There’s a bar near Daytona, off the side of State Road A1A, called The Last Resort. It sits atop a patch of scraggly lawn, squat and brick and foreboding. From the limbs of an oak tree behind the building hang several busted and rusted motorcycles, suspended by heavy chains.

The bar advertises itself on Google as the “Home of Ice Cold Beer and Killer Women”. This became their claim to fame when a regular at The Last Resort, a woman named Aileen, was there drinking some of those ice cold beers—Miller Lites, actually. She played Randy Travis on the jukebox and shot some pool with the other patrons, most of whom knew her well. The owner of the bar would later tell the Miami New Times that this woman “kept to herself… she was quiet, and never messed with anyone.” That night would be Aileen’s last as a free woman. Before that, though, she joined in one of the bar’s oldest traditions: with a cigarette still dangling from her mouth, she removed her bra and hung it with dozens of others, over the crumbling wooden beams above the pool tables of The Last Resort. Littered among them were the typical Florida-dive-bar ephemera: scrawled-on dollar bills, Gasparilla beads, bumper stickers and local motorcycle club patches. Two men came up to her, pretended to solicit her for sex work and offered to buy her a motel room. These men, who were in fact undercover cops, walked America’s first female serial killer, the “ice-cold” Aileen Wuornos, out of the bar and straight into federal custody.

I’ve driven A1A dozens of times. The long state highway begins in Key West and winds all the way up to Amelia Island, the Atlantic Ocean’s endless blue flickering in and out of view through the passenger-side window. It’s dotted with endless condos, beach houses, bait shops, tourist traps and shitty little bars, like The Last Resort, every few miles. A1A passes through Miami Beach, the throngs of off-duty influencers, winds along the braindead suburbs of Hollywood and the gilded, evil streets of Palm Beach. These streets turn into avenues, branching into the wide driveways where the New-York-expats of Boca Raton park their luxury hatchbacks. Motorists along A1A with their eyes to the skies can spot the Kennedy Space Center as they continue north, broken-down fruit stands strewn across the highway over which edgelord billionaires hurl themselves into the future. It continues along the weed-scented shores of Cocoa Beach, last bastion of the puka shell necklace. I like to take a long last look at the young bodies arcing their surfboards over the glittering seafoam before the highway carries me deep into the past. A1A emerges, then, onto the cobblestones of America’s oldest city. I scan for the Bridge of Lions, built by the Spanish when they first settled the town known as St. Augustine and erected their seashelled fortress, whose coquina walls absorbed cannonballs as softly as if they were navel oranges. Patinated plaques grace the side of the roadway every few feet, it seems, indicating this or that centuries—old monument or another historic site: the settling and renaming of other peoples’ land. Not far from the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! Museum on San Marco Avenue stands the alleged site of Juan Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth. The average traveler could be forgiven for not seeing the sad, trickling stream, reeking of sulfur, as a miracle. The palm trees start to descend in number as you drive even further north and the live oaks take over, their Spanish moss hanging down like little branch-beards, moving back and forth in the lazy wind. The road starts to incline. The billboards for crisis pregnancy centers increase in number. More pecans decorate the exit signs than cartoon alligators now, as the roadway begins ramping up to meet I-95, then I-10, and the hills of south Georgia.

Along this highway, down backroads and turnoffs and rest stops, in the middle of the night and very early in the morning, Aileen Wuornos murdered at least seven men who stopped to solicit her for sex work. She claimed that the murders had been in self-defense, after these men pushed her beyond her limits or violently assaulted her. At her trial, she said, “Well, if you can’t be a good example, be a horrible warning.” A year and a week after her arrest at The Last Resort, Aileen was sentenced to death by lethal injection. 

Aileen Wuornos and I have a few things in common. I think about those things more than I should.


Like Aileen, I love Randy Travis. I danced with my husband to one of his songs at our wedding, promising to love him forever and ever, amen as Category-5 Hurricane Irma churned towards us, just miles away. Our wedding guests were jovial but edgy, a manic energy falling over the dozens of attendees who had either been brave enough to stay put or were headed north on evacuation routes, anyway, and had decided to pull up a beach chair on the deck of our personal Titanic.

My vows were scribbled on the back of a grocery list, the most unselfconscious writing I may have ever done. I was too preoccupied to let them get long. His were the most beautiful words I’ve ever heard. My brothers filled in as the missing best men, and in doing so became mine, forever. My sister, carrying my growing niece in her belly, eight months along, stood behind me, as she always has, radiant and apple-cheeked in the September heat. The sun shone the whole time we vowed. Not a cloud in the sky. We ate boiled peanuts and chicken biscuits and my redneck cousin from Arkansas got proposed to while I was distracted.

Later, Adam told me that an enormous bee had circled my head, and my bouquet, for the entire ceremony. I never saw it, too starry-eyed by my conviction and his Star Search smile to care about anything else. For his part, he had pretended not to notice, knowing how frayed my nerves were that day as call after call from guests and vendors and family members came in—their flights canceled, highways in standstill traffic, their elderly parents and babies needing to be cared for and worried about. He looked at a circling threat, however small and irritating, and grinned it out of existence.

We shut it down early, sensing the wind and humidity changes in our bones like only people who have lived through tropical storms can. Everyone loaded into their cars in high heels and suits, wedding favors taking their place next to flashlights loaded with fresh batteries, gallons of distilled water, and board games. My new husband and I drove through the night in a rental car, alternately flying across the highway and crawling along traffic-jammed state roads, nervously eyeing the gas gauge and the clock, barely talking, as the storm chased us. I only breathed a sigh of relief when, ascending, we saw the state recede out of the tiny window. we disappeared into the clouds, towards our future, finally free of the storm. Randy Travis’ words rang in my head: They say time can play tricks on a memory / make people forget things they knew. As much as I missed Florida, I was grateful to be escaping such a familiar panic, all the hurricanes I had weathered before. What a gift, to be able to finally fly away. 


So, both country music fans, and both married, Aileen and I—that’s another thing we share. Although her nuptials were short lived; her husband was in his seventies, she hit him with his cane, he filed a restraining order against her. Apples and oranges, really.

Both fake blondes, who used to be real ones when we were little girls, whenever that was. We were both the result of unwanted pregnancies, but this is another common place where our paths twist away from one another. We were both breech births, adding injury to the original insult of our presence in the wombs of our mothers. Tiny feet, yet to step onto the cold ground of this indifferent state, pointing out first instead of our heads. “She was born ass-backwards,” my uncle used to say about me. “She been that way ever since.” 

We both eventually made it out of Florida, albeit in different ways—me in a rented car, escaping to New York City in my early twenties; her in a body bag at just forty-six.

In his foreword to Monster: My True Story, an unauthorized biography of Aileen, the author Christopher Berry-Dee talks only briefly of Aileen’s life before the murders. He says that his ultimate goal in writing this book was not sensationalism, but to shed light on the flaws of the criminal justice system, to show the hard work and diligence of the cops involved in Aileen’s case.

The book is co-credited to her, but I don’t buy it. Aileen hated cops, had since she was little, when they failed to do anything to stop the obvious abuse she suffered at the hands of almost every single man she came into contact with, or had the bad luck of being blood related to. Berry-Dee does say something towards the end of the foreword that I snag on, though. It strikes me as profound in a way the author almost certainly did not intend, but I think about it every time I compare the way my life played out against Aileen’s path: “When one sets out to investigate the road to murder, well signposted as it may be, one finds diversions, small, seemingly insignificant dirt roads that can lead to unexpected discoveries. Aileen Carol Wuornos led her eight victims into such diversions where they expected something less than being blasted to death. This book will take you down those roads to a place where you will never look back.” 


One thing that I’d bet most people can’t say: I got my first period in the Everglades.

I was on a school trip, part of an educational program called “Nature’s Classroom” that took public school students to state parks and preserves. The idea, I think, was that children could learn about Florida’s flora and fauna up-close and personal, fostering some sense of civic pride. It was the nineties, and we were still optimistic about conservation. The trip bought our parents a weekend of peace, anyway, and that is how, in the name of ecology, my eighth-grade class boarded a charter bus headed over the Skyway Bridge, southeast-bound and down into the heart of the swamp. I crept, oblivious, one exit sign at a time, closer to my womanhood. A kind of Sword of Damocles bumped gently, invisibly, above my head as we moved south down the map.

I think about it at weird times, especially when I am alone or if I find myself staring up at a streetlamp, buzzing sunset-colored in the nighttime Florida heat that pays no mind to the changing of seasons. There’s a story there, a hazing or a haunting, I’m not sure. Something about the moon and the tides, the swamp and the street. I digress.

We got to Everglades National Park and settled in. I felt a weird twinge, a stabbing feeling, while unpacking my pajamas. My flashlight and I took a little trip out of the cabin, towards the fluorescent-lit public bathroom, swatting away mosquitoes on the dimly lit path. I eased a rusted latch, stepped in, eased it shut again.

Then—red. No cinematic moment. No revelations, no angels singing or symbolic ladyflower unfurling. Just a sweaty campground bathroom and panic and a stomach ache that bent me double. Eventually, I found an adult—my gifted teacher, Miss Burgess; a wavy haired hippie who wore batik dresses and Tevas and grew her own loofah plants. The charter bus took a motley trio out of the park and into the night: her, me, and our school’s charter bus driver, a stocky woman with a Bluetooth earpiece and little regard for my womanly plight. The carpeted seats of the bus were depressingly empty. I didn’t know where to sit. The two grownups sat at the front of the bus, talking in hushed tones. I meandered towards the back, head hung low, thighs chafing in my jean shorts as I walked bow legged like a cowboy to avoid what I assumed was a deluge of blood cascading, unseen, from deep within me. I sat down gingerly towards the back, hoping I might disappear into the seat like Alex Mack. 

I did not disappear.  


As we crept past the ranger’s hut at the front of the state park, I imagined what my friends were doing in our thatched cabin back at the park. My stomach still hurt. In my head, I couldn’t help counting the secrets being divulged by the minutes while I was gone on this stupid, embarrassing ride. I wanted to be anywhere but here. The highway lights rose and fell over my reflection in the mirrored surface of the bud windows, like I was in my own personal music video.

Eventually we turned off the highway and into a brightly lit parking lot. Miss Burgess called my name and I walked to the front of the bus as if to my grave.

“Do you want me to go in with you?”

The question amazed me. I was fourteen, at a Flying J on the side of the highway in the south-est part of South Florida, with no clear idea of what I was going into the gas station’s convenience store to obtain.

I looked past my teacher’s face towards the parking lot from the top step of the bus. I wasn’t afraid, exactly; I’d played enough “Hey, Mister” with my friends at the 7-11’s and Albertson’s around town to lose any initial fear of strangers, especially the convenience store kind. I don’t really remember the store, buying pads, who paid for them, or whatever happened inside.

I remember very clearly, though, walking down that little set of stairs. The pneumatic noise of the bus doors opening and then closing behind me. Setting foot on asphalt and looking up into the street lamps. I wasn’t in the swamp anymore, but in my heart, I was lost in the wilderness.

On that quiet, late ride back, I sat in the seat next to Ms. Burgess. I could tell she was uncomfortable, but that she felt either an urge or an obligation to be maternal. I didn’t want or need her to be motherly, though, and I didn’t really know how my own mother would have behaved if she had been there. Still, it felt rude to sit far away from her after she’d been part of what I knew would probably be a formative experience. We rode in silence for a while until suddenly the bus driver cleared her throat, glancing at us in the rearview mirror.

“A lot of the swamp people around here believe a lot of stuff about the moon, and the land, and all that. Like the tides, and mangroves, shit like that. Maybe means something, you getting your—”

Here, she mumbled and then coughed a wet, nicotine cough. “Your cycle, you know, while it’s a full moon.”

I looked down at my lap.

“Maybe,” Ms. Burgess said.

She patted my leg, weakly.

“Maybe it doesn’t mean anything at all.”


I wonder if you care that Aileen Wuornos was a Pisces. Born on leap day, perpetually skipped over. When I think about a young Aileen, I imagine her transparent; a dotted line around the space on the calendar, a shadow where a silhouette should be. Obviously, I am leading you here, with these similarities. I do not aspire to be like Aileen Wuornos. When I start looking for them they appear one after another, but the ways in which we are similar do not make us the same. I’ve never killed anyone—or hit them with a cane, for that matter. Charlize Theron has certainly never won an Academy Award for playing me in a movie—for gaining thirty brave pounds and wearing fake fucked up teeth. She would, though—have to do both of those things—were she cast in the story of my life. Charlize is pretty tall, and another thing Aileen and I have in common is a fondness for Miller Lite.

It scares me a little bit to think about us as connected. It thrills me a little, too. We are also both rape survivors. Well, sort of. Not the rape part—the surviving part. I think she’d agree with me, that the word “survivor” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I think she’d also agree with me that “victim” doesn’t tell the whole story, either. The term does nothing for us, gives us no quarter, no special treatment in court or in a church pew or in a classroom. It provides no solace, no answers. It’s just a noun. 


Aileen’s mother was fourteen at the time she was born, and the pregnancy was the result of a sexual assault by her family’s adult handyman. Her biological father was arrested not long after Aileen’s birth for the kidnapping and rape of another minor, a seven-year-old girl. He hung himself in prison. When Aileen was around four years old, her mother asked Aileen’s grandmother to watch her two children and never came back. Aileen and her brother were raised by her grandparents, and by all accounts, all parties involved were not willing participants.

I wonder if it matters to anyone but me that young Aileen was made to clean and condition the leather of the belt that her grandfather beat her with, often and viciously. That he told her she wasn’t worth the air she breathed while he did so. Do you feel any differently about her crimes when you know that she was drinking by the age of twelve, that she started having sex with boys from her neighborhood in exchange for food? These same boys once threw her out of a moving van, badly injuring her head. 


Very often, I envy Aileen. I wonder what it would feel like to kill the men who hurt me. Maybe that sounds extreme, but consider for a moment the fact that I have to use the plural there—men, not man.To be a woman who has been assaulted is to learn how to live with constant, indescribable, near-overwhelming rage. Rage that animates you, propels your limbs out of bed when you’d rather sink into the earth’s core. Rage that threatens to ruin your life all over again when it surfaces, at the slightest prompting. Rage that makes you watch trial footage of an unrepentant woman, accused of murdering seven men. A woman who showed up at her grandfather’s funeral, the funeral of a man who was coincidentally the father of her own miscarried child, just to blow cigarette smoke in the corpse’s face. My rage makes me exhale right along with her. This kind of rage will make you read these facts and think: I get it. Had things been only slightly different for me, I might have found myself on the wrong side of A1A some dark night, nothing to my name but sheer force of will and desperation. I feel pretty confident that the chances of my mugshot making the nightly news were always slim; but they were never zero. 


On a rainy day in college, when I’m about twenty, I decide to watch the movie Monster. At the time, I lived in Gainesville, Florida, home to another famous killer. Ted Bundy, handsome devil, spent some time here, and a man named Danny Rolling, otherwise known as The Gainesville Ripper, murdered five students in the ‘90s. The movie is also something to do that isn’t a football game, or a frat party, in a town where there isn’t much else to do besides those things. It’s a college town surrounded on all sides by rural Florida, farmland and biker bars just a few miles down Waldo Road. Sometimes drifters come through and stop at the pool hall where I bartend when I’m not in class, blowing menthol smoke in fat clouds across the bar while I open their longnecks. The day in question is my day off, and I ride my bike from my apartment down to the punk-rock video store and rent the DVD of Monster from a scrawny guy in a Black Flag tee shirt. He looks at me suspiciously. I take it home and retreat to my room. 

Seeing Charlize-in-poor-people-drag feels strange and familiar at the same time. There’s a scene in the movie where Aileen is at a gas station, attempting to freshen up between johns. Hers is a body I recognize instantly: soft at the belly, strong everywhere else. Long arms with tapered shoulders. Home-bleached hair, dark at the roots. She wears dirty bikini briefs, puckered at the elastic waistband. This harsh view, of this kind of body, makes me want to put my hand in front of the screen. Aileen’s body looks a little like mine, a lot like my aunt’s. The leg holes of her Hanes sag around the soft flesh that I share, what I’ve heard called “baby-bearing hips”. I feel something hot and sludgy under my skin when I see Charlize-as-Aileen giving herself an “airplane bath”, something I’ve done several times at rest stops and campsites as a kid: soap pumped from the dispenser and rubbed under the armpits and down the front, “two wings and the tail.” I can tell I’m supposed to be nauseated by this scene, but it just makes me sad. 


Aileen, of course, was not the only Florida woman to commit horrible crimes. Something about her inspires a uniquely vitriolic feeling, though—my guess is that it has to do with her appearance, her poverty, her existence on the margins. She is not especially nice to look at, or listen to. One would think this doesn’t matter, but time has shown us that it does.

I watch another movie, one where a real-life woman is again portrayed by an Oscar-winning actress. In May December, Julianne Moore plays a fictionalized version of Mary Kay LeTourneau, a school teacher infamous for sleeping with and bearing the child of her underage student. The film follows the “couple” as adults, while another actress is studying Moore’s character for the upcoming biopic she will play her in. At times it’s hard to tell if the movie is a comedy or a drama. Moore is gorgeous, of course, and with the passage of time, the age gap is seemingly less severe. But the young man who was a child when he met this woman clearly feels the dissonance, struggles with the memory of who he was and what he could have been.
 
Florida has its own version of this story, too, of course. Debra Lafave was a middle school teacher in Temple Terrace when she groomed and raped a 14-year old student. Lafave was blond and blue-eyed and had dated a Backstreet Boy in high school. The media went crazy, with headlines like “Hot for Teacher”, and pictures of her on a motorcycle in a bright blue bikini made the rounds. Many years later, a man named Joe Zuniga met Debra through his sister, who worked with her at a community health center. He found Lafave, who he called “Debbie”, intriguing. Eventually, she agreed to let him write about her; the ensuing biography is titled “A Crown of Beauty for Ashes”. Its cover is a soft-focus photo of a blonde, blue-eyed woman, gazing at a monarch butterfly perched on her forefinger. It has quite a different story to tell about its subject than Monster does about Aileen. The book’s synopsis, from its Amazon listing:

“Debra Jean Beasley LaFave is known to the world as a beautiful monster, a seductive pervert, a lovely wrecker of lives. How difficult must it be to live in a world that views you in such extreme polarities? When the media portrays someone as a sex object, or worse as a monster; it is easy to forget that that person developed over time. The story of 'now' overshadows the story of 'then.' It is only when the dust has settled and the news outlets are looking for ways to boost their ratings that the backstory is investigated and considered.”

I remember the media coverage of Lafave, that she wasn’t much older than me. One outlet even declared her “too pretty for prison”. During the subsequent trial, her attorney argued that putting Lafave in jail would be “like throwing meat to the lions”.

Absolutely no one ever said that about Aileen.


The information I can find about Aileen’s early life calcifies something inside me. The volume of violence visited upon this one young woman is staggering. In his foreword to the book, Aileen’s biographer talks only briefly of the monstrosity of her life before murder. He says that the ultimate goal in writing this book is not sensationalism, but to shed light on the flaws of the criminal justice system, to show the hard work and diligence of the cops involved in Aileen’s case. I don’t buy it. Aileen hated cops, had since she was little, when they failed to do anything to stop the obvious abuse she suffered at the hands of seemingly every last man she came into contact with. It’s not hard to see why she went crazy; why so many of us do. 

In the movie version of her life, right before Aileen is apprehended outside the Last Resort, she runs into Tom, the veteran landlord of the storage unit she was living in sporadically before she met Selby. Tom sees a “Wanted” sketch of what is clearly Aileen on the bar’s TV, has known, probably, for some time what is going on, and tries in his way to level with her.

Tom says: “I know you didn’t dial it up on the goddamn telephone. That’s where you landed, that’s what you had to do. What you’re feeling right now is just guilt over something that you had absolutely no control over. You know how many of us came back from the war and almost killed ourselves because we felt exactly the same thing you do right now?”

Aileen says: “Yeah?”

Tom: “Yeah. And they’ll never get it. They don’t get it now, they’ll never get it then, and they sure as hell won’t ever get fucking circumstance.”

Aileen: “Fuck, man, circumstance. That’s exactly it. You know, it’s like I feel like I never had a fucking choice.”

I wonder about that circumstance a lot. It unsettles me, how much I care for Aileen. I know that I am supposed to be disgusted by her, afraid of her frizzed-out hair and wild eyes, her assertions at her trial that she would do it again. But I just feel guilt, and a strange, sad kinship.

Where did I take a right turn, one that led me down the path I am on, where so many others were forced left—often without a choice? Why did I get the loving mother, the husband who distracts me from buzzing threats, instead of dark highways and armed robbery? I’m poring over police reports and details about the night Aileen was finally taken in when I come across a snippet of information that makes me pause. The last song that she played on the jukebox at The Last Resort was Randy Travis—this, I know already, but it’s the name of the song that catches me by the throat. It’s “Diggin’ Up Bones.” Not one of Randy’s major hits, to be sure. The title sends a little chill down my spine, connecting it with Aileen—responsible for the animated, living bodies of seven people being reduced to bones. But the song isn’t actually about murder—it’s about memories, and the pointlessness in trying to rehash the details of something you’ve long let go. Her wedding ring, a negligee, everything a woman left behind on the way towards something or someone else.

I wonder what I’m trying to prove, showing that I empathize with a woman who did monstrous, unforgivable things. I may not have been as monstrous as her, but I felt like it, often. I understand what it feels like to be out of options. To feel like no one understands your pain. I felt it, too. The rapid deterioration of a sense of self, the gnawing hopelessness. The difference between our trajectories is, I guess, arbitrary. Luck of the draw, fate, some cosmic dice roll. Circumstance. Thankfully, I have words. Sometimes they help. Sometimes they make it way worse. What I think I want to say winds away from me, always just beyond my headlight beams. Sometimes I sit down and someone else appears—some other, younger me who wants to talk instead. I relate to Randy, who says in the song that he’s “exhumin’ things that’s better left alone”. Writing about myself sometimes gets a little spooky, like drinking with a ghost. I don’t like staying too long in that world, one where I should probably be dead, but have gotten away with the opposite of murder, which is the incredible feat of keeping myself alive.

At times, especially when I am driving down dark highways like A1A, and passing some roadside bar, I think about Aileen, and Florida, and Last Resorts. There’s something about Florida highways in the middle of the night that I find soothing. Maybe it started with that weird bus ride through the Everglades. Once I got my driver’s license, and got my own car, it became a ritual, almost. When I can’t sleep, when I’m trying to work my head around an essay or existential crisis, I grab the keys, a fountain soda from the gas station, and find the nearest on-ramp. I do my best thinking with the windows down, my hands and feet occupied with the muscle memory of driving. I look out the window and twist the dial, navigate the static, searching for clarity of voice. 

I wonder if I think about the past too much, if I’m romanticizing it or making it a tragedy. At the time, it was just my life. It wasn’t a narrative, just a series of choices moment to moment. But this is the work of writing about yourself, I think—looking for patterns, the subtext underneath those choices, contextualizing who you were and who you might have been. On this particular night, I am thinking again about the choices that separated me from Aileen, my circumstance, so to speak. I play back the tape in my head. As much as I may outwardly joke about my wild years, as much as I beat myself up in private about my own recklessness and naïveté, the truth is less easily explained. The main difference between Aileen and I isn’t one I can claim credit for, really. But I always felt a sense of certainty that I, myself, was not ice cold. By some dumb luck I found that I could still be soft, open to the world. If I could find a well-lit place, maybe better things awaited me. If I could just make it through the night. In the darkest parts of my life, through the mangroves and the buzzing bar lights, my own voice was whispering to me from the future, maybe from this car, gliding over the asphalt right now, saying: no stopping. This is not our exit.

RACHEL KNOX is a recent graduate of the MFA program for Creative Writing at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Her work has been featured in publications such as Counter Service Magazine, Lumina Journal, 12th Street Journal, The Inquisitive Eater, and Saw Palm. Her essay "Me & Mary Frances" was listed as a Notable in "Best American Food Writing: 2020". She is a born-and-raised Floridian, and my writing explores art, class, culture, and girlhood in the Sunshine State.

Volume 15.1, Winter 25

Rachel Knox

The Last Resort