Is Aileen Wuornos the Queen of Serial Killers?
She’s not the first, the worst, or the only female killing for gain.
Updated January 21, 2026 | Reviewed by Tyler Woods
A recent documentary on Netflix proclaimed Aileen Wuornos the “queen” of serial killers . Wuornos fatally shot seven men in Florida between 1989 and 1990. She initially claimed self-defense. Later, she changed the narrative: she said if she were released, she’d kill again, and that she’d robbed and killed her victims in the first degree.
Erroneously, the production presents her as a “first” in the U.S. She was not. She just happened to get a lot of press at the time of her murders, and the FBI had no database on females to put her into context. Some agents erroneously called her the first American female serial killer. This false label stuck.
The documentary’s title gives the impression that no other female serial killer stacks up to Wuornos. She's the queen! This distorts what criminologists have learned and could adversely impact law enforcement’s handling of such cases. The public, too, is duped. I’ve seen reviewers of the documentary discuss Wuornos as representative of female serial killers when she’s really not.
Hahn and Wei (2024) examined the effect of perceptual bias on behavior. “This theory allows us to understand how humans see the world and predict how they will see it, as well as how they may behave.” Bias derives from our experience, attitudes, and exposure to information. False information can have a wide-ranging impact. With extreme offenders, bias can influence how we identify them, predict their future behavior, and develop early treatment programs. How do we stay on the right track?
“The best way to reduce the biases in perceptual decisions,” Wei says, “is to reduce the noise, or in other words, to gather more data before the decision is made. More information, less biases.”
So, let’s add some information.
The 64 female serial killers in Eric Hickey's 2004 study accounted for between 410 and 628 victims. Most (93 percent) were white. Poison was the preferred method, "though some strangled or stabbed their victims and a few used a gun." Financial gain or revenge were common motives. The average age was 40, and the longest known period of killing without apprehension was 34 years. In more recent years, females have increasingly targeted strangers. They generally choose easy targets among vulnerable populations, like clients of sex work, hospital patients, or the elderly.
For example, Rebecca Auborn, 33, met men in Ohio for sex in 2022 and 2023. She overdosed some with fentanyl and robbed them. Four died. Ana Paula Veloso Fernandes, a thirty-six-year-old law student, allegedly confessed to murdering her landlord in São Paulo. Investigators connected his death to more fatal poisonings. Remedios Sánchez, the “granny killer,” was jailed in Spain in 2008 for the murders of three elderly women and seven attempted murders. On a temporary release in 2025 for good behavior, she strangled a 91-year-old woman.
Back to Wuornos. Several American serial killers who predate her were also more prolific.
Jane Toppan, a nurse in the Boston area, confessed to 31 murders after her 1901 arrest. She said that her ambition was “to have killed more people—helpless people—than any other man or woman who ever lived.” She got a sexual rush from drugging her victims to watch them die. Sometimes, she held them to feel the life force diminishing.
Belle Gunness, a female killer-for-profit, insured her first husband and two of her children before killing them in the early 1900s. She purchased a pig farm in Indiana and took her surviving kids there. She then married and eliminated husband #2. The twice-widowed, insurance-enriched Gunness published matrimonial ads. Men arrived at the farm, one by one. All disappeared. One man had revealed where he was going, so his brother came looking. This (or a fire) ended Gunness’ spree in 1908. Authorities eventually found the decomposed remains of 16-20 buried victims, some mutilated, on her property.
In Sacramento, California, Dorothea Puente was quick to help those down on their luck. During the 1980s, this 59-year-old fraudster opened her home to welfare and social security recipients. The turnover seemed surprisingly high. A social worker notified police about a client who was reported missing. Upon investigating, they dug up the gardens and found seven bodies covered in lime, one of which had been beheaded and dismembered.
An Italian who operated decades before Wuornos might claim the title of most unique. Leonarda Cianciulli lured three acquaintances to her home to kill, dismember, deflesh, behead, and cook. She’d developed a delusional superstition that her son needed these sacrifices to survive his military service for Mussolini. She knocked out the victims with a drugged beverage, bludgeoned them, and cut them up herself. She baked their blood into a hard substance she could grind into flour for teacakes and boiled their flesh for soap. She managed to kill three unsuspecting women before she was caught. (Her son survived.)
Wuornos, an angry sex worker with a gun, shouldn’t be exalted with a false status. For the sake of accurate perception, production teams should do better research.
Hahn, M., & Wei, X. X. (2024). A unifying theory explains seemingly contradictory biases in perceptual estimation. Nature Neuroscience, 27, 793–804. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-024-01574-x
Hickey, E. W. (2013). Serial murderers and their victims . 6th Ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Myers, W., Gooch, E., & Meloy, J.R (2005). The role of psychopathy and sexuality in a female serial killer. Journal of Forensic Sciences, 50(3). 652-657.
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Katherine Ramsland, Ph.D., is a professor of forensic psychology at DeSales University and the author of 69 books.
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