What turns a bedwetting twelve-year-old girl with bruises she does not talk about into the woman the cameras would, two decades later, call America's first female serial killer?

The answer is not the one the headlines gave you.

Aileen Wuornos killed seven men along the Florida highways in twelve months. She confessed to all of them, took the stand against her own lawyers, and screamed at the jury that she hoped their wives and daughters would suffer the same fate she claimed had been done to her. The state of Florida killed her by lethal injection in October 2002. The mug shot, the courtroom outburst, the Hollywood film, the Christian mother who adopted her on death row, you have probably met them all.

You have not, however, met the person underneath.

This is the book that opens her up. Not the monster of the documentaries. Not the saint the religious lobby tried to sell. The woman herself, decoded layer by layer, from the lie about her parents that broke her at twelve to the .22 in the bag that finally answered the question the lie had been asking.

Drawing on the latest research in trauma neuroscience, attachment theory, and the dark psychology of predatory offenders, this is true crime as it should be written. Unflinching about the bodies. Honest about the why.

By the last page, you will understand exactly how a child gets assembled into a killer.

You may also recognise some of the ingredients.