Everyone knows her, but no one can name her

At first glance, the little girl in the old photograph looks like someone destined for a future of spelling bees, summer camp ribbons, and maybe a modest collection of ceramic cat figurines. Instead, she grew up to become Aileen Wuornos — proving once and for all that childhood pictures tell us absolutely nothing about who will one day become a serial killer.

Born in 1956 in Rochester, Michigan, Aileen’s life began with the kind of family chaos that makes even the most dysfunctional reality TV households look stable. Her father went to prison for a horrific crime before she even knew he existed, and later died by suicide, leaving Aileen in the care of grandparents who were… let’s say, *not* contenders for “Best Guardians of the Year.”

By fourteen, after enduring extensive abuse, she became pregnant and placed the baby for adoption, which was arguably the most responsible and well-adjusted decision anyone in her family tree had made up to that point.

As a teenager, she dropped out of school, turned to prostitution to survive, and accumulated petty-crime arrests at a rate that suggested she might have been collecting them like Pokémon cards. Her personal tragedies kept stacking, and eventually she hitchhiked to Florida — the state where bad life decisions go to flourish.

There, between 1989 and 1990, she killed a series of men, insisting each time that she acted in self-defense. Whether self-defense, rage, trauma, or a cosmic collision of every bad event in her life, her story became one of the most infamous crime cases in U.S. history.

Convicted of six murders, she received six death sentences and was executed in 2002, forever cementing her legacy as the troubled, chaotic, and darkly notorious “Damsel of Death.”