Lizzie Borden House is back in the frame as Netflix’s Monster turns to the 1892 killings of Andrew Borden and Abby Borden. The new season shifts a familiar true-crime story back into mainstream entertainment, this time around a case that was tried in June 1893 and never fully resolved in the public imagination.
Andrew Borden was found on a living room sofa after 11 hatchet blows, and Abby Borden was killed in the same house in Fall River, Massachusetts, in August 1892. Lizzie Borden was 32, Emma Borden was 41, and Abby Borden was 64; only Lizzie Borden and Bridget Sullivan were in the house when the murders occurred, apart from Emma Borden being away on holiday and a house guest who had gone out.
Monster and Lizzie Borden
Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan selected Lizzie Borden for Monster’s fourth season after using the anthology to dramatise Jeffery Dahmer, Lyle Menendez, Erik Menendez and Ed Gein. Murphy said the series asks, “Are monsters made or are they born?” That is the franchise’s basic business model: it turns notorious crimes into serialized speculation, and Borden gives it a case with a verdict but no satisfying end.
Joseph Conforti wrote that Lizzie Borden hired a top lawyer from Boston with her late father’s money, a detail that helps explain why the courtroom story played as much on image as on evidence. He also wrote, “She presented herself as a helpless maiden.” Lizzie Borden appeared in court tightly corseted, dressed in flowing clothes, and holding a bouquet of flowers, a presentation that fit the period’s gender codes while the prosecution tried to build a murder case around her movements and contradictions.
Fall River in August
The pressure around the case did not begin in the courtroom. A local pharmacist reported that Lizzie Borden had tried to buy poisonous prussic acid the day before the murders, and a judge had her arrested and jailed after that report. Friends and neighbours were already aware of tension in the Borden home: Andrew Borden was described as wealthy but miserly, he forced his daughters to live in a shabby part of town and scrimp on household expenses, and he gave money to his new wife’s family.
That financial friction gives the current Netflix season a sharper frame than a simple murder retelling. This was not just a violent family death in Fall River, Massachusetts; it was a household defined by money, status and suspicion, with the accused daughter later becoming the face of the story. The title character’s appeal is not mystery alone but the way class and gender shaped who seemed believable before any jury heard a word.
June 1893 verdict
Lizzie Borden was tried and acquitted in June 1893, but the murders of Andrew and Abby Borden remain one of the most infamous unsolved mysteries in US history. The case kept moving after the killings, too: a friend testified to a grand jury in December that Lizzie Borden had burned a dress in the stove a few days after the murders, and formal murder charges led to a trial date set for the following June.
Only men could serve on juries in that era, which meant the defense and prosecution were working inside a system that excluded half the adult population from deciding the outcome. For viewers, that is the useful reason to care about Monster now: it is not just revisiting a famous crime, it is revisiting a case where the evidence, the optics and the rules all pulled in different directions.
What exactly happened in the Borden house on the morning of the murders remains unanswered, and that unresolved gap is what keeps Lizzie Borden House marketable more than 134 years later.
