Oxygen Insider Exclusive!

Create a free profile to get unlimited access to exclusive videos, breaking news, sweepstakes, and more!

Sign Up for Free to View
Crime News Breaking News

'A Girl's Gotta Do What A Girl's Gotta Do:' Trailer For New Movie About Aileen Wuornos's Marriage To Millionaire Released

Peyton List plays serial killer Aileen Wuornos when the notorious serial killer was in her early twenties.

By Gina Tron
Peyton List Will Play Aileen Wuornos In Upcoming Movie

The trailer for “Aileen Wuornos: American Boogeywoman," an upcoming film depicting future serial killer Aileen Wuornos through her rocky marriage to a millionaire, has been released this week.

The film takes place in Daytona Beach in the 1970s when Wuornos was in her early twenties. It promises to portray her life as she meets Lewis Fell, a wealthy 69-year-old yacht club president, as Deadline reported in March. The two shared a short and turbulent marriage which resulted in the millionaire filing a restraining order against Wuornos, claiming she beat him with his cane. After only nine weeks together, Fell had the marriage annulled.

The two-minute-long trailer, released Monday, features a fictionalization of the moment in which Wuornos meets Fell. She’s introduced to him through his daughter, Wuornos’ new friend; in the scene, that friend appears noticeably disgusted when Wuornos begins to flirt with her father.

While Wuornos later tells Fell in the trailer that he’s the best thing that ever happened to her, we know that doesn’t last long — soon her character is making herself the authorized signer on all his accounts and tries to close them out at the bank.

Peyton List Aileen Wuornos G

A girls’ gotta do what a girl’s gotta do,” Wuornos, played by Peyton List, say.

The trailer is full of suspense as Fell’s family begins to worry that Wuornos may be a sociopath.

“She does not have a conscience like other people,” one relative says.

Years after she terrorized that family, she became one of America’s most notorious serial killers. Scenes that allude to her spree of killings along Florida highways are included in the trailer.

In total, Wuornos has been linked to seven murders between 1989 and 1990 along Florida's Interstate 75. After her arrest, Wuornos claimed that she only killed in self-defense and that her first victim violently raped her while she was a sex worker. In 1992, as she was found guilty of first-degree murder, she shouted that she was raped.

Wuornos was sentenced to death the same year and executed by lethal injection in 2002. 

A year after Wuornos’ execution, the movie “Monster” was released, starring Charlize Theron. That film explored her case with empathy but focused on Wuornos at the time she was actively killing men. “American Boogeywoman” appears to be a prequel to those events that takes a similar multifaceted look at Wournos' life.

“I guess I always did dream of being famous,” Wuornos says in the new trailer.

The film will be released on Sept. 20 in theaters for one night only. It will be available on-demand elsewhere on Oct. 8. The new film is connected to “America’s Boogeyman,” a new movie about Ted Bundy created by the same production company.

“American Boogeyman” has stirred up controversy this week after critics called it yet another Bundy film that romanticizes serial killers. It was released in theaters for one night only on Aug. 16 and hits demand on Sept. 3.