she did not deserve to die.....

The ones who did not deserve to die were Aileen's victims. Why isn't anyone concerned about them & the families that miss them?

Because Hollywood didn't make a movie about them and cast a normally hot woman who went ugly to play them. They didn't give endless interviews, change their story a couple hundred times and then start talking about how cops knew she was killing but let her continue as a part of some grand conspiracy.

Nick Broomfield did a two documentaries about Aileen that I think show who she truly was. I don't think she had the ability to feel compassion or empathy for others because she just didn't care. Chalk it up to her truly awful life and crap life experiences but having a truly awful life and crap experiences doesn't give anyone permission to kill others. She admitted she killed those men because she was "eliminating the witness" during her robberies. She admitted she made up the attempted rape and torture stories too. Then she changed her story again and claimed the cops wanted her to kill, knew she was doing and followed her around watching her do it. She probably wasn't totally connected to reality but she knew the difference between right and wrong which legally means she was not insane.

And I don't think for a minute that she just gave up because she was emotionally drained. I don't think she thought she would be executed. As long as she kept talking and acting nutty, she got attention. That was something she never got in her life. She was a sad figure to be sure but hell, we all have our crosses to bear.

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Those arguments are pretty fatuous, fiatlux. I know they get trotted out on the Internet over and over, particularly by Americans who want to justify their institutionalised vengeance, but they're just as lacking in substance every time.

she knew exactly what she was doing & just did not care

Statements like that might make it easier to dehumanise her, but they miss the point. Wuornos' case was pretty sad, because she's probably as clear an example as you'll find of what can happen when someone is repeatedly brutalised and treated as without worth. She came to a state of mind where she thought that if everyone treated her as valueless, then that was how she would treat everyone else.

I'm not a bleeding heart, and I'm not excusing what Wuornos did. What she did was not justifiable, but it was comprehensible. And I think we, as a society, are our own kind of insane if we continue to allow people to be brutalised, and then get all morally indignant when they do something retaliatory. Really, what do we expect?

She had a tough life, fine. So do thousands of people & they don't go around butchering innocent people!

Everyone has different trigger points, and it makes no psychological sense to say that one person's response to fracturing pressure on their personality is incomprehensible because someone else didn't respond the same way.

My specific issue with this claim (I think it falls far short of being an argument) is that it's completely subjective; no-one would ever accept this argue against their own behaviour, so why advance it against others'?

The ones who did not deserve to die were Aileen's victims. Why isn't anyone concerned about them & the families that miss them?

Sorry, but that's completely inane, and merely black/white thinking. Of course they didn't deserve to die, and that's why Wuornos was executed. Discussing Wuornos in no way indicates a lack of concern for her victims. It's a silly thing to say.

It's possible to feel sadness and empathy for Wuornos as a failed and struggling human being, without it meaning that what she did wasn't wrong or that her victims don't matter.



You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.

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