The Phone Call That Broke Aileen Wuornos: When Love Turned Into a Confession

When investigators struggled to get Aileen Wuornos to admit to seven murders across Florida, they turned to the one person she loved most. From a motel room in Ocala, detectives had Wuornos’ longtime girlfriend, Tyria Moore, make a series of recorded phone calls — and in one of them, Wuornos’ love outweighed her instinct for self-preservation.

In Netflix’s documentary Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers, released on Oct. 30, previously unreleased footage and interviews reveal insight from the people closest to Wuornos, including the lover whose cooperation helped secure her confession.

Wuornos had been arrested just days earlier on Jan. 9, 1991, outside the Last Resort Bar in Port Orange. Investigators had been tracking her for weeks, connecting her to multiple missing men and pawnshop items belonging to the victims. At the time, she was 34 and living out of cheap motels and along highways throughout the state.

Moore, who had fled to Pennsylvania, was brought back to Florida and agreed to cooperate in exchange for immunity. Under police supervision, she called Wuornos repeatedly from a hotel room, pleading for help to clear her own name.

“I’m not gonna go to jail for something that you did,” Moore said in archival audio played in the documentary. “My family’s a nervous wreck. My mom has been calling me all the time. She doesn’t know what the hell’s going on.”

After a long pause, Wuornos replied, “I love you. If I have to confess everything just to keep you from getting in trouble, I will.”

“Well, do it now,” Moore urged. “Get it over with.”

Within hours, Wuornos sat down and confessed — sealing her fate and cementing her place among America’s most notorious female serial killers.

The documentary presents that conversation as a defining moment, both in terms of the investigation and Wuornos’ emotional world, marked by lifelong trauma, abandonment, and a longing for connection.

Born in Michigan in 1956, Wuornos was abandoned as an infant and raised by her grandparents. By her mid-teens she had run away, and by 16 she was living on the road and selling sex to survive — a four-year stretch she described in archival footage as “hitchhiking and… hookin’… 24/7.”

She later said she was raped “about thirty times” while hitchhiking. In another clip featured in the film, she added, “It doesn’t bother me. It’s been tough, you know? A wussy woman, it would bother her, but I’m tough.”

By 1989, she had settled in Daytona Beach and met Moore, a hotel maid who became her partner and, as friends in the documentary describe, “the love of her life.” They lived and traveled together for more than four years, rarely apart except when Wuornos was working along the highways.

“I was a cook; I was cookin’ for Ty, I cleaned the place for Ty. Ty didn’t have to move a muscle,” Wuornos recalled in footage. “I loved her so bad.”

Between late 1989 and late 1990, seven men were killed across Florida: Richard Mallory, David Spears, Charles Carskaddon, Peter Siems, Troy Burress, Charles “Dick” Humphreys, and Walter Antonio. In multiple cases, the victims’ cars were found far from their bodies, complicating the investigation.

Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers shows how investigators began spotting a disturbing pattern — the victims were mainly middle-aged white men, there was similar ballistic evidence, and used condoms and blonde hairs were found at several scenes.

Witnesses reported seeing two women walking away from Peter Siems’ crashed car. According to case records compiled by the Charley Project, Siems’ vehicle was found near Orange Springs on July 4, 1990, off State Road 315, with the license plate removed and broken glass scattered inside.

Composite sketches circulated widely, triggering a wave of tips that pointed investigators toward Wuornos and Moore. Those connections ultimately led Moore to cooperate — and to the confession she elicited during the monitored phone calls.

In courtroom footage shown in the documentary, Wuornos claimed her first victim, Richard Mallory, raped and tortured her before she killed him in self-defense. The film notes that Mallory had a 1957 assault-with-intent-to-rape case and years of subsequent treatment — information the Tampa Bay Times reported was not shared with jurors.

After less than two hours of deliberation, the jury found Wuornos guilty of first-degree murder. She was sentenced to death soon after and later pleaded no contest to the remaining murders, telling the court she wanted to “get it over with” and “die as quickly as possible.”

The documentary includes Moore’s reflection on her decision to work with law enforcement.

“I was scared,” she said. “I was scared of being arrested. I wanted her to talk to me about the offenses so I would be cleared.”

When asked what it was like to love a killer, Moore responded quietly: “I thought about it a lot. How can I be in love with someone who has killed? I don’t know if it’s a question that can be answered. She was a great person. She was very caring, and I did fall in love.”

Wuornos later said the last time she ever saw Moore was in court, and they never spoke again.

Over time, Wuornos became more religious and maintained correspondence with Australian artist Jasmine Hirst, whose letters and interviews appear throughout the film.

“I want to make it right with God,” Wuornos told Hirst in 1997. In another clip she said, “The real Aileen Wuornos is not a serial killer. I was so lost, so messed up in the head, that I turned into one.”

On Oct. 9, 2002, Wuornos was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison.

In footage shown in Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers, her final words were: “I’d just like to say I’m sailing with the Rock, and I’ll be back, like Independence Day, with Jesus — June 6th, like the movie. Big mother ship and all, I’ll be back, I’ll be back.”

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