Aileen Wuornos’ final statement before her 2002 execution matches the bizarre words Sarah Paulson delivers in Netflix’s latest Monster installment.
The convicted serial killer, 46, spent a decade on Florida State Prison’s death row after a jury rejected her self-defense claims and sentenced her to die for murdering several men between 1989 and 1990. She was executed by lethal injection on October 9, 2002.
Before the execution, Wuornos was offered a final meal with a $20 budget. She requested only a cup of coffee.
In Ryan Murphy’s Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, Paulson’s Wuornos faces the gallery with an IV in her arm and delivers the same strange message that the real Wuornos spoke that October morning. “I would like to say I’m sailing with the rock. And I’ll be back, like Independence Day with Jesus. June 6, like the movie,” the character says.
“Big mothership and all. I will be back. I’ll be back.”
The series also shows her requesting that Natalie Merchant’s “Carnival” play as she dies.
While Murphy took creative liberties with Wuornos’s imagined connection to Lizzie Borden, the execution scene’s dialogue was drawn directly from the historical record.
The incoherent nature of Wuornos’s last words fueled debate about whether she was mentally competent to be executed. Similar questions had been raised throughout her final years on death row.
Florida law required only that she understand why the sentence was imposed and that execution would result in death. Three psychiatrists examined Wuornos before the scheduled date, interviewing the death row inmate and concluding she met that standard, the Herald-Tribune reported at the time.
Wuornos belonged to a rare demographic. Women make up roughly two percent of death row inmates in America.
One of the few others in that category is Christa Pike, whose own execution is scheduled to proceed in the coming days. Her legal team has mounted urgent appeals to overturn or delay the sentence without success.
If the execution moves forward, Pike has requested that an all-female team carry it out. She would become the first woman put to death in Texas in over 200 years.
The real Wuornos maintained until her trial that the men she killed had sexually assaulted her, but prosecutors argued the murders were premeditated. The 12-month killing spree made her one of the most notorious female criminals in modern American history.
Netflix’s Monster anthology has previously dramatized the lives of Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez brothers before turning to the Borden murders and Wuornos’s place within true crime’s pantheon of infamous figures.