Aileen Wuornos: The Damsel of Death - Paperback

by Raphael Eschmann (Illustrator), Gisela K (Author)

Aileen Wuornos, known as "America's First Female Serial Killer", "The Damsel of Death", "The Florida Highway Killer", and "The Highway Hooker" has had movies, documentaries, books, songs, and even an opera made about her life. She was a victim and a villain all in one, the monster that everyone has had a soft spot for or sympathized with at some point, and the woman who would go down in history as the most callous female serial killer to have ever lived.

What set her apart from other female killers was the way in which she operated. She picked on strangers and murdered them with a .22-caliber pistol at point-blank range before robbing them and taking home wads of cash and shiny things to impress her lover, Tyria Moore with. Her frequent homelessness, hunger for unconditional love, and the defiant way that she faced every single day on the street with her thumb in the air is mesmerizingly sad; she had few alternatives to survive and genuinely seemed to try her best to find love and happiness, every grim step of the way in her short life. Nonetheless, she was a serial killer with a criminal history who would do anything for love and anything to get her way, right until the end.

While almost every person that she had ever encountered exploited her in one way or another, she too, manipulated and used people to meet her own needs, and discarded them when they no longer served her purposes. Still, Bundy, Dahmer, Kemper, Ridgway, Rader, and many other serial killers that she was supposedly as evil as got a life sentence, something that was never an option for her.

There are dark elements to her story, which include politics, corruption, betrayal, and the total exploitation of a new brand of serial killer. Her case was complex and her outcome, irrespective of everything that she did, felt wrong.

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