In 10 days this woman will be executed. They call her America's first

SHE is a woman on Death Row, and she has just 10 days left before she is executed. But what makes Aileen Wuornos so very unusual is that she is a mass killer of a type that is almost always male: she worked alone, she used a gun and her victims were strangers. Dubbed the "highway hooker", Wuornos serially murdered at least six middle- aged men in 1989 and 1990 after they picked her up on a central Florida freeway. Now 46 years old, she has more death sentences on her head than any other criminal in the US, where there are about 15,000 murders every single year.

From top: Beets, Riggs and Allen "I want the world to know I killed these men - as cold as ice. Right after they picked me up and we parked in the woods, I whipped out my gun and killed them," she told a judge last year in an attempt to have all the appeals against her death sentence dropped. "I'm one who seriously hates human life and would kill again."

Wuornos convinced the court, and earlier this month Florida governor Jeb Bush, the president's brother, signed her death warrant. She has since been moved to a cell close to the execution chamber in Florida State Prison, where she will be strapped to a gurney in a white room on the morning of October 9 and given a lethal injection.

There has been little outcry, even though the woman dubbed "America's first female serial killer" was raped and assaulted as a child and most likely by the first man she murdered. A chain- smoking, hard-drinking, angry woman, Wuornos is a perpetrator and a victim. She pumped as many as nine hollow-nose bullets into one of her victims, choosing the sort of ammunition that causes maximum damage by spreading out on impact.

She has been vilified as the ultimate man-hater, a low-life lesbian prostitute who was "obnoxious, aggressive and unsexy", to quote state attorney John Tanner, one of the prosecutors at her 1992 trial. "She was a homicidal predator. She was like a spider on the side of the road, waiting for prey - men," adds Tanner, who once told reporters that Wuornos could not have been a victim because she chose to be a prostitute.

Nine women have been executed in America since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. There are more than 3700 people on America's death rows, but just 52 are women. And none of them has murdered like Wuornos, in the predatory sexual way that criminologists usually describe as masculine. Indeed, after shooting and robbing her victims Wuornos went home to Tyria Moore, the woman she called her "wife."

Serial killing, a rare and headline-grabbing crime, is not well understood. Most of these lone predatory killers are white males in their 20s and 30s, narcissistic and clearly without empathy. Some plan their crimes in detail, while others are more opportunistic. The crimes often involve sex and a need for ultimate control - the ability to kill.

Women, even more so than men, tend to kill people they know: lovers, children, parents or lodgers. Their motives often include hatred and money, and they tend to choose indirect methods such as poisoning. "It's a personal crime," says Robert Ressler, a former FBI agent who coined the term "serial killer" and advised author Thomas Harris on his novel Silence Of The Lambs.

If women do kill sadistically or sexually, he says, it is often in partnership with a male: like Myra Hindley or Rosemary West. But even then the stereotype is that the woman is the submissive partner in crime, taking orders and dealing out death simply to please her lover.

Society's double standards tend to help female murderers in the courtroom; in the Deep South, where most of America's executions take place, there is almost a chivalry towards women. They may end up serving life rather than being condemned.

And many criminologists say that Wuornos, despite her cold- blooded killing, does not fit the serial-killer mould. Her behaviour was too random - she had scores of clients during her 11-month spree - and she did not seem to enjoy the killings. In fact, she told investigators shortly after she was arrested that she killed only when her business deal went wrong. "It wasn't just 'kill somebody.' It was because they physically attacked me. Or were tryin' to get free ass because they said they were a cop or something," she said in her three-hour taped confession.

Ressler, for one, has no doubts. "If Wuornos is said to be a serial killer, we have to rewrite the rules," he says.

The place where Wuornos was arrested - a tawdry biker joint in Florida's Daytona Beach called The Last Resort, where women's underwear hangs above the bar - draws the curious. It now displays a framed photo of the murderess. Earlier this year, with Wuornos's date with death nearing, a Japanese film crew recreated the murders in and around the town, a white trash place that even Penthouse has dubbed the "summit of sleaze." Unsurprisingly, the case has spawned a slew of books and movies - and even an opera called, simply, Wuornos.

Tabloid publicity dominated the case from the start. Wuornos's lover Moore, who became the star prosecution witness, was talking with a police lawyer about selling her story even before Wuornos was arrested. One of the first lawyers to represent Wuornos also tried to sell the tale to a Hollywood producer. By the time Wuornos had been convicted for the first murder, so many people had sold their rights to entertainment producers that she did not have a character witness left to testify at her sentencing hearing.

One of the strangest personalities involved is horse trainer and fundamentalist Christian Arlene Pralle. Pralle had not known Wuornos before her arrest. But after reading about the case, she and her husband legally adopted her. "We're like Jonathan and David in the Bible," she has said of her relationship with the murderess. She is convinced that Wuornos, the "Christian sister" she always wanted, murdered only in self-defence and that her only crime was looking for love in all the wrong places. "She is like the heroine in a Country and Western song," she once told a magazine. She gave the interview while sitting near a box full of letters from Wuornos and next to her shotgun, which she calls Victor.

It is the first real family Wuornos has had. She was abandoned by her mother when she was less than six months old. Her father, a convicted child molester, committed suicide in prison.

She and her brother, who would later die of cancer, were raised by their grandparents in small-town Ohio, and it has been suggested that the abusive grandfather may have been her real father. By 14 she was pregnant. She has said she was raped, although her stories have changed over the years.

She was forced to give up the child and from 15 she worked the freeways, turning tricks for motorists, drinking beer, popping pills and hustling pool. But, as she once confided to a saleswoman called Brenda McGarry, the booze and pills were not numbing enough. McGarry recalls: "She kept saying, 'The pain, the pain the only thing that gets rid of the pain, that slams it, is the hate."

The women executed since 1976 Velma Barfield: 1984, North Carolina, lethal injection A Sunday school teacher, she poisoned her mother, fiance and two others. She was the first woman executed in America since 1962.

Karla Faye Tucker: 1998, Texas, lethal injection The Pope pled for clemency for born-again Christian Tucker, even though she and her lover hacked two people to death.

Judy Buenoano: 1998, Florida, electrocution The "Black Widow" poisoned her husband, drowned her paralysed son, tried to blow up her fiance and was suspected of killing an ex.

Betty Lou Beets: 2000, Texas, lethal injection Grandmother Beets shot her fourth and fifth husbands and buried their bodies under a flower bed.

Christina Marie Riggs: 2000, Arkansas, lethal injection Smothered her two small children, then tried to kill herself. A former nurse, she waived all appeals on her behalf.

Wanda Jean Allen: 2001, Oklahoma, lethal injection Killed two female lovers. Severely mentally impaired, she was the first woman ever executed in Oklahoma.

Marilyn Plantz: 2001, Oklahoma, lethal injection She and her boyfriend attacked her husband with a baseball bat while her two children were in the room next door. They then burned him to death in his truck.

Lois Nadean Smith: 2001, lethal injection, Oklahoma Nicknamed "Mean Nadean" by her workmates, she stabbed her son's ex-girlfriend in the throat and shot her nine times.

Lynda Lyon Block: 2002, Alabama, electrocution She and her boyfriend stabbed her ex-husband to death, then shot a police officer while on the run.

Copyright 2002
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