The documentary Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers revisits the chilling and complex true story of Aileen Wuornos — a woman whose life, crimes, and ultimate fate defy easy categorisation. Released in 2025 and available on Netflix, the film presents a fresh investigation into the killings she committed between 1989 and 1990 in central Florida.

From the very beginning, the documentary situates Wuornos as “a rarity: a female serial killer”, underscoring how her case disrupted the typical profile of serial murderers in the United States.  Against this backdrop, the film supplements archival footage, prison interviews with Wuornos herself, and new audio testimonies from people who knew her, offering viewers layered insight into what drove the violence and how society, the media and the justice system responded.

The narrative of Wuornos’ early life is deeply troubling. Born in Michigan in 1956, she experienced abandonment, foster care, abuse and neglect — a childhood that left her on the fringes of society and shaped many of her later choices.  These themes are woven throughout the documentary, not to excuse her actions, but to help the viewer understand the full context of the person behind the headlines. The film grapples with difficult questions: Was this destruction inevitable? Where does responsibility sit between individual choices and structural failures?

Between late 1989 and 1990, Wuornos killed seven men while working as a sex worker along Florida’s highways, often asserting that the killings were in self‑defence against rape or assault.The documentary does not shy away from this claim — nor from the violent facts that emerged during police investigations and her trial. It presents the accumulation of evidence, the media spectacle that surrounded a female killer, and the moral and legal labyrinth that followed.

What makes Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers especially compelling is its refusal to reduce the story to mere sensationalism. Director Emily Turner uses the interviews and archival materials to build a more nuanced portrait: of a woman who was feared, vilified, sometimes pitied, and ultimately executed in 2002.  The documentary asks its audience to sit with the discomfort of witness, victim, perpetrator and system all at once.

In the end, the film leaves viewers with more questions than answers: about trauma and culpability, about justice and redemption, about how a society responds when the monster it fears doesn’t look or act like its assumptions. For anyone interested in true‑crime, psychology, or the intersections of gender and violence, this documentary delivers a thought‑provoking journey into a story that continues to haunt.