The Last Resort Bar
Port Orange is a small Central Florida town of around 65,000, located about 15 minutes north of Daytona Beach. On South Ridgewood Avenue, there is a gritty biker bar known as The Last Resort. In the early 1990s, a female drifter frequented the establishment, sometimes even spending the night on the old vinyl car seat on the porch.
She had stringy blonde hair and a weathered face that made her look easily two decades older than her 34 years and was described as quiet and reserved. Pool was her pastime of choice and she had an affinity for playing Randy Travis’s “Digging Up Bones” on the cash-only bar’s jukebox.
On January 9, 1991, the bar’s name seemed to match her station in life. She had just been abandoned by her girlfriend and was so down on her luck that she couldn’t afford the nearby $15 a night motel that she sometimes called home. When two of the men she’d been drinking with the night before offered to rent her a motel room for the night, she quickly accepted, before walking out of the bar with them and right into the custody of a couple of Volusia County sheriffs.
The two men were actually undercover cops, and she was ostensibly being arrested on an outstanding warrant for possession of a concealed weapon. Bar patrons knew her as a probable sex worker who looked like the hard life she’d led. We know her as Aileen Carol Wuornos.
Nicknamed “The Damsel of Death,” Wuornos was convicted in 1992 for the murders of six Florida men who had solicited her for sex. She confessed to seven, but the body of Peter Siems was never found, and she was not charged. Wuornos initially asserted that she’d killed the men in self-defense, after they’d either raped or attempted to rape her, though she eventually retracted that claim.
In 2001, she wrote to the Florida Supreme Court: “I killed those men robbed them as cold as ice. And I'd do it again, too. There's no chance in keeping me alive or anything, because I'd kill again." One of the men, Richard Mallory, had in fact spent time in jail for attempted sexual assault.
On October 9, 2002, Wuornos was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison, and her last words were: “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. Big mothership and all, I’ll be back, I’ll be back."
So, does Wuorno’s spirit now haunt her old haunt? There are those who think so. Current bartender Ted E. Bear reports that Aileen likes to disturb her when she’s airbrushing at the bar, and that attractive women sometimes feel her brush their hair. Paranormal investigators have claimed to see floating orbs and objects moving inexplicably and a bell is said to mysteriously ring somewhere in the bar.
Bear also claims that shortly after Wuornos’s execution, there was a Dollar Store skeleton in the bar, whose left arm kept going missing and turning up in odd places. She says this is significant because the lethal concoction was injected into Wuornos’s left arm. Bartenders report that mail addressed to Wuornos still comes to the bar, though it’s mostly miscellaneous subscriptions and magazines.
Aileen Wuornos remains a controversial figure, a cult (and even feminist) hero in that good-for-her, she-did-nothing-wrong way. Al Bulling, owner of The Last Resort, feels only sympathy. According to him: "She was a victim. Everybody makes up stories [about her] like Bonnie and Clyde or Al Capone because there’s nobody around to verify that.”
Today, the bar leans into its status as a macabre tourist attraction, selling T-shirts and Crazed Killer Hot Sauce. Mugshots, photos, and newspaper clippings cover the walls, and there is an altar dedicated to Wuornos near the back exit. It displays the names of the men she killed and is adorned with stuffed animals and other trinkets. The bar was featured in Patty Jenkins’ 2003 biopic Monster, in which Wuornos is portrayed by a near-unrecognizable Charlize Theron.
Bulling was there the night Wuornos was arrested and still has a collection of her belongings, including the bra she placed in the rafters on her last night of freedom. Bulling reports that “a teaspoon” of Wuornos’s ashes were scattered near a tree behind the bar, and perhaps that is why she never left The Last Resort.
According to Bear: “Oh, Aileen lets you know she's here all right. You can feel her presence."
