Aileen Wuornos, The Monster behind Monster- Part 1

 I'm one who seriously hates human life and would kill again -Aileen Wournos


     Of the more than 2,500 hundred individuals classified as serial killers, only 7.5 percent are female [1]. Aileen Wuornos, who was the subject of the 2004 hit movie, Monster, is widely believed to be the United States’ first serial killer and is arguably one of the most infamous women in this small group. The following takes a look at her life, which began on Leap Day, 1956 and ended at the time of her execution on October 9, 2002 at Florida State Prison.

The Early Years
        Born Aileen Carol Pittman, Aileen was born into a dysfunctional family completely devoid of normal family relationships. Her father, Leo Pittman, was a convicted molester who committed suicide and is usually referred to as a psychopath, while her teenage mother, Diane Wuornos, abandoned Aileen and her brother by the time she was 4. The pair was adopted by their maternal grandparents, which likely started her on the path to serial killer. Sexually and physically abused from a young age by her pedophile grandfather, Aileen, developed a sexual relationship with her brother and began engaging in sex for food and drugs by the time she was nine. When she became pregnant at 14 with a baby, who according to some reports was fathered by her brother, she opted to put the baby up for adoption. At 15, her alcoholic grandmother died and her grandfather threw her out.




Living as a Teen on the Streets of Rochester, Michigan
 Although she was made a ward of the state, Aileen quickly ran away and began living in the woods near the home she has been forced out of. For money and to support a growing drug habit, she turned to prostitution before she started hitchhiking across the United States. Before she was 20 years old, she had been arrested numerous times for everything from firing a weapon from a vehicle to DUI, assault, and disturbing the peace, which stemmed from an attack on a bartender.

Marrying a Wealthy Yacht Club President
 By 1976, Aileen had managed to hitchhike all the way from Michigan to Florida, where she met 69-year old Lewis Fell, who almost immediately fell in love with and married her during the same year. While she could have used this as an opportunity to completely change the direction of her life, she, instead, brought chaos to his high society lifestyle. After just a few months, Lewis had the marriage annulled. Before the year was out, she had lost her brother to throat cancer, inherited a $10,000 insurance policy, which she blew through, and continued down her self-destructive path.

Building Up to the Murders

 From 1977 to 1986, Aileen wandered aimlessly around the state of Florida, primarily living off money she made as a prostitute or stole. During this time, she was arrested for several offenses, including forgery, theft, assault, and armed robbery, which resulted in her incarceration for slightly more than a year.

         In 1986, Aileen met Tyria Moore who she soon started a lesbian relationship with and was supporting with the money she earned prostituting. Their relationship, which is most often described as intense and volatile, lasted just over four years, though it didn’t end until Aileen had started her murder spree.



The Murders
         In December 1989, the naked body of 51 year-old Richard Mallory, a convicted rapist, was found along I-95 in Volusia County, FL. He had been shot three times with .22 caliber pistol. Police made very little progress trying to identify his killer before a second body was found in Citrus County, FL in June 1990. 43-year old David Spears had been shot with a .22 pistol six times. Before they could positively identify Spears, the naked body of a badly decomposed male was found in Pasco County, FL. Eventually identified as 40-year old Charles Carskaddon, he had been shot nine times with .22 caliber pistol. By this time, police saw a pattern, but they didn’t know who was behind the killings.

The Infanticide of Amelia Dyer

The Infanticide of Amelia Dyer

 

"You’ll know all mine by the tape around their necks.". - Amelia Dyer

Amelia Dyer is a women who manages to embody quite a few truths all at once, given the gravity of her crimes and the manner in which history has ultimately treated those crimes. 'Amelia Dyer' is not a name that rolls off the tongues of many people today, even though these same people would be able to name serial killers like Ted Bundy and Aileen Wuornos.

There is a common perception today that the media has a tendency to sensationalize the trials of serial killers and other monsters more than the media of the past ever did. However, history shows us that if anything, people in the past turned murder into even more of a spectacle than the people of today. They had dramatic public executions for their murderers. The trial of Amelia Dyer was one of the most sensationalized trials in all of history, rivaling the trials of modern murderers like O.J. Simpson. However, she was hanged in a manner that was as dispassionate as the manner in which she murdered at least three hundred babies.

Amelia Dyer managed to be emblematic of a greater social evil in Victorian society: infanticide. Dead infants filled the streets in Victorian Britain to the point where the police did not even investigate what happened to them. Women who had illegitimate children during this time period were not allowed to work in any field other than the illegal and stigmatized field of prostitution, and the fathers were not legally obligated to care for the children.

 

People may remember the character of Fantine from Les Miserables as an emblematic example of a fictional woman caught up in this situation. Fantine took the route of prostitution and poverty. Other women put their babies in the baby farms in order to get rid of them and avoid the life of horror they would have to endure instead. Lots of the women who did this did not want to think about what went on in these baby farms. They hoped that their babies would be adopted in these baby farms, but these institutions certainly could not be regulated under the circumstances.

A baby farm murderer like Amelia Dyer was essentially taking advantage of these poor women who were in a desperate situation and exploiting a greater social evil for her own sadistic desires. Amelia Dyer managed to carry on as a serial killer of infants for an astonishing thirty years, taking advantage of a society that dehumanized illegitimate children. She may have taken in six babies a day according to some reports, killing ten infants a year. She killed the children who could not be adopted. Since baby farms were not legal and the situation was a dire one, even many of the people who might have wanted to stop her felt powerless to do so.

Amelia Dyer was executed in 1896, and the photographic evidence of her shows a woman who seems completely ordinary. It is hard to imagine this simple elderly midwife committing hundreds or even thousands of murders. Her story demonstrates the fact that evil people hide in the shadows that society creates for them.

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Charles Manson, The Family Man

Born to a sixteen year old alcoholic prostitute, Manson was born Charles Miles Maddox on November 12, 1934, in Cincinnati. His mother, would marry a man, but the marriage would not last. Charles was placed in a boy's school, and would run back to his mother. She did not want to have anything to do with him. He lived on the streets and quickly started stealing. When he first started getting locked up, he was considered dangerous. After a while, he would discover that being a model prisoner had its benefits.

In 1955, he would marry a seventeen year old and the couple moved to California. Even though she was pregnant, he started committing crimes again, mainly stealing cars. His wife would leave him in 1956, with their child and her new lover.

It is said, by different probation officers that he had, that he was suffering from rejection, psychic trauma, and instability, making him try to get some status and trying to get people to love him. He was viewed as unpredictable and safe but only with supervision.

He spent time in prison, from 1958 until early 1967, for writing bad checks and pimping for ten years. While inside, he would rape an inmate while he held a razor on the inmate. He would tap into his creative talents and learned how to play the guitar.

After being released in 1967, he started a campaign that would put him down as one of the most infamous serial killers of all time. He thought he would bring about the end of the world. He was influenced by different works of art, drugs, and religions (such as the Church of Final Judgment, Scientology, Book of Revelations, LSD, and Helter Skelter by the Beatles). All these things made him have strong feelings that the world was going to end, and he was going to be the one that was going to bring it about. 

Manson started to put together a group who shared his feelings about living unconventionally and use of drugs. They became known as 'The Family”. “The Family” grew to have over a hundred followers, mostly made up of impressionable young girls from broken but middle class families, who started to believe that Manson was Christ and that his talk of a race war soon happening would come true. Manson started out preaching to these kids about peace, love, and acceptance, typical hippie beliefs of the time. He would quickly change to talk of revolution and violence.

It was easy for him to convince them of an impending race war. He would lecture them during meal times while they were on an isolated ranch, called the Spahn Ranch, that used to be used for western movies. His voice and opinion was the only things that these girls would hear. He also set up an arrangement with the owner of the ranch that his female followers would sleep with the owner as well as working on the property in lieu of paying rent.

Manson wanted to become a pop star and devoted some time to it. Some people told him that he was not a very good musician. Manson, on the other hand, believed that he was a musical genius and they just did not see it. He hooked up with Dennis Wilson (drummer and co-founder of the Beach Boys), that put him on the outside of the music scene in Los Angeles. Wilson paid for Manson's studio time so that Manson could record his music. He also allowed Manson and part of “The Family” to stay in his house for some time.

Since 1949, Manson has spent all but four years locked up; including half of his first 32 years. Him and his gang have killed an estimated 35 people, but were never tried for most of them for different reasons. Either a lack of physical evidence or the fact that most of those people involved in the killings were already convicted of murder in the LaBianca and Tate cases.

Most of the people involved in the Tate and LaBianca murders were sentenced to death, but because California abolished the death penalty the next year, all death penalties were commuted to life with parole. Manson has had twelve parole hearings, as of 2012, and has been denied each and every time. He has been eligible for parole since the late 1970s.

Leslie Van Houten and The Manson Family

Leslie Van Houten

Leslie Van Houten was born in a Los Angeles suburb, Altadena, growing up in a middle class family on August 23, 1949. She had an older brother and an adopted brother and sister that were Korean. Her parents divorced at fourteen, and had a bout of drug use (Benzedrine, LSD, and hasish) the next year. The fact that she was from a broken home and came from a middle class family, made her a perfect fit as a woman being a part of the Manson family.

Van Houten was part of a commune for a few months in 1968, at the age of nineteen, with two women and a man that broke up in the summer. She followed one of the women, Catherine Share, to Charles Manson's commune. Manson's ideas at this time were like the cultural utopianism that was circulating through the hippies at the time. They did not work, but rather freeloaded and ate out of garbage bins (which is a form of environmentalism).

While living with Manson, everything was controlled by Manson. Having sex, eating, drug use, and sleeping. They did not have the ability to wash themselves or their clothes. His was the only opinion they would hear while they stayed at a very isolated ranch (the Spahn Ranch) that was formerly used as a movie set for western movies. Whenever meals were eaten, he would lecture them constantly about his different ideas of acceptance and free love (traditional hippie ideas at the time).

By 1969, Manson's former message of peace and love would change to violence and revolution. And all they would do is listen to the White Album by the Beatles and read the Book of Revolutions. His bizarre plan to start a race war included killing Sharon Tate and all the people that were living in the house with her. Van Houten was not involved in these killings directly.

Leslie Van Houten took part in killing Rosemary and Leno LaBianca; she asked to take part in this killing after feeling left out of the killing of Sharon Tate. Sixteen of the 42 stab wounds that Rosemary had inflicted upon her were done by Leslie. Most of the stab wounds that Rosemary suffered were after she had died.

Van Houten is the woman responsible for telling the police the bulk of the information that they were able to gather on all of the killings. She told them things like who was present and took part in the Tate and LaBianca killings, as well as who showed up to the crime scene but did not take an active part in killing anyone. Through this testimony, the police were able to figure that Linda Kasabian was a crucial witness, due to the fact that she waited outside at the Tate murders and went to the LaBianca house with Steve Grogan, Susan Atkins, Manson, and Watson. She did not kill anyone, but would serve as a key witness for the prosecution.

At trial, Van Houten would fire three different lawyers on the grounds that she refused to say that her involvement with the LaBianca murders was due to Manson's hold over her. During trial, she did not seem to take the trial very seriously and would be heard giggling while people would be giving testimony. She said that she was given LSD before trial. No verdict was found. 

Van Houten was granted two re-trials. The first of which was granted because of a failure to call a mistrial after Van Houten's lawyer had passed away. Her new defense council would argue that her ability to think rationally was diminished due to her use of LSD and the influence that Manson had over her.

At her second re-trail, the prosecution added robbery to the charges to try to undermine her diminished mental capacity defense with the help of the felony murder rule. She was on bond before being found guilty and sentenced to life with the possibility of parole.

In 1971, Van Houten was found guilty and given the death penalty, but the next year, California would ban the death penalty and commute all people given death penalties to life in prison. At the age of 19, she was the youngest member of the Family to be convicted and also the youngest in the state of California to be given the death penalty. She's been in prison for over forty years and had twenty parole hearings; she is still in prison. At one of these hearings, Barbara Hoyt said that Van Houten was considered a leader in the Manson family. Since being in prison, she has gotten two degrees and helps elderly inmates.