After a jury convicted Aileen Wuornos of first-degree murder in January, 1992, she dismissed its members as "scumbags of America." To the media, she insisted: "I'm innocent! I was raped! I was tortured!" The case of Wuornos, 46, who is scheduled to die by lethal injection in Florida on Wednesday, is a lurid one. Not least because she was a lesbian and a prostitute who told police she'd slept with 250,000 johns, her story has inspired books, a made-for-TV movie, a documentary film and a play. Last year, an opera based on her life premiered in San Francisco. But the...