3 cases tagged “prostitution”
Convicted: Delfina María de Jesús González
Delfina de Jesús González, along with her sister María de Jesús González, were Mexican serial killers. They operated a bordello in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico, from the 1950s to the mid-1960s, luring poor girls with promises of good jobs, only to force them into prostitution. The sisters murdered the girls when they became ill, unattractive to clients, or stopped complying. The exact number of their victims remains unknown, with estimates ranging from 91 to 150 people.
Convicted: Matilda Mary Devine
Matilda Mary Devine, popularly known as Tilly Devine, was an English Australian organized crime boss. She was involved in numerous illicit activities including running sly-grog shops, which were illegal bars in Australia, leading razor gangs, and managing prostitution. She became a notorious figure in Sydney during the interwar years. Her criminal reign was marked with violence, lawlessness, and defiance of the authorities, which contributed to her fame and infamy alike.
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.
