In 2003, Aileen Wuornos’ story of her life as a prostitute was told through director, Patty Jenkin’s movie, Monster. The film was set nine months between the years 1989 to 1990 when she was prostituting and killing her clienteles. The movie’s main focus was on Wuornos’ lover, a girl name Shelby, whom she had met in a Daytona Beach bar. Charlize Theron, who played Wuornos, eventually won awards for her role in this movie. What viewers saw on screen was merely a nine months period of Wuornos’ life. True, Theron did a spectacular job portraying an aging prostitute, or at least, what an aging prostitute is thought to have been like, but ‘Monster’ did not show the audience who Wuornos was before she began killing along with many other facts, including people who have influenced Wuornos’ life before and after her arrest.Critics who studied the life of Wuornos’ may say that her difficult childhood might have been the reason to her promiscuity, which eventually led to Wuornos’ reasoning behind the murdering of several men. Wuornos was raised by her grandparents after her mother had abandoned her and her brother. Wuornos’ mother had her when she was 15. Wuornos’ father was a convicted psychotic child molester who left before Wuornos was born. When Wuornos was raised by her grandparents, she was abused as she was beaten with a belt several times. Her grandmother was an alcoholic and neglected Wuornos was a child.
Wuornos was a troubled child from early on, however, her behavior got worse when she was 12 and found out that she was actually abandoned by her parents. Wuornos claimed that she was sexually active at an early age, and even admitted to have a sexual relationship with her brother, Keith. She was pregnant by 14 and gave her son up for adoption after his birth. Wuornos eventually dropped out of school during the same year as the birth of her son and ran away. She began prostituting and moved to Florida when her grandfather committed suicide after her brother died of cancer.
Wuornos met Lewis Fell when she was 20 and the two got married for a brief period. Fell was a wealthy Yacht Club president who gave Wuornos the high-class lifestyle. However when Wuornos kept up with her old promiscuity ways of doing drugs and selling her body for money, Fell divorced her, leaving her suicidal. She didn’t succeed in killing herself when she shot herself in the stomach. Wuornos found herself in and out of abusive relationships as she continued prostituting.
In 1986, Wuornos met a girl name Tyria Moore, who was Shelby, played by Christina Ricci in the film. It is unknown why producers changed Moore’s name, but critics say that Moore resembled nothing from Ricci’s depiction of Shelby in the movie. The movie began its storyline here, when Wuornos met Moore at a Daytona Beach bar. ‘Monster’ showed Shelby’s dedication to Wuornos when Shelby, a young lesbian, left home to hitchhike and live off of Wuornos’ wage as a prostitute. Moore, the real life Shelby, was known to have loved Wuornos, just as the movie had shown. However, the real Wuornos never admitted to being a lesbian in real life, contrasting the film’s depiction of Wuornos and Shelby’s lesbian lifestyle.
During Wuornos and Moore’s relationship, Wuornos found herself committing her first murder when she was working on the streets. She had been picked up by a man who began to sexual assault her. Wuornos said that she killed because of self defense and murdered all the other men because of the same reason. The film did a great job of making the audience sympathize with Wuornos as she is seen being raped on screen by her clients. Jenkins took Wuornos’ side of the story over the jury that eventually convicted her of being a serial killer.
Wuornos was arrested in 1991 at a bar in Port Orange, Florida. There were no weapons that
directly linked Wuornos to the killings of the men found by police. However, there was DNA evidence of bodily fluid found on or near the men on condoms. Eventually, Moore was able to make Wuornos confess to all six murders she was accused of. During Wuornos’ time in prison, she had met a girl named Arlene Pralle, who wrote to Wuornos after seeing her picture in the paper. Wuornos and Pralle began writing letters to each other, as well as visits to Wuornos from Pralle. By this time, Wuornos and Moore had already separated and Wuornos grew closer to Pralle day by day. Pralle began doing all she could to defend Wuornos and her innocence. She was the second woman Wuornos ever loved and it was said that Wuornos was adopted by Pralle and her husband while she was in jail.Wuornos was executed on October 9, 2002. Many believed she died for wrongful reasons. She insisted that she acted out of self defense while the jurors saw otherwise. It was not until a year in prison that Wuornos was diagnosed with being mentally incompetent. Before her indictment, Wuornos never showed evidence that she was serial killer, as many had thought she was. Some experts define a serial killer was someone who killed for the pleasure of killing, however, since Wuornos insisted she killed out of self-defense in a short period of time, she was seen more as a “spree killer.” She was never diagnosed with a mental illness as many serial killers were diagnosed with and until a couple weeks before her execution, Wuornos was mentally aware of her surroundings.
But Wuornos did lose her mind towards the end of her life and even begged to be put to death. Some say that Wuornos never got a fair trial because of who she was and how she made her money. Just watching the movie, I could have never guessed the important details that the movie had left out to what lead and became of Wuornos before and after her life as a prostitute.
An Interview with Wuornos by Nick Bloomfield one day before Wuornos' execution - courtesy of YouTube
Jenkin’s depiction of Wuornos’ murders was fairly accurate. There isn’t much of a debate on how and where the men were murdered since she had actually based the scenes on Wuornos confessions. The film ended when Wuornos was arrested at the Last Resort Bar in Port Orange. Theron’s award comes from her resemblance to Wuornos throughout the movie, but the Last Report Bar owner told the Daily Star newspaper that Theron was “on target” portraying Wuornos in the last scene when she was arrested. This movie leaves audiences with the truth of what happened to Aileen Wuornos, unfortunately, the film only shows a couple months of her life when the real Aileen Wuornos’ whole life needed to be shown to truly understand that she wasn’t just a prostitute, but a person with a troubled past.
Photographs courtesy of movies.com and home.comcast.net/~corkymcg/crime/aileen.html
