The Man Serial Killer Aileen Wuornos Spared: He Says She Let Him Walk Away By Christina Coulter

Aileen “Lee” Wuornos claimed she’d seen roughly 400 men during the months her murders. Seven of those men were killed.

That period, the people who crossed her path and the legal aftermath are re-examined in Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers, a new Netflix documentary that premiered Oct. 30. The film draws on decades-old archival footage, police interviews and newly recorded reflections from those who investigated her crimes and knew her personally.

Before her arrest in January 1991, Wuornos was living along Florida’s highways and supporting herself through sex work, often hitchhiking between Daytona Beach and Ocala.

Between late 1989 and late 1990, seven men were found shot to death across central and northern Florida, per the documentary: electronics store owner Richard Mallory, construction workers David Spears and Charles Carskaddon, sausage delivery driver Troy Burress, retired Air Force major Charles “Dick” Humphreys, trucker Peter Siems, and police reserve officer Walter Gino Antonio.

But one man who gave Wuornos a ride and lived to tell about it says she had every chance to kill him — and didn’t.

“She had the opportunity if she wanted to,” he recalled in the Netflix documentary. “I had about $3,300, $3,400, $3,500 cash on me. I had a gold watch worth about $1,200, I had a ring worth about $450… If Lee would want to kill somebody it would’ve been me. I’m living proof that Lee’s not a cold-blooded killer.”

Judge Gayle Graziano, who is also featured in the film, said Wuornos once claimed she had seen about 400 clients while working Florida’s backroads during that twelve-month period.

“She killed seven men,” Graziano says. “She said during that same time period she had 400 johns. She hadn’t killed any of them. Why these seven? Why didn’t she kill all of them?”

Throughout her trial and in multiple interviews, Wuornos insisted she shot the men in self-defense after being assaulted by them. She described being beaten, choked and threatened at gunpoint — but prosecutors argued the killings were planned robberies.

“This was not so much a crime of passion,” John Tanner, the prosecutor who tried Wuornos’s first case, said of Richard Mallory’s murder in archival footage, “as it was a crime of absolute control and domination over the victim.”

Although prosecutors argued there was no evidence any of the men had attacked her, court and psychiatric records later revealed that Mallory had previously served time for assault with intent to rape and had been institutionalized for sexual violence in the 1950s, per the documentary.

Wuornos was convicted of first-degree murder in 1992 for killing Mallory and sentenced to death.

She later pleaded no contest to the murders of Spears, Burress and Humphreys, and was convicted in the deaths of Carskaddon, Siems and Antonio. According to the documentary, Wuornos told the court she wanted to end the process and “go home to Jesus.”

In the hours before her execution, longtime friend Dawn Botkins said Wuornos finally called herself a serial killer.

“She said she was definitely a serial killer,” Botkins recalled in the film. “She killed to rob, she robbed to kill. Period.”

Wuornos was executed by lethal injection on Oct. 9, 2002, at Florida State Prison. She was 46.

Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers, a new Netflix documentary, began streaming Oct. 30.