Monster Lizzie Borden Story: What’s True and What’s Fiction

The Real Lizzie Borden Is Still a Mystery, So Netflix Had to Invent Her

Netflix’s Monster turns Lizzie Borden’s unsolved murder case into a fictional story built around the gaps in what history can prove.

Sep 18, 2026

by Treasure Ayanfe Adetula

Most people know the rhyme. Far fewer know how little certainty exists behind it. In 1892, Lizzie Borden was accused of killing her father and stepmother in their Fall River, Massachusetts, home. She was acquitted at trial, and more than 130 years later, the question of what actually happened remains unanswered.

Netflix has now turned this uncertainty into eight episodes with Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, the fourth instalment of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s anthology series.

All episodes arrived on September 17, 2026, with Ella Beatty playing Lizzie alongside Vicky Krieps, Rebecca Hall, Charlie Hunnam and Sarah Paulson. The interesting part is that Netflix cannot really tell Lizzie’s story as fact. Too much of it has disappeared into speculation.

The woman behind the nursery rhyme

Andrew Borden, 70, and his wife Abby, 64, were killed on August 4, 1892. Andrew was found on a sofa downstairs, while Abby was discovered upstairs. Lizzie, Andrew’s daughter and Abby’s stepdaughter, was at the family home and quickly became the prime suspect. The family’s live-in maid, Bridget Sullivan, was also there.

Lizzie was arrested, tried in 1893 and acquitted by an all-male jury after a trial that lasted about two weeks. No one else was convicted of the killings. That legal ending is important because it means Monster is working with an unusually large blank space.

Netflix’s own account acknowledges that “no one knows” whether Lizzie committed the murders, while noting that the surviving evidence has kept suspicion around her for generations.

What Netflix changes about Lizzie

The series presents Lizzie as a young woman trapped inside a restrictive Victorian household, with a difficult relationship with her father and stepmother.

Her relationship with Bridget “Maggie” Sullivan becomes central to the story, with the two women finding an escape from the limitations of their lives. Netflix describes the relationship as leading them towards a “fantasy of sex, power, and revenge”.