Aileen Wuornos - Monster

More often than not, many of these youngsters grow up to harbour deep-seated grudges against either a male or a female in particular. ‘The trauma they suffer festers away and becomes a fantasy for getting revenge,’ says Ian Stephen, a forensic psychologist who works with the police and the prison service in Strathclyde. It could be the father or the mother, an aunt or an uncle, and they may well mirror this hatred in later life, their prey becoming the repository for their anger and their earlier mental and physical traumas. Simply put, it’s payback time.

Society ignores these issues at its great peril, for in doing so we are breeding evil. But, many will say, there are lots of kids out there who suffer abuse. They don’t all turn into serial killers, do they? That, I would agree, is a clear and concise observation. However, one only has to look at the escalating rates of serious juvenile crime, often linked to heavy drinking in today’s society, to realise that parents and society are failing. Our prisons are full of young criminals. Many will graduate into very serious crime – and the murder rates are rocketing.

However, one could never find a more apt example of this phenomenon than by looking at Aileen Wuornos – an innocent child who turned into a monster. In a nutshell, she copped the lot.

There are always two sides to a story. Lee has given her own account, one which was strongly contested by her adoptive brother. But, for all of Lee’s faults, we are unable to say that she was born evil, and she most certainly did not enter this world with a genetic flaw, or biochemical imbalance, although on her natural father’s side there was certainly bad blood.

The young Diane Wuornos was living a troubled life. She had gone with Leo against the express wishes of her parents. Lauri Wuornos, with good reason, detested him and had banned him from the house. With one unwanted child in Keith, Diane gave birth to another unwanted child with Aileen.

A naïve, well-intentioned girl, abandoned by a wayward husband who was a sexual pervert, Diane did all she could for her two children with the meagre tools at her disposal, but Troy, the twelfth largest city in Michigan, had no time for the likes of Diane and her kids. A friend of Lee’s, Michelle Shovan, would later say, ‘Troy was a community out of control, unsupervised by any social-welfare agencies, and there was no school liaison between schools, parents, the police and welfare officers. Nothing seems to have changed much since.’

In this uncaring community, Diane was unable to find work or get welfare. Faced with these circumstances, she felt she had only one option: to abandon her children and run away. During this formative period, Lee should have seen and felt her mother’s emotions. The negative mirroring had started.

Diane knew that her parents, especially her disciplinarian father, would never agree to take on Keith and Lee, so she asked them to babysit and never returned. It was emotional blackmail if you will, for who else would take on the kiddies other than their grandparents? They did the honourable thing in adopting them. Lauri held down a secure job with a stable income; but two additional children was undoubtedly a financial strain on the family budget.

By the age of six, it was becoming apparent to the Wuornoses that Lee was a problem child. When she caused a fire that nearly burned the house down, Lauri reacted in the only way he knew how: he gave the child a thrashing, and thereafter the beatings never stopped.

Lee would have been confused and disappointed. Her innermost thoughts would have told her that the mother she had known, the person who had held and loved her for four years, had suddenly vanished. The home that she had known for four years had gone. She had been thrust into a new, unfriendly, strange environment. There were new faces staring down at her. She was no longer the centre of attention, and Lee would be subconsciously vying for the attention she craved when it was being shared amongst three other young people.

Lee would not, or could not, have understood why this had happened to her. She was far too young to comprehend such matters. However, deep in her psyche, there was a void. Most psychiatrists will agree that to rip a child away from its mother after a bonding period of four years can cause levels of subconscious mental trauma we cannot even begin to calculate. To start with, this form of early upheaval breeds uncertainty and insecurity. When things go wrong, children often withdraw into a world of their own. They suffer from learning disabilities because they cannot focus on the tasks at hand, their thoughts being elsewhere. They find it difficult to mix freely with their own peer group, and appear as loners. In this isolated world their thoughts turn inward; they start to brood.

So many serial killers have suffered the same mental trauma as youngsters, and I cite Kenneth Bianchi as but one example. Born illegitimate, adopted by a neurotic woman whose husband was an inveterate gambler – his debtors were forever chasing him for money and threatening his life – the young Ken went through at least five schools, six different addresses and was of such concern to his teachers that they recommended him for psychiatric help on no fewer than four occasions. Frances, his adoptive mother, explained to me that Kenneth became a problem child, yet she absolutely failed to accept responsibility for her own shortcomings in not taking the advice offered by her young son’s tutors.

Aileen Wuornos was definitely suffering from serious psychological problems at a very early age. As the FBI will confirm, at least 70 per cent of serial killers have faced similar childhood traumas. Many of these people found an interest in playing with fire. Adding up all of Lee’s problems to date, she was on the road to disaster.

For those readers who have read my book Talking with Serial Killers , you will recall that the sexual sadist Michael Bruce Ross suffered from an identical form of physical and emotional abuse. Michael, who is now on Death Row in Connecticut, is the state’s only ever convicted serial murderer. As a kid, he was ordered by his brutal father to choose the tree limb he would be beaten with from the yard woodpile. He soon learned that the thicker the branch, the less painful it was. We see exactly the same thing with Lee, who was similarly forced to cut willow branches. Do we not find this young girl being laid naked over a table and whipped with a leather belt which she had to clean after its use? That child, already a loner at school and amongst her friends in the neighbourhood, would arrive home a little late in the sure-fire knowledge that a sick punishment awaited her at the hand of a brutal man.

We also know that Lee was having full sex from around the age of nine. We cannot even start to think that she was some kind of ‘slut’ at that age, as so many observers feel content to believe. She would watch all the other boys and girls engaging in healthy childhood relationships while she was ignored. Again, lost in a world of her own, any attention from older boys was welcome, even if it was for all the wrong reasons. Being bribed with cigarettes – a smoke in exchange for sex – may have partially satisfied the young Lee’s short-term needs for friendship and attention, but all of this was being built on shifting sands. Once the boys, including her own brother Keith, had had their fill, they would leave her alone once again. Her psychological problems became further enhanced by the fact that she was known as a slut, with the unwanted sobriquets of the Cigarette Pig and the Cigarette Bandit, all of which further alienated her from the few companions she had. In reality, Lee had already entered the seedy world of prostitution, being paid for sex in kind. Lauri Wuornos had much to answer for.