Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers

0:00Rebecca Lavoie:I'm Rebecca Lavoie, and this is You Can't Make This Up.

0:15Rebecca Lavoie:You Can't Make This Up is the podcast where we uncover the true stories behind your favorite Netflix documentaries and films. On today's episode, we take a closer look at the Netflix documentary film Eileen, Queen of the Serial Killers. She said, so I'm going to tell you the truth of my life and the crimes because I want to make it right with God. Today we're talking to director Emily Turner. Police called her a cold-blooded killer who lured seven men into the woods to murder them. She claimed she shot them all in self-defense. Long before a Florida jury sentenced Aileen Wuornos to her death, her case was a national sensation.

0:56Rebecca Lavoie:Pursued by prosecutors, journalists, and movie producers, Wuornos was viewed as a peculiar criminal oddity, a female serial killer. But was the story in the papers and on the screen more complex than we knew? The Netflix documentary film, Aileen, Queen of Serial Killers, recounts Wuornos' violent childhood, lethal killing spree, and problematic trial. It provides additional context to her story and invites viewers to reconsider her complicated legacy. Featuring never-before-seen footage from Death Row, Wuornos discusses the trauma she endured, the case against her, and the victims of her crimes.

1:30Rebecca Lavoie:I lost it. And I said, you ain't gonna take me to prison. I've spent the rest of my life in prison with these creeps. I'm gonna take a bunch of creeps with me before I go.

1:49Rebecca Lavoie:And I'm joined now by director Emily Turner. Emily, welcome to You Can't Make This Up. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Aileen Wuornos is among the most famous of the contemporary serial killers. Why did you want to cover her story? So this film all came about with access to a piece of archival footage that hadn't been seen before. I think a minute of it had been seen somewhere, but the entirety of the interview had never been seen. And so it was really that that kind of all kicked this off. And that was an interview that an artist and filmmaker Jasmine Hurst secured with Eileen on death row.

2:29So they had been writing, they'd been pen pals for five years when Eileen invited Jasmine to fly from Australia to Florida. And she told Jasmine she was going to tell her the truth about her crimes. And up until that point, Eileen's kind of consistent line had been that she'd killed all seven of the men in self-defense. And so this really represented the only time that Eileen had kind of deviated from that story. And when I watched the interview, it kind of was really remarkable. I wasn't quite sure what to make of it other than there was just so many contradictory people in the room in terms of who Eileen was.

3:08She would go from being quite charismatic to quite deceptive, from emotional to pretty callous. And it just struck me that we had a piece of footage that really gave us access and some insight that I don't think had been there before. So that was the kind of beginning.

3:26Rebecca Lavoie:Where did that footage, like where has it been this whole time? I'm just curious. I was watching it and I couldn't believe that this had never been seen. So Jasmine and Eileen were friends for 10 years and Jasmine has held onto this interview not knowing what to do with it and really wanting to do justice to Eileen's story as we go into in the film. A lot of Eileen's life and history, Jasmine really related to and responded to. And so I think she felt the burden of responsibility to do justice to it. And I think her experience with producers had been not great, to say the least. And so it was really when my colleagues, Polly, Greta and Kirsty Cunningham at BBC Studios, reached out to Jasmine and they built that relationship over years.

4:11So, yeah, it was a very special thing to have to make a film with.

4:16Rebecca Lavoie:This is a very human portrait of Eileen Wuornos, I think. And, you know, some audience members, you know, maybe thinking about the brutality of the crimes at the same time looking at this humanity. How did you think about that? I think as filmmakers, we often have to think about these very difficult ethical questions. And it was something that honestly kept me awake at night making this film. It was like, I don't want to be making an apology piece for this woman. Like she what she did was awful. She's, you know, left this kind of path of destruction and trauma for so many people. And we did not want the film to be an apology piece for her.

4:56But I just think in kind of researching the case, so often people fall into these binary views of her. She's either this hapless victim who all these awful things happen to and like poor her, or she's this cold-blooded killer. And I think, I don't think either of those things are true. I think so often, particularly today, we want kind of certainty and answers and life's just not like that. And so it felt, I hope no one feels in the film that we don't look in the face what she did. I think we do present the more challenging parts of her. But I think it's just so easy to write Eileen off as being bad.

5:35But actually, I think when you look at the truth of this, there's much more important questions that emerge. She can't just be discounted. She was made.

5:43Rebecca Lavoie:Yep. You open the documentary with some quotes from former detective Steve Bineger. I honestly don't know how anybody could be attracted to that. I mean, she was not. She was vile and she was not attractive.

6:00Kind of baffles me how she got any customers at all.

6:03Rebecca Lavoie:No one expects him to have affection for Eileen Wuornos. But what we heard hit really differently. What do you think about what he said? Yeah, it was really interesting doing these interviews because I, as a viewer, feel so often that voices in films, you know, we cut to talking heads, we cut to experts. And for me, a lot of those lines feel very rehearsed. And as a filmmaker, you want people to tell you things to help an audience. And I really didn't want the interviews to feel like that. and so I went to the audio only interviews with a lot of archival footage that we'd cut down and just showed it to them long and just asked them to respond in the moment and so that was just something that he I think we were watching a piece of her footage of the charge and he just started talking about her um and responding to the material and that kind of came from him and felt important because that is so you know he talks about her appearance in the beginning and talks about he has lots of views about her and how she made her living doing sex work and that that really is on brand for how how she was discussed it's really interesting when you look at the 2003 movie that charlie's thrown does that incredible performance in and you know a worthy oscar winner but so much of the coverage of the time of that performance is what she looked like well isn't it amazing she put on weight isn't it amazing she looked so ugly and we so often do that with women.

7:26And so it felt really important to share those sentiments.

7:30Rebecca Lavoie:Don't you think, though, that if she looked completely differently, say she were very glamorous, there would also be a lot of criticism in that direction? I mean, I've seen that over and over again. Like, look at this beautiful woman who is also a killer. You know what I mean? Yeah, for sure. For sure. There's definitely like a certain flavor that female perpetrators, in terms of how they're covered in the press. Could you talk a little bit about Eileen's childhood? Yeah. So Eileen was born to, I think her mother was a teenager, 15, 16, when she had her as a result of a very difficult and abusive relationship.

8:08And very young, accounts differ, but as an infant, she was abandoned by her mother and adopted by her grandparents. And we spent a lot of time doing that. That's one of the most incredible things about this production is that we really had a lot of time with this story and Netflix were incredibly generous for making sure we got it right. So we spent a lot of time seeking out people in her life, you know, friends, people who grew up with her, her neighbours. Yeah, by all accounts, it was like a very abusive and unhappy home that she was brought up in, like a lot of punishment, you know, like physical abuse.

8:41The question of sexual abuse is unclear. But what's so interesting about Eileen and the interview is how unreliable she is about her childhood. She almost wants to cast herself as this kind of heroine in her own mythology. So she says, you know, my childhood wasn't even that bad. And so we kind of wanted to present that and her saying that and then kind of have her childhood friend, you know, contradict that a bit.

9:05Rebecca Lavoie:This poor kid had a child, you know, was raped and had a child. Her grandmother died and she was abandoned, living out, you know, in the woods and her older brother's sister got to stay in houses. That's where she got to be a prostitute. She needed food and things, cigarettes for her brother and sister. Why didn't they take care of her? That's another really interesting thing about Eileen, where you talk about how she was presented. But in terms of how she presents herself, like she doesn't want to be seen as a victim. For her, that's a weakness. And you can't help but wonder, had she been more honest, if she'd have had a different experience.

9:38Rebecca Lavoie:Yeah. Remind us how police put together the investigation, which led to Eileen's arrest. So it's not something we like pay huge attention to in the film. That procedural true crime story has been really well told and it's been told many times and I've watched all of them. So we really wanted to, as you say, bring something new to it. But it was a really difficult case to pull together from a police point of view. You know, of course, there wasn't the technology that we have now in terms of like quick access to DNA and things like that. And she was a pretty sloppy operator. She left huge amounts of evidence and fingerprints, but it took a long time to piece those together.

10:22Cars were found miles away from bodies because she would drive them. But the thing that really, the sort of turning point in the investigation was a car crash that happened with one of the victims and two women were seen abandoning the vehicle. And then they had leads to go and photo fits were made. And that was put together with Eileen's fingerprint that had been picked. You went to pawn property in Florida at that time. You had to leave a thumbprint. And so some of Richard Mallory, her first victim's property, was turned up and her thumbprint matched. And she had actually already been on file for an armed robbery a few years earlier.

11:01And so that's how they found her.

11:04Rebecca Lavoie:One of the people who first realized the potential for a big story was TV producer Jacqueline Giroux. She was on the case before there was even an arrest. So how did she eventually connect with Eileen? Jacqueline Giroux traveled to Florida. Her mother lived locally and had been calling her and keeping her abreast of the story. And she went to the last resort bar, including other bars in the area, because she knew the area pretty well, despite the fact she was in L.A. But because that's her, our mother lived there. And she wrote her name and phone number on post-it notes. and put them up in the bar.

11:42And it was one of the first calls Eileen made when she was arrested was to this movie producer to sell her story.

11:49Rebecca Lavoie:And she said, well, first of all, do you do movies or books? I thought, okay, she's auditioning me, right? I said, mostly movies. She goes, great. My story is unbelievable. And if you look at where we are with true crime now in terms of, you know, just a huge fascination with it. That's not new. Like you can track that back to Jack the Ripper in London like hundreds of years ago. But it's a particularly interesting time in the early 90s. You know, the networks in America have these movies of the week slots that they need to fill. They're doing huge numbers like network TV would love to be doing those numbers now.

12:27Yeah. And so there was a real kind of hunger for stories like this. And it felt like that was a really interesting element of this story to explore as well.

12:37Rebecca Lavoie:Right. Sometimes folks make deals around their so-called life rights, which is the version of their story that they are going to participate in and help tell. Did you talk to Jackie about the criticism she received about getting those life rights before the formal charging for the crimes? Yeah, we did. This story is so huge and we could have gone in so many different directions. So we did ask her about that, but we were just always in the edit trying to stay on, you know, the story that we were telling, which is the story that had emerged from the Jasmine interview and her treatment. And so it felt like there were so many dog legs that we could have gone off on that it didn't feel the place to do it.

13:16But it's certainly a very interesting consideration, isn't it? How the media were kind of there before one should be.

13:24Rebecca Lavoie:Yeah. And the CBS TV movie came out before the trial, right? Yeah, as a result of the cops having done the deal. I think before she had even been arrested, they had also signed a deal. That's all a bit unclear. It's so unusual. It's so unusual. Investigators usually aren't able to talk about cases until they've been adjudicated. So to understand that they did that, I think people should really understand how odd and unusual that is. One of the more bizarre details, at least to me, or details I was curious about, is Eileen's adoption after her arrest by this woman, Arlene. Can you talk about that?

14:00Rebecca Lavoie:Can you parse that out and make sense of that? Yeah, I mean, this story, like, it's a good name for the podcast. It's like you literally couldn't make up the things and the characters that come into this story. So the kind of facts of that are that Arlene probably was looking. She says she never would read the newspaper, but her father had been sick in hospital. And so for the first time ever, she opens the newspaper, sees Eileen's photo and just feels like she knows her. And so goes down, writes to her, posts it. And then apparently, according to Arlene, the night before, Eileen had been thinking about whether or not she wanted to go on and she prayed to God and said, God, please send me a Christian woman to help me.

14:39And then Arlene's letter arrives.

14:41Rebecca Lavoie:Wow. I saw her picture in the newspaper and I get butterflies. Then when I was out on the lawnmower, like 10 days later, Jesus asked me to reach out to her. I want you to write her a letter and tell her about me. You know, Arlene has featured in a very notable documentary before by a kind of titan of documentary filmmaking, Nick Broomfield. And the focus was very much on the movie deals and her kind of financial motives for getting involved. and what I found in the research and you know it was very interesting coming to a story 30 years down the line I think people are very interesting when they make sense of things at the point in their lives that they are often in their 60s, 70s but she felt really misunderstood I think in the media to that point and for her it was purely a religious motive and that was such an interesting part of this story to me because on the one side you've got Arlene Prowley who feels motivated by God to reach out and work with Arlene and then you've got John Tanner who feels like he's doing God's work by prosecuting her.

15:46And so those two elements of the story were really interesting to me.

15:50Rebecca Lavoie:Yeah. One of the more intriguing figures in this story is Eileen's girlfriend, Tyra Moore. There are many theories on what her actual role in the crimes may have been, but what is your overall impression of Tyra? Yeah, it's one of the big kind of enigmas at the heart of the story. Captain Biniger, when we interviewed him, had a really interesting way of understanding it. And he said his sense of Tyra was that she was kind of like a mob wife. Like she knew what was going on, but there were things that she was just willfully not looking at and ignoring, like Eileen coming home with money or with a new car.

16:31And I think they had such a hand-to-mouth, meager existence that Tyra was kind of enjoying those elements without really wanting to know what was happening. Why did you get her to confess? I was just living with her for four and a half years. I know her better than I think anyone else does. And I think she's very intelligent. She knows how to work around things. She could lie her way out of anything. And that's mainly why I wanted her to confess to the murders is because I knew she could lie her way out of it. My sense isn't, from the time that I spent with this story, that she was involved or there.

17:09But, you know, like with the murders, like there were really only two people that know and Tyra has spoken very little. She did a documentary in 2003. She did the Dateline interview that we have in the film. But it's hard to know. But I think there was a real relationship there and love. And at the heart of it, it's an interesting thing that she was characterized by lots of the prosecutors and the police as being this immoral person who was cold-blooded, but they understood that the way to get her was through this relationship that she had with Tyra. So it feels like a kind of slightly double standard in an understanding of her.

17:47Rebecca Lavoie:It's rare that we hear directly from a judge involved in a high-profile case in a documentary, but we do hear from the original judge, Gail Graziano. Given the rulings that came later, do you think the trial would have been different if she had been allowed to keep the case? Yes. This was a direct attack on me that I was not the person they wanted to try this case. They knew that I would give this woman a fair trial. And they had no intentions of that ever happening. I think she was asking questions at the time that people didn't want her to be asking, like how the confession was gained and whether or not Eileen was in the right state of mind.

18:31Do I think Eileen deserved to spend the rest of her life in prison or even on death row? Yes. I don't think any of us who spent this time with the film feel like there's a series of events that Eileen should have been ever free, you know, like I don't think Gail, but I think we should all hope that our criminal justice system does serve people justice and she did not get a fair shake. I think.

18:55Rebecca Lavoie:Well, the prosecution said they had a problem with Graziano's impartiality. What was that code for? Gail was bringing her life experience as the only feature. She was the chief judge in Volusia County Court, a very rural part of Florida. And she's talked to me about other judges asking her to replace the toilet roll in the women's loos. like it was a it was a difficult thing to be a woman in her position and I think often her gender was weaponized against her yeah I mean you never hear of a straight white male judge being asked to be recused because there's a straight white male defendant I mean that's just not a thing so it's just it was an interesting turn sometimes when we watch the documentaries you know about a real person who was convicted especially when we know that all the evidence wasn't necessarily present to help them out in their case.