Netflix has chosen Lizzie Borden for the fourth season of Monster, bringing one of the most notorious murder cases in US history back into the streaming spotlight. Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan are using the show’s next chapter to focus on the woman acquitted in June 1893 of killing her father and stepmother.
That is why viewers are searching for the Lizzie Borden cast now: the case has moved from old court records into a new true-crime drama built around a figure people think they know. Murphy and Brennan created Monster as an anthology on Netflix, and Murphy has framed the series around the question of whether monsters are made or born. This season gives that idea a new home in Fall River, Massachusetts, where Borden was 32 and Abby Borden was 64 when the killings happened in August 1892.
The facts of the case still carry the force of a courtroom exhibit. Andrew Borden was found on the living room sofa after 11 hatchet blows, more than an hour after Abby was killed. Only Lizzie Borden and Bridget Sullivan were at the house, while Emma Borden was away on holiday and a house guest had gone out. At the time, police did not first zero in on Lizzie, even though she later changed her account of her movements and a pharmacist reported she had tried to buy prussic acid the day before the murders. A judge had her arrested and jailed after that report.
The gap between suspicion and proof is part of what keeps the story alive. In December, a friend testified to a grand jury that Lizzie had burned a dress in the stove a few days after the killings, and formal charges followed with a trial date set for the following June. Joseph Conforti later wrote that she hired a top lawyer from Boston to defend her in front of an all-male jury, and that she presented herself as a helpless maiden in court, tightly corseted, dressed in flowing clothes, and holding a bouquet of flowers.
What Netflix has not said is how closely Monster will follow the historical record, or how much of the legend built around the case will be kept in place for drama. The Lizzie Borden story has already been stretched by the school rhyme, which gets the weapon wrong and exaggerates the number of blows. Even so, the core facts remain stark: a wealthy but miserly father, a household under strain, and a verdict that left one of America’s most infamous unsolved mysteries unresolved. The new season does not solve that riddle. It puts it back in front of a new audience and asks them to sit with it all over again.
