The real Lizzie Borden story is even darker than Netflix's newest show
Ryan Murphy has turned America's most infamous axe murder into his latest Monster obsession - but the true story behind Lizzie Borden's alleged killing of her father and stepmother is stranger, sadder, and somehow even more disturbing than the on-screen adaptation.
By now, you've probably heard the rhyme, you likely know the weapon, and you might already know that Lizzie was accused of murdering her father and stepmother in 1892 - and then, somehow, walked out of court a free woman.
If you hadn't already been aware, Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story lands on Netflix on 17 September, with Succession star Ella Beatty stepping into the role of the US' most infamous alleged female killer.
Take note: 'alleged' is key here.
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And if the trailer is anything to go by, we're getting everything you'd expect from a Murphy production - repression, family dysfunction, blood, sex, beautiful people behaving terribly and enough Victorian gloom to make you grateful for central heating.
If Murphy's series will be your first encounter with the woman behind the axe, however, there are a few things you should know about the real-life Lizzie Borden beforehand.
After all, the producer is notorious for taking notorious crimes and turning the gaps in the historical record into drama.
So, what is Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story actually about?
The fourth season of Murphy and Ian Brennan's Monster moves away from serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ed Gein and towards a woman whose name became synonymous with an unsolved murder mystery.
Netflix's official synopsis is deliciously blunt: Lizzie is trapped in a cruel Victorian household before killing her parents in a 'gory axe murder' that shocks the nation. Chills, literal chills.
Alongside 26-year-old Beatty, Rebecca Hall joins the line-up as her Bordon's stepmother Abby, while Charlie Hunnam - who played Ed Gein in Murphy's previous blockbuster - plays her father Andrew.
Meanwhile, Vicky Krieps plays family maid Bridget 'Maggie' Sullivan, Billie Lourd portrays Lizzie's sister Emma, and the role of Jessica Barden will be assumed by actress Nance O'Neill.
Surprisingly, the trailer also showed Murphy's regular Sarah Paulson taking on the role of Aileen Wuornos, despite the multiple-murderer venturing on her killing spree a century after Lizzie did.
Already, that gave future viewers their first clue that the series isn't going to be a straightforward courtroom reconstruction.
Is Ryan Murphy changing the Lizzie Borden story?
Of course he is; that's what he does - or at least expands it dramatically.
The real-life record tells us what happened to Lizzie's parents, Andrew and Abby - as we'll touch on momentarily - but it doesn't give us an easy answer for why they met such a sinister fate.
That's where Murphy comes in.
The trailer presents Lizzie as a woman suffocating inside her family home, with her relationship with her parents portrayed as abusive and oppressive.
It also appears to build a romantic relationship between Lizzie and Maggie Sullivan into the story, which seems to frustrate Andrew and Abby.
That relationship is important because there is no established historical evidence that Lizzie and Bridget were lovers. In other words, viewers should expect a dramatisation rather than a documentary.
Murphy has also said this season isn't just about Lizzie. He described it as a story about women who have been labelled 'monsters', with figures including Wuornos and Countess Elizabeth Báthory entering the broader narrative.
His interest, he has said, is less about recreating crimes for their own sake and more about the questions they raise about society.
"So we are kind of doing this fantasia of women vs. the system," Murphy told THR. "And it’s not what they did; it’s the question of: What made them do it? Why did they do it, if they did it? That’s what the show is about."
Which is very Monster - take a horrifying crime, then spend eight hours asking whether the person at the centre of it was born a monster, made into one, or simply labelled one.
And yes, there will probably be blood
Nobody is exactly tuning in to Ryan Murphy for a tasteful, bloodless afternoon tea, given that his work has long played with the collision of horror, sex, glamour and grotesquerie.
His 'OG' scare-fest, American Horror Story, in particular, has repeatedly mixed extreme violence with eroticism and sensational imagery - and Murphy himself has previously described seasons as deliberately pushing both sexuality and gore.
So while we don't yet know every boundary Monster will push, the material hardly needs much help in the gore department, because actual murders of Abby and Andrew Borden were horrific.
And that's where the story gets considerably less fun.
Who was the real Lizzie Borden?
Lizzie Andrew Borden - given the middle name of her father - was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1860.
She wasn't a social outsider or a drifter, and came from a respectable, financially comfortable family. She was involved in church and charitable organisations and was regarded as a classy young lady.
Andrew Borden, meanwhile, had been a successful businessman and property owner, although records show he was known locally for being miserly.
He became a single parent when Lizzie's mother died when she was just a young child, after which he married Abby Durfee Gray.
And Abby was not simply 'Lizzie's mother'; she was her stepmother, despite the eerie rhyme referring to her as the former.
Oh yeah - if you were lucky enough to avoid it being sung to you as a child, the nursery rhyme goes:
Lizzie Borden took an axe,
And gave her mother forty whacks;
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.
The family's relationship was regarded by those who knew them as extremely complicated.
Andrew gave property to members of Abby's family, something that apparently irritated Lizzie and her older sister Emma. The sisters even bought back a house they had previously lived in from their father for $1, before selling it back to him for $5,000.
There was money, resentment and tension - and then there was an axe.
What actually happened on 4 August 1892?
The morning of the grisly double murders began like any other in the Borden household.
Andrew Borden returned home at around 10.30 am, lying down on the sofa in the sitting room for a nap.
While resting his eyes, he was viciously attacked by someone wielding a hatchet-like object, inflicting deep blow after blow.
Andrew was struck 10 or 11 times in the head, with one blow allegedly splitting his eyes cleanly in two.
When his body was discovered, his wounds were still bleeding, suggesting he had been killed only shortly beforehand. He wasn't the first victim to lose their life that day, however.
Upstairs, Abby was already lying dead on the floor of the guest room. She'd gone upstairs sometime between 9 am and 10.30 am to make the bed.
According to the forensic examination, she was facing her attacker when the first blow landed, cutting her just above the ear, the force causing her to fall face-down onto the floor.
The attack didn't end there, however. Abby was struck 17 more times in the back of the head, killing her.
It was Lizzie who raised the alarm, calling for Sullivan at 11.10 am, shouting that somebody had come into the house and killed her father.
What followed was an extraordinary crime scene for a supposedly respectable Victorian home - Andrew's body sprawled on the sitting-room sofa, Abby's upstairs, face-down in the guest room, with no obvious signs of an intruder.
Why did everyone suspect Lizzie?
Well, to put it simply, there was no one else around to pin the crime on.
No stranger was caught fleeing the house, and no killer was identified in the weeks that followed. Lizzie, on the other hand, had been inside, if not approaching the property, when the horror show began.
Then, her accounts of where exactly she'd been and what she knew about the attack changed.
She initially described hearing a noise before entering the house, then later said she hadn't heard anything, and her explanations about where Abby was began to distort, with police officers reportedly finding her demeanour unnervingly calm.
Then, Lizzie was accused of having tried to buy prussic acid shortly before the murders, although that evidence was ultimately excluded from her trial.
She also burned a blue dress several days after the killings, claiming it had been ruined by paint.
So, was she found guilty?
You'd think, but no. In fact, Lizzie was acquitted later that year.
She'd been arrested in the weeks following the attacks, going on trial the following June.
The prosecution's case was largely circumstantial, and some potentially damaging evidence was excluded.
Most importantly, Lizzie's inquest testimony couldn't be used against her at trial because of the circumstances under which it had been obtained by police.
Her defence also understood the power of appearances, citing her presentation as a respectable, delicate Victorian woman. She wore conservative clothing, carried flowers and a fan, and appeared in court as almost the complete opposite of the violent figure prosecutors were attempting to construct.
Money is also thought to have been a factor in her acquittal, as Lizzie's father's wealth helped pay for an exceptionally strong legal team, including former Massachusetts governor George Robinson.
The prosecution had holes in its case, and the defence had the benefit of a jury that was ultimately unconvinced Lizzie could be proved guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
So, on 20 June 1893, after roughly an hour and a half of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty, and Lizzie walked free.
The case of Abby and Andrews' killings remains unsolved to this day.
What happened afterwards?
Though Lizzie 'got away with' the murders on paper - and she and Emma inherited substantial money and moved into a large Victorian home in Fall River called Maplecroft - the years that followed saw her become a local ghost story who was still alive.
People stared when she walked by, children taunted her, former friends abandoned her and she was shunned by parts of Fall River society, eventually withdrawing into private life.
Then came the most painful loss of all.
In 1905, Emma left Maplecroft following a rupture between the pair, with one point of tension reportedly being Lizzie's friendship with actress Nance O'Neill - although exactly what caused the final break remains unclear.
All we do know is that the sisters never reconciled or saw one another again.
Financially, Lizzie lived a good life, travelling the country, attending the theatre, living with a degree of comfort her younger self probably couldn't have imagined - all the while, her reputation had been tarnished.
She'd been unable to make the world see that 'not guilty' meant the same thing as innocent, and in 1927, aged just 66, Lizzie died from pneumonia.
Records state that Emma died just nine days later, after which the pair were buried together in the same family plot as Andrew and Abby.
But why is the real Lizzie Borden story darker than Netflix's?
Sure, Murphy can - and undoubtedly will - give us blood, a tortured Victorian heroine, forbidden romance, gothic interiors and all the deliciously lurid horror his Monster universe does so well.
He can give Lizzie a rumoured love interest, an axe and a perfectly choreographed murder scene.
But he can't manufacture the most unsettling part of the real story - that still, 130 years later, we don't know what exactly went down in the Borden home on 4 August 1892.
Topics: Netflix, True Crime, Entertainment, TV And Film, Real Life
Rhianna Benson