Aileen Wuornos Decoded

A bedwetting twelve-year-old girl with bruises she would not explain. Twenty years later, the cameras called her America's first female serial killer. What turned the first into the second is not the story the headlines sold you. Aileen Wuornos killed seven men along the Florida highways in twelve months. She confessed to every one of them. She took the stand against her own lawyers. She screamed at the jury that she hoped their wives and daughters would suffer the fate she said had been done to her. In October 2002, the state of Florida killed her by lethal injection. The mug shot. The courtroom outburst. The Hollywood film. The Christian mother who adopted her on death row. You have probably met them all. You have not met the person underneath. This is the book that opens her up. Not the monster of the documentaries. Not the saint the religious lobby tried to sell. The woman herself, decoded layer by layer, from the lie about her parents that broke her at twelve to the .22 in the bag that finally answered the question the lie had been asking. Drawing on the latest research in trauma neuroscience, attachment theory, and the dark psychology of predatory offenders, this is true crime as it should be written. Unflinching about the bodies. Honest about the why. By the last page, you will understand exactly how a child gets assembled into a killer. And you may recognise some of the ingredients.