In 1992, Aileen Carol Wuornos, an itinerant sex worker, was arrested for the murders of seven men in or near Volusia County, Florida in 1989 and 1990: all of them shot while Wuornos was on the job, all of them shot at point-blank range. She became, in the view of the public, according to the filmmaker Nick Broomfield, who made two documentaries about her and about the media storm that surrounded her, a "man-hating lesbian prostitute who tarnished the reputations of her victims,” a useful foil for family-values string-em-up-dead politicians who wanted to show that they were tough on crime–and an unlikely lesbian hero.

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SOURCES:

Barrett-Ibarria, Sofia. “How Serial Killer Aileen Wuornos Became a Cult Hero.” Vice (blog), September 19, 2019. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mbm3j4/how-serial-killer-aileen-wuornos-became-a-cult-hero.   Broomfield, Nick. Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer. Documentary, Crime. Channel 4 Television Corporation,  Lafayette Films, 1994.   Broomfield, Nick, and Joan Churchill. Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer. Documentary, Crime. Lafayette Films,  Channel 4 Television Corporation, 2003.   chesler, phyllis. “A Woman’s Right to Self—Defense: The Case of Aileen Carol Wuornos.” Off Our Backs 23, no. 6 (1993): 6–15.   Levina, Marina, and Diem-My T. Bui, eds. Monster Culture in the 21st Century: A Reader. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.   Pearson, Kyra. “The Trouble with Aileen Wuornos, Feminism’s ‘First Serial Killer.’” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 3 (September 2007): 256–75. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420701472791.   Vronsky, Peter. Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters. 1st edition. New York, N.Y: Berkley Books, 2007.   Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.