The sweet-faced child in this image became one of the most infamous female serial killers ever known.
Born in 1956 in Rochester, Michigan, she endured a turbulent upbringing from the start.
At just four years old, her mother walked out on her and her brother.
The desertion happened almost simultaneously with her father’s life sentence for kidnapping and raping a seven-year-old girl.
He eventually ended his own life in prison.
Placed with her maternal grandparents in Rochester, Michigan, the girl’s suffering only intensified.
She later claimed her grandmother struggled with alcoholism, while her grandfather allegedly beat and sexually assaulted her.
At 14, a rape left her pregnant, with whispers that her own brother could be the father.
She delivered a baby boy and swiftly put him up for adoption, wishing him a kinder life.
After her grandmother passed away, she left school and survived through prostitution.
Her rap sheet grew between 1970 and 1980 with a string of minor offenses no one imagined would foreshadow worse.
Arrests piled up for disorderly conduct, drunk driving, assault, shoplifting, and prostitution; in 1976 her brother died, and soon after her grandfather took his own life.
She hitchhiked south to Florida, where crimes escalated, culminating in a 1982 armed-robbery prison stint.
Severe mental-health crises stemming from childhood trauma led to six suicide attempts between ages 14 and 22.
Working the streets in Florida, she took her first life.
The victim was 51-year-old electronics-store owner Richard Mallory, shot three times; his body turned up in woods outside Daytona two weeks later.
She first said a payment argument and alleged assault sparked the fatal fight.
Over the next 12 months—December 1989 to November 1990—she admitted to six more killings.
All targets were middle- to late-aged white men: a construction worker, rodeo rider, truck driver, retired police chief, and others.
In recorded calls she insisted every man tried to rape her and she fired in self-defense.
Charged with first-degree murder for six deaths—one unprosecuted due to a missing body despite her confession—she received six death sentences.
Nicknamed the “Damsel of Death,” Aileen Wuornos was executed by lethal injection on October 9, 2002.
Her story powers the Netflix documentary Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers.