The monster prostitute serial killer RETURNS: As an Ohio sex worker faces a QUADRUPLE homicide trial, the nightmare of America's worst female murderer - immortalized on screen by Charlize Theron - is reawakened...

The 911 call to Columbus, Ohio police must have seemed depressingly routine.

30-year-old male incapacitated. Suspected overdose.

Except, Joseph Crumpler's death in January was anything but ordinary.

When paramedics arrived at his rundown bungalow on the northeast side of the city, he was in critical condition. At the hospital, he died – another sad statistic in a drug-ravaged city.

But then a second man turned up dead on April 1; a third on April 17; a fourth on June 17. All overdoses. All suspicious.

In short order, police arrested 33-year-old Rebecca Auborn and charged her with murder after she reportedly admitted to lacing Crumpler's crack pipe with fentanyl.

It wouldn't have been complicated: A lethal dose of heroin is 100 mg, about the size of a quarter teaspoon. But a lethal dose of fentanyl is just 2 mg, equivalent to a few grains of sands.

A prostitute, Auborn – red-haired, pudgy and disheveled – hardly fit the mold of a femme fatale. But prosecutors allege she hovered around Columbus-area motels where she encountered her prey, accompanying them home or to rented rooms, where she'd drug the unsuspecting Johns before stealing their wallets, cash and cars.

Now she awaits trial on four counts of murder and five counts of corrupting another with drugs. A fifth purported victim survived.

Certainly, more questions remain, including whether - in the words of Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost - Auborn may number among the rarest of criminals: a female serial killer.

Already her case has drawn comparison to another notorious prostitute, Aileen Wuornos, a.k.a. 'The Damsel of Death,' perhaps best known by a single word: Monster. Her sordid tale was turned into a 2003 film of that title.

Charlize Theron played the lead. The blonde bombshell transformed her face to resemble Wuornos' scarred visage which was burned in a childhood accident. The role won Theron the Oscar for Best Actress.

Christina Ricci played Wuornos' lesbian lover Tyria Moore – and it was Moore who eventually helped convict Wuornos for one of the most vicious murder sprees in American history.

The rampage began on the night of November 30, 1989, when Richard Mallory, 51, locked up his TV repair store in Palm Harbor. Instead of driving home to Clearwater, eight miles south, Mallory drove east along Interstate 4, which crosses central Florida from Tampa to Daytona Beach.

He was looking for sex and found Wuornos, who walked Florida's highways trawling for clients and pretending to be in need of help – a damsel in distress. She carried a photograph of children - not her own - and told drivers she needed a ride to a motel where they were waiting for her.

Mallory picked Wuornos up, she claimed at trial, and drove to an isolated area, where they drank vodka, smoked marijuana, and talked for hours. Then, she said, Mallory looped a cord around her neck, tied her hands to the steering wheel, raped, sodomized and threatened to kill her 'like the other sluts I've done.'

Wuornos said she eventually wrestled free, grabbed the .22-caliber pistol she kept in her purse and shot Mallory multiple times in the chest. Two weeks later, his body was discovered in a Daytona Beach junkyard by men searching for scrap metal to sell.

It's this scene - graphically depicted in Monster - that Wuornos biographer Sue Russell said led some to assume Wuornos killed in self-defense. But Russell, a journalist who covered Wuornos' 13-day trial, told DailyMail.com 'there was compelling evidence that painted a very different picture.'

'She killed to rob, and killed deliberately in cold blood,' said Russell. 'She carried a 'kill bag' containing her gun, and Windex to clean off fingerprints from her victims' cars.'

Neither Russell, nor the jury, which found Wuornos guilty of first-degree murder and armed robbery after less than two hours of deliberations, believed her. After all, self-defense doesn't explain how'd she go on to kill six more times.

The naked body of David Spears, a 43-year-old construction worker, was found on June 1, 1990, in the woods north of Tampa. He'd been shot six times in the torso with a .22-calibre. A used condom lay near the body.

Forty-year-old part-time rodeo worker and bull rider, Charles Carskaddon, turned up in Pasco County, also naked. He was shot nine times. Wuornos stole his .45 calibre pistol with a pearl handle.

Whether all of Wuornos' targets were seeking sex is unclear. There is little doubt about her first three, but some of the victim's families insist their loved ones were likely trying to help her.

In the case of retired merchant marine seaman Peter Siems, 65, we may never know: his body has still not been found.

Troy Burress, a 50-year-old salesman, was unlikely to have paid for sex, his family said. He was discovered face down, fully clothed, on August 4, 1990, less than a week after he was reported missing.

The wife of Charles 'Dick' Humphreys, a former Alabama police chief, was adamant that he would never knowingly pick-up a prostitute.

Humphreys had worked as an investigator specializing in abused and injured children. On September 10, 1990, the 56-year-old celebrated his 35th wedding anniversary; on September 11, he turned up dead.

Wuornos' seventh and final victim was also found fully clothed, and with valuable items missing.

Walter Gino Antonio, a 62-year-old security guard and police reservist, was found without his handcuffs, reserve deputy badge, police billy club, flashlight, Timex wristwatch, suitcase, toolbox and baseball cap.

By this time, police had started to put together the pieces of Wuornos murder spree.

Witnesses saw her and Moore running from Peter Siems' Pontiac Sunbird after crashing it on a Seminole Indian Reservation. Wuornos left a bloody palm print behind and cops connected it to pawn shops where she sold stolen goods.

Her girlfriend, Tyria Moore saw a police sketch resembling the two of them on television and decided to split around Thanksgiving in 1990.

The net tightened. Undercover officers infiltrated the seedy dives she frequented and the rest stops where she was known to work.

Wuornos was arrested on January 9, 1991 while drinking a beer at The Last Resort biker bar in Port Orange, Florida.

Moore would later testify against her former lover at trial - describing the day that she came home to their motel after her very first murder – the killing of Richard Mallory.

'Did she ever advise you that the man she had shot did anything to her?' the prosecutor was asked. 'No she didn't,' Moore replied. 'We were just sitting around watching TV and drinking a few beers. She seemed fine.'

Wuornos was convicted on January 27, 1992.

When the verdict was announced, Wuornos yelled at the jury: 'I was raped. I hope you get raped, scumbags of America.' She was sentenced to death and later admitted to all seven killings. On October 9, 2002, she was executed by lethal injection in a Florida State Prison outside of Jacksonville.

Today, the bar where Wuornos was arrested is still something of a tourist attraction: its slogan 'Home of ice-cold beer and killer women.'

Pictures of Wuornos and her mug shot plaster the walls. A mural on the bar's brick wall depicts her craggy face and a list of her victims. Theron signed one of the bricks while filming there.

Meanwhile, new details about Rebecca Auborn's alleged victims are starting to emerge, and much like the men who fell prey to Wuornos, they leave behind grieving, heartbroken families.

Wayne Akin, 64, a retired Postal Worker, was found dead at his North Columbus apartment at 12:44 PM on April 17. 

It was his birthday.

His daughter, Ittai Crockett, - a local church administrator - had recently reconnected with her estranged dad.  He was a man, she says, who worked hard to move his family out of the worst neighborhoods of Columbus.

'He was always intent on making sure that we had a good life with stable parents and a solid upbringing,' Crockett said. But after developing chronic fatigue syndrome, his daughter claims, he turned to hard drugs. 

Crockett was planning on calling her dad on the evening of April 17 to wish him a happy birthday. Instead, she received the news that he had died. 

Upon entering his apartment, Crockett found women's underwear on the floor and his wallet and phone missing.  Months later, police told Crockett that his death was being investigated as a homicide.   

As for Auborn, her story remains to be written. But if her sister is to be believed, she may attempt something akin to a Wuornos defense.

'This is my baby sister,' Michelle Vaughters wrote on Facebook back in August. 'If anyone ever needed anything and she had it she wouldn't think twice to give it to them… She was an addict getting another addict some dope.'

Prosecutors appear to disagree. They allege that Rebecca Auborn, like Alieen Wuornos, knew full well what she was doing.