The Phone Call That Broke Aileen Wuornos: When Love Turned Into a Confession By Christina Coulter

When investigators couldn’t get Aileen Wuornos to admit to seven murders across Florida, they turned to the one person she loved the most. From a motel room in Ocala, detectives had Wuornos’ longtime girlfriend, Tyria Moore, make a series of recorded phone calls — and in one of them, Wuornos’ love eclipsed her instinct to survive.

In Netflix’s documentary Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers, which released on Oct. 30, previously unreleased footage and interviews reveal the people closest to Wuornos, including the lover who police used to elicit her confession.

Wuornos had been arrested just days earlier on Jan. 9, 1991, outside the Last Resort Bar in Port Orange. Investigators had been tracking her for weeks, connecting her to several missing men and pawnshop items belonging to the victims. Then-34 years old, she’d been living out of cheap motels and along highways across the state.

Moore, who had already fled to Pennsylvania, was brought back to Florida and agreed to cooperate in exchange for immunity. Under police supervision, she called Wuornos from a hotel room — again and again — pleading for help clearing her name.

“I’m not gonna go to jail for something that you did,” Moore said in archival audio played in the documentary. “My family’s a nervous wreck, my mom has been calling me all the time. She doesn’t know what the hell’s going on.”

After a long pause, Wuornos replied, “I love you. If I have to confess everything just to keep you from getting in trouble, I will.”

“Well, do it now,” Moore said. “Get it over with.”

Within hours, Wuornos sat down for the confession that would seal her fate and make her one of America’s most infamous female serial killers.

The documentary explores that moment as both a turning point in the investigation and a look at Wuornos’ history of abuse and abandonment — and the longing for connection that runs through her story.

Born in Michigan in 1956, Wuornos was abandoned as an infant and raised by her grandparents. By her mid-teens, Wuornos had run away from home, and by 16 she was living on the road and selling sex to survive — a four-year stretch she described as “hitchhiking and… hookin’… 24/7” in archival footage.

She later said she was raped “about thirty times” while hitchhiking, and in a clip featured in the film she added, “It doesn’t bother me. It’s been tough, you know? A wussy woman, it would bother her, but I’m tough.”

By 1989, she’d settled in Daytona Beach and met Moore, a hotel maid who became her partner and, as friends in the film describe, “the love of her life.”

They lived and traveled together for more than four years, rarely apart except when Wuornos was working the highways.

“I was a cook; I was cookin’ for Ty, I cleaned the place for Ty. Ty didn’t have to move a muscle,” Wuornos recalled in footage shown in the documentary. “I loved her so bad.”

Between late 1989 and late 1990, seven men were killed across Florida: Richard Mallory, David Spears, Charles Carskaddon, Peter Siems, Troy Burress, Charles “Dick” Humphreys and Walter Antonio. In multiple cases, the victims’ vehicles were found far from where their bodies lay, complicating the investigation.

Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers highlights how investigators noticed a chilling pattern — middle-aged white men, similar ballistic evidence and used condoms and blonde hairs found at the scene of the crimes.

In the film, investigators recall witnesses seeing two women leave Peter Siems’ crashed car and disappear. According to case records compiled by the Charley Project, the vehicle was found near Orange Springs on July 4, 1990, off State Road 315, with the license plate removed and glass scattered inside.

Composite sketches were then widely circulated, prompting a surge of tips that put Wuornos and Moore on investigators’ radar. Those links helped persuade Moore to cooperate — and led to the confession she extracted by phone.

In courtroom footage featured in the Netflix documentary, Wuornos claimed her first victim, Richard Mallory, raped and tortured her before she shot him in self-defense. The film notes Mallory had a 1957 assault-with-intent-to-rape case and years of subsequent treatment — details the Tampa Bay Times reported were not presented to jurors.

After less than two hours of deliberation, the jury found Wuornos guilty of first-degree murder. She was sentenced to death soon after, and later pleaded no contest to the remaining murders, telling the court she wanted to “get it over with” and “die as quickly as possible.”

In the documentary, Moore reflects on her decision to cooperate with police.

“I was scared,” she said. “I was scared of being arrested. I wanted her to talk to me about the offenses so I would be cleared.”

When asked what it was like to love a killer, her answer was soft and resigned: “I thought about it a lot. How can I be in love with someone who has killed? I don’t know if it’s a question that can be answered. She was a great person. She was very caring, and I did fall in love.”

Wuornos later said the last time she saw Moore was in court, and they never spoke again.

Over the next decade, Wuornos grew increasingly religious and maintained correspondence with Australian artist Jasmine Hirst, whose letters and interviews appear throughout the documentary.

“I want to make it right with God,” Wuornos told Hirst in 1997. In another clip she said, “The real Aileen Wuornos is not a serial killer. I was so lost, so messed up in the head, that I turned into one.”

On Oct. 9, 2002, Wuornos was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison.

In footage shown in Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers, her final words were: “I’d just like to say I’m sailing with the Rock, and I’ll be back, like Independence Day, with Jesus — June 6th, like the movie. Big mother ship and all, I’ll be back, I’ll be back.”