“Thanks a lot, society, for railroading my ass!”
-Aileen Wuornos

On this date in 2002, the tragically, horrifically iconic serial killer Aileen Wuornos checked out at Florida’s Starke Prison (and into an afterlife as an Academy Award-winning role) with the appropriately bizarre last words,

“I’d just like to say I’m sailing with the rock, and I’ll be back like Independence Day, with Jesus June 6. Like the movie, big mother ship and all, I’ll be back.”

Her sensational FBI-bestowed reputation as America’s “first” female serial killer rests on exaggeration,* but there’s something of the larger-than-life about prostitute/manslayer Aileen Carol Wuornos.

Heck, Aileen herself sold rights to her story within weeks of her arrest. So did investigators who worked the case. A year before our day’s perp faced lethal injection, her surname titled “the world’s first opera about a lesbian prostitute serial killer survivor of child abuse who is now on death row.” (Here’s the opera’s home page.)

That’s not the sort of legacy usual for a seven-time murderer. But there wasn’t much usual about Aileen Wuornos.

Wuornos — “Lee,” to her friends — projects for all her trail of bodies an irrepressibly humanity; Charlize Theron played her in Monster as the most sympathetic serial killer ever put to celluloid, her crime spree a desperate and impossible cry after human love that her life’s many travails had warped but never drained.

Still professing love for the lover who had sold her out and thereby ducked prosecution, Wuornos resigned her appeals and went her own way out this date in 2002.

* Or, if you like, a precision of definition not likely shared by the majority of her headline-reading public. What made Wuornos distinctive was killing strangers in a pattern over time; the stereotypical female multiple-murderer kills in a single spree, and/or for distinct pecuniary motives, and/or kills family members or other intimates.

Part of the Themed Set: Women Who Kill.

• 1992: Sukhdev Singh Sukha and Harjinder Singh Jinda, Operation Blue Star avengers
• 1732: Edward Dalton, brotherly hate
• 1685: Rebecca Fowler, Chesapeake witch
• 1601: Nikolaus Krell, Saxon chancellor and Crypto-Calvinist
• 1646: The effigy of Jean de Mourgues
• 1938: Ivan Stepanovich Razukhin
• 1796: Thirty Jacobins for the Affaire du camp de Grenelle
• 1968: Pierre Mulele, hoodwinked
• 1569: Vladimir of Staritsa, royal cousin
• Feast Day of Saint Denis, cephalophore
• 1401: Llywelyn ap Gruffydd Fychan, an army marching on his stomach
• 1967: Ernesto "Che" Guevara