In a captured moment from the late 1990s, a woman in a blue prison jumpsuit could easily be mistaken for someone enjoying a casual chat with friends at a café.

Playful and charming, she strikes poses for the camera and accepts an offer of face powder, smiling as she notes her usual disinterest in such vanity.

“In the outside world,” she remarks, “I would never wear this.”

This woman is Aileen Wuornos, filmed during her incarceration at a Florida state prison, a place she would never leave.

Five years after this footage, Wuornos, infamously labeled as America’s most notorious female serial killer, was executed at 46 by lethal injection, following a decade on death row.

Now, 23 years after her execution, experts and scholars continue to debate whether Wuornos was a calculated killer or a victim of unfortunate circumstances.

She had, at different times, presented herself as both.

Now, in unearthed footage filmed on death row by Australian filmmaker Jasmine Hirst – showcased in Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers, a gripping new Netflix documentary – the woman who shot seven men dead in the space of a year offers a tantalising new insight into what really lay behind Wuornos’ horrific crime spree.

Aileen Wuornos was killed by lethal injection in 2002 after shooting seven men dead in the space of a year offers (pictured in court in Florida in 1991)

The murderer is now back in the spotlight as part of Netflix documentary Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers which explores her life and crimes

It was, the killer insisted, not revenge or rage, but grim pragmatism that drove her. 

After murdering her first two victims in self-defence, the sex worker reasoned that since she was destined for punishment anyway, she may as well ‘take a bunch of creeps’ with her, she said.

‘And that’s what happened.’

Another big driving force was her fatal love for her girlfriend Tyria Moore, her partner of four years, who would ultimately betray her.

‘I’ll always love her, and I’ll be thinking about her the day I’m executed,’ she says. 

‘I’ll be thinking about her leaving. I loved her so bad. And the only reason I carried guns was because I loved her so much I wanted to make sure I got home alive in one piece, so I could be another day breathing with her. 

‘You know, it didn’t turn out that way. Got all screwed up.’

Memorably brought to life on the big screen in the 2003 film Monster, where she was played by Charlize Theron, in what became an Oscar-winning role, Wuornos was responsible for the deaths of seven men between 1989 and 1990.

She shot them, abandoned their bodies, took their cars, and dumped them miles away.

Initially baffled by what seemed to be a series of unrelated killings – and stunned by the discovery of long blonde hairs and used condoms in one of the victims’ cars, suggesting a woman’s involvement – Florida police finally caught a break when some of the belongings of Wuornos’s first victim turned up in a pawnshop.

The documentary asks whether Aileen was a cold-blooded killer or a victim of circumstance – after murdering her first two victims in self-defence, the sex worker reasoned that since she was destined for punishment anyway, she may as well keep killing

Wuornos’s fingerprints were all over them. With a long record of petty crime and assault, her details were already in the system.

On January 9, 1991, she was arrested at one of her favoured haunts – a biker bar aptly named The Last Resort.

Her fate was sealed when her long-term partner, 28-year-old former motel maid Tyria Moore, agreed to work with police to help elicit a confession.

Both women had been identified by an eyewitness fleeing the car of missionary and retired merchant seaman Peter Siems.

Siems’s body was never found, but Wuornos’s fingerprints were discovered on the door handle of his abandoned vehicle.

Moore’s cooperation proved fatal to her lover: in exchange for immunity from prosecution, she made numerous recorded phone calls to Wuornos, pleading with her to help clear her name.

Three days in, on January 16, 1991, Wuornos confessed.

In a subsequent interview with an American news show, shown in the Netflix series, Moore – now 62 and believed to still live in Florida – denies making a deal with police, insisting she only betrayed Wuornos to prevent her from getting away with her crimes.

‘She could lie her way out of anything,’ Moore says. ‘And that’s mainly why I wanted her to confess to the murders – because I knew she could lie her way out of it.’

Whatever the truth about Moore’s motivation, a year after her arrest, in January 1992, Wuornos was convicted of the murder of Richard Mallory, a 51-year-old electronics store owner who, it later emerged, had previously been convicted of attempted rape.

At trial, Wuornos claimed self-defence, saying Mallory had beaten, raped and sodomized her after driving her to an abandoned area for sex.

Her plea fell on deaf ears, and she was sentenced to death.

She later pleaded guilty to the murders of construction worker David Spears, 47; part-time rodeo worker Charles Carskaddon, 40; sausage salesman Troy Burress, 50; former police chief Charles Humphreys, 56; and trucker Walter Antonio, 61.

Initially insisting all the killings were also in self-defence, she later recanted, declaring herself a cold-blooded murderer who robbed and killed her victims to cover her crimes.

By then however, she had also started a long correspondence with documentary maker Jasmine Hirst, who first contacted her after seeing her picture in a newspaper.

‘We wrote for eight years up until her execution,’ Hirst recalls in the documentary. ‘Then in 1997 she said, “So I’m going to tell you the truth of my life and the crimes, because I want to make it right with God.” She told me she wanted to confess everything to another human being.’

That summons brought Hirst and her cameras to Florida’s state penitentiary, where she was greeted by a skittish yet strangely composed Wuornos.

Much of the footage has never previously been aired and is striking for Wuornos’s calm, almost matter-of-fact demeanour, chillingly at odds with the harrowing life she recounts.

A teenage runaway forged in a crucible of neglect, poverty, and sexual abuse, she endured trauma from her earliest years. (Although touched on only briefly in the documentary, Wuornos gave birth at 15 after being raped by a friend of her maternal grandfather; the baby was adopted.)

The killer pleaded guilty to the murders of construction worker David Spears, 47; part-time rodeo worker Charles Carskaddon, 40; sausage salesman Troy Burress, 50; former police chief Charles Humphreys, 56; and trucker Walter Antonio, 61

Raised – if barely – in Michigan, she turned to sex work aged just 11 to buy cigarettes and food for herself and her siblings, and was homeless at 16.

‘For four years, nonstop from 16 to 20, I was on the road,’ she tells Hirst. ‘I’m hitchhiking, and I’m hooking, running into a lot of situations because I never had a place to live. I slept under trucks, in abandoned homes, cow pastures.’

Eventually, she landed in Daytona Beach, Florida, where, now calling herself ‘Lee’, she entered her first lesbian relationship and soon met 24-year-old Tyria Moore – the start of an all-consuming love that she would carry to her grave.

‘When I met Tyra, we never left each other, except when we worked and I was a cook,’ she recalls. ‘I was cooking for Ty. I cleaned the place for Ty. Ty didn’t do nothing. I loved her so bad. She didn’t have to move a muscle.’

With detached candour, she relates how her years as a sex worker were punctuated by brutal violence. ‘I must have been raped, I’d say about 30 times, maybe more,’ she shrugs. ‘It doesn’t bother me, because I’m tough. You know, a wussy woman, it would bother them.’

Still, the perpetual threat of violence haunted her enough that she began carrying a gun.

‘I had double-barrel shotguns in my head, .357 magnums to my head. So when a cop friend told me to go ahead and get a gun, it was purely for protection. I had to do what I had to do.’

All she wanted, she said, was to make it home safely to Tyria.

It was that determination to survive that lay behind her first killing, which she maintained was an act of self-defence after being raped and brutalised by Mallory.

She goes on to relate how, six months later, when David Spears allegedly tried to attack her with a lead pipe in his car, something snapped.

‘He was trying to hit me with it, just missed my hand, and by the time I got the door open and got the gun, he was about three feet from me. And I started shooting,’ she says.

‘There was no rape during that jazz, but it was an assault. Now my head’s swimming, and I thought, “I’m not gonna go to prison for life for these creeps. If you’re gonna stick me in the chair, I’m gonna get me a bunch of rapists.” So I was ready.’

But that, she adds, ‘didn’t happen.’

‘Instead , I was running into these idiots,’ she says, describing one victim as a ‘drug smuggler’ – something she was ‘highly against’.

Realising after shooting him dead that she had now crossed into the realm of first-degree murder – punishable by death – she says: ‘So I don’t care about anything no more now, and it’s over. Aileen Wuornos, the real Aileen Wuornos, is not a serial killer. But I was so drunk and so lost, so f**ked up in the head, man, that I turned into one. But my real self is not one.’

For the first and only time in the footage, she weeps – apologising to the families of those she killed.

‘I’m really sorry for the families,’ she says softly. ‘I’m really sorry that your father or your brother or whoever he might have been to you in kinship … I’m really sorry they got killed. I want you all out there to know that telling the truth was the hardest thing … so I laid it down to you as best as I could, in full honesty.’

Was that the truth? In later years, Wuornos again changed her story, declaring herself a ‘cold-blooded killer’ who ‘hated humans’ – a claim those close to her believe was a ploy to hasten an execution she had come to crave.

‘She really wanted to go,’ recalls Deirdre Hunt, a convicted murderer who spent time on death row with Wuornos before her own sentence was commuted to life in 1998. Hunt remembers Wuornos’s deteriorating mental state as paranoia set in.

She remembers her becoming fixated on the intercom, and saying how prison authorities were using ‘sonic pressure’ on her head.

‘She was not fully there at all.’

At the same time, Wuornos would beg her fellow inmates not to talk to the media, fearing that any hint of mental instability might delay her execution.

Finally, on October 9, 2002, at 9:47 a.m. that moment came – her final words ‘I’ll be back.’

The night before, she spent her final hours with her childhood friend Dawn Botkins – in whose backyard her ashes are now scattered.

‘I gave her a hug goodbye, told her I’d see her on the other side,’ Dawn recalls in footage filmed by Jasmine after that final, painful meeting. ‘I didn’t want to look back, because I could hear her standing there as they were reshackling her. But I did look back, and I just gave her a little wave. And I heard her say, ‘I love you, Dawn’.’

That final meeting lasted six hours and ended at midnight on the eve of her death.

Dawn says her old friend finally acknowledged what she had long resisted – that whatever her motivation, she was indeed a serial killer. ‘All along, she always said, “I killed a series of men,” Dawn says. ‘But she said she was definitely a serial killer.’

Whether, as Wuornos had prophecised to Hirst, Ty was on her mind in her final moments we will never know. ‘Now there’s eight people gone,’ Dawn reflects in that dimly-lit hotel room in the strange aftermath. ‘And she has paid her price.’

Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers is released on Netflix on October 30th