Aileen Wuornos's Messed Up Childhood Will Actually Make You Feel Bad For A Serial Killer

The story of Wuornos's pregnancy is one of the few pieces of her backstory that's been corroborated, but like much of her past, it's clouded in misremembering and rumor. Many retellings of her origin story claim Wuornos's brother, Keith, was the father of her child. While that's possible, there's a more likely, and equally as troubling, explanation. Other versions allege her grandfather's friend impregnated her.

Both in the Nick Broomfield documentary Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer and in an interview with Broadly, Wuornos's best friend, Dawn Botkins, claims that Wuornos was raped and impregnated by a known pedophile. Botkins told Broadly:

The guy that raped her... was, like, 60 years old, and he loved all the kids. [Aileen] was drunk, and he'd take advantage of her and sh*t like that, so that's who she got pregnant by.

After she gave birth at age 15, she named the boy Keith after her brother, fueling rumors the baby was his. Her grandfather, however, forced her to put the infant boy up for adoption, and she never saw him again.