2 cases tagged “1990s crime”
Convicted: Karla Leanne Homolka (also known as Karla Leanne Teale and Leanne Bordelais)
She was blonde, pretty, and worked part-time at an animal hospital. She cried on cue for investigators. She told them she was a victim — a battered woman trapped in a monster's web. Canada believed her. Prosecutors believed her. They gave her a deal. Then the videotapes surfaced, and everything changed. The footage showed Karla Homolka not cowering in fear, but actively participating in acts so savage that seasoned law enforcement officers required counseling after viewing them. Among the victims captured on those tapes was her own fifteen-year-old sister, Tammy — drugged, assaulted, and dead by Christmas. The plea bargain had already been signed. Double jeopardy protections made it untouchable. The deal that spared Karla Homolka from a murder conviction — struck before prosecutors had seen a single frame of evidence — would become the most reviled legal arrangement in Canadian history, immortalized forever as 'the Deal with the Devil.' She served twelve years. Then she walked free, changed her name, married, had three children, and disappeared into ordinary life. She is out there still. This is how it happened.
Convicted: Aileen Carol Wuornos (née Pittman)
Her last words from the execution chamber stopped the witnesses cold. "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 mothership and all. I'll be back." Moments later, at 9:47 a.m. on October 9, 2002, Aileen Carol Wuornos was pronounced dead. She had declined her final meal. She accepted only a cup of coffee. Between November 1989 and November 1990, Wuornos shot and killed seven men along the highways of Florida, each of them a middle-aged motorist who had stopped for a woman working the roads. She took their money, their cars, and their lives. She was a highway prostitute operating under multiple aliases, a drifter with a .22 and a history that read less like a criminal file and more like an indictment of everyone who had ever failed her. She was raised by alcoholic grandparents after her mother abandoned her at age four. Her father, whom she never met, was serving a life sentence for raping a seven-year-old child when he hanged himself in his prison cell. She was pregnant and living on the streets by fourteen. She told police, and later the courts, that every man she killed had attacked her first. The jury in her first trial deliberated for less than two hours before convicting her. She received six death sentences in total. The tabloids called her America's first female serial killer. The more precise truth: she was the first woman formally profiled by the FBI as a serial killer. The distinction hardly seemed to matter by the end. What mattered was that seven men were dead, and Aileen Wuornos had spent a lifetime arriving at that outcome.
