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She looked so innocent — but grew up to become one of the most notorious female killers
Became wards of the state
By the age of 13, she was pregnant after being assaulted. Some even whispered that her own brother might have been the father. But according to many others, she was allegedly assaulted by a friend of her grandfather.
Family members later told The Tampa Bay Times that no one believed her at the time. No police report was ever filed.
She gave the baby up for adoption, hoping to give him a better life than the one she’d been handed.
Soon after, tragedy struck again. Her grandmother passed away, and it was a tough blow for her. She described her as a “really clean and decent” woman who didn’t drink or swear. Soon after hat, her grandfather took his own life.
She and her brother, Keith, became wards of the state. By age 11, she began engaging in sexual activity at school in exchange for cigarettes, drugs, and food. Alone and desperate, the teenage girl then dropped out of school and began living on the streets, surviving through petty crime and prostitution.
Over the next decade, she racked up arrests for theft, assault, and disorderly conduct — the kind of rap sheet that seemed to grow longer with each passing year.
By her mid-20s, she had drifted to Florida, a state that would soon learn her name in the worst possible way. In 1989, a man’s body was found deep in the woods near Daytona Beach, shot multiple times. Two weeks later, police linked the murder to a woman who had recently been seen hitchhiking nearby.
When they found her, she confessed, not just to one killing, but to several. One after another, men across central Florida were turning up dead.
She claimed she was defending herself and that every man had tried to assault her, that she’d been fighting for her life.
“I’m not a man-hater,” she told the Orlando Sentinel in March 1991. “I’ve been through so many traumatic experiences that either I’m walking in shock or I’m so used to being treated like dirt that I guess it’s become a way of life.”