Serial Killer Aileen Wuornos

Subject
Aileen Wuornos, daughter to Finnish-American mother, Diane Wuornos, and Leo Dale Pittman, was born in Rochester, Michigan on February 29, 1956. Aileen grew up in a dysfunctional family in which her parents divorced before her birth. She never knew her father due to his incarceration at the time of her birth. Her father was also diagnosed with schizophrenia and committed multiple sex crimes against children. At the age of 32 he hung himself in prison. Aileen also had a brother. At a young age, her mom abandon both her brother and herself and they were left to the grandparents who later adopted the two of them. In the younger years of her life her alcoholic and violent grandfather would sexually abuse her, which is likely the reason for her sexual behaviors which arose later in life. Around the age of 11, Aileen began engaging in sexual behaviors in exchange for items. This was the starting point to her downhill spiral. At the age of fourteen Aileen became pregnant. She had been raped by a man who was friends with her grandfather and upon giving birth she dropped out of school and put the child up for adoption. Shortly after this, her grandmother died of liver failure and that was when her grandfather kicked her out of the house. Her rough childhood is what lead her to becoming a sex worker in the woods near her home in order to

Wuornos had a lot of influence based on how she was treated as a child. She was abandoned and went to becoming a sex worker to fill this void. She had no strong male figure in her life and her father left her and her brother which may have been her reason for killing men later in life. Her grandfather's alcoholic tendencies may have lead to her issues as well. She was beat and threatened by him and may have kept her anger locked up, only to come out later down the road. From an early age she showed signs of deviant