The Real Women of ‘Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story’

Warning: Spoilers ahead for all episodes of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story.

Part of what makes the story of Lizzie Borden so fascinating is just how little we know. After her father and stepmother were murdered by a hatchet-wielding killer in their Fall River, Massachusetts, home in 1892, suspicion eventually turned to Lizzie. But her account of her actions that day changed constantly — maybe a result of the morphine that was being fed to her by doctors, or maybe the result of her not being able to keep her story straight — and she was eventually acquitted of the crimes. No one else was ever charged. That mystery has left a vacuum, and in the century since, Borden has become a blank slate onto which people can project their own understanding of what might drive a woman to parricide. 

That’s great news for Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, the duo behind FX’s new series Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story. The fourth installment of the anthology series, it’s the first to be based around a woman. Like all seasons of Monster, it’s extremely bingeable, while being both historically dubious and unhinged from time altogether. The eight-episode show opens with a singsong recounting of the schoolyard rhyme most Americans would know (“Lizzie Borden took an axe…”) before cutting to a fairly accurate account of how Lizzie (Ella Beatty) allegedly committed the crimes: killing her stepmother, Abby (Rebecca Hall), as she tidied the guestroom upstairs, before greeting her father, Andrew (Charlie Hunnam) with an axe to the face when he got home. That’s where any commitment to accuracy wears off (no, Andrew didn’t try to kill Lizzie during the crime, as the penultimate episode suggests). 

The season, though, isn’t just about Lizzie — it’s also about the double-standard inflicted on women, who are expected to take the beatings of the world with a smile on their face. By braiding together a storyline about a 16th-century killer in the past, Lizzie in the present, and America’s first female serial killer in the future, Monster sets up a throughline of female rage, suggesting that the crimes these women allegedly committed were a result of the subjugation of women everywhere. But who were Lizzie and her family, who were the other accused killers, and how much truth did Murphy and Brennan sneak into the show? 

Lizzie Borden

In Monster, Lizzie comes off as a naive young woman who’s dismissed by most of her family as being “feeble minded.” She doesn’t have any friends, really, outside her maid Bridget (Vicky Krieps) — who the show also depicts as a romantic interest — and her stepmother only lets her go into town if she’s accompanied by a member of their household staff. 

In reality, Lizzie was 32 at the time of the murders, and pretty worldly. She was a bit of a klepto, as shown in Monster, but she was also a Sunday school teacher and had taken a 19-week tour of Europe just two years earlier. She went on trips in the Fall River area with friends — that fishing trip she alludes to a few times in the show, which was planned for a few days after the murders, was supposed to be with a handful of other young women — and had a pretty full social life. There’s no evidence that she was in a romantic relationship with Bridget Sullivan, the Borden family maid, though those rumors started flying almost immediately after the murders. 

Monster depicts Lizzie keeping a great number of doves as her dear pets, housing them in an elaborate coop out back. While it’s true that Lizzie loved animals — after her death, she left her estate to a local animal rescue organization — the setup for her pet birds wasn’t nearly so ornate. The family kept some doves, which she cared for, in the barn, but according to a 2005 essay in The Hatchet: A Journal of Lizzie Borden, she accepted the fact that Andrew would sometimes kill a couple for dinner. 

The show also makes frequent references to Lizzie’s menstruation, from an early scene of her nearly ruining Abby’s fainting couch to the excruciating pain she endures monthly. In reality, menstruation played into the narrative around the case, but wasn’t such a personal issue. Lizzie told authorities during the inquest that she had “fleas,” a euphemism for her period, in the days before the murders, as a way of explaining away a pail of bloody rags soaking in the basement. Though the real Lizzie Borden’s periods weren’t out of the ordinary, periods in general terrified the men of the day, who believed that menstruation could cause women to commit crimes. According to Cara Robertson’s 2019 book The Trial of Lizzie Borden, her defense team struggled to thread the needle between explaining the bloody rags without offering the prosecution a new lane to discredit her.

At the end of the show, after Lizzie is acquitted, she builds a home in the more affluent part of town, which she dubs Maplecroft. This is true — she quickly got out of the Borden family home and created a new, more luxurious life for herself in a house where she lived with her sister, Emma, even calling herself Lizbeth of Maplecroft as a way to distance herself from the notorious crime. But Lizzie never became a suffragette, as is depicted in the final episode, even if it is a nice narrative ending to the show. (Her mother, Sarah Borden, had been friends with the women’s rights advocate and journalist Mary Livermore, so when Lizzie declares in the show that her mother would probably be standing up there fighting for the women’s vote, she wouldn’t have been far off.) 

Abby Borden

In Monster, Abby is made out to be a wicked stepmother. She describes herself as “forceful” and takes command of the household. She’s beautiful and cold, laughing at the pain of others as a way to win over her husband. When Lizzie’s doves annoy her, she massacres them with a hatchet. She’s lost her husband’s affection, so she sleeps with his dead wife’s brother. She’s a social climber who finds actors intriguing and wants to leave her boring life for something more exciting. 

In reality, Abby was apparently innocuous. In the show, she insists that Bridget will be called Maggie, the same as their last servant, so the family doesn’t have to learn a new name; but in truth, Abby was the only one of them to call her by her real name. Abby wasn’t a cold beauty who resented her stepchildren because she couldn’t have her own, but a five-feet-three, 200 pound, matronly woman in her sixties, who’d been plucked out of spinsterhood at 37 to cook, clean, and raise Emma and Lizzie. And while there’d been some unhappiness between her and the Borden girls a few years before the murders — a disagreement over a property the family owned — there wasn’t the kind of outright resentment portrayed in the show. She also never killed any birds — that was Andrew. 

Emma Borden

Emma, as portrayed by Billie Lourd, is about as far from the actual Emma Borden as one could get. In the show, she’s barely home, always out on the town, being pursued by various suitors who are desperate to marry her. She’s stylish, cutting, and Abby’s favorite, and is just as down on Lizzie as her stepmom is. In real life, Emma wasn’t a social butterfly by any means; in fact, she’s been described as agoraphobic. She was 42 when her father and stepmother were killed, making her about 20 years past marrying age by Victorian standards. Though she wasn’t at home at the time of the murders — she was visiting friends in Fairhaven, about 15 miles away — that outing would have been an exception to her usual routine. 

One thing that is true, however, is the promise she made to her and Lizzie’s biological mother, Sarah, on Sarah’s deathbed. Emma was 12 when Sarah died, and vowed that she would always take care of her little sister, then just two. This devotion to Lizzie apparently caused rifts with Abby when she came on as the sisters’ stepmother, but ensured that Lizzie and Emma were extremely close. After the trial, Emma moved in with Lizzie at Maplecroft. She left in 1905, apparently after disagreements about Lizzie’s choice of friends, particularly her friendship with the actress Nance O’Neil. The two didn’t speak for the rest of their lives, but died within a week of each other in 1927.

Bridget Sullivan 

Monster isn’t the first adaptation to suggest that Bridget and Lizzie had a romantic relationship — see 2018’s Lizzie, starring Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart — but this version imagines Sullivan as a witchy transplant in the Borden home, brewing potions for everything from getting blood out of a sofa to ending a pregnancy. 

The real Bridget Sullivan did not appear to have any such tendencies. She was 26 when the murders took place, and by then had been working for the Bordens for almost three years. 

Bridget would testify in court that she was outside washing the windows the morning of the murders, at Abby’s request. This was beneficial to the prosecution, who would use this as evidence that Lizzie was the only one inside with the opportunity to commit the crime. However, she would also tell the jury that she never saw any animosity among the members of the family, thus pouring cold water on the prosecution’s theory that some kind of deep-seated anger led Lizzie to commit the murders. 

Monster shows Bridget living in the mountains after the trial ended, marrying an older man and working on their farm before murdering her husband and finding her way back to Lizzie at Maplecroft. Part of this is true: After the trial, Bridget moved to Montana and married a man named John Sullivan. But she lived out the rest of her days there, and never went back to live with Lizzie. She would later say that she liked Lizzie, and that she never knew the truth about who killed the Bordens. 

Nance O’Neil

Nance O’Neil, a real-life stage and silent-film star, plays a large role in Monster. Early on in the show, Lizzie and Bridget go to see O’Neil (Jessica Barden) perform at a local theater, and Lizzie introduces herself after the performance. She invites O’Neil to dinner, and the two strike up a friendship; later, while Lizzie is preparing for trial, O’Neil teaches her acting techniques to help her fool the jury into thinking she’s innocent. O’Neil remains friends with Lizzie, frequenting Maplecroft well into their old age. 

The real Lizzie Borden did have a deep respect for O’Neil, but it wasn’t until 1904 that the two even met, at which point Lizzie was 44, and O’Neil was 29. They struck up a fast friendship, with Lizzie hosting the actress and her entourage at her Fall River home. There were also rumors of a romantic relationship, which were never confirmed but persisted for decades. (“Whether they were or weren’t lesbians, what’s important is that people thought they were,” one expert told Vanity Fair.) O’Neil left the U.S. in 1906, as her popularity started to wane, moving to Paris and eventually marrying the English actor Alfred Hickman. After that, the two lost touch, she told a reporter after Lizzie’s death. 

Elizabeth Báthory

When Bridget and Lizzie meet in Monster, the two bond over a French book that Bridget has with her, an account of the 16th-century countess Elizabeth Báthory (called Elizabetta on the show, also played by Vicky Krieps). As depicted in the show, Báthory bathed in the blood of virgins, young women she murdered by the hundreds. Monster sets up an origin story of sorts, that Báthory was raped by a peasant when she was 13, resulting in a pregancy. When the baby is born, her servants drown the child in a bowl of water, “before she’d even had a chance to name her.” Years later, after Báthory receives her inheritance, she finds the peasant’s five daughters. He’s dead, so she extracts her revenge on them, and they become her first victims. She is eventually found guilty of her crimes and bricked into a chamber, where she starves to death. 

Given that this all happened roughly 400 years ago, it’s tough to say exactly what happened. But there was a real Countess Báthory who was tried in the early 1600s for the murder of more than 600 girls. The accounts of her cruelty were gruesome — publicly torturing women, cutting off their fingers, murdering hundreds of them. However, as Encyclopedia Britannica notes in a recent post about the countess, there is some reason to suspect that the accusations and the trial were ginned up. For one thing, Elizabeth held outsized power for a woman, and this condemnation would have been a way to take that away from her. For another, the Hungarian king who tried her owed her a fair amount of money — a debt that was forgiven after her conviction. 

Aileen Wournos 

Most people probably know Aileen Wuornos’ story from the 2003 film Monster (starring Charlize Theron, who won an Oscar for the role). When it comes to her backstory, this Monster is pretty accurate, at least according to Wuornos’ account: Working as a prostitute in the late 1980s in Florida, Wuornos was violently raped, and shot her attacker. She then went on a killing spree, murdering six more johns over the course of about a year, purportedly in self defense. She was arrested in 1991, convicted of murder, and sentenced to death; she died by lethal injection in 2002. 

Monster purports that Wournos (here played by Ryan Murphy go-to Sarah Paulson) was obsessed with Lizzie Borden, though there is no evidence to back up this idea. Like most people born in the 1950s, Wournos may well have heard of the accused killer, but probably not past the nursery rhyme about her. It would have been impossible for Wuornos to book a night at the Borden house, as she does in the show — it wasn’t even open to the public as a bed and breakfast until 1996, long after Wuornos was in prison. 

In the final episode, Wuornos is seen talking with a woman — presumably her longtime friend Dawn Botkins, who really did spend the serial killer’s last hours with her. Monster shows Wuornos declining her requested last meal, chicken from KFC, saying she’s too nervous to eat. This isn’t quite true — she’d been given the standard prison dinner of BBQ chicken that night, but requested only a cup of coffee for her last meal. However, Monster did manage to slip in one final tidbit of truth: In the show, Wournos asks to have Natalie Merchant’s song “Carnival” play as she slips off; this fact is true. She was apparently a big fan of the former 10,000 Maniacs singer. 

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is not just the first season to depict a woman, but the first to depict a person who wasn’t convicted of their crimes. Despite what the show may posit, Lizzie’s guilt is very much unsettled, and at this point, there’s no reason to think we’ll ever know the truth. For now, we’ll just have to settle for periodic retellings that reflect the mores of our time. This one may be summed up best by the Wuornos character’s statement as she’s preparing for her execution: “Just another woman put to death for something a man would’ve gotten away with.”