Monster: Netflix is turning to Lizzie Borden for its fourth season, with Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan selecting the Fall River case that still sits near the center of US true crime. The move keeps the anthology inside a story that ended in acquittal in June 1893 and never lost its cultural pull.
June 1893 and Monster
In June 1893, Borden was tried and acquitted of the murder of her father and stepmother, Andrew Borden and Abby Borden. That result did not end the case’s life in public memory; it left behind one of the most infamous unsolved mysteries in US history, which is why Monster: Netflix can still treat it as fresh source material.
Ryan Murphy has said the Monster portrayals aim to answer a simple question: "Are monsters made or are they born?" That framing explains why the series keeps returning to cases with unresolved public meaning, and why Lizzie Borden now joins Jeffery Dahmer, Lyle and Erik Menendez, and Ed Gein in the anthology’s lineup.
Fall River details
The case begins in August 1892, when the American woman was accused of two grisly murders on a hot summer morning in Fall River, Massachusetts. Whoever killed Andrew and Abby Borden began with Abby, who was 64 and Andrew’s second wife, before Andrew came home more than an hour later and was killed on the living room sofa after 11 hatchet blows.
Lizzie was 32 at the time, and the public story has long been distorted by the ditty about "40 whacks." The rhyme exaggerates both the number of blows and the weapon; the weapon was a hatchet, described as a small axe light enough to use with one hand. That gap between the song and the facts is part of what makes the case so durable for a streaming franchise built around notoriety.
Bridget Sullivan and the record
Only Lizzie Borden and Bridget Sullivan were at the house when the murders occurred. Emma Borden was away on holiday, and a house guest had gone out. Authorities did not initially suspect Lizzie, even though she was a seemingly mild woman who taught at Fall River’s Central Congregational Church, and a local pharmacist reported that she had tried to buy poisonous prussic acid the day before the murders.
At the inquest, Lizzie kept changing her account of her movements on the morning of the killings. A judge had her arrested and jailed after the pharmacist’s report, and in December a friend testified to a grand jury that she had burned a dress in the stove a few days after the killings. Formal charges of murder were brought and a trial date was set for the following June.
Boston counsel and the finish
Joseph Conforti wrote in Lizzie Borden on Trial: Murder, Ethnicity and Gender that she 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 and that Borden presented herself as a helpless maiden. That combination of money, gender, and courtroom strategy is the part the new season inherits, even without a premiere date attached to it.
The smart read here is simple: Monster: Netflix is not just revisiting a murder case, it is reopening a story whose facts were contested in real time and whose mythology still outgrew the record. The series has picked a subject that already lives in the gap between evidence, rumor, and performance, which is exactly where this franchise works best.
