Serial Killer Aileen Wuornos Confessed to Police to Protect the Woman She Loved: 'If I Have to, I Will' Christina CoulterOctober 29, 2025 at 7:30 AM 0 Peter BauerUSA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images In a 1991 taped call from jail, Aileen Wuornos told girlfriend Tyria Moore she would confess "to keep [...
- - Serial Killer Aileen Wuornos Confessed to Police to Protect the Woman She Loved: 'If I Have to, I Will'
Christina CoulterOctober 29, 2025 at 7:30 AM
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Peter Bauer-USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
In a 1991 taped call from jail, Aileen Wuornos told girlfriend Tyria Moore she would confess "to keep [her] from getting in trouble"
The Netflix documentary Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers — premiering on Oct. 30 — features a rarely-seen 1997 death-row interview in which Wuornos says, "The real Aileen Wuornos isn't a serial killer. I was so lost I turned into one"
Wuornos, a sex worker who found clients along Florida's highways, was convicted of six murders of men between 1989 and 1991 — and the state of Florida executed her in 2002
In January 1991, drifter Aileen "Lee" Wuornos, the 34-year-old suspect recently arrested for a string of murders along highways in central Florida, was heard on a taped phone call from jail as she told her girlfriend, 28-year-old Tyria Moore, that she would do anything for love. "Lee, [the police] are coming after me," a frightened-sounding Moore says on the call. Wuornos answers, her voice straining with emotion: "I'm not gonna let you go to jail. Ty, I love you. If I have to confess everything just to keep you from getting in trouble, I will."
That confession led to Wuornos's convictions for six murders and, in 2002, her execution by the state of Florida. Dubbed "the first female serial killer" and a "hooker from hell" by the media, Wuornos gained notoriety on true-crime TV shows and in the 2003 film Monster, starring Academy Award winner Charlize Theron.
Now a Netflix documentary, Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers, premiering Oct. 30, reopens the Wuornos case, presenting footage from an interview conducted on Florida's death row while reexamining the killer's history of rape, physical abuse and betrayal. Says the film's director Emily Turner: "Aileen said, 'I'm going to talk to you about the truth of my crimes,' and from watching this interview, a very different version of her comes through—contradictory, very human, at times quite disturbing."
In that death-row interview, Wuornos says, "The real Aileen Wuornos isn't a serial killer. I was so lost I turned into one."
Abandoned by her parents when she was 4 and adopted by her grandparents in Michigan, Wuornos became pregnant at 13 (her baby was adopted), was beaten by her grandfather and claimed in the 1997 prison interview seen in Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers that she was sexually assaulted by teenage friends.
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Investigators of lesbian serial murderer Aileen Wuornos (L-R), Richard Vogel, Bob Kelley & Larry Horzepa & Jake Erhart; holding mug shots of Aileen Wuornos & 1st victim Richard Mallory; Volusia County.
By 16, she had run away and become a traveling sex worker. "I'm hitchhiking, and I'm hooking," she said. "I slept under viaducts, in abandoned homes, in cow pastures. I must have been raped, I'd say, about 30 times, maybe more."
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Yet the assaults, she added defiantly, didn't bother her: "I'm tough. A wussy woman? It would have bothered her."
Peter Bauer-USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
Aileen Wuornos giving testimony during her 1992 murder trial in Daytona Beach, Florida.
Wuornos met Moore, a motel maid, at a bar in Daytona Beach, Fla., in 1986, the start of an intense four-year relationship. "I loved her so bad," Wuornos said. "[She's the] only reason I carried that darn gun. I wanted to make sure that I got home alive—so I'd be another day breathing with her."
Their romantic idyll, however, didn't last. In 1989 police began investigating the brutal deaths and robberies of men found shot near Florida highways — Richard Mallory, 51; David Spears, 47; Charles Carskaddon, 40; Troy Burress, 50; Charles Humphreys, 56; and Walter Antonio, 62. Witnesses recalled seeing two women driving a victim's stolen car, and investigators lifted Wuornos's fingerprint from a pawnshop item that had belonged to one of the dead men.
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The hearse carrying the body of convicted killer Aileen Wuornos leaves the Florida State Prison following her execution by lethal injection October 9, 2002 in Starke, Florida.
Arrested on Jan. 9, 1991, Wuornos was persuaded to confess by Moore, who was working with police to avoid being prosecuted as an accomplice. (Moore wasn't accused of a crime.)
At her trial for the murder of her first victim, Richard Mallory, Wuornos pleaded not guilty and testified that she killed in self-defense after he raped and tortured her — but the jury found her guilty. Wuornos pleaded no contest or guilty to five other murders. In the doc a childhood friend, Dawn Botkins, recalls her final visit with Wuornos the night before her execution: "She said she was definitely a serial killer. It was all the years of the abuse, and then she started drinking. Plus Ty [Moore]. Aileen kept saying that to me: 'That was quite the love, wasn't it? It was fatal.'"
Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers, a new Netflix documentary, beging streaming Oct. 30.
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