Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003)

Directed by Nick Broomfield, Joan Churchill

Production Year: 2003

Rating: 15 Certificate

Production Country: UK/USA

Filmed in Colour

In January 1991, the police arrested Aileen Wuornos, a hitch-hiking hooker, for the murder of seven men in the woods of Florida. Dubbed the world's first female serial killer, her case earned her international infamy.

In the early 1990s, Nick Broomfield followed the hysterical media circus covering her bizarre and extraordinary trial. The resulting film, Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer, documented the trial itself, the misfits attached to the case, the people out to make money from the tragedy, and the whole peculiar charade that came to surround the complex, tragic, violent figure at its centre. Now, almost a decade later, Wuornos has been executed, but the controversy surrounding her case lives on, the flames fanned by the release of Monster, an Oscar-winning Hollywood blockbuster about her life.

In the last months of her life, Broomfield returned to Florida to appear in her appeal hearings, and to answer some of the questions that had plagued him in the intervening years. This extraordinary feature-length film examines Aileen's harrowing life, tracing her story from the freezing woods of Michigan to the steamy swamps of Florida, and features her closest friends, her lawyers and even her estranged birth mother. At the heart of the film are the astonishing, unique, troubled interviews Broomfield filmed with Wuornos in prison, including her last, defiant words the day before her execution.