Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: documentary / In category: 6 of 10 / Overall: 44 of 100

While working on ‘Biggie and Tupac’, Nick Broomfield was served with a subpoena to appear as a witness at a hearing to determine Aileen Wuornos’s fitness for execution. It was a decade down the line from ‘The Selling of a Serial Killer’ and Broomfield had remained in touch with Wuornos after that film had been released. He had never stopped believing that Wuornos had killed in self-defence; that of her seven victims, as Wuornos herself put it, “two raped me and five tried”.

‘Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer’ begins like some weird, inverted legal thriller – John Grisham filtered through the refracted vision of, say, David Lynch. Wuornos, after twelve years on Death Row, suddenly changes her story: the killings, she now claims, were done in cold blood and motivated by robbery. At the hearing, she cautions the judge that witnesses appearing in her favour didn’t know her that well. She fires her lawyer. In short, she seems to be doing everything she can to play into the hands of those who want her declared fit for execution.

Chief amongst these parties is Jeb Bush, coming up for re-election and riding a “tough on law and order” ticket. To say the man has an agenda is putting it mildly. Broomfield comes to suspect Wuornos has an agenda as well: after ten years with the death sentence hanging over her, she’s had enough. She wants out. And lethal injection is the only out Wuornos is ever going to get.

When Broomfield attends the hearing, he’s reunited with Steve Glazer, Wuornos’s money-driven and terminally incompetent attorney from the ‘The Selling of a Serial Killer’. Glazer greets Broomfield with a cheery “Fuck you and your documentary.” Broomfield’s appearance at the hearing is over a point of editing in that film and whether Glazer had smoked a joint prior to a visit to Wuornos. Not that it takes Broomfield’s presence in court to establish that Glazer acted outside of Wuornos’s best interests – his own bumbling testimony establishes that.

Broomfield begins to interview some of the other witnesses, who knew Wuornos in childhood and adolescence. He builds up an unremittingly bleak portrait of a young woman, desperate for acceptance and affection and striving for it in all the wrong ways (sexual favours granted arbitrarily and from such a young age that she’d had a child and put it up for adoption by 13), who was pretty much set on a certain course from the outset. The whole glum family history is revealed: the teenage mother who abandoned her after birth; the absent father imprisoned for sodomising an eight-year-old boy who hanged himself in jail; the grandfather not averse to thrashing Wuornos sadistically with a leather belt; the banishment from said individual’s house following the birth of her illegitimate child; nights spent sleeping in a wrecked car up on cinderblocks or in the woods during the winter.

Broomfield also meets Wuornos’s birth mother whose only contribution to the proceedings is to speculate whether Wuornos was brain-damaged owing to a difficult birth. By this point in the documentary, it’s hard not to view Wuornos as a woman fucked over by society from the start. As with the first film, there’s a sense of sympathy for the devil – you can’t get away from the fact that she killed seven men. That’s the one element which has never been in dispute. Perceptionally, however, ‘Life and Death of a Serial Killer’ takes on a different coloration from ‘Selling of a Serial Killer’ when she changes her story regarding the reason for the killings.

In an attempt to understand, Broomfield conducts a series of interviews with Wuornos, including her final interview before her execution. The bulk of the second half of the documentary centres around these interviews. And this is where ‘Life and Death of a Serial Killer’ becomes really disturbing. The decade-long incarceration, virtually a life of solitary confinement, coupled with the shadow of the death sentence as a constant companion has sent Wuornos over the edge.

Although there are moments of lucidity (including a wrenching scene where, thinking the cameras are off, she quietly confides in Broomfield that the killings were self-defence), a good percentage of Wuornos’s interview footage is pure paranoia. She alleges that “sonic pressure” is being channelled into her cell in a deliberate attempt to drive her insane, and that the police had identified her after the first killing but allowed her to continue so they could capitalise on her notoriety as “America’s first female serial killer” through book and movie deals.

Jeb Bush instructs three psychiatrists to evaluate Wuornos. Whereas most mental health practitioners would consider a single evaluation merely a starting point, these guys spent just 15-minutes with Wuornos prior to declaring that she was of sound enough mind to be executed.

The final interview, which the prison authorities organise as a three-ring circus, is painful to watch, with Wuornos clearly mentally unbalanced. Broomfield spares us the actual execution, instead portraying the media’s vulture-like descent around the prison on the day. A prissy official makes a statement and reads out Wuornos’s clearly-not-of-sound-mind last words: “Yes, I would just like to say I'm sailing with the rock, and I'll be back, like ‘Independence Day’ with Jesus, June sixth, like the movie. Big mother ship and all. I'll be back, I'll be back.”

The title ‘Life and Death of a Serial Killer’ is bludgeoningly appropriate. Aileen Wuornos was a product of the American dream gone wrong, her fame a result of the media’s obsession with the dark side of celebrity, and her death a showboating political act. She was imprisoned for what has never been categorically established weren’t acts of self-defence; she was exploited as a commodity, misrepresented and had the death penalty held over her for over a decade. And when she was driven mad, they put her to death.

Fuck you, Jeb Bush.

Some immediate thoughts on Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer

When I decided to watch and review two documentaries and a feature film about Aileen Wuornos over the space of a single weekend, it was having not seen ‘Monster’ since its theatrical release and the first of the Nick Broomfield documentaries for about five years. I’d never seen the second – ‘Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer’ before. I have no idea what the hell possessed me to watch them within such a short space of time and blog about them same day. I didn’t find it easy putting together my review of ‘The Selling of a Serial Killer’ earlier on.

I finished watching ‘Life and Death of a Serial Killer’ about fifteen minutes ago. It’s left me feeling – to quote a Metallica title – broken, beat and scarred. I’m going to need some time to collect my thoughts and assemble as coherent a review as possible. I might need to go and watch something else before I turn in tonight, just for some light relief. ‘Schindler’s List’ maybe.

The first thing that struck me about ‘Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer’ is that what she did and why had all but ceased to matter – not to Broomfield, not to the viewer, but to the legal system. The film shows how a person is arrested, kept on Death Row for over a decade and loses their mind as a result. Loses their mind to the degree that they’ll do or say anything just to get that execution date and just get the whole fucking thing over and done with. And how, when the state finally decides to do the deed, it’s to bolster some oily politician’s re-election campaign.

I’m going to drink some beer and collect my thoughts. Full review tomorrow.

Fuck Jeb Bush.

Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: documentary / In category: 5 of 10 / Overall: 43 of 100

As a documentary filmmaker, Nick Broomfield’s approach has always been as lo-fi as it is provocative. Working with an extremely small crew, usually touting the sound equipment himself, Broomfield goes after the story as tenaciously as a hunting dog. His films are often more about his search for the facts than the ostensible subject.

In ‘Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer’, Broomfield’s subject appears mostly in archive footage. His quest to gain an interview with her culminates in one brief conversation. The implications of what they discuss – and Broomfield’s subsequent probing – results in doors closing and denial, by prison authorities, of a further interview.

But before Broomfield even gets this far, he has to negotiate the twin hurdles of a corpulent lawyer who fancies himself as an entertainer, and a born-again Christian with about as much soul and spiritual benevolence as a cash register. Broomfield initially approached the subject of Aileen Wuornos while unenthusiastically perusing research material for a possible series on serial killers; initially discouraged that all he had on his hands were endless accounts of men killing prostitutes, he stumbled across Wuornos – a prostitute who had killed seven men. Broomfield set out to tell Wuornos’s story. The resulting documentary, however, soon reveals itself as the story of how the imprisoned Wuornos became a financial commodity.

During the police investigation into the killings, two suspects were sought and police sketches were issued in the likenesses of both Wuornos and her partner Tyria Moore. Arrested, Wuornos insisted the killings were in self-defence and determinedly kept Moore out of it. Moore repaid the favour by cooperating with the police and conducting a series of (borderline entrapment) phone conversations designed to make Wuornos implicate herself. Moore’s lawyer also represented some of the officers on the case in trying to line up a profitable deal with a film production company.

Nor does Wuonos’s lawyer, Steve Glazer, emerge as anything other than a shyster. Obese, ill-groomed, grinningly insincere and self-delusional with respect to his musical ability (he all but admits the law was a reluctant alternative to a never-viable career in showbiz), Glazer would comes across as a satirical figure but for the fact that his interest in Wuornos has nothing to do with her rights and/or entitlement to legal representation. Glazer – along with the equally reprehensible Arlene Pralle – is clearly out to use Wuornos as a cash cow.

And yes, at a cynical base level, you can look at Glazer, remember he’s a lawyer and ask yourself if you really expected anything else. But what to make of Pralle? Doll-like, softly spoken, well-mannered, a born-again Christian, she adopted Wuornos as her ‘daughter’ after they had exchanged correspondence, poetry and drawings following Wuornos’s conviction. Archive footage shows her speaking defensively of Wuornos, declaring that she couldn’t have done such terrible things.

In front of Broomfield’s camera, she shows her true colours, promising him the inside story on Wuornos and agreeing to arrange an interview, but holding out for $25,000. Broomfield’s queries vis-à-vis the transaction elicit a referral to Glazer (she refers to him as “my agent”). Late in the day, with a down payment made (Pralle denies receiving it even though Broomfield reminds her he’s got it on film) and none of her promises delivered on, Pralle again tries to palm Broomfield off, insisting he talk to Glazer to confirm whether the $25K gets just the interview or “the letters, the poems, the artwork, everything”. Broomfield steps slightly outside of the documentarist’s remit at this stage and delivers a verdict of his own. “I think you’re a very very deceptive person,” he tells her pointedly, “and I think you’re incredibly mercenary and I think you’ve been playing around with us and I’ve had enough.”

Wuornos, when Broomfield eventually gets his interview, demonstrates that she has reached the same conclusion. She lambasts Glazer and Pralle and urges Broomfield to look into the profiteering cops and the movie deal. Although the documentary ends with archive footage of one of the implicated cops leaving the force, Broomfield’s subsequent attempts to contact the police department are stonewalled.

In amongst all this venal money-grubbing and sneaky side-stepping of the “Son of Sam law” (i.e. the legislature stipulating that a serial killer not earn money from selling their story) – which was essentially happening here, only with the proceeds being diverted into Glazer and Pralle’s pockets – it would have been easy to lose sight of Wuornos herself and the killings she committed. Broomfield doesn’t fall into that trap, though. He incorporates two pieces of footage which provide chilling reminder. The first is Wuornos on the stand, recounting – in increasingly disturbing detail – Richard Mallory’s sexual assault on her. The second counters any criticism that might have been made of the documentary as an hour and a half’s worth of sympathy of the devil. It shows Wuornos’s response after sentence has been passed. “I hope your wife and kids get raped in the ass,” she offers to the prosecutor, before telling the judge, “I was raped and you’re scum. Putting someone who was raped to death, you fucking bastard. Motherfucker.”

It’s a moment that weighs awkwardly against Broomfield’s assertion that Wuornos was the most honest and straightforward person in the documentary. Had ‘Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer’ been Broomfield’s last word on the subject, a nagging sense of the unfinished might have dogged the project. A decade later, however, just as he was finishing work on his equally controversial ‘Biggie and Tupac’, Wuornos came back into Broomfield’s orbit.

Wuornos weekend

Shots on the Blog goes into dark territory this weekend with three Aileen Wuornos related movies. Today, a double bill of the acclaimed Nick Broomfield documentaries – ‘Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer’ and ‘Aileen: The Life and Death of a Serial Killer’ – and tomorrow Patty Jenkins’s ‘Monster’, for which Charlize Theron bagged a grimly deserved Oscar.

Wuornos hailed from a white-trash background and it doesn’t take a psychiatrist to join the dots of her troubled childhood and adolescence and arrive at the conclusion that her life was pretty much headed on a certain course from the outset. This from the Wikipedia article (which draws heavily on Michael Reynolds’s book ‘Dead Ends: The Pursuit, Conviction and Execution of Female Serial Killer Aileen Wuornos’):

“Her mother, Diane Pratt, was 15 years old when she married Leo Dale Pittman …Piittman was a child molester who spent most of his life in and out of prison. Wuornos never met her father, as he was imprisoned for the rape and attempted murder of an eight-year-old boy at the time of her birth. Leo Pittman hanged himself in prison in 1969 … From a young age, Wuornos engaged in sex with multiple partners, including her own brother. At the age of 13, she became pregnant, claiming the pregnancy was a result of being raped by an unknown man.”

When, at the age of 15, Wuornos’s grandfather (at this point her legal ward) threw her out of his house, she turned to prostitution to sustain herself. A brief (nine week) marriage to an older man in the mid-70s seems to have been a union of convenience. Wuornos unexpectedly came into some money following the death of her brother and the marriage ended.

Wuornos proved temperamental and several violent outbursts at a local bar, to the extent of her hurling a cue ball at the bartender’s head, landed her in jail for a spell. A convenience store robbery, the passing of forged cheques and grand theft auto rounded out her criminal credentials. She met Tyria Moore in 1986 and they moved in together. Wuornos was evidently deeply committed and referred to Moore as her “wife”. She supported them by continuing her career in prostitution.

Between November 1989 and November 1990, Wuornos shot and killed seven of her clients. It’s notable that the first, Richard Mallory, was a convicted rapist who had spent ten years in a psychiatric facility for his violent acts against women. Wuornos claimed her killing of him was self-defence. It may have been Mallory’s rape of her that brought all the demons of her childhood howling back. I’m going no further with that thought: this article is merely a prologue to the cinematic portrayals, either documentarian or fictional, of Aileen Wuornos and I’d rather base my opinions on the films themselves.

What is certain is that the story didn’t end with Wuornos’s arrest. There was a spectacular betrayal, some grossly inappropriate conduct by police and lawyers, the mammothly hypocritical involvement of a supposed Christian and wholesale exploitation. Pre-arrest, Wuornos was clearly the villain of the piece (whatever litigation may be offered in terms of her troubled background, the nature of her profession and the behaviour of her clients). Post-arrest, her role was recast as that of victim.