Starke, Fla. ? Aileen Wuornos went to her execution voluntarily and peacefully Wednesday morning, dying less violently than the seven men she shot to death on her way to becoming one of the first female serial killers in U.S. history.

“She was extremely happy, ready to go. She has made her peace,” said Dawn Botkins, a longtime friend who spent three hours with Wuornos at Florida State Prison late Tuesday night and will take her ashes back to Michigan for burial.

Wuornos was condemned to death for the murder of Richard Mallory, 51, a Clearwater, Fla., appliance-store owner. She later confessed to killing six other men.

Terry Griffith, daughter of another victim, Charles “Dick” Humphreys, watched the execution and called it, “a very easy death. I think she should have suffered a little bit more.”

Wuornos, 46, hitchhiked the highways and interstates of north-central Florida, where she robbed and killed her middle-age victims over 13 months between 1989 and ’90. She once claimed she was a prostitute, then recanted. She gave much of what she stole to her lover, police said.

Wuornos voluntarily stopped all appeals, saying she wanted to end a tragic life of violence. She was abandoned at birth by her parents, raped before she was a teen and gave birth to a baby before she had a driver’s license.

Botkins said there was a better side to Wuornos that she first got to know when they were in high school in Michigan. It was one of kindness and generosity, especially to the less-fortunate around her.

Botkins knew a Wuornos who was a “very good person with a heart of gold.”

Dawn Botkins makes arrangements with a funeral home to pick up the cremated remains of Aileen Wuornos. Wuornos was executed Wednesday at the Florida State Prison. Botkins spent Tuesday night visiting Wuornos, a childhood friend.

They lost touch, then renewed their friendship many years later after Wuornos was arrested in 1990, exchanging frequent letters. In those letters, Wuornos sometimes spoke to Botkins’ two children, warning them to live a more righteous life than she had.

Wuornos was the 10th woman in the United States and second from Florida to be executed since the resumption of capital punishment in 1976.

State Atty. John Tanner, who prosecuted Wuornos, witnessed her execution.

“The evidence was overwhelming that she killed seven men in cold blood,” Tanner said.

Botkins said that during their Tuesday night visit, Wuornos prayed for the families of her seven victims, asking forgiveness for the pain that she caused them. She was also angry because she believed that police could have caught her earlier but didn’t.

The visit, which Botkins said was upbeat and without tears, ended at midnight.

Nine and a half hours later, as Wuornos lay bound by leather straps to a blue surgical gurney, her eyes searched the audience quickly, witnesses said. Then, looking at the ceiling, she said: “I’d just like to say I’m sailing with the Rock and I’ll be back like Independence Day with Jesus, June 6, like the movie, big mothership and all. I’ll be back.”

The “Rock” is a biblical reference to Christ.