Rebecca Hall is tied to a new Lizzie Borden project as Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan make the accused woman the focus of the fourth season of Monster on Netflix. The case has lingered for more than 130 years, and this turn keeps one of the most famous unsolved crimes in the US in active circulation.
In June 1893, Borden was tried and acquitted of murdering her father and stepmother. That trial, not the killings alone, is what gives the new season its edge: the story is built around a figure the public has never stopped reinterpreting, and Hall’s name points to another pass at the same legal and cultural rupture.
June 1893 and Fall River
In August 1892, Andrew Borden and Abby Borden were killed in Fall River, Massachusetts, and the details have stayed lodged in public memory ever since. Andrew Borden was 64, Abby Borden was his second wife, and the family maid, Bridget Sullivan, was in the house when the murders happened.
The case moved quickly from violence to suspicion. Andrew Borden was found on the living room sofa after 11 hatchet blows, and a local pharmacist later reported that Lizzie Borden had tried to buy poisonous prussic acid on the day before the murders. That report sent the case toward arrest, jail, and then formal murder charges.
Joseph Conforti and the trial
Joseph Conforti, in Lizzie Borden on Trial: Murder, Ethnicity and Gender, wrote that Lizzie Borden hired a top lawyer from Boston with her late father's money. He also wrote that only men could serve on juries in that era, a structural fact that shaped how the case was heard and judged.
Conforti's account gives the trial its sharpest visual detail. He wrote that Borden “presented herself as a helpless maiden,” that “Her lawyers told her to dress in black,” and that “She appeared in court tightly corseted, dressed in flowing clothes, and holding a bouquet of flowers.” Those choices turned the courtroom into a performance space as much as a legal one.
Monster and the Borden draw
Ryan Murphy has said the show's portrayals aim at the question, “Are monsters made or are they born?” That framing is why this season lands with businesslike logic: Rebecca Hall leads the Lizzie Borden Netflix series, and the material already has the one thing anthology true crime needs most, a case that audiences think they know but still cannot settle cleanly.
The contradiction is the story's engine. Lizzie Borden was first treated as a suspect only after evidence and testimony piled up, yet she was later acquitted, leaving the murders among the most infamous unsolved mysteries in the US. For Monster, that means the fourth season is not just revisiting a crime; it is returning to a verdict that never closed the case.
What comes next is the creative interpretation itself. Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan have picked the case, Hall is attached, and the show is going back to the board where law, rumor, and costume all still compete for the final word.
