About
Sue Russell is an award-winning journalist and author based in California. She has written for numerous publications including the Washington Post, New Scientist, Salon.com, PSmag.com, Miller-McCune.com, American Legion, Alternet.org, GE’s Healthymagination.com, Healthline.com, and the UK’s Independent, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Express, Sunday Times. Her work has also been published in international publications like Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Hong Kong Tatler and Irish Tatler.
Russell writes often about crime, criminal justice, forensic science, wrongful convictions, animal rights research and law, missing persons, female gangs, health and medicine, social and women’s issues.
Her fact crime book Lethal Intent, a “true crime classic,” is a biography of executed serial killer Aileen Wuornos who shot seven men to death in Florida and was executed in 2002. It was fully updated in 2013. When 2014’s Serial Podcast phenomenon swept the US, Lethal Intent was on Business Insider’s list, “11 True Crime Books You Should Read If You’re Obsessed with Serial,” alongside Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter. Former FBI agent, pioneering profiler and best-selling author, John Douglas, called Lethal Intent “Shocking, sad, revealing and deeply researched…”
Along with illustrator/co-author Elizabeth Williams, Russell wrote The Illustrated Courtroom: 50+ Years of Court Art (CUNY Journalism Press, 2014, 2nd edition 2022, Redwood Publishing.) It was named to Kirkus Reviews’ “Best Books of 2014” and was a Times Literary Supplement pick for “Books of the Year 2014.” With iconic artwork from five award-winning court artists, it takes readers into celebrated trials like those of Jack Ruby, the Black Panthers, Charles Manson, Patty Hearst and Michael Jackson. It received four ELit Awards.
Russell enjoys editing and ghostwriting books for others. She has appeared on numerous television and radio shows both sides of the Atlantic — and beyond — including A&E channel’s Biography and Notorious, Investigation Discovery Channel’s Deadly Women, CNN and HLN broadcasts, Britain’s This Morning and Good Morning Australia, etc.
BOOKS: Lethal Intent, Pinnacle Books USA. Book of the Month Club selection. (Published in the UK and Australia as Damsel of Death.) The Illustrated Courtroom: 50+ Years of Court Art (co-author) CUNY Journalism Press 2014, Redwood Publishing 2022. How to Buy & Sell (just about) Everything (contributor) Free Press, USA. Star Mothers: The Moms Behind the Celebrities, Simon & Schuster, USA, & St. Martin’s Press, USA (hardback & paperback.) (Co-authors: Cher’s mother & Phyllis Quinn.) Sensual Beauty: co-author with Britt Ekland. Sidgwick & Jackson, U.K., Merrimack, USA (hardback & paperback.) Ghostwritten titles.
Featured Work
Lethal Intent
Serial killer Aileen Wuornos always craved fame. Long before she was hunted and caught by Florida law enforcement, long before she confessed to killing seven men, she told friends that she wanted to do something “no woman has ever done before” and wanted a book about her life. That life was ended by lethal injection in 2002 after more than a decade on Florida’s Death Row.
Sue Russell’s book, Lethal Intent, is packed with exclusive material that sheds a different light on this rare, if not unique, serial killer. It contains insights and intimate memories from her family, friends and childhood peers (some of whom lost their virginities to Aileen, who began prostituting herself at a shockingly early age).
The book reveals Aileen’s devastating double abandonment by her mother before she was age two, the crimes of her father, and the myriad events that helped set her path of destruction. It contests the widespread superficial judgment of Wuornos as a “man-hating lesbian” via insights from men with whom she shared sexual and romantic relationships. Lethal Intent also explores the dynamics of her fateful relationship with Tyria Moore, the lesbian lover who knew Aileen was killing yet stayed by her side, and how those dynamics moved her closer to a life of murder.
Other Works
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The Illustrated Courtroom: 50 Years of Court Art
2014
