A Daughter on Death Row

BACKGROUND: In a December story, View spoke with Arlene Pralle, 44, the born-again Christian who legally adopted accused serial killer Aileen Wuornos, 35, after seeing her picture in the paper and befriending her in jail.

The hitchhiking “Damsel of Death” was charged with murder in five of the seven killings to which she has confessed.

UPDATE: Wuornos is now on Death Row in Florida, awaiting a date with the electric chair, after her Jan. 27 conviction in the slaying of Richard Mallory, 51, a video-store owner.

Wuornos goes on trial again May 4 in Ocala, Fla., in the death of Charles R. Humphreys, a 56-year-old former Alabama police chief.

Pralle talked to her adopted daughter the night before her sentencing in the Mallory case. “She was frightened, but she maintained her faith in God and believed that a miracle would be worked,” Pralle said in a telephone interview from her north Florida horse farm.

“It’s a relief in that it’s over,” Pralle says. “There was that scariness of not knowing what (the trial) is going to be like. Now, there’s nothing scary left. We’ve been through it.”

Wuornos maintains that she killed in self-defense, only when being raped or brutalized. Prosecutors say she lured traveling men to secluded spots, robbed them to support herself and her female lover, then shot them in cold blood.

Pralle defends Wuornos, saying the verdict “gives rapists an open door, an encouragement, to kill prostitutes and get away with it.”