Closing the book on a killer. (Crime).

The last chapter in the story of one of the few known female serial killers ended with the execution of Arleen Wuornos in Florida state prison October 9. Wuornos, a lesbian who worked as a prostitute, killed at least six men in Florida between 1989 and 1991. She confessed to police after investigators started looking at her girlfriend, Tyria Moore, as a suspect.

For years Wuornos claimed she shot the men in self-defense while being raped and sodomized. But she recanted in 2000, and she later wrote to the Florida supreme court, "I'm one who seriously hates human life and would kill again." This year she won the right to end her court appeals.

Wuornos's case has inspired three books, a documentary, a TV movie, an opera, and now a Hollywood film. On the day Wuornos died by lethal injection, The Hollywood Reporter said that actress Charlize Theron had signed on to play Wuornos in an upcoming independent film called Monster. Director-writer Patty Jenkins described the film as "a character film centered [on] the relationship between the two women" and compared it to films such as Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands.