Prosecution
Wuornos was arrested 405 days after she murdered her first victim; she was caught on the 9th of January, 1991 at the Last Resort Bar after an intense manhunt was initiated. Police found evidence against her for one of her other crimes, there was no mention that she was a suspect for any murders at the time of her arrest. Police initially held off from arresting Wuornos, in an attempt to track and locate her girlfriend and partner in crime, Tyria Moore. The next day, on January 10 1991, Moore was found hiding at her sister’s house, and in a panic, told the police that Wuornos had admitted to killing Mallory. Fearing her own lack of safety and the prospect of prosecution, she secured a deal with the police. Over the next few days, Moore would not be arrested, but watched by police as she made multiple phone calls to Wuornos, begging and pleading with her. And so on the 16th of January, 1991, Aileen Wuornos confessed to the killings of six people, claimed that Moore had no involvement and that all of the murders were all in self defence; Wuornos retracted the latter statement at a later date.
After the court case and legal proceedings, the jury came to a conclusion. The jurors voted for Wuornos to be sentenced to death, all twelve in agreeance. Their reasons behind this were that Wuornos had a threatening and violent history, that a portion of the murders were committed during robbery, that murder was committed to avoid arrest, that the murders were heinous and cruel and that the murders were premeditated, calculated and cold. They also decided that from the list of mitigations, the only issue that was legitimate in affecting Wuornos would be that she had borderline personality disorder. However, the jury stated that this was not severe enough to hinder her thought processes and make her unaware of what she was doing. Wuornos was on death row for a whole decade, from the conclusion of her trial on January 30, 1992 until her execution by electric chair on October 9, 2002. |
Wuornos requested Natalie Merchant's song 'Carnival' to be played at her funeral.
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