that she's overcome something and that she's now the protector.

• 18:30Vanessa Richardson?

  Well, even without Walter's valuables, the police were able to quickly identify him. But Eileen hadn't left any forensic evidence behind, and the authorities weren't getting any useful tips either. To see if something had fallen through the cracks, they started looking into missing persons cases. And when they learned about the disappearance of Peter Seams, whose car Eileen and Tyra crashed on the 4th of July, they wondered if it was connected. They were still analyzing the forensic evidence from Peter's car, but they did have the composite sketches of the women who'd crashed Peter's vehicle. On November 30, 1990, exactly one year after Eileen killed her first victim, Richard Mallory,

• 19:14Vanessa Richardson?

  police flooded the news with pictures of the sketches. It wasn't long before Eileen and Tyra tuned into the coverage and saw their own faces staring back at them.

• 19:30Vanessa Richardson?

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• 20:46Speaker 03

  Can't switch off at night? Give your curious mind somewhere peaceful to wander. I'm Simon Mettacks, host of Sleepy History. Join me for lost cities and ancient mysteries, told slowly and calmly, to help you drift off. And if you miss the ending, oh, that's rather the idea. Find Sleepy History in your podcast app and try an episode tonight.

• 21:13Vanessa Richardson?

  By the end of November 1990, police in Florida were zeroing in on 34-year-old Eileen Wuornos. Although they didn't know her name yet, they'd tracked down the composite sketches from when she and her girlfriend Tyra had crashed Peter Seem's car a few months earlier. For the first time, the police had viable suspects to go after, and the story was all over the news. Now that Eileen's face was out there, she couldn't hide the truth from Tyra, especially because the police were looking for them both. Tyra was understandably freaked out by the news that her girlfriend was a serial killer,

• 21:55Vanessa Richardson?

  and she later said that when the story broke, she was scared she might be next. But Eileen had no intention of hurting her. Instead, she told Tyra to get out of town, which Tyra was more than happy to do. On December 3rd, 1990, Eileen took her to the bus station in Daytona Beach, and Tyra went to her parents' house in Pennsylvania, leaving Eileen alone and heartbroken. But rather than lie low, she started drowning her sorrows at bars all over town.

• 22:29Tristin Engels?

  This was such a critical connection for her, given her history marked with abuse and abandonment. Not only did Eileen choose Tyra, but Tyra also chose her and stayed. And that was probably the single most constant attachment she has had that she clearly felt safe with. Not to mention, it's not uncommon for individuals with borderline personality disorder who have identity fragmentation to fuse their identity to their partner. And thus, when there is a real or perceived abandonment, they struggle. They worry about who they are without them, or how they will survive without them. So this is why it was more impactful for Eileen to lose Tyra,

• 23:10Tristin Engels?

  because this loss likely felt more life-threatening to Eileen than the idea of getting caught.

• 23:16Vanessa Richardson?

  Could this be a form of defeatism? Like, it seems like she was doing all this to make Tyra happy, or at least that seems to be her excuse. With that now gone, is Eileen just giving up?

• 23:26Tristin Engels?

  Yeah, it could be a form of defeatism, because what she's experiencing right now is a lose-lose conflict. Because either way, she loses Tyra. She knows her arrest is imminent. So for someone like Eileen, letting her go willingly dulls any sense of rejection or abandonment, because she's doing it on her terms. And it was sacrificial, which allows for her to possibly view it as inevitable and a matter of circumstance, rather than the loss being because of her. So once again, it's a form of reclaiming the power.

• 23:58Vanessa Richardson?

  While Eileen was drinking her pain away, the police were getting closer to identifying her. The sketches of Eileen and Tyra were being circulated constantly. And after just a month, police had nearly a thousand tips called in. The most promising lead came from a pawn shop where someone called Kami Green had sold a radar detector belonging to Eileen's first victim, Richard Mallory. The name Kami Green didn't come up in any databases, but there were other ways to find her. Because in Florida, and many other states, pawn shops require sellers to leave a fingerprint on file. And that print matched someone in the criminal database.

• 24:40Vanessa Richardson?

  It turned out Kami Green was actually Eileen Wuornos. And when the police eventually compared it to the handprint on Peter Seams's car, it was a match for her, too. From there, it didn't take the police long to track Eileen down. In the early morning hours of January 9th, 1991, the 34-year-old was arrested outside a bar in Daytona Beach called The Last Resort.

• 25:06Vanessa Richardson?

  After that, investigators quickly learned about her secret storage unit. When they opened it, they found a mountain of evidence stolen from her victims. It all but confirmed their theory that Eileen was the serial killer they were after. But if they really wanted a slam dunk case, they needed a confession. And luckily, they knew how to get Eileen to talk. The police hadn't forgotten about the other woman in the sketch, and it didn't take them long to realize she was Eileen's girlfriend, Tyra. But they weren't sure what Tyra's level of involvement had been. For all they knew, she and Eileen had killed those men together,

• 25:48Vanessa Richardson?

  so they made it a priority to track Tyra down at her parents' house in Pennsylvania and arrest her. After questioning Tyra, it became obvious that she wasn't part of Eileen's crimes. But the police weren't done with her. Even if she wasn't a killer, the authorities had a feeling she knew more about Eileen's murder spree than she was letting on. And withholding information from them was a crime of its own. So the police offered Tyra a deal. If she could get Eileen to confess on tape, they'd give her immunity. Tyra accepted their offer. On January 14, 1991, Tyra called Eileen in prison on a secretly-recorded line.

• 26:33Vanessa Richardson?

  She started casually reminiscing on their relationship in the good old days. Eileen was happy to talk to her. But when Tyra shifted the conversation to the murders, Eileen got suspicious. Tyra was relentless, though. Over the next two days, she called Eileen 11 times. Tyra tried everything to get her to confess, telling Eileen how scared she was of going to prison herself, and even threatening to die by suicide if Eileen didn't confess to the murders. Eileen still loved Tyra, even if she might never see her again. So in the end, she relented. She told Tyra she'd come clean about everything.

• 27:17Vanessa Richardson?

  And she knew her story would be explosive. She told Tyra, quote, "I'm going to go down in history."

• 27:25Tristin Engels?

  Eileen's delayed confession, I don't think was because she wanted to unburden herself in the way, let's say Jeffrey Dahmer or Joel Rifkin did. It was an attachment decision to protect Tyra. Part of her identity and self-concept that formed from the relationship with Tyra was one of protect her. And that is what we are seeing happening here. She knew confessing now was going to protect Tyra and in turn, maybe preserve what was good about that relationship for as long as she could. Eileen needed something good to believe in.

• 27:56Vanessa Richardson?

  What about Eileen's words to Tyra here that she would go down in history? Does it seem like maybe she was confessing more as a way to secure her own legacy than out of concern for Tyra?

• 28:06Tristin Engels?

  It's possible, but why would she want a legacy? So to answer that, we have to look at her pattern to begin with. And again, we know that she targeted men who abused or exploited women, and she felt she was morally obligated in some way. So at the core, this was what gave her meaning and purpose, ridding the world of dangerous men. With that in mind, it seems more likely that this is a continuation of that need for meaning. By confessing, she's able to continue controlling the narrative and reclaim her purpose and moral framework. And it would allow her to be seen not just as this violent offender, but as someone with a message and a platform. I also feel it served another purpose. This was also her way of saying to Tyra, okay, I will confess and I will make it a

• 28:51Tristin Engels?

  grand gesture because I am confessing for you. And if you think about it, that is symbolic of a confession of love as well, coming from Eileen. So really, I think it had multiple purposes. And if she wanted a legacy, she wanted it to be one of someone who reclaimed her power.

• 29:08Vanessa Richardson?

  Well, when Eileen did confess, she didn't hold back. She told the police about all seven of her victims and admitted to throwing her gun into a bay by her house. Police were able to fish it out of the water, which gave them the murder weapon, a confession, and physical evidence to corroborate it. Now, all they needed was a conviction. As the trial approached, Eileen's case was all over the news, just as she'd predicted. It was a massive story. People were fascinated by Eileen, who was being called America's first female serial killer. Many of them felt compelled to reach out to her. One of those

• 29:50Vanessa Richardson?

  people was a woman named Arlene Prawley, a horse farmer from Ocala, Florida. Arlene, who was very religious, claimed she was compelled by God to contact her, and Eileen was inclined to listen. The two of them quickly formed a powerful bond. Arlene filled a void in Eileen's life now that Tyra was gone, but in a very different way. In November of 1991, 44-year-old Arlene legally adopted Eileen, who was only eight years younger than her. Eileen said she agreed to it because she didn't have any family she was close to and wanted someone to have her remains after she passed. She

• 30:32Vanessa Richardson?

  also enjoyed talking with Arlene, and the adoption gave them more phone time. As for Arlene, she said she wanted Eileen to know what it felt like to have a more supportive family. Critics accused her of trying to profit from the media attention, something she always denied. And yet, she reportedly charged a steep fee for giving interviews.

• 30:54Tristin Engels?

  So I don't see how Eileen felt there was anything to lose with this arrangement with Arlene, because Eileen needed to be seen as human, and her relationship with Arlene gave her that, and some stability. Arlene called regularly. She visited, praised her publicly, defended her in the media, and she felt like a mother figure who was protecting her. At the same time, Eileen also got other perks, like more phone time, which actually is a very big deal for someone who is incarcerated, especially on death row. So I think that it was convenient to Eileen because it was a distraction and a superficial fulfillment of her needs. Even though Arlene was exploiting her relationship with Eileen for financial gain, that was nothing compared to the other ways in which

• 31:39Tristin Engels?

  Eileen was exploited throughout her life. To her, the was probably the second least abusive connection she had, and she had more to gain from it than to lose. Now, Arlene, on the other hand, this says a lot about her. Firstly, she has a savior complex. She's positioning herself as someone who was sent by God, and she answered the call. And therefore, Eileen's redemption is because of her. So it's self glorifying. It was also highly manipulative and opportunistic. She was exhibiting very ego driven and controlling behavior and was arguably predatory because she held the power in that dynamic. Eileen was isolated, traumatized and vulnerable, and Arlene preyed on that.

• 32:19Vanessa Richardson?

  However, Eileen felt about her new adoptive mother, Arlene was all she had when her first trial began on January 13, 1992. Although she would eventually be charged with all of the seven murders, this first trial would only be for her first victim, Richard Mallory. When Eileen took the stand, nobody knew what to expect. She'd told so many versions of what happened between her and Richard, it was hard to know what she'd say. And this one would be under oath, legally binding with no going back. But when Eileen gave her testimony, it was a story nobody had heard before. And if she was to be believed, it changed everything.

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• 34:09Vanessa Richardson?

  In 2002, Ryan Wedding was an Olympic snowboarder at the top of his game.

• 34:15Speaker 05

  Ryan's style is really gunning it in gold.

• 34:18Vanessa Richardson?

  And in less than a minute, it slipped away. But he continued to chase the high.

• 34:23Speaker 06

  Ryan James Wedding. He controls one of the most violent drug trafficking organizations in this world.

• 34:33Vanessa Richardson?

  I'm Michelle Shepherd and from CBC Podcasts and The Toronto Star, The Most Wanted Olympian. Available now.

• 34:43Vanessa Richardson?

  In the lead up to her murder trial in January 1992, 35-year-old Eileen Wuornos gave many different accounts of what happened between her and her first victim, 51-year-old Richard Mallory. And when Eileen finally testified about their encounter, the details were more shocking than anyone could believe. A warning, the following account is extremely disturbing. We're not going to go over every single detail, but we do need to offer some specifics in order to properly tell the story. If you'd prefer to pass over this section, we suggest skipping forward a minute and resuming the story there.

• 35:22Vanessa Richardson?

  Eileen said that on the day she killed Richard, he tied her to the steering wheel and violently raped her. He then tortured her with rubbing alcohol, pouring it over her various cavities. According to her, he said he was going to pour the alcohol in her eyes when he was done with her. Eileen also claimed that Richard said he'd killed women before and that if she didn't cooperate with him, he would murder her and violate her corpse. However, Eileen managed to break free from the steering wheel and grab her gun. Then she killed him to save herself. During this testimony, Eileen was shaky and had to pause to gather herself several times.

• 36:05Vanessa Richardson?

  She even started crying near the end. Many people who take a sympathetic viewpoint on Eileen Wuornos point back to this testimony as the reasons why. They find it hard to believe that someone could lie so convincingly about something so traumatic. On the other side of it, Richard's friends and family defended his character. They insisted that he wasn't a violent man. Richard's girlfriend, who'd been with him for several years, said that he was always gentle with women and would never have done what Eileen described.

• 36:38Tristin Engels?

  This is arguably one of the most complex parts of Eileen's story. So, right off the bat, she's immediately viewed as not credible. Based on her demographics alone, she was unhoused, a sex worker, and a substance user with a criminal history. Society has deemed her less worthy of being believed. And the reality is, statistically, women like Eileen, who are disenfranchised and vulnerable, are at the highest risk for sexual violence and are the least likely to be protected or taken seriously. And I think her entire life is a testament to that statistical truth. So she's already not credible, and she's accused of killing seven men, and was inconsistent

• 37:21Tristin Engels?

  in her narratives, which definitely complicates things, especially to the public. But inconsistent narratives doesn't automatically disprove her either, which we've already covered. But again, trauma survivors like Eileen often retell events in fragmented and contradictory ways, especially when they are experiencing dissociation, shame, or emotional dysregulation. We also covered in Episode 1 how Eileen learned very early on that being vulnerable means being abused or abandoned, and that telling the truth has been unsafe for her. So she became more of a storyteller for survival. And so for those listening who may believe that Eileen was not telling the truth about Richard, would you change your mind if you learned that Richard, prior to his encounter

• 38:05Tristin Engels?

  with Eileen, had served a 10-year prison sentence in Maryland for attempted rape? This is not information Eileen would have known during her encounter with Richard, so it's unlikely she fabricated this story because of his past in order to make it believable. So the real message here is that many sexual assault stories are messy, contradictory, and painful, and we all have biases that can impair objectivity. But it's important to believe survivors, and to do that, you start by listening. It doesn't mean you turn off critical thinking and blindly accuse someone. It means you turn on compassion and accountability and remember that there is no such thing as a perfect victim. False reporting is rare, and we should all actively challenge our implicit biases in

• 38:48Tristin Engels?

  every aspect of our lives so that no one gets left behind. We saw the damage that it did to 14-year-old Eileen. Believing and supporting is critical.

• 38:59Vanessa Richardson?

  Eileen's testimony was certainly shocking, but when it was time for the jury to deliberate on January 27, 1992, they only took an hour and a half to make a decision. Eileen was guilty. However, their next decision was much harder to make because the jury also had to decide if Eileen would receive the death penalty. That deliberation was much more contentious, but eventually, the jury did agree, and Eileen was given the death sentence. After her sentencing, Eileen turned to her adoptive mother, Arlene Prawley, for guidance. But Arlene didn't think she should fight.

• 39:41Vanessa Richardson?

  She convinced Eileen there was no winning in this life, so she had to do everything she could to prepare for the next. In order for Eileen to properly cleanse her soul and get into heaven, she had to plead guilty to the rest of the murders. To walk her through this process, Arlene recommended one of her friends, a real estate lawyer named Steve Glazer. Steve was not a criminal defense attorney, and according to Eileen, he didn't take her case seriously whatsoever. She said he would smoke joints before giving her legal advice and did a poor job of explaining what was happening in court. Despite her confusion, Eileen stuck with her strategy,

• 40:23Vanessa Richardson?

  and she pleaded guilty to the rest of the murders. With her fate sealed, all Eileen had left to do was wait. She spent her time studying the Bible and writing letters. She checked in with her Aunt Lori and eventually reconciled with Tyra. But the person she wrote to more than anyone else was her childhood friend, Don Botkins. Don had been there for Eileen when they were teenagers. They'd grown apart since then, but rekindled their friendship after Eileen was incarcerated. Over the next few years, they exchanged hundreds of letters. The additional support seemed to give Eileen newfound resilience. She fired Steve Glazer as her attorney,

• 41:08Vanessa Richardson?

  and in the year 2000, she appealed her case on the basis of ineffective counsel.

• 41:15Vanessa Richardson?

  But in order to make that argument, Eileen's new lawyers wanted to bring up the abuse she'd experienced as a child. That included testimony from witnesses who said Eileen was sexually abused by her family, something Eileen steadfastly denied. She refused to go along with that strategy and chose to stop her appeals altogether. Not only that, she recanted all her previous statements that she'd killed in self-defense. Now she claimed she'd committed the murders for money and an overall hatred for the human race. Eileen said that she was ready to die and that if she didn't get executed, she would kill again if she had to.

• 41:59Tristin Engels?

  This actually makes sense if you consider Eileen's pattern. She's been spending most of her adult life trying to reclaim her power and control the narrative, and there is no way she's about to let people see her as powerless now, especially because of the vulnerability and the re-traumatization that would bring on a national scale if she took the stand. She's using her rage as an armor to protect her identity as she has been doing. I also think this decision was her resigning to her fate because the success rate of appeals is very low, and they are also very expensive, and she may have known her odds. So in her mind, she could be executed as someone who was viewed as powerless, who was a child sexual abuse victim, or she could be executed

• 42:43Tristin Engels?

  as someone who reclaimed her power and maintained it. She wanted to go out on her terms, which is similar to someone like Ted Bundy. He started to give chilling details and very performative details of his crimes in the final days before his execution because he was looking to be remembered in a certain way. I will say, from a forensic psychologist's perspective, drastic legal decisions like this raise alarm bells regarding competency. She refused a legal strategy that was presented to her by her new attorneys, and that could indicate that she lacks the ability to rationally assist counsel in her defense or appreciate the risks of saying no to that. She could still be competent, but it would be best practice for the court to ensure that first before moving forward.

• 43:28Vanessa Richardson?

  Well, even if Eileen was embracing her fate, there was a chance her life could be spared. There were rumblings of possible changes to the death penalty in Florida, and an attorney named Rog Singh Hall was tasked with addressing concerns with Eileen's mental competency one last time. She'd been diagnosed with borderline and antisocial personality disorder, but Singh Hall believed there was more going on. He told the courts he believed Eileen wasn't mentally competent to make her own legal decisions, and that her appeals should continue. But Eileen disagreed. She was adamant that she was of sound mind, and the courts agreed. Her wish to die was granted,

• 44:13Vanessa Richardson?

  and her death warrant was signed in September of 2002. Eileen's execution was scheduled for October 9, 2002. The day before, she sat down for a final interview with a filmmaker named Nick Broomfield. It seemed like she'd broken from reality. Eileen was convinced the police had known she'd killed Richard Mallory, but they let her keep killing so they could get a movie made about the investigation. She claimed her prison guards were trying to poison her and spying on her through a camera disguised as a mirror. Not only that, Eileen also said the guards were torturing her

• 44:53Vanessa Richardson?

  by sending "sonic pressure" into her cell to mess with her brain, all to make her look crazy. But Eileen accepted that there wasn't anything to be done about it, and she was ready to die, and God would take her up to heaven on a spaceship.

• 45:12Tristin Engels?

  So it sounds to me that her attorney had reason to be concerned regarding her competency because she's endorsing several different types of delusions. We are seeing paranoia, persecutory, and somatic, all of which are signs of psychosis. And this should have warranted an evaluation by a mental health professional to determine if they are genuine and if she needs additional treatment. It's unusual for a judge to listen to the defendant who had the doubt declared against and determine that based on that. Typically, when an attorney declares a doubt of competency regarding their client, the judge will listen, they will hear their reasons for concern,

• 45:54Tristin Engels?

  and they will genuinely hold a competency hearing and order an evaluation. And it doesn't seem that that was done in this case, and that was in September. And now we're in October and we're seeing some decompensation in Eileen.

• 46:06Vanessa Richardson?

  Do you think this could have been a final attempt to avoid execution by Eileen? Though, on the other hand, Eileen did say she was ready to die. What are your thoughts on that?

• 46:15Tristin Engels?

  Yeah, I don't think she was trying to avoid being executed, but this does seem unusual for Eileen. She has a pathological need to avoid being viewed as a victim, yet she is making statements in a taped interview that millions will see that implies she's being victimized and that she is powerless. And that seems contradictory to the version of her that refused to pursue her appeal to begin with in order to avoid this perception. So why the sudden change? I think she may have genuinely been decompensating. It appears as if she's experiencing trauma-based regression, and that can come with psychosis. She was incarcerated on death row for years, isolated, stripped of agency, and once again, under the control of men, custody officers,

• 46:57Tristin Engels?

  who symbolize abuse and who may have very possibly been abusing their authority with her in prison. So being there, isolated, was a complete sensory reenactment of her deepest fears and her earliest betrayals. And under those conditions, anyone's reality can become distorted. But more importantly, I think she may have been expressing real fears through a distorted lens. This explains why she's expressing that she's ready to die, because in death, at least to her, no one has control over her anymore.

• 47:28Vanessa Richardson?

  On the morning of October 9th, 2002, hundreds of spectators, members of the press, and protesters gathered outside the prison. Some of the victims' family members talked with reporters about justice finally being served, and a few even attended the execution itself. When the curtain parted at 9:30 a.m., Eileen smiled. When asked if she wanted to say any last words, she responded, quote, "Yes, I'd like to say I'm sailing with the rock and I'll be back, like Independence Day with Jesus, June 6th, like in the movie, big mothership and all, I'll be back," end quote.

• 48:12Vanessa Richardson?

  Minutes later, she was declared officially dead at 46 years old. Eileen had long since severed ties with her adoptive mother, Arlene Prawley, but she'd found someone else to take her remains, her only friend, Don Botkins. Don took the ashes home and scattered them at her farm. Eileen Wuornos's story is a complicated one. There's a lot about her life that people can empathize with, having an abusive childhood, falling through the cracks in the system, and having to make her own way in a cruel, unforgiving world. But while there are so many tragic things about Eileen's story, the real tragedy is

• 48:57Vanessa Richardson?

  that they transformed Eileen into someone who inflicted pain on others. And in the end, seven men lost their lives, all because they had the misfortune of spotting Eileen Wuornos on the side of the highway.

• 49:25Vanessa Richardson?

  Thanks so much for listening. Come back next time for a deep dive into the mind of another murderer. Of the many sources we used when researching this episode, the ones we found the most credible and helpful were the Orlando Sentinel newspaper archives and the film Life and Death of a Serial Killer by Nick Broomfield.

• 49:46Tristin Engels?

  Killer Minds is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on Instagram at Killer Minds. And don't forget to rate, review, and follow Killer Minds wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference.

• 50:06Vanessa Richardson?

  And to enhance your listening experience, subscribe to Crime House Plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get every episode of Killer Minds ad-free, along with early access to each thrilling two-part series and exciting Crime House bonus content.

• 50:23Vanessa Richardson?

  Killer Minds is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson, and Dr. Tristin Engels, and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Killer Minds team: Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Laurie Marinelli, Natalie Pritzowski, Sarah Camp, Bethany Branson, Sarah Tardif, and Carrie Murphy. Thank you for listening.

• 50:53Vanessa Richardson?

  If you're looking for your next podcast, check out What the Fact with Connor Tomlinson from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum and Carter Roy. Every week, they take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen, or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.