Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story – Netflix's Take on America's Unsolved Axe Murders

Netflix's true-crime anthology returned on 17 September 2026 with Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, a dramatisation of the infamous 1892 hatchet killings in Fall River, Massachusetts. The fourth season of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan's series has driven a spike in Indian Google searches for 'monster' and 'lizzie borden' — here is what the show covers and why the real case still has no answer.

What the new Monster season covers

The season stars Ella Beatty as Lizzie Borden and revisits the morning of 4 August 1892, when Abby Borden was killed upstairs and her husband Andrew was attacked on the living-room sofa roughly an hour later. As the BBC's cultural history of the case notes, this is the fourth figure to receive the anthology treatment after Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers and Ed Gein. A curious addition this season is a parallel thread featuring Sarah Paulson as Aileen Wuornos, the Florida sex worker convicted in 1992 of killing seven men — a device the creators use to compare female rage across a century.

The real case: an acquittal, not an answer

Lizzie Borden was tried in June 1893 and acquitted; no one else was ever charged. The prosecution's case was entirely circumstantial — the murder weapon was never conclusively identified, and her attempt to buy prussic acid the day before the killings was ruled inadmissible. Her shifting accounts at the inquest, and a friend's testimony that she burned a dress days after the murders, fuelled suspicion but never proof. According to the case record summarised on Wikipedia, she lived out her life in Fall River under a cloud of suspicion and died in 1927.

Why 'born or made' is the show's central question

Murphy has framed every Monster season around one question: are monsters made or born? For Borden, the drama leans into psychological and feminist readings — a daughter squeezed by a miserly father, property disputes and Victorian constraints — rather than the camp villain of earlier adaptations. Historian Cara Robertson told the BBC the case endures precisely because an acquittal is open-ended: it offers a closed circle of suspects, an alibi puzzle hinging on timing, and the possibility of deep psychological drama. That ambiguity is why novels, operas, films and now Netflix keep returning to Fall River.

Fact versus dramatisation

Viewers should treat the series as speculation, not history. The trailer hints at a romance between Lizzie and the maid Bridget Sullivan — an idea Robertson points out is undercut by the fact that Lizzie never even called Sullivan by her real name, using 'Maggie', a previous maid's name, instead. The famous rhyme about 'forty whacks' is also wrong on both the weapon (a hatchet, not an axe) and the blow count. The show's value lies less in solving the mystery than in asking what circumstances could turn an apparently mild Sunday-school teacher into a suspect in one of America's most brutal unsolved crimes.