Netflix’s Monster anthology is returning to one of America’s most famous unsolved murder cases: the 1892 killings of Andrew and Abby Borden in Fall River, Massachusetts. Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story premieres on September 17, 2026, with Ella Beatty playing Lizzie Borden, the woman whose name became permanently attached to the crime despite her acquittal.
The fourth installment of the anthology comes from Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan. Netflix has confirmed a cast that includes Vicky Krieps, Charlie Hunnam, Rebecca Hall, Billie Lourd, Jessica Barden and Sarah Paulson. But because the season has not yet been released, the distinction between history and television matters here: the real Borden case is documented, disputed and still unresolved, while the series is a dramatized interpretation of that history.
Andrew and Abby Borden were killed on August 4, 1892
The facts at the center of the case are straightforward, even if the identity of the killer never became legally settled.
On the morning of August 4, 1892, Andrew Borden and his wife, Abby, were killed in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts. Lizzie Borden, Andrew’s 32-year-old daughter, was in the house around the time of the murders.
Abby was Lizzie’s stepmother, not her biological mother, a distinction that the popular rhyme about the case famously ignores. The nursery rhyme claims Lizzie gave her “mother” 40 whacks and her father 41, but the rhyme is not a reliable account of the crime. Historical accounts describe Abby and Andrew as having suffered multiple devastating blows, though the exact counts commonly cited in summaries vary according to how wounds and blows are described.
The murders immediately attracted extraordinary attention. This was not a stranger killing in an isolated place. The victims were killed inside their own home, and suspicion quickly focused on someone within the Borden household.
Lizzie Borden was arrested, but the case against her was circumstantial
Lizzie Borden was arrested on August 11, 1892, one week after the murders. A grand jury later indicted her, and her trial began in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in June 1893.
The prosecution's case faced a fundamental problem: it could not produce direct evidence placing Lizzie at the murders with a weapon.
The murder weapon was never definitively established. Nor was bloody clothing conclusively connected to Lizzie. Investigators and prosecutors relied heavily on circumstantial evidence, statements, behavior and questions surrounding events before and after the killings.
That does not mean the case against her was imaginary or trivial. Prosecutors believed the surrounding evidence pointed toward Lizzie. But the defense had substantial room to attack the investigation and argue that the physical evidence did not conclusively connect her to either killing.
The quality of the investigation also became part of the controversy. Police had searched the Borden home repeatedly, and questions later arose about how evidence had been handled and whether the scene had been adequately preserved.
The case became a national sensation, but sensational coverage is not the same thing as proof. That gap between notoriety and certainty is one reason the Borden story has survived for more than a century.
A jury acquitted Lizzie Borden in 1893
Lizzie Borden's trial began on June 5, 1893. On June 20, she was found not guilty.
The acquittal is the central fact that many retellings of the case blur. Lizzie Borden was accused of murdering her father and stepmother. She was tried for those murders. A jury acquitted her.
Legally, that was the end of the prosecution against Lizzie. No one else was ultimately convicted of the killings, and the murders remain unsolved.
That unresolved status has created the strange afterlife of the Borden case. Lizzie Borden was never convicted, yet she became one of the most recognizable alleged murderers in American history. Her name entered popular culture so completely that generations of people learned a rhyme accusing her of a crime that a court did not find proven.
The distinction is not merely technical. Any account of Lizzie Borden that states as settled fact that she murdered Andrew and Abby Borden is making a stronger claim than the historical legal record supports.
Why people still argue about whether Lizzie did it
The basic mystery has never disappeared because neither side of the historical argument can close it completely.
Those who believe Lizzie was responsible point to the circumstances surrounding the murders and the fact that suspicion focused so intensely on her. Those who believe the evidence was insufficient point to the absence of a conclusively identified murder weapon, the lack of direct evidence connecting Lizzie to the killings, and problems with the investigation.
That debate continues because the surviving record contains evidence without a final answer.
More than 130 years later, historians, true-crime writers and amateur investigators are still proposing theories involving Lizzie, other members of the household and possible outside suspects. But theories are not verdicts. The most accurate answer to the question of whether Lizzie Borden really killed Andrew and Abby Borden remains the least satisfying one: nobody knows for certain.
The Library of Congress still describes the case in those terms. Lizzie was arrested, tried and acquitted, while the question of whether she committed the murders remains unresolved.
Netflix’s Monster Season 4 is a dramatization, not a historical verdict
That uncertainty is particularly relevant to Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story.
Netflix describes the new season as the fourth installment of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Monster anthology and has positioned Borden as the franchise's first female “monster.” Ella Beatty stars as Lizzie, with Charlie Hunnam and Rebecca Hall playing Andrew and Abby Borden. Vicky Krieps, Billie Lourd, Jessica Barden and Sarah Paulson are also part of the confirmed cast.
The show's own promotional material makes clear that this is an interpretation rather than a documentary reconstruction. Beatty has described the character as a “very fictionalized version” created for the series from historical source material and the show's own dramatic approach.
That is worth keeping in mind before the season premieres. The real case offers an unusually large space for dramatization because so much about the crime remains uncertain. Dialogue, private relationships, motives and the exact sequence of events surrounding the murders cannot simply be recovered from a definitive historical record.
A drama has to make choices where history leaves gaps.
Ella Beatty leads a cast built around a familiar American mystery
Beatty takes on the most difficult role in the story because Lizzie Borden is simultaneously a historical person, an accused murderer, an acquitted defendant and a cultural myth.
Netflix has also confirmed Hunnam as Andrew Borden and Hall as Abby Borden. Billie Lourd plays Lizzie's older sister Emma, while Jessica Barden plays actor Nance O'Neil, who was a real figure associated with Lizzie Borden's later life. Sarah Paulson appears as Aileen Wuornos, another historical figure whose presence connects the new season to broader questions about how society interprets women who kill.
Those details are confirmed. What viewers should not do before September 17 is mistake promotional material or a dramatized premise for a settled account of what happened in Fall River in 1892.
The enduring point of Lizzie Borden's story is that the verdict never ended the argument
Most famous murder stories eventually settle into one of two forms: someone was convicted, or someone else was conclusively identified.
Lizzie Borden's case did neither.
Andrew and Abby Borden were murdered. Lizzie Borden was accused. She stood trial. She was acquitted. No one else was convicted. Then the public imagination effectively put her on trial again and kept doing it for more than a century.
That is the tension Netflix's Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story inherits when it arrives on September 17, 2026. The woman at the center of the new season is not simply a solved true-crime subject. She is the accused figure at the center of a case whose most important question still has no universally accepted answer.
And that may be the reason the story still works as television at all: more than 130 years after the murders, America remembers the rhyme far more easily than it remembers the verdict.
