You know the rhyme. Forty whacks, forty-one. Here’s the thing: Lizzie Borden was found not guilty, nobody was ever convicted, and the real number of blows was lower (not that it helps). With Netflix’s Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story out since September and everyone suddenly an expert, let’s go back to what the records actually say.
Fall River, 4 August 1892
Andrew Borden was a wealthy, famously stingy businessman in Fall River, Massachusetts. He lived with his second wife Abby, his two adult daughters Lizzie (32) and Emma (41), and an Irish maid, Bridget Sullivan. The house had no indoor plumbing and the sisters ate separately from their stepmother. Not a happy home.
That morning, Emma was away. Around 11 a.m., Lizzie called out to Bridget that her father had been killed. Andrew was on the sitting-room couch, struck repeatedly in the head with a hatchet-like weapon. Abby was found upstairs in the guest room; she’d died an hour or more earlier.
Lizzie said she’d been in the barn. Bridget said she’d been washing windows and then resting in her attic room. Nobody saw an intruder.
Why everyone suspected Lizzie
- She was in the house. The timeline leaves almost no window for an outsider.
- She’d tried to buy prussic acid (a poison) the day before, according to a pharmacist.
- Three days after the murders, she burned a dress in the kitchen stove, saying it was stained with paint.
- Her answers at the inquest were contradictory, though she’d been given morphine to calm her nerves.
The trial
In June 1893, after a two-week trial, the all-male jury took about ninety minutes to acquit her. A few things helped: the judge excluded her inquest testimony, the prussic acid evidence was thrown out, no bloody clothing was ever found, and a Victorian jury simply couldn’t picture a Sunday-school teacher doing this.
Lizzie never left Fall River. She and Emma bought a big house they named Maplecroft, the sisters eventually fell out, and Lizzie died there in 1927. The town never stopped whispering.
What Netflix’s Monster changes
The series frames Lizzie and Bridget as two women trapped in a cruel house who escape into a shared fantasy of revenge. That’s a dramatic choice, not a historical one. A few things to keep in mind while you watch:
- The Lizzie–Bridget relationship is largely invention. In the record, Bridget was a witness, not an accomplice, and she left town after the trial.
- Lizzie’s “dark” interior life is speculation. The real Lizzie’s writings are mostly about the church, charity, and animals.
- The cruelty of Andrew Borden is amplified. He was cheap and cold, by most accounts, but “monster” is doing a lot of work.
- The “it was Lizzie” framing. The show presents her guilt as a given. Legally and historically, it isn’t.
So did she do it?
Honestly? Probably. Most historians who’ve spent time with the evidence land there. But there are serious alternative theories: Emma (whose alibi was never checked properly), Bridget, an uncle who’d visited the night before, and the “illegitimate son” theory that pops up every decade or so.
The case has stayed alive for 130 years precisely because the answer is “almost certainly” instead of “definitely.” Netflix wants it to be definitely. I get it. But that’s not the story. (For another unsolved classic where everyone thinks they know, see our Monster of Florence post.)
Team Lizzie, Team Emma, or Team mysterious stranger? Vote in the comments and tell me why.
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