STARKE, Fla. (AP) — Serial killer Aileen Wuornos was executed Wednesday, more than a decade after she murdered six men along central Florida highways while working as a prostitute.
Wuornos, 46, became the 10th woman executed in the United States since the death penalty resumed in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
She was pronounced dead from lethal injection at 9:47 a.m. in Florida State Prison near Starke.
"I'd just like to say I'm sailing with the Rock and I'll be back like Independence Day with Jesus, June 6, like the movie, big mothership and all. I'll be back," Wuornos said from the execution chamber. The Rock is a Biblical reference to Jesus.
Wuornos had fired her attorneys and dropped her appeals despite lingering questions over her sanity.
Wuornos was sentenced to death six times for killing middle-aged men in 1989 and 1990 and spent a decade on Florida's death row.
The death warrant was based on her first murder victim, Richard Mallory, a Clearwater electronics shop owner whose body was found in 1989 in Volusia County.
During her 1992 murder trial, Wuornos testified that Mallory raped, beat and sodomized her and that she killed him in self-defense. After standing trial for Mallory's death, Wuornos pleaded guilty to five other murders in Marion, Pasco and Dixie counties.