Hello and welcome to Badgays, a podcast all about evil and complicated queer people in history.

My name's Hugh Lemmy. I'm a writer and author. And I'm Ben Miller, a writer, researcher, and member

of the board of the Shulis Museum in Berlin. Last week, we discussed Roger Casement, an Irish nationalist

and anti-colonial whistleblower. Who are we discussing this week, Ben?

In 1992, four years before the sensational trial of O.J. Simpson, and six years before the

sex scandal surrounding President Bill Clinton and his intern, Monica Lewinsky, another

massively publicized media-driven trial swept the nation, and the subject was our subject

this week, Eileen

Warnas. Warnas, an itinerant sex worker, was arrested for the murders of seven men in or near

Volusia County, Florida in 1989 and 1990. All of them had been shot while Warnas was on the job.

All of them had been shot at point-blank range. A series of trials followed, in which Warnas pled self-defense, claiming that the men had raped

her or threatened to. She had been turned into the police by her butch lover, the hotel-maid Tyria Moore.

She became, in the view of the public and the media, according to the filmmaker Nick Brimfield, who made two documentaries

about her and about the media storm that came to surround her, a, quote, man-hating lesbian

prostitute who tarnished the reputations of her victims, end quote, a useful foil for family

values string-em-up dead politicians who wanted to show that they were tough on crime.

Never receiving more than comically incompetent legal representation, which is not uncommon in the

United States, where you get the justice system you can afford to buy, she languished on

death row for years. I'm going to say right now that this is an episode that deals very frankly

with sexual violence and other kinds of violence, including sexual violence against children, murder, sexual abuse and assault, and graphic depictions of all of the above.

Listeners who would prefer not to hear graphic depictions of those topics should probably skip this episode entirely.

We are not going to give any content warnings for further descriptions beyond that point because the episode would otherwise mostly be content warnings. So here's your opportunity to stop listening. If you'd rather not hear about this stuff, we don't want to subject anything to anybody that don't want to hear. But there's just no way to talk about this case without being very frank. And unfortunately, the story of sexual violence begins very young here, so now would be a

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