The fourth Monster season is the first the franchise has given to a woman, and the first whose subject walked out of court a free woman. Here is what really happened in Fall River in 1892, who plays whom across the eight episodes, and why an acquittal makes a strange engine for Netflix’s most reliable true-crime brand.

A jury in Massachusetts once looked at a woman accused of splitting her father’s and stepmother’s skulls with a hatchet and decided she had done no such thing. Lizzie Borden walked out of the New Bedford courthouse a free woman in June 1893, and the country has spent every decade since refusing to accept the verdict, keeping her a suspect in the culture long after she stopped being one in law. Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, the fourth season of the Netflix anthology, stands in that gap between the court’s answer and the folklore’s.

What really happened in Fall River

On the morning of 4 August 1892, in a narrow house at 92 Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts, someone killed Abby Durfee Borden in the upstairs guest room. She was struck around nineteen times with a hatchet. Roughly an hour and a half later, her husband, Andrew Jackson Borden, one of the richest men in the town and a man known for his frugality, was killed on the sitting-room sofa where he had lain down to rest, with around ten blows to the head. Andrew’s younger daughter, Lizzie, then 32, raised the alarm by calling up to the family’s Irish maid, Bridget Sullivan, who was resting in her attic room after washing the windows. The elder daughter, Emma, was away visiting friends in Fairhaven. John Vinnicum Morse, the sisters’ maternal uncle, who had stayed the night, was out on a visit across town.

Suspicion settled on Lizzie within days, and the record explains why. She told police she had been in the barn loft during the killing of her father, a story that struck investigators as thin on a stifling August morning. A local druggist said she had tried to buy prussic acid, a poison, the day before. A friend of the family, Alice Russell, later testified that she had watched Lizzie burn a dress in the kitchen stove the Sunday after the murders, explaining that it was stained with paint. Her testimony at the inquest was contradictory enough that she was arrested on 11 August. Police also recovered a hatchet head with a broken handle from the basement, a piece of evidence that never quite became the murder weapon the prosecution needed.

The trial that cleared her

The trial opened in New Bedford in June 1893 and became one of the most closely followed cases in the country. Lizzie Borden was defended by George D. Robinson, a former governor of Massachusetts. The prosecution was led by the district attorney Hosea Knowlton, assisted by William H. Moody, who would later sit on the United States Supreme Court. Much of what made her look guilty never reached the jury: the court excluded her contradictory inquest testimony and the prussic acid episode. No blood-soaked clothes were found, no witness saw the killings, and a churchgoing daughter who taught Sunday school and belonged to the temperance movement did not fit the picture twelve men of the period held of a killer. The jury returned its verdict in under two hours. On 20 June 1893, Lizzie Borden was found not guilty.

The town did not agree with the verdict. Lizzie and Emma used their inheritance to buy a larger house on French Street, which Lizzie named Maplecroft, and she began calling herself Lizbeth. Fall River kept its distance. Her friendship with the stage actress Nance O’Neil in the early 1900s fed gossip, and Emma moved out in 1905 and never returned. Lizzie Borden died on 1 June 1927; Emma died nine days later. They are buried in the family plot at Oak Grove Cemetery, and Lizzie left a substantial bequest to the Animal Rescue League of Fall River. The Second Street house now operates as a bed-and-breakfast and museum, where visitors can sleep in the room where Abby died.

Meanwhile the schoolyard rhyme did what the jury refused to do. “Lizzie Borden took an axe / And gave her mother forty whacks” convicts her in four lines and gets almost everything wrong along the way: the weapon was a hatchet, Abby was her stepmother, and the blows numbered around nineteen and ten, not forty and forty-one. The rhyme is the version most people know, and it has never once mentioned the acquittal.

Who plays whom in Monster season 4

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, the partnership behind the earlier Monster seasons; Brennan also co-created Glee with Murphy. Ella Beatty, the daughter of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, plays Lizzie. Vicky Krieps, known for Phantom Thread and for playing Empress Elisabeth in Corsage, is Bridget Sullivan. Charlie Hunnam plays Andrew Borden, a pointed piece of franchise bookkeeping, since he played the killer Ed Gein in the previous season and returns here as the man on the wrong end of the hatchet. Rebecca Hall, who directed Passing and played the television reporter Christine Chubbuck in Christine, is Abby. Billie Lourd, a regular in Murphy’s American Horror Story, plays Emma.

The supporting cast follows the case beyond the trial. Jessica Barden plays Nance O’Neil, the actress whose friendship with Lizzie split the sisters, and Joey Pollari plays the uncle, John Morse. Max Winkler, director of the 2017 film Flower, directs six of the eight episodes; Sarah Adina Smith, director of Birds of Paradise, directs the other two. The most loaded name on the call sheet sits at the edge of the story: Sarah Paulson, who won an Emmy for playing the prosecutor Marcia Clark in Murphy’s The People v. O. J. Simpson, appears as Aileen Wuornos.

That casting reaches back to the film that first fixed the word to a female killer at this scale. Monster, the 2003 film about Wuornos, won Charlize Theron the Academy Award for Best Actress. A Netflix anthology called Monster casting a second actress as the same woman is a deliberate wink, and it folds that lineage into a season about how a culture decides who gets the label.

Why an acquittal breaks the Monster formula

Everything that makes this season different is legible from its premise. The Monster machine was built to take apart men whose guilt was never in doubt. Jeffrey Dahmer confessed. Lyle and Erik Menendez were convicted. Ed Gein was caught with the evidence of what he had done. Those seasons could move from the crime toward some cold understanding of the person who committed it, because the crime itself was settled. Lizzie Borden is the first Monster subject the law cleared, which means the usual arc has nowhere to go. There is no confession to reach and no conviction to explain. The season can only move sideways, across the competing versions of a woman nobody was ever permitted to decide about.

That makes it the rare Monster installment with a genuine mystery at the centre, and it arrives after a run of television built on the same nerve. The Girl from Plainville, Candy and Love & Death all handed a female defendant to a marquee actress and asked audiences to sit with women whose cases resisted a simple verdict; Candy Montgomery, like Borden, walked free. Those shows played their cases straight, as tragedy or courtroom procedural. This season was described ahead of its release as a feminist black comedy, with modern pop on the soundtrack, Kate Bush and Wet Leg among the artists named, so that the century between the crime and the viewer keeps folding shut.

The register is a risk. The Monster brand sells dread, and jokes told over a double killing can go sour in a second. But the tone fits the case better than solemnity would. An acquittal is already an ironic object: the court says one thing, the public believes another, and both verdicts somehow stand. Comedy is one of the few modes that can carry two incompatible conclusions without collapsing into either, and that is how the Borden story has always actually been told.

Ella Beatty as Lizzie Borden holding a hatchet in Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story — Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story / Netflix

Bridget Sullivan moves to the centre

The other structural choice is where the season looks. Bridget Sullivan was the only other adult in the house that morning, and at trial she was a witness, not a character. The season pulls her from the margins toward the middle of the drama and, according to pre-release reporting, takes up the possibility of an intimate bond between the two women. The historical record leaves that relationship unproven. It is an old theory with a screen history of its own: the 2018 film Lizzie, with Chloë Sevigny as Borden and Kristen Stewart as Sullivan, built its whole reading of the murders on it. Here it works as a way of looking at the household, a lens on what a respectable Victorian home was built to keep out of sight, rather than as a fact the series claims to have established.

Few American crimes have been retold as often. Agnes de Mille turned the case into the ballet Fall River Legend in 1948, Jack Beeson wrote the opera Lizzie Borden in 1965, and Elizabeth Montgomery played her in the 1975 television film The Legend of Lizzie Borden. Christina Ricci took the role in Lizzie Borden Took an Ax in 2014 and kept it for the series The Lizzie Borden Chronicles a year later. Each version had to choose between guilt and innocence, or decide not to choose at all. A season-long anthology entry has more room than any of them to stay inside the second option.

How the season has performed on Netflix

All eight episodes arrived together on 17 September 2026, and the numbers suggest the formula still travels. According to the figures Netflix published, the season logged 12.1 million views in its first four days, enough to make it the most-watched title on the platform worldwide that week across both series and films. That debut sits right alongside its predecessors: The Ed Gein Story opened with 12.2 million views in October 2025, and The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story with 12.3 million in September 2024. In its first full week, from 21 to 27 September, it added another 14.5 million views and held the No. 1 spot on Netflix’s English-language TV list, for 26.6 million views across its first two weeks, despite a cooler critical reception than earlier seasons.

There is a larger machine in view, and the season seems aware of standing inside it. Streaming true crime runs on resolution: it exists to name a monster and give the viewer somewhere to put the dread. A case that ends in acquittal denies the genre its usual payoff, and a same-day release of every episode turns an unsolved killing into an argument across group chats and timelines within a single weekend. The show feeds that appetite and raises an eyebrow at it, using the most commercial true-crime brand on Netflix to ask why audiences need a culprit so badly that they keep overruling a jury, generation after generation.

A conviction gives a culture a monster it can file and forget. An acquittal leaves it with a woman it has to keep arguing about, because the argument was never officially closed. The season’s bet is that the argument is the real story, and that viewers will finish the eighth episode roughly where the jury left the courtroom in 1893, with a verdict on paper and a doubt nobody has managed to put down in 133 years.