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abused and beat; and she used the insurance money to buy a fancy car, which she promptly crashed. So she was soon back on the road as a hitchhiking hooker, hanging out with bikers, and getting regularly arrested: for cheque forgery, breaches of the peace, car-theft, gun-theft and holding up a convenience store. For the latter, she did a year in jail, and when she came out, she tried to commit suicide.
    Then, though, in 1986, Aileen, by now known as Lee, met twenty-two-year-old Tyria ‘Ty’ Moore in a Daytona Beach gay bar; and she turned out to be the love of her life – all the love that she’d never had. They rented an apartment together; they worked at motels and bars while Aileen turned tricks on the side. Her looks, though, weren’t getting any better – and at some point Aileen decided that Ty shouldn’t have to work any more: She, after all, was Ty’s ‘husband.’ That’s when she started to kill.
    Beginning at the end of 1989, there was a string of deaths that soon had police baffled. All were men; some were found naked; and they’d all been killed by the same small-calibre gun. They included a trucker, a rodeo worker, a heavy-machine-operator, even a child-abuse investigator. And a sixty-year-old missionary had disappeared.
    There was only one clue to the killer’s identity. The missionary’s car was involved in an accident and two women seen walking away. The police released sketches to the press; and Ty and Lee were identified. Lee had also pawned the possessions of many of her victims, and she’d left her finger- or thumb-prints – as per Florida law – on the pawn-shop receipts. It was only a matter of time.
    There was one final betrayal. Ty, to save herself, went to the Florida police; and then, via a taped call to Aileen, persuaded her to confess. She did, but she said that her victims had beaten and raped her. She wasn’t believed. She was condemned to death, even though her defence presented her as terminally damaged, with a personality disorder.
    Almost immediately, her story was told in a made-for-TV movie. Feminist writers defended her; an Aileen Wuornos Defence Group was set up. However, in 1999, she admitted that the claims about beatings and rape had been entirely made up. But she also said that the police had delayed five months before arresting her, because they were negotiating a movie deal with Hollywood producers desperate for the real-life story of a female serial killer. In his 2003 documentary The Selling of a Serial Killer, Nick Broomfield claims that there was a meeting to discuss rights to the police investigation a month before she was arrested.
    On Death Row, Wuornos seems to have had a religious conversion. She said:
    ‘I believe I am totally saved and forgiven by Jesus Christ’
    — and added that there were angels waiting for her on the other side. She was executed in late 2002.

The Boston Stranglings
    Albert DeSalvo was oversexed, everyone agreed. His lawyer, F. Lee Bailey, wrote that he was,
    ‘without doubt, the victim of one of the most crushing sexual drives that psychiatric science has ever encountered.’
    His wife said he demanded sex up to a dozen times a day. If it hadn’t been for this monumental sexual appetite of his, everything might have gone well for Boston handyman DeSalvo. For he was, to all appearances, a clean-living individual.
    But the need for sex kept getting him into trouble. In Germany, it was the officers’ wives. And in Boston, after he’d been honourably discharged and had moved back home, it was all the gullible pretty women who wanted to be models.
    In 1958, Albert DeSalvo began to be known in police circles as the ‘Measuring Man.’ Posing as a talent scout for a modelling agency, he had started smooth-talking women into having their measurements taken. He would touch them, whenever and wherever he could. Then he’d leave, saying that the agency would soon be in touch.
    He was finally caught in March 1960, when he was convicted