Monster: Inside the Mind of Aileen Wuornos

THE FOOD AIN’T ALL BAD. WE’RE SERVED THREE MEALS A DAY. AT 5AM, 10.30 TO 11AM, AND 4 TO 4.30PM. THEY COOK IT IN HERE. WE GET PLATES AND SPOONS. NOTHING ELSE. I CAN TAKE A SHOWER EVERY OTHER DAY, AND WE’RE COUNTED AT LEAST ONCE AN HOUR. EVERYWHERE WE GO, WE WEAR CUFFS EXCEPT IN THE SHOWER AND EXERCISE YARD WHERE I CAN TALK TO MY CELL MATES. LATELY, I LIKE TO BE BY MYSELF. APART FROM THAT, I AM ALWAYS LOCKED UP IN MY ROOM. I CAN’T EVEN BE WITH ANOTHER INMATE IN THE COMMON ROOM.

‘People think this is all painless and stuff like that. It ain’t! Basically, they suffer a lot. They are sort of paralysed but they can hear. They drown in their own fluid and suffocate to death really. Yeah, we get problems. Sometimes the guy doesn’t want to get on to the table. But we have the largest guard in Texas here. He gets them on that table, no problem. They are strapped down in seconds. No problem. They go on that mean old table and get the goodnight juice whether they like it or not.’

ASSISTANT WARDEN IN CHARGE OF EXECUTIONS NEIL HODGES TO THE AUTHOR, HUNTSVILLE PRISON, TEXAS, 1995

Aileen Carol Wuornos shared Death Row with several faces familiar to readers of true crime. The first of which springs to my mind is Judias ‘Judy’ Buenoano. Aged 45, and popularly known as the Black Widow, she had been on Death Row since 1985. Convicted of poisoning her husband, drowning her quadriplegic son by pushing him off a canoe and planting a bomb in her boyfriend’s car, she had the distinction of being the first woman to die in Florida’s electric chair on 30 March 1998.

Deirdre Hunt was sent to Death Row in 1990, and her sentence has since been commuted to life.

Andrea Hicks Jackson, sentenced to death for shooting a police officer in 1983, has also had her sentence reversed.

Virginia Gail Larzelere, aged 49, has recently been given the death penalty for murdering her husband at Edgewater, near Daytona Beach, on 8 March 1991.

Ana M. Cardona, aged 40, was sentenced to death for aggravated child abuse and the first-degree murder of her three-year-old son in Miami on 2 November 1992.

At the time of her execution, Aileen Wuornos was 46 years old but looked a decade older. The condemned woman, wearing an orange T-shirt and blue trousers, was five feet four inches in height and weighed 133 lbs. The characteristic strawberry-blonde hair described by witnesses framed her face, but her eyes were constantly bloodshot. Always looking washed-out, her once-attractive looks had been replaced with a face that life had not treated kindly. She still had the scar between the eyes and burn scars on her forehead. Her body was marked with a long cut along her lower left arm and a crude appendectomy scar across the middle of her abdomen.

The cell in which Lee was confined measured eight feet by ten. It was painted a dull-looking pink, and the ceiling was quite high, maybe 15 feet, which made the room seem larger and more airy than it really was. She had a black-and-white television placed above the stainless-steel toilet on a varnished brown shelf. The furniture consisted of a grey metal footlocker that doubled as a desk, but no table and only a single chair. There was also a dirty, lime-green cupboard at the foot of a metal bed which contained her clothes and personal possessions. Everything had to be locked away at bed-inspection time which could be any time between 9 and 11am. The only view she had of the outside world was a parking lot and a high fence festooned with glittering razor wire. There were no bars in her cell, but a metal door with a small hatch separated her from the rest of the cellblock. It cost the state of Florida $72.39 a day to keep Lee in her place of incarceration.