Monster: Inside the Mind of Aileen Wuornos

After getting the most pressing, and somewhat self-serving, issues off her chest, a resilient Lee settled down to jail life, her mood alternating between abject depression and joviality. She had been allowed newspapers, and she avidly poured over the notoriety she was now receiving from the world’s media. Her emotions, which had originally centred around Tyria, started to take a back seat. Religion and turning to God was way back in the past. She was becoming a celebrity – a person of some import and, for the first time in her life, she felt she had at least achieved something of value. If she could beat the rap – and she was sure she could convince everyone that she had only killed in self-defence – she could make a mint and buy a decent attorney and her way to freedom.

The true nature of Lee’s psychopathic personality was about to be unleashed; not, this time, in a car with a vulnerable man at some lonely place, but in a more insidious way in the county jail, where she was observed by corrections officer Susan Hanson.

Two days after Lee’s interviews with police, Susan Hanson was on duty and assigned to keep an eye on Lee. Although this inmate was not supposed to be treated any differently to the other prisoners, a certain mystique had built up around the so-called ‘mystery guest’ – everyone was curious and everybody wanted a piece of the action that was focused on Lee Wuornos.

As cocky as one would like, Lee saw Officer Hanson peering through the glass panel of her cell, and said, ‘Listen to this. They say here [in the newspaper] “This woman is a killer who robs, not a robber who kills.” That’s… sure, I shot them, but it was self-defence.’

Later, in her deposition, Hanson recalled that Lee said that she had been raped many times, ‘and I just got sick of it… If I didn’t kill those guys, I would have been raped a total of 20 times maybe. Or killed. You never know. But I got them first… I figured that at least I was doing some good killing these guys. Because, if I didn’t kill them, they would have hurt someone else.’

Officer Hanson in took every word, but said very little in return. Her instructions were to listen and document as much as she could remember as soon as it was possible to get to her notepad. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you any of this,’ continued Lee, ‘but get this. I had these two guys say they were cops, or at least they flashed their badges at me. They picked me up and wanted sex but didn’t want to pay. Said if I didn’t they’d turn me in. One grabbed my hair and pushed me towards his penis. We really started fighting then so I killed them. Afterwards I looked at their badges and one was a reservist cop or something [Walter Gino Antonio was a Brevard County reserve deputy] and the other worked for like the HRS [Charles Humphreys was a supervisor for the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services, referred to as the HRS.]

‘I had lots of guys, maybe ten to twelve a day,’ boasted Lee. ‘I could have killed all of them, but I didn’t want to. I’m really just a nice person. I’m describing a normal day to you here, but a killing day would be about the same. On a normal day we would just do it by the side of the road if they wanted oral sex, or behind a building or maybe just off the road in the woods if they wanted it all.

‘On a killing day those guys always wanted to go way, way back in the woods. Now I know why they did it: they’re going to hurt me… I figured if these guys lived, and I got fried for attempted murder, I thought, Fuck it, I might as well get fried for murder instead.’

In her deposition, Officer Hanson said, ‘She was laughing a lot when she talked to me. When she would talk about, specifically, how she shot the guy, the one guy with the .45, she just stood there. She was very… sometimes she would laugh, sometimes she was calm in explaining this. Other times she would just get very excited. She was never sad in any way. Never once did she say, “I’m upset about this.” She just said, “If I hadn’t killed him, he’d kill other people.”’

The jailhouse medic also witnessed Lee’s cheerful mood when he stopped by to give her some medication to calm her nerves. ‘I never really saw her down,’ he said. ‘She was always jovial and boasted of having done 250,000 men in the past nine years.’

‘We kind of looked at her a little strange for that,’ said Officer Hanson. ‘The doctor just kind of walked away after that, and she sat down and began reading the papers again.’