Lizzie Borden, the question a hatchet left open for 134 years

Lizzie Borden

Photo: AnonymousUnknown author / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 19, 1860 Fall River, Massachusetts, United States
Died	June 1, 1927 (66)
Occupation	Historical figure, murder suspect
Known for	Born in Flames

The Question That Refuses to Close

There is a question that has been asked in Fall River, Massachusetts, in courtrooms, in dormitories, in theater houses, and now on streaming platforms, for more than one hundred and thirty years. Did she do it? The “she” is always Lizzie Andrew Borden — the Sunday school teacher, the charitable churchwoman, the unmarried daughter of one of the city’s wealthiest men — who stood at the center of one of the most grotesquely violent domestic crimes in American history and emerged from the other side of a sensational trial with the law’s blessing and society’s permanent condemnation. Ryan Murphy‘s Monster franchise arrives at her case with its fourth installment on September 17, 2026, with Ella Beatty in the title role and Charlie Hunnam and Rebecca Hall as her parents. The question is still open. Not because the evidence is inadequate to form an opinion, but because the woman who carries it is too interesting to reduce to a verdict.

A Fortune in a Frugal Cage: The World of the Bordens

She was born on July 19, 1860, the second daughter of Andrew Jackson Borden and Sarah Morse Borden, in Fall River, Massachusetts — then a prosperous and rapidly stratifying textile city where old Yankee Protestant families watched a new immigrant working class rise around them and felt their social authority quietly slipping. When Lizzie was two years old, her mother Sarah died of uterine disease, leaving her and her older sister Emma to be raised by their father and, from 1865 onward, by their stepmother, Abby Durfee Gray, whom Lizzie addressed as “Mrs. Borden” for the rest of her life and pointedly corrected anyone who called her “mother.” The distinction was not etiquette. It was a refusal.

Andrew Jackson Borden was a formidable figure in Fall River’s commercial landscape — a bank president, a board member of multiple financial institutions, a man who had accumulated a fortune estimated at between three hundred thousand and five hundred thousand dollars, the equivalent of well over ten million dollars in contemporary terms, through shrewd investments in textile mills, real estate, and banking. His prominence in the city’s business life was unquestioned. His character was another matter entirely. He was legendarily frugal — “penurious” is the word the historical record favors — and exercised his parsimony in ways that compounded daily humiliation. The house at 92 Second Street, which he could easily have replaced with something grander, lacked indoor plumbing and electric lighting, amenities that were standard features in the residences of Fall River’s elite by 1890. The neighborhood itself had shifted over the preceding two decades from respectable Yankee territory to an enclave increasingly populated by Catholic immigrants from Ireland and French Canada who labored in the city’s mills. Lizzie had grown up knowing that her father possessed the money to live among the city’s upper class in the fashionable Hill district, and that he had chosen not to. That choice, multiplied across every week of her adult life, shaped her understanding of herself as a woman of frustrated social ambition living in a house that advertised her family’s subordination to the father’s frugality rather than its wealth.

The family’s domestic tensions were less visible than its public respectability. Lizzie, at thirty-two, and her sister Emma, at forty-one, were unmarried and living at home — an arrangement unremarkable by the standards of their class but one that came with a particular texture of economic dependence and constrained possibility. Outwardly, Lizzie was a model of Victorian Christian womanhood. She was named to the board of the Fall River Hospital at the remarkable age of twenty, taught Sunday school to the children of recent immigrants at the Central Congregational Church, and participated in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Christian Endeavor Society. The public Lizzie Borden was conspicuously, almost defiantly, respectable.

The domestic Lizzie Borden was something harder to characterize. The relationship between her and Abby had cooled from coolness into something structural. Lizzie believed for years that Abby, the daughter of a pushcart peddler who had married well, had wed Andrew primarily for his money and his social position. Whether this was accurate or unfair mattered less than the fact that Lizzie’s conviction had calcified into something impenetrable — she refused to acknowledge Abby as her mother, used the back stairs to avoid encountering her in the shared rooms of the house, and rarely took meals at the family table. In 1887, Andrew had transferred a rental property to Abby’s sister as a gift, an act that both daughters interpreted as their father beginning to redirect his estate toward his wife’s family and away from their own inheritance. Lizzie and Emma responded by demanding and receiving the house in which they had lived before 1871, purchased from Andrew for a symbolic dollar. Just three weeks before the murders, in a transaction whose exact financial logic historians have never fully untangled, the sisters sold the property back to their father for five thousand dollars. The money dealings between the Borden women and Andrew in the years before 1892 read less like family business and more like a cold war fought in the currency of property.

Andrew Borden also disposed of things that belonged to Lizzie with a thoughtlessness that bordered on contempt. Some weeks before the murders, he discovered that neighborhood boys had been breaking into the family’s barn. The barn contained a roost of pigeons that Lizzie had built and tended herself. Andrew beheaded the birds with a hatchet to eliminate them as a reason for the break-ins. Lizzie’s distress at the killing of her pigeons was noted by witnesses at the time. The fact that the weapon Andrew used to dispatch the pigeons was a hatchet would later acquire its own grim significance.

The Week the Pressure Broke

The days immediately before August 4, 1892, carried, viewed in retrospect, the logic of a system approaching a limit. The household fell ill in early August with a severe gastric illness — persistent and violent vomiting that struck Andrew, Abby, and the maid Bridget Sullivan in sequence. Lizzie reported feeling only mildly unwell. Abby, frightened by the severity of the illness, visited the family physician, Dr. S.W. Bowen, and expressed her fear that they had been deliberately poisoned by Andrew’s enemies. The doctor dismissed her concern, attributing the illness to improperly stored mutton that the family had consumed over several days in the August heat. Whether the household had been subjected to a deliberate but insufficient poisoning attempt, or whether the illness was coincidental, is one of the small unresolved facts that orbit the larger unresolved fact at the center of the case.

On the evening of August 3, Lizzie paid a visit to her friend Alice Russell. During their conversation, she spoke with what Russell later described as a sense of gathering dread — telling her friend that she felt “that something is hanging over me,” that enemies of her father provoked by his “discourteous” business dealings might attempt to harm him or burn the house down. This conversation can be read two ways: as genuine anxiety about a danger she could feel approaching, or as a calculated rehearsal that planted the idea of an external threat in a witness’s memory before it became necessary. Alice Russell remembered it precisely, and testified to it at trial.

Earlier that same day — August 3, 1892, in the afternoon — Lizzie Borden walked into Smith’s Drug Store and approached a clerk named Eli Bence with a request for ten cents’ worth of prussic acid, also known as hydrogen cyanide. She explained that she needed the substance to clean a sealskin cape. Prussic acid is one of the most acutely toxic substances known to pharmacology; it is not a cleaning agent for anything. Bence, familiar with the substance’s effects and noting that Lizzie had purchased it before only with a physician’s prescription, declined the sale. Lizzie did not dispute this, produced no prescription, and left the store.

The next morning, August 4, 1892, Andrew Borden and his wife Abby were killed with a hatchet inside their locked house.

The implications of the proximity between the failed prussic acid purchase and the murders are not subtle. If a person attempts to obtain a lethal poison the day before two people are murdered by a different instrument, the most economical interpretation is that the first method was tried and failed or became unavailable, forcing the murderer to an improvised alternative. The presiding judge at trial ruled the pharmacy evidence inadmissible, determining it was too remote in time to the murders to constitute legally relevant evidence of premeditation. The jury never heard Eli Bence’s testimony. The reader, however, has now heard it, and can make of it what the law would not permit twelve men to make of it in June 1893.

An Hour and a Half of Silence: The Morning of August 4

The murders of August 4, 1892, unfolded with a compressed and terrible precision that makes the theory of an outside intruder nearly impossible to sustain on its own terms. The timeline is also the reason the case has never been closed.

John Morse, Andrew Borden’s brother-in-law, had spent the previous night at the house and established a solid alibi by leaving to visit other relatives at 8:48 AM. His movements that morning were confirmed by multiple independent witnesses. Andrew himself departed for his downtown business rounds shortly after 9:00 AM. In the locked house on Second Street remained three people: Lizzie, Abby, and Bridget Sullivan, the Irish maid the family called “Maggie” — the name of a previous maid, applied to Bridget without concern for the person to whom it actually belonged, a small domestic cruelty characteristic of the household’s texture.

Bridget went outside sometime around 9:00 AM to wash the ground-floor exterior windows, a task that occupied approximately an hour. While she worked outside, between 9:30 and 10:30 AM, Abby Borden went upstairs to the second-floor guest room to make the bed. She was struck first on the side of the head, fell face-down onto the floor, and received seventeen further blows to the back of the skull while lying prone. The room showed no signs of a struggle. Abby had had no time to react. The attack required a person who knew the house, knew where Abby would be, and was prepared to wait.

For the following ninety minutes, Abby Borden’s body lay on the second-floor guest room floor while her killer remained inside the locked house. Bridget finished her windows, came inside, and locked the screen door. Andrew Borden returned home from his business rounds and knocked at the front door, having found it locked. Bridget struggled with the jammed lock. From the top of the staircase — the staircase whose second-floor landing was several feet from the door of the room where Abby’s body lay — came what Bridget later described as a muted laugh or giggle, which she attributed to Lizzie. This testimony, which Bridget gave under oath, has never been satisfactorily explained by any alternative theory of the crime.

Andrew was helped inside and settled on the sitting room sofa. Lizzie spoke with him briefly and told him that Abby had received a note about a sick friend and gone out of the house. The note was never found by investigators. No messenger was ever identified. No sick friend was ever located. Andrew lay down on the sofa for a nap; Bridget, her morning chores complete, went up to her third-floor attic room to rest. Sometime in the approximately fifteen minutes that followed, the person who had killed Abby Borden entered the sitting room and struck Andrew Borden across the face and head with a hatchet-like weapon. He received between ten and eleven blows. One divided his left eye. The wounds, when Bridget and the neighbors who arrived within minutes found him, were still producing fresh blood. The total elapsed time between Abby’s murder and Andrew’s was between seventy-five and ninety minutes.

It was then that Lizzie called up to Bridget: “Come down quick. Father’s dead. Somebody came in and killed him.”

The Investigation and Its Failures

What followed in the Borden house on the afternoon of August 4, 1892, was less an investigation than a demonstration of how social class and gender assumptions could systematically distort the mechanics of criminal inquiry. Most of Fall River’s police force was at its annual summer picnic; the single officer who responded to the initial call found himself within the hour outnumbered by dozens of officers, physicians, reporters, neighbors, and curiosity-seekers, all tramping through what should have been a protected crime scene. The case became one of the first in American history to incorporate crime-scene photographs — images that now constitute some of the most arresting visual documentation of the murders — but the handling of the physical evidence was otherwise catastrophic and largely unrepeatable.

Lizzie’s demeanor in the hours after the discovery unsettled many who encountered her. She did not weep. Her composure was remarked upon by neighbors, physicians, and officers alike. While those around her were visibly distressed by the scene, she remained calm, her hands steady, her bearing controlled. This self-possession was read at the time as unnatural — the Victorian consensus held that a genuinely grieving daughter would have fainted or become hysterical, and Lizzie did neither — and the prosecution would later argue it as evidence of guilt. The defense would reframe it as evidence of character and self-control. Neither argument fully accounts for the variety of ways human beings respond to extreme shock, but the absence of performed grief made a lasting impression on the witnesses who observed it.

Her alibi for the period of Andrew’s murder was investigated and found deeply improbable. She claimed to have spent fifteen to twenty minutes in the barn loft, seeking lead sinkers for a fishing trip she was planning. Investigators who entered the barn found the loft floor covered with a thick, undisturbed layer of dust — no footprints, no evidence of recent occupation. The loft in the August heat was, by all accounts, stifling. Under questioning, Lizzie’s account of what she had been doing and where she had been doing it shifted in ways that the prosecution would catalog with considerable precision: at various moments she claimed to have been in the backyard, in the loft, below the loft eating pears, and searching for the sinkers from different positions. The inconsistencies were not decisive in isolation, but they accumulated.

Three days after the murders, on the morning of August 7, Alice Russell was visiting the Borden house when she witnessed Lizzie in the kitchen systematically tearing a blue corduroy dress into strips and feeding the pieces into the kitchen stove. Lizzie, when asked what she was doing, explained that the dress had been ruined by a paint stain and was too old to keep. Russell, who would later testify to this act, told Lizzie at the moment: “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” The destruction of a garment three days into a murder investigation — in which the central forensic question before every investigator was where the blood-stained clothing of the murderer had gone — is among the most discussed and least resolvable facts in the entire case. The prosecution argued it was calculated evidence suppression. The defense argued it was a coincidence of bad domestic timing. Neither reading is fully convincing; neither reading can be ruled out.

Among the physical evidence recovered in the basement, police found two axes, a hatchet with a broken handle, and a handleless hatchet-head whose ash and dust coating appeared to investigators at the time to have been applied artificially to simulate storage dirt. This hatchet-head became the primary candidate for the murder weapon. When a Harvard University chemist analyzed it and the other recovered tools at trial, he testified that his examination found no traces of blood on any of the items. Without blood on the weapon, the prosecution had no physical anchor for the murders.

The investigation was compromised further by the explicit deference police extended to Lizzie as a woman of her class. They later admitted at trial that they had not conducted a proper search of Lizzie’s bedroom on the day of the murders because she was “not feeling well” — a deference to her gender and social position that would have been unimaginable applied to a suspect of a different social background. The contaminated crime scene, the inadequate search, and the missing evidence are the direct products of the same social codes that had, in the defense’s argument, made Lizzie Borden constitutionally incapable of murder.

The Trial of a Victorian Woman

Lizzie Borden was arrested on August 11, 1892. Her trial opened in the New Bedford courthouse in June 1893 and became the national spectacle of that year — a forerunner of every high-profile criminal trial that followed in American public life, in which the defendant’s public image, carefully managed and socially legible, competed with the evidence for the jury’s attention. Newspapers dispatched reporters from across the country. The press in Fall River divided sharply along class and ethnic lines: the working-class Irish Catholic papers argued consistently for Lizzie’s guilt; the establishment papers representing the Protestant Yankee elite of which she was a member defended her innocence with equivalent consistency. The trial was not merely a proceeding to determine whether one woman had committed two murders. It was a contest over whose version of social reality would be ratified by the verdict.

The prosecution team of District Attorney Hosea Knowlton and the future Supreme Court Justice William H. Moody confronted a structural problem from the opening of the case: their entire argument was built on circumstantial evidence. They had no blood-stained clothing. They had no murder weapon with traceable blood. They had no confession. They had no eyewitness to either murder. What they had was a compelling logic — motive (inheritance and accumulated resentment), opportunity (presence in the locked house during both murders), inconsistent statements, the destruction of the dress, and the testimony of Alice Russell about the dress-burning. And they had the prussic acid evidence, which was the closest thing the prosecution possessed to evidence of premeditation. Then the judge ruled it inadmissible. The prosecution argued their case without its most damning proof.

The defense team, led by former Massachusetts Governor George D. Robinson with a clarity of strategic purpose that has been admired ever since, made a single irreducible argument: the jury was being asked to believe that a pious, educated, charitable, genteel Christian woman of established respectable standing — a Sunday school teacher, a hospital board member, a churchwoman — was physically and morally capable of hacking her stepmother and father to death with a hatchet, removing or destroying all blood-stained evidence from her person and clothing in the ten to fifteen minutes between the murders and her call to Bridget, and then managing the investigation that followed with sufficient composure to fool a house full of police officers. Robinson’s closing addressed the jury in terms they understood: “To find her guilty, you must believe she is a fiend. Does she look it?”

She did not look it. She sat through the trial in proper mourning dress, her bearing composed, her religious credentials on full display. The Victorian social contract that had confined her life was, in the courtroom, also her most effective shield. The all-male jury — products of the same culture that had constructed the house she had lived in, the social codes she had chafed against, the gender conventions that made certain acts literally unthinkable when attached to certain kinds of women — was being asked to override what they could see with their own eyes.

On June 20, 1893, after deliberating for just over an hour, the jury returned not-guilty verdicts on all counts. Lizzie Borden sank into her chair. She later told reporters she was “the happiest woman in the world.”

The Verdict and What It Actually Decided

The acquittal did not resolve the question. It crystallized it. The jury found — in accordance with the law as it was applied by the presiding judge, and under jury instructions so favorable to the defense that legal historians have since debated whether they effectively directed an acquittal — that the prosecution had not proven Lizzie Borden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. This is not the same as finding her innocent. The distinction matters in law and, for the purposes of living with the case for the past century and a third, it matters in history.

The circumstantial logic pointing toward Lizzie’s guilt remains, after more than a hundred and thirty years, the most coherent available explanation for what happened in the locked house on Second Street. The ninety-minute gap between Abby’s murder and Andrew’s argues powerfully against an outside intruder committing both crimes in a single continuous act and escaping: the killer waited, inside the house, for an hour and a half. The house was locked from the inside when Andrew came home and had to knock for entry — a fact the intruder theory must explain but cannot satisfactorily account for. The only people with access to both victims during the relevant windows were Lizzie and Bridget. Bridget’s alibi for the period of Abby’s murder is solid — she was outside washing windows. For Andrew’s murder, she was upstairs in the attic, placing her farther from the sitting room than Lizzie. Emma was in Fairhaven that day and confirmed absent by multiple independent witnesses.

The prosecution’s failures were, however, real. The Harvard chemist found no blood on the recovered hatchet-head. No blood-stained clothing was ever found. The judge’s instructions leaned so far toward the defense that the legal question of whether Lizzie Borden received a fair trial — in the sense of a trial where the evidence was given its full weight — has been debated ever since. The prussic acid testimony, the one piece of evidence that could have established premeditation and linked the events of August 3 to those of August 4, was excluded. Without it, the circumstantial chain, while suggestive, had a gap at its most critical joint.

What the Borden trial also made legible — with increasing clarity as the decades pass — is the degree to which the criminal justice system of 1893 was not merely a mechanism for determining guilt or innocence, but a social institution shaped by and reflecting the class and gender assumptions of its culture. A wealthy Yankee Protestant woman of middle age, a churchwoman and a charitable worker, could not — by the operative logic of her era’s social imagination — have committed two axe murders. The jury acquitted not primarily because the evidence was legally insufficient, though a reasonable case can be made that it was; the acquittal was secured partly because convicting Lizzie Borden would have required twelve men to believe something that their entire formation had taught them was impossible. She could not be a fiend. She did not look it. They let her go.

Maplecroft: The Life She Bought

The acquittal gave Lizzie Borden her freedom and her father’s money. She and Emma inherited the estate, abandoned 92 Second Street within months, and purchased a large and elegant Queen Anne-style mansion in The Hill — the neighborhood Lizzie had always wanted to live in, the neighborhood her father’s frugality had made inaccessible during his lifetime. She named the house “Maplecroft,” began calling herself “Lizbeth,” and furnished her new home with all the modern conveniences — indoor plumbing, electricity, a large domestic staff — that had been withheld from her at Second Street. She had arrived, by the measures that had mattered to her, at the life she had appeared to want.

Fall River had its own verdict, and it did not change. Despite her legal innocence, the community’s social judgment was delivered immediately and enforced permanently. Former friends abandoned her. When she attended the Central Congregational Church — the institution she had served for years as a Sunday school teacher and board member — congregants emptied the pews in her vicinity. She eventually stopped attending. Children threw gravel and eggs at Maplecroft and rang the doorbell as a dare. The neighborhood that was supposed to represent her social arrival became instead her social prison; she moved about the city by carriage with the shades drawn to avoid the stares of those who recognized her, which was everyone. The gilded cage at Maplecroft had different dimensions than the one on Second Street, but it was a cage.

In 1897, she was accused, though never formally charged, of shoplifting in Providence, Rhode Island — an incident that those who assumed her guilt took as confirmation, and that those who defended her innocence dismissed as the product of prejudice from an officer who recognized her name. The incident produced another wave of newspaper coverage and another layer of social damage from which she did not recover.

The most conspicuous act of social defiance in her later years was a friendship with a stage actress named Nance O’Neil. The relationship was intense in ways that Fall River in the early twentieth century read clearly: the two women were seen together frequently, traveled together, and Lizzie’s attachment to O’Neil was the subject of considerable newspaper gossip that used, for the era, the most direct available language. When Lizzie threw a lavish party at Maplecroft for O’Neil and her theater company in 1905, she apparently crossed a line that Emma had been unwilling to acknowledge until then. Emma Borden, who had stood beside her sister through the trial, the acquittal, the initial years of ostracism, and every subsequent social difficulty, moved out of Maplecroft abruptly and permanently. She never spoke to Lizzie again. When a reporter asked Emma why she had left, she would say only that “conditions became absolutely unbearable.” She elaborated on nothing. Whatever she had understood in the twelve years since the murders, she carried it to her death without sharing it.

Lizzie Borden lived the remaining twenty-two years of her life at Maplecroft in a withdrawal that was hard to distinguish from siege. She maintained a household staff, traveled occasionally to Boston and Washington, and watched as the culture outside her window slowly converted the events of August 4, 1892, into something other than a double murder. Into a riddle. Into a rhyme. Into an entertainment.

A Grave and a Question

Lizzie Borden died at Maplecroft on June 1, 1927, at the age of sixty-six, from complications of pneumonia following a year of declining health. She was buried in the Borden family plot at Oak Grove Cemetery in Fall River, under the name she had chosen for herself: Lisbeth Andrews Borden. Emma Borden — who had moved out twenty-two years earlier and had spent those years in neighboring Newmarket, New Hampshire, with no documented contact with her sister — died on June 10, nine days after Lizzie. The reconciliation that had not happened while they were alive remained undone when they were both dead.

The estate Lizzie left, valued at approximately two hundred thousand dollars in 1927, was distributed primarily to charities she had supported during her lifetime, including the Animal Rescue League of Fall River and the YWCA. The house at 92 Second Street, after passing through several owners and incarnations, opened in 1996 as a bed-and-breakfast and museum. The room in which Abby Borden died is available to book overnight. The house markets its history as its primary attraction, which is a kind of ending that the case itself seems to have been preparing for all along.

Alternative Suspects and the Case for Doubt

The case against Lizzie Borden has always been circumstantial, and the circumstantial case against any alternative suspect has generally been thinner. Bridget Sullivan, present in the house and carrying her own burdens as an Irish immigrant servant in a household where she was addressed by someone else’s name, has been a subject of periodic scholarly reconsideration, with some historians suggesting that her testimony may have been shaped by motives other than pure accuracy. John Morse, whose alibi for August 4 was airtight, has appeared in some theories as a planner or co-conspirator. The Arnold Brown account, Lizzie Borden: The Legend, the Truth, the Final Chapter (1991), which proposed an illegitimate half-brother of Lizzie’s as the actual murderer, attracted significant attention when published and has not achieved lasting scholarly acceptance.

The legal historian David Kent, working from the full original court records, concluded that the jury’s outcome might have been different had it heard the prussic acid testimony alongside the rest of the circumstantial record. This is counterfactual speculation, but it is the kind that the evidence supports. What the case actually demonstrates — with or without the prussic acid — is that the criminal justice system of 1893 was a social institution as much as a legal one, capable of producing outcomes that the social assumptions of the era demanded. Whether those outcomes reflected justice is a different question, and one that has no clean answer.

The Culture of Lizzie Borden

No American criminal case from the nineteenth century has generated a cultural afterlife comparable to Lizzie Borden’s. The skipping-rope rhyme — “Lizzie Borden took an ax, gave her mother forty whacks; when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one” — gets the blow counts wrong, describes Abby as Lizzie’s “mother” rather than her stepmother, and has persisted as a piece of American folk memory for over a century. Its survival is not testimony to historical accuracy. It is testimony to something else: the way the case has always operated as a cultural text rather than merely as a crime record, absorbing and reflecting the anxieties of each era that returns to it.

Agnes de Mille’s 1948 ballet Fall River Legend was among the earliest high-art treatments of the case, transposing it into the idiom of American psychological realism in movement and giving Lizzie a tragic interiority that the historical record is too incomplete to confirm or deny. Sharon Pollock’s 1980 play Blood Relations offered what became the defining feminist reframing: Lizzie as a woman whose rage at the conditions of her domestic life had both historical justification and consequence, the murders less a crime than an eruption of legitimate fury against a system of constraint that had no other exit. The rock musical Lizzie, which has been in various productions since the 1990s and was performed in South Korea in 2020 and 2022, takes the feminist reading to its most theatrical extreme, asking audiences to cheer.

On film and television, the case has been interpreted across wildly divergent tonal registers. Elizabeth Montgomery’s The Legend of Lizzie Borden (1975) made the argument for guilt with considerable force and earned its star an Emmy nomination. The Lifetime film Lizzie Borden Took an Ax (2014), with Christina Ricci, approached the case as pulp thriller. Craig William Macneill’s feature Lizzie (2018), with Chloë Sevigny as Lizzie Borden and Kristen Stewart as Bridget Sullivan, proposed that a lesbian love affair between the two women was the emotional engine of the murders — an interpretation that the historical record neither confirms nor definitively contradicts — and earned Sevigny the best actress prize at the Locarno Film Festival. The case has always operated this way: as a surface onto which successive generations project the questions about women, desire, constraint, and power that their own moments find most pressing. The gaps in the evidence are, paradoxically, the source of its cultural richness. A solved case has an answer. The Borden case has remained a question, and questions are more useful to art than answers.

Monster and the September 2026 Reckoning

The most culturally significant engagement with Lizzie Borden in the current moment arrives on September 17, 2026, when Netflix releases all eight episodes of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, the fourth installment of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s true-crime anthology franchise. The series is, by any commercial measure, a major event: the Monster brand generated enormous viewership with its first three seasons, devoted to Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and the Manson murders, and has established itself as the dominant format through which American streaming audiences process the country’s most extreme criminal histories.

The choice of Lizzie Borden as Season 4’s subject carries its own argument. Where the first three seasons selected male killers who fit the dominant archetype of the American serial murderer — charismatic, predatory, drawn to violence as domination — Lizzie Borden disrupts every category that archetype depends on. She was a woman. She was respectable. She was a churchgoer. If she killed, she killed twice, in her own home, people she lived with and who controlled her life. The Monster franchise has designated her, in its promotional materials, as its “first female monster,” and the designation is doing several kinds of work at once: acknowledging the rarity of female perpetrators in high-profile true-crime narratives, positioning the series as feminist intervention, and implicitly raising the question of whether “monster” even applies to a person whose actions, if she committed them, might be explained as resistance to a specific and documented form of domestic captivity.

Ella Beatty, a Juilliard-trained actress and the daughter of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, plays Lizzie. Her previous highest-profile work had been in Murphy’s own Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, giving the casting a kind of institutional coherence as well as a statement of confidence in her capacity to carry a role that has attracted major talents throughout its cultural history. Charlie Hunnam and Rebecca Hall play Andrew and Abby Borden; Vicky Krieps, whose work in Phantom Thread demonstrated her ability to hold her own in a period of controlled psychological pressure, plays Bridget Sullivan. Sarah Paulson appears in a role that the released materials associate with Aileen Wuornos — a connection whose full narrative logic will emerge once the episodes are viewable. The script, by Brennan, leans into the language of fantasy and liberation that the feminist interpretive tradition of the case has always suggested: “when the repressed daughter of a wealthy New England family and her rebellious maid find themselves trapped in a house built on humiliation and cruelty, they escape into a fantasy of sex, power and revenge,” in the formulation Netflix’s promotional synopsis uses.

This will not satisfy historians, who are right to note that the actual historical record does not support the specific liberation narrative the series appears to be telling. It will satisfy something else, however: the persistent cultural need to tell Lizzie Borden’s story not as a legal proceeding with an insufficient outcome, but as something larger — a story about what women in confined circumstances are capable of, what they might legitimately want to be capable of, and what the verdict of 1893 actually resolved. Which, on that last point, was very little.

The house at 92 Second Street still stands in Fall River, operating since 1996 as a bed-and-breakfast and museum that charges admission to sleep in the room where Abby Borden died and to walk the ground floor where Andrew Borden was found on his sofa. Maplecroft, the mansion Lizzie purchased with her inheritance and died in alone, was designated a Fall River historic landmark in 2013. The city that spent thirty years making Lizzie Borden’s life as socially uncomfortable as possible without breaking any laws now charges admission to enter the rooms where the story happened. History, like an acquittal, gives with one hand and takes with the other.

What Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story will give audiences in September 2026 is the latest version of something that has been produced in American culture, in one form or another, continuously since August 1892: an attempt to look at Lizzie Borden and decide what she was. The original jury managed the same task in just over an hour. The rest of us have had one hundred and thirty-four years and still cannot agree. The hatchet left the question open, and the question has stayed open, and on September 17 a new generation will have eight hours to sit with it and find their own answer, which will also not be the right one, because there is no right one — only the question itself, which refuses, as it always has, to close.

Tags: Ryan Murphy, Lizzie Borden, Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, Ella Beatty, crime, Fall River

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