Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan are expanding the Lizzie Borden Netflix cast in the fourth season of Monster, turning a long-running true-crime franchise toward the 1892 murders in Fall River, Massachusetts. The move folds one of the most debated US murder cases into a series that has already used Jeffery Dahmer, Lyle and Erik Menendez, and Ed Gein as season-long subjects.
Lizzie Borden was 32 when Andrew Borden and Abby Borden were killed in August 1892, and she was tried and acquitted of the murders in June 1893. That age matters because it places her in the center of a case that was litigated around conduct, class, and gender in a way that still invites dramatization more than a century later.
Fall River in August 1892
The killings began with Abby Borden, who was 64. Andrew Borden was killed more than an hour later, and police found him on the living room sofa after 11 hatchet blows. Only Lizzie Borden and Bridget Sullivan were at the house when the murders occurred, while Emma was away on holiday. Those details keep the case hard-edged and narrow: a small house, a short window, and a sequence that investigators and storytellers have returned to for 134 years.
Lizzie Borden also taught at Fall River's Central Congregational Church, which adds another layer to how the case has been remembered in the US. Ryan Murphy has said Monster asks, “Are monsters made or are they born?” That question fits a season built around a woman who was at first not suspected, then faced evidence and testimony that led to arrest and murder charges.
June 1893 and Boston
A judge had Lizzie Borden arrested and jailed after a local pharmacist reported that she had tried to buy poisonous prussic acid on the day before the murders. In December, a friend testified to a grand jury that she had burned a dress in the stove a few days after the killings. She later hired a top lawyer from Boston to defend her in front of an all-male jury, at a time when only men could serve on juries.
Joseph Conforti captured the case’s public framing in Lizzie Borden on Trial: Murder, Ethnicity and Gender, writing, “She presented herself as a helpless maiden.” That line tracks with why Monster keeps returning to figures like Lizzie Borden: the franchise trades on cases where the public record leaves enough room for performance, suspicion, and interpretation to do the rest.
Monster and the Borden record
The new season gives Netflix another true-crime property with a built-in audience for famous murder cases, but it also sharpens an old dispute about the historical record. Schoolchildren still recite the rhyme about Lizzie Borden, though it misidentifies the weapon and the number of blows; the story survives because the facts are grim enough without embellishment.
Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan have not explained why they chose Lizzie Borden for Monster’s fourth season, and that omission is part of the appeal now. The case already has the ingredients the series likes most: a household crime, a contested trial, a woman at the center, and a record that still leaves room for argument.
