Monster: Inside the Mind of Aileen Wuornos

She spent the long, solitary hours reading books on spiritual growth and writing lengthy letters to her now adopted mother Arlene Pralle. Lee’s lifestyle was spartan and monotonous, and the days and the years rolled indistinguishably and uneventfully past her locked cell door. In the knowledge that 11.3 years is the average length of stay on Death Row prior to execution, Lee knew that, when her death came, it would be a painful end to a painful life.

Up until the botched execution of ‘Tiny’ Davis, Florida administered executions primarily by electric chair and only later by lethal injection. For this reason she was sentenced to die in ‘Old Sparky’. This three-legged electric chair, constructed from oak by prison personnel, was installed at the Florida State Prison in Starke in 1999. The previous chair, dating back to 1923, was also made of oak after the Florida Legislature designated electrocution as the official mode of execution.

When that fateful day arrived, her head and body hair was to be shaved to provide better contact with the moistened copper electrodes attached to her body by the execution team. Sanitary towels would be forced into her vagina and rectum, and cotton wool pushed into her nostrils and ears to prevent the leakage of bodily fluids. In Florida, executioners are anonymous private citizens who are paid $150 per death. A four-second jolt of 2,000 volts is applied, followed by 1,000 volts for the next seven seconds and finally 200 volts for two minutes. Electrocution produces visibly destructive effects on the body, as the internal organs are burned. The prisoner usually leaps forward against the restraints when the switch is thrown. The body changes colour, swells and may even catch fire. The dying person may also lose control of the bladder and bowels, and vomit blood. Lee knew all this, but appeared unfazed. ‘Death does not scare me. God will be beside me taking me up with him when I leave this shell, I am sure of it. I have been forgiven and am certainly sound in Jesus’s name.’

But Lee would die by lethal injection.

Millions of us have been into hospital and recall the jab being given prior to an operation. This pre-med injection causes one to relax before another injection brings about unconsciousness around the count of ten. This is how the idea of sending a condemned inmate to perdition by a similar means came about. The drugs were certainly available, and they were cheap to use. And there was an extra bonus: the proposition of putting someone to death, in this clinical sort of way, necessitated clinical surroundings. Gone were the dread gallows, the ominous electric chair with all its wiring and leather helmet and death mask. Gone, too, was the evil-looking gas chamber with its sickly green walls, its rods, tubes and linkages.

There were benefits as well for the state authorities. The whole idea would appeal to the media and public alike, for execution could not possibly be made more merciful. A team of paramedics would attend to the inserting of a needle into the victim’s right or left arm, and a doctor would be, as with all executions, in attendance to pronounce death.

On Sunday, 29 September 2002, Lee was woken in her cell at Broward and told to shower and dress for the drive north to her place of execution. This would be the last day the hot Florida sun would strike her face, and it would be for only a few moments at that. Heavily shackled, she shuffled into daylight and was assisted into a Florida Department of Corrections truck. Ironically her route would take her north, along I-95 towards the Florida Turnpike, west to Wildwood, then up I-75 to Gainesville. Leaving tourist Florida, with its Miami Beach hotels and Disneyworld and orange trees, far behind, she now entered a poor, rural landscape.

Nick Broomfield describes the journey. ‘Stretch after stretch of flat, unrewarding scraggly pine trees and truck farms passed her by. Tiny post offices, well-attended Baptist churches – a good deal of praying and singing, often stomping and hollering, in the name of the Lord goes on in this part of Texas. They turned north-east along US 24, 30 miles then the road opened out on to a broad plain. To the right is the Union Correctional Institution, and then the Florida State Prison itself, just a rifle shot away across the New River in Bradford County. Interspersed between the prison cattle standing motionless along the roadside were inmate work gangs out with their uniformed guards, who cradled shotguns and wore sunglasses that coruscated in the afternoon light. It was a banal vision of purgatory, the sullen, shuffling convicts toiling under a heavy sun that glinted hard at them from their keepers’ shielded eyes.’