Monster: Lizzie Borden true story explained – what's real and what's not?

The latest season of Ryan Murphy's Monster takes us back further than usual with the story of Lizzie Borden, a Massachusetts woman who was accused of murdering her father and stepmother with an axe in 1892.

This is the first season based on a female perpetrator, just as Lizzie also happened to be America's first celebrity murder suspect at the young age of 32.

Lizzie came under fire at the trial of the (19th) century, and over a century later, we're still talking about her. From a sinister playground rhyme to multiple shows, films and plays, fascination continues to grow around the murders and Lizzie's subsequent acquittal in 1893.

But what's true? And how much has series co-creator Ian Brennan embellished in Netflix's take on the axe murders?

Did Lizzie Borden really kill her parents?

While the playground rhyme suggests Lizzie's parents were hacked at 41 and 40 times respectively, Abby was actually struck 19 times and Andrew 11.

In the days after Andrew and Abby Borden were murdered in their own home, Lizzie emerged as the prime suspect. She and the housemaid, Bridget "Maggie" Sullivan, were the only people left alive who were also home at the time of the killings.

Numerous contradictions in Lizzie's statement led to her arrest on 11 August 1892.

Her whereabouts at the time of the murders changed more than once across multiple statements, with Lizzie claiming she was upstairs at one point or out in the backyard in another, as seen in the show.

Lizzie also burned a dress in the kitchen stove soon after, as also depicted in Monster. Maggie’s window-cleaning alibi was true as well, but where the show deviates is in Lizzie's attempt to poison her parents.

In the series, she and Maggie first try to kill them using spoiled oysters. Real-life accounts differ though, with two pharmacists claiming that Lizzie tried to purchase prussic acid from them two days prior. They refused to sell it to her, noting that this deadly poison can only be sold usually with a doctor's prescription.

All this circumstantial evidence led to a three-day inquest followed by a nine-month stint in county jail while Lizzie awaited trial.

As depicted in Monster, the jury of 12 men were quick to deliver a verdict of "not guilty", reportedly waiting two hours just so they didn't appear too hasty in their decision.

To this day, it remains unclear if Lizzie really killed Andrew and Abby or if someone else was responsible.

So who really killed Andrew and Abby Borden?

Assuming Lizzie is indeed innocent, as the law concluded, who else could have been responsible for such a heinous crime?

Lizzie's maternal uncle, John Morse, seems to be a likely suspect. In the series, he certainly bears ill will towards Andrew, and Lizzie herself points out that he did return just in time for the murders.

Other possible suspects revolve around rumours of an illegitimate son fathered by Andrew, or perhaps even Lizzie's sister, Emma, could have been responsible given her personal connection to the victims.

Lizzie also mentions the possibility of a Portuguese man being responsible, the same one who killed their neighbour, Bertha Manchester. While the show states Lizzie and Maggie were the ones who killed her as a practice run for the double-homicide in question, Manchester was actually murdered some time after the Bordens, just before Lizzie's trial began.

The man convicted for this crime was indeed a Portuguese man (named Jose Correa de Mello) who also used an axe to kill Manchester during a botched robbery.

There's also the possibility that this was just a random act of violence, that someone with no connection to the Bordens just walked into their family home with intent to kill.

But as Lizzie says in the series: "None of these theories have evidence, so that’s what they’ll remain forever. Theories."

Was Lizzie Borden in a relationship with her servant Maggie?

This idea that Lizzie and Maggie were secretly in love didn't really come into focus until Evan Hunter’s 1984 novel Lizzie, which suggested that Borden committed the murders after Abby discovered the pair's romantic connection.

None of this has been proven, but that didn't stop Craig William Macneill's film Lizzie from dramatising these rumours with stars Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart in 2018.

In reality, it seems unlikely that Lizzie and Maggie enjoyed anything more than a professional relationship.

Maggie was employed for almost three years before the murders, living above the Bordens in their attic room. Accounts suggest she tried to quit on multiple occasions due to tension in the household, although it's hard to imagine Abby could have been as monstrous as Monster paints her out to be.

In Maggie's testimony, she claims to have heard a laugh upstairs around the time of the first murder, which suggested Lizzie might have been responsible and even took joy in it. There was no actual evidence of this to speak of though.

After Borden's acquittal in 1893, Maggie left the town of Fall River and settled down in Montana where she married a man named John M. Sullivan in 1905.

As far as we know, she did not secretly return and build a new life with Lizzie a few decades later, as depicted in the show.

Did Lizzie Borden really know actor Nance O’Neil?

In Monster, Lizzie's friendship with real-life actor Nance O'Neil helped get her acquitted thanks to some choice acting lessons. The pair really were friends in real life, as it turns out, but they didn't actually meet until 1904, more than a decade after the trial.

"When you’re doing a true-crime show, the trial episodes are always the ones I dread the most," co-creator Brennan told Tudum. "They can lend themselves to the most tropes. They’re the hardest to dramatise. Trials are incredibly dry, incredibly boring. But this notion that Lizzie knew an actress, which she did, that suddenly really activated it for us."

O'Neil performed in a wide variety of productions across the world, as she mentions in the Monster finale. This included multiple appearances on Broadway as well as many silent films before she made the transition to "talkies" such as Ladies of Leisure (1930) and her final film, the 1932 medical drama False Faces.

Lizzie's friendship with O'Neil became the subject of gossip, but the actor actually married a British film actor named Alfred Hickman in 1916. They remained together until Alfred's death in 1931. O'Neil died much later in 1965 at the age of 90.

What happened to Lizzie Borden?

To shake off the stigma that followed her trial, Lizzie changed her name to Lizbeth, as she does in the show. Still, she remained rather reclusive, often staying at home to avoid more gossip and curious onlookers.

Lizzie did have one more run-in with the law though, four years after her acquittal, when a Providence jeweller lost two pieces of painted porcelain. A woman who later brought in one of the missing pieces to be repaired informed the clerk that she had received it as a gift from Borden.

Police later found the second piece with Lizzie, but she argued that the pieces were paid for, and the matter was eventually dropped.

Estranged from her sister in later years, Lizzie had surgery to remove her gallbladder in 1926, but she remained ill another year and eventually died in her home on 1 June 1927 at the age of 66. Emma died nine days later on 10 June 1927. They were buried together in the Borden family plot alongside Abby and Andrew.

Was the story of Countess Elizabeth Báthory true?

Aside from Maggie, Vicky Krieps also plays the historic figure Elizabeth Báthory in flashbacks recounted by the book Lizzie and Maggie read together.

According to this fictional account, the Hungarian countess instructed her servants, nicknamed the Furies, to trick beautiful young woman into the castle where they would be tortured and killed. Why? To use their blood in a bath that could help Báthory retain her youthful skin.

Born in 1560, the real Countess was also plagued with such rumours following the death of her husband, Count Ferencz Nádasdy. Apparently, she killed more than 600 girls in total, if accounts at the time are to be believed.

Elizabeth and her servants were arrested in 1609. While the servants were eventually executed, Elizabeth was never put on trial. Instead, she continued to live in the Castle of Csejte (Čachtice) where she died in her sleep, five years later, in 1614.

Did the Countess really bathe in blood? It's possible that such accusations were politically charged given her wealth at the time.

Was Aileen Wuornos really obsessed with Lizzie Borden?

Aileen Wuornos, born in 1956, killed seven men in Florida between 1989 and 1990 before she was executed for her crimes by lethal injection in 2002.

Why is Aileen mentioned here? Because the show decides to run her story in parallel to Lizzie's, drawing on a legacy of female rage and suppression within our patriarchal society.

The pair are two of society's most notorious female killers, whether Lizzie was innocent or not, but were they connected beyond that?

Monster suggests Aileen was obsessed with Lizzie, inspired by how she exacted revenge on those who wronged her and actually got away with it. In reality, there is no evidence for this, just as there is no evidence that Aileen visited the Borden home at any point.

However, that's not to say any of this couldn't be true. It's just that there's no proof to support this. As such, this connection appears to be concocted for the sake of the show.

One thing that is true, however, is that the Borden Home did indeed become a bed and breakfast – and it remains an inn and a museum to this very day.

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is streaming now on Netflix.

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After teaching in England and South Korea, David turned to writing in Germany, where he covered everything from superhero movies to the Berlin Film Festival. 

In 2019, David moved to London to join Digital Spy, where he could indulge his love of comics, horror and LGBTQ+ storytelling as Deputy TV Editor, and later, as Acting TV Editor.

David has spoken on numerous LGBTQ+ panels to discuss queer representation and in 2020, he created the Rainbow Crew interview series, which celebrates LGBTQ+ talent on both sides of the camera via video content and longform reads.

Beyond that, David has interviewed all your faves, including Henry Cavill, Pedro Pascal, Olivia Colman, Patrick Stewart, Ncuti Gatwa, Jamie Dornan, Regina King, and more — not to mention countless Drag Race legends. 

As a freelance entertainment journalist, David has bylines across a range of publications including Empire Online, Radio Times, INTO, Highsnobiety, Den of Geek, The Digital Fix and Sight & Sound.