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Teathe ghost of Aileen Wuornos Still stuck at The Last Resort – The Florida The biker bar where the serial killer drank his last beer before his arrest more than three decades ago.
His framed mugshot hangs behind the bar. His face appears on T-shirts and hot sauce bottles. A makeshift shrine to his painted portrait features a list of the men he murdered and the bar’s slogan: “Home of ice cold beer and killer women.”
The story of Eileen Wuornos has long been the subject of pulp fiction, having been fictionalized and dramatized many times for TV and film, the most famous being Charlize Theron, Who won an Oscar for his role as a murderer in the 2003 film Demon,
And it’s the attraction to Wuornos, America’s most notorious female serial killer, that continues to draw people from around the world to the Port Orange bar.
Owner Al Bulling, who has been running the bar for 33 years, knew him well.
“She wanted to be remembered and her memory lived on,” Bulling said. Daytona Beach News-Journal“Okay, we’ll keep it up for him.”
Wuornos was a sex worker in Florida who fatally shot at least seven men between 1989 and 1990, dumped their bodies in a remote wooded area, and stole their property. He claimed that he killed his victims in self-defense when the men became violent towards him.
In 1991, he was arrested in a biker bar and convicted of murder the following year at the age of 35. After a decade on death row, he was executed by lethal injection.
Nearly four decades later, Wuornos’ name is back in the spotlight with a new release Netflix Documentary.
Aileen: Queen of Serial KillersNow streaming, the series re-examines the woman behind the murders. Directed by Emily Turner, the film blends never-before-heard audio, archival footage, and rare prison interviews with Wuornos.
Her story, equal parts tragedy and horror, captivated the nation and redefined what a “female serial killer” could look like.
“The real Aileen Wuornos is not a serial killer,” she says in the Netflix documentary.
“I was so drunk and so lost, so crazy, man, that I turned to alcohol. But my real self isn’t one.”
From sex work to murder
Born in Michigan in 1956, Wuornos’ childhood was a cascade of trauma: abandonment, rape, and early exposure to violence.
Her father, Leo Wuornos, was jailed for raping a minor and hanged himself while behind bars. Their mother, who was only 16 when she gave birth to them, later abandoned her children, leaving them in the care of their parents.
After becoming pregnant as a teenager, she was forced to give the child up for adoption and was thrown out of her grandparents’ home. After becoming homeless at age 15, Wuornos turned to sex work to earn money for food as she traveled across the country before landing in Florida.
During the 1980s, she was regularly in trouble with the law, engaging in armed robberies, car thefts, and disorderly conduct as she wandered between bars and motels along Florida’s highways, and eschewed sex work.
In 1986, he met Tyria Moore, a 24-year-old maid at a Daytona Beach motel, at a gay bar. They fell in love and Wuornos tried to support Moore.
But then there was darkness in her sex work.
murders
Between 1989 and 1990, Wuornos shot and killed seven people – Richard Mallory, David Spears, Charles Carskadon, Troy Brace, Charles Humphries, Peter Sims, and Walter Antonio – claiming at least one was in self-defense.
All the victims were motorists who had approached her as sex-work clients.
The first person was Richard Mallory, a 51-year-old electronics store owner, whom he shot dead on November 30, 1989. His body was found two weeks later in a wooded area, riddled with bullets.
Wuornos claimed that after picking her up, Mallory beat and raped her. It later emerged that Mallory had a previous conviction for attempted rape in Maryland, adding credibility to Wuornos’ account.
Between 1 June and 19 November 1990, the bodies of five other missing persons were discovered, all in Wuornos.
The victims were construction worker David Andrew Spears, 47; rodeo rider Charles Edmund Carskadon, 40; salesman Troy Eugene Burress, 50; Retired US Air Force major and police chief Charles Richard Humphreys, 56; and truck driver and security guard Walter Geno Antonio, 62.
Wuornos is believed to have killed and robbed a seventh man – retired merchant seaman Peter Abraham Sims, 67 – during the same period. He was reported missing but his body was never found.
a killer’s last stand
On January 9, 1991, undercover detectives entered The Last Resort Bar and quietly arrested Wuornos.
Police eventually caught Wuornos when Sims’ car was found crashed on the roadside and his palm print was found on the interior door handle.
His girlfriend was arrested the next day. But she was persuaded to turn in her lover and extract a confession from him.
During a taped phone call, Wuornos admitted to Moore that he had committed the murders. That recording was played in court, surprising Wuornos, who had no idea Moore was recording him.
On January 27, 1992, Wuornos was convicted of Mallory’s murder.
During her trial, defense psychiatrists argued that she was mentally unstable and suggested she may have suffered from borderline personality disorder. Despite this, Wuornos was sentenced to death for the murder.
On March 31, 1992, he pleaded no contest to the murders of Spears, Burress, and Humphries and received three more death sentences. He later pleaded guilty to the murders of Carcassonne and Antonio and was again sentenced to death.
The murder of Sims is the only case for which she was not obliged to answer, due to the fact that there was no body.
‘Home of ice cold beer and killer women’
Nearly 24 years after Wuornos was hanged, The Last Resort bar where he drank his final beer still attracts visitors from all over the world – bikers, supporters, true-crime fans and the just plain curious.
“They come from all over the world,” Bulling said. “They just come, normal people, because they know it’s all here. Everything’s the same. Same pool tables, everything.”
He said business has declined somewhat over the years, but some patrons believe it may pick up again with the release of the Netflix documentary.
Alan Campbell of Iowa, who visited the bar in 2023, told Independent He didn’t know there was a new documentary but said he was now looking forward to watching it.
“Best. Stay. Forever,” he wrote on Facebook after his visit, along with a post of photos of the bar.
Campbell told Independent He was traveling in Florida and had researched the area and when he saw information about the bar and the story behind it, it piqued his interest.
“I have never seen this movie (Demon), but remembered it, and thought the bar would be an interesting place to visit.
However, Michelle Forbes observed Demon and traveled from New Orleans to Florida to see the bar – which is featured in the film.
he told New York Daily News She remembers hesitating in the parking lot.
“It’s not the kind of place I would go under most circumstances,” she said. “But once inside, they were really happy to talk about it. They made me feel bad for being scared in the car! I think they were respecting that, not just making a scene.”
Just down South Ridgewood Avenue, another piece of Wuornos’ history still stands. The former Fairview Motel, now renamed the Scoot Inn, is where she stayed before her arrest.
The fascination with Wuornos continues to shape how people talk about women who murder. To some, he symbolizes the anger born from abuse – to others, he is simply a ruthless killer.
last words of a murderer
After spending a decade on Florida’s death row, Wuornos was executed by lethal injection on October 9, 2002. She was 46 years old.
For his last meal, Wuornos skipped the normal prison meal and opted to drink only a cup of coffee.
Just before he was sentenced to death, he spoke his last words.
“Yeah, I’d just like to say I’m sailing along the reef, and I’ll be back, like Independence Day, with Jesus. June 6th, like in the movie. Big motherhood and everything, I’ll be back, I’ll be back.”
These words are engraved on the wall beneath his photograph in The Last Resort Bar – where his memory lives on.
Aileen: Queen of Serial Killers Now streaming on Netflix.