For three seasons, Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan's "Monster" anthology has asked audiences to sit uncomfortably close to men who kill--Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers, and Ed Gein. On September 17, that formula breaks.
"Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story," the fourth season of the anthology, drops all eight episodes at once on Netflix, and for the first time, the killer at the centre of the frame is a woman. And Ella Beatty stars as Lizzie Borden.
The case itself needs no introduction to true-crime devotees, but for the uninitiated: Lizzie Borden was accused of the axe murders of her father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892. It is still one of the most enduringly debated criminal cases in American history.
Before Netflix's version takes its liberties, here's the actual case "Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story" is built on.
And it all goes back to the morning of August 4, 1892.
Andrew and Abby Borden were found dead in the home they shared with Lizzie and her older sister Emma in Fall River, Massachusetts. Andrew's body was discovered on a sitting-room couch, his head and face struck repeatedly with an axe or hatchet.
Police then found Abby's body upstairs. She was also brutally murdered earlier that same morning.
Besides Lizzie, the only other person in the house was the family's maid, Bridget Sullivan. And that made Lizzie the prime suspect almost immediately. By her own account, she'd been in the barn eating pears before finding her father's body. She said she didn't go looking for her stepmother afterward.
No weapon, no witness, no confession
This is the detail most adaptations gloss over: there was no physical evidence tying Lizzie to the crime. No murder weapon was ever conclusively identified, and Lizzie had no blood on her despite the killings happening in a window of roughly fifteen minutes.
Even police testimony about the suspected hatchet contradicted itself at trial. Motive was murky, too. The Bordens were wealthy; Lizzie and Emma stood to inherit.
Lizzie reportedly had a strained relationship with her stepmother, but none of it was ever proven. A druggist was prepared to testify that a Borden woman had once tried to buy poison and been refused. The court excluded that testimony entirely.
Lizzie was arrested and charged on August 11, 1892, a week after the bodies were found. Her inconsistent answers under police questioning, and her strikingly composed demeanor throughout, did little to help her in the court of public opinion even before the trial began.
The trial
The trial opened on June 5, 1893, in New Bedford, with defense attorneys George D. Robinson (a former Massachusetts governor) and Andrew Jennings representing Lizzie against prosecutors Hosea Knowlton and William H. Moody. Newspapers covered it obsessively, and public opinion split hard between "vengeful harpy" and "wrongly accused Christian woman."
The turning point came from the bench. Judge Justin Dewey ruled that Lizzie's confused statements to police couldn't be used at trial. The reason being she’d made them without a lawyer present.
Without that testimony or the poison evidence, prosecutors leaned almost entirely on circumstantial argument. The case's most theatrical moment came when the district attorney, mid-closing-argument, dropped Lizzie's dress onto the prosecution table, revealing her parents' actual skulls kept as evidence.
Lizzie reportedly fainted at the sight, swinging courtroom sympathy sharply her way.
The verdict
On June 20, 1893, an all-male, all-white, Protestant jury deliberated for roughly 90 minutes before returning a verdict of not guilty. By most historical accounts, jurors simply couldn't accept that a respectable, church-going woman of Lizzie's standing was capable of such violence. The murders remain officially unsolved.
Life after acquittal
Lizzie was ostracized in Fall River, though she never left town. She and Emma bought a fourteen-room house they named Maplecroft, where Lizzie, who began going by "Lizbeth," lived a largely private life. She started traveling to Boston, New York, and Washington and formed a close friendship with stage actress Nance O'Neil. She and Emma eventually had a falling out. Lizzie died in 1927 at age 66, still shadowed by suspicion.
No weapon, no confession, no alternate suspect ever charged. That vacuum is exactly what period dramas like "Monster" are built to fill, reading motive and repression into gaps the record never closed.
Whatever liberties the show takes, the core facts remain: two people were killed with a hatchet on a hot August morning. A woman was tried and acquitted on evidence too thin to convict but too suspicious to fully clear her.