Aileen Wuornos Alloplastic Adaptation

Aileen Wuornos was born on February 29, 1956 in Rochester, Michigan; at a young age she and her brother, Keith, were raised by their grandparents, after her parents divorced just months before Aileen was born. Her father, a career criminal, was later convicted of kidnapping and raping a seven year old girl and eventually hung himself in his prison cell. Wuornos grandparents drank heavily and parented with strict authority. Wuornos would later say that she was sexually abused by her grandfather and had sexual relations with her brother. She became pregnant at the age of 14, and the baby was given up for adoption, and was forced out of her home and lived in the woods. She was arrested during the mid 1970s for charges related to assault and disorderly

conduct. In Florida, she met a wealthy man Lewis Fell where she settled and married him in 1976, but the marriage ended shortly thereafter, Wuornos was arrested in another altercation. A decade later, having been involved in numerous additional crimes, Wuornos met Tyria Moore, and the two embarked on a romantic relationship. From late 1989 into the fall of 1990, Wuornos had murdered at least six men along Florida highways. In December 1989, the body of Richard Mallory was found in a junkyard, with five more men’s bodies to be discovered over subsequent months. Authorities were eventually able to track down Wuornos and Moore but to avoid prosecution, Moore made a deal, and in January 1991 she conducted a phone confession from Wuornos, where she took full and sole responsibility for the murders. During the trial, Wuornos asserted that she had been raped and assaulted by Mallory and had killed him in self defense and that the killings of the other five men had been in self defense as well. On January 27, 1992, a jury found Wuornos guilty of first degree murder for the Mallory case and she received the death penalty. After spending a decade on death row, Wuornos eventually to fire her appeals lawyers, who were working for a stay of execution. Aileen Wuornos was executed by lethal injection on the morning of October 9, 2002.
I believe that she was mentally ill because she fired her lawyers and she basically said that she just wants to die, and someone that is not mentally ill would think that way.

I think that she is both alloplastic adaptation and autoplastic adaptation. First, alloplastic because she committed crime to change her environment as she was living in the woods and streets she may have encounter many crimes and she just did the same. Secondly, I think she also experienced autoplastic adaption because as she committed a crime it was stressful and to deal with it she committed another crime after another. Also, I believe that a well being person would not committed crime to feel better unless they were mentally ill as I believe she was. I think that sociopath and neuroticism for personality trait should be applied to this case. Sociopath is defined as cruel and without thought or feelings for victims. The characteristics are poverty or inability to imagine how others feel and think. All this is Wourons live because when she was thrown out her grandparents home she did not had any money and she killed and perhaps the victims were not trying to hurt her but the inability to think as a well being human could not permitted her. Neuroticism is of typical people who are irrational, shy, moody, and emotional which Wourons did in her life and during her trial. As a child she did not have friends and had sexual relations with her brother which I find that irrational and perhaps that is why

she was emotional. In trial she admitted killing the men and after she just wants to get the sentence over with and was executed. If she was mentally ill was would of received help and not been executed but she could not of realize that because of her mentality.