How Lizzie Borden became Netflix’s latest Monster – despite being acquitted for murder

It is one of modern history’s most enduring murder mysteries: a bloody double killing, a sensational trial and an acquittal that has fuelled debate for more than a century.

On a hot August day in 1892, a wealthy Massachusetts couple, Andrew and Abby Borden, were hacked to death in broad daylight in their home in the small industrial city of Fall River.

Andrew was found lying on the sofa downstairs, while Abby was upstairs in the guest bedroom, face down beside the bed. She was thought to have been killed 90 minutes earlier by 19 axe blows.

Andrew’s 32-year-old daughter, Lizzie, had apparently been unaware of the murders, despite the fact that she was on the property at the time.

Although she found the bodies of her father and stepmother, Lizzie claimed to have been in the barn behind the house eating pears when they were murdered.

Even so, she soon became the prime suspect – and the only person ever charged with the killings.

‘It was this horrific double murder of two elderly people on an otherwise typical Thursday morning in a mill town that just wasn’t used to those sorts of crimes,’ explains historian Cara Robertson, author of The Trial of Lizzie Borden.

‘The nature of the murders was so grisly and so violent, they were very male-coded. It was hard to believe that a woman who ticked all the boxes of respectable upper-middle-class womanhood could commit a crime like that.’

Next month sees Lizzie’s story covered as the fourth instalment of Netflix’s gruesome Monster series, with Ella Beatty taking on the lead role and Charlie Hunnam – who previously starred in Monster: The Ed Gein Story -as her father.

A dysfunctional family

When Lizzie was arrested a week after the murders, the public were mesmerised by the case.

Investigators soon discovered that the home she shared with her father, his second wife, Abby, and her older sister, Emma, who was away at the time of the murders, was an unhappy one.

Andrew had remarried two years after their mother’s death and the girls refused to talk to Abby, but when they did, they called her ‘Mrs Borden’.

The family lived by different routines, eating at separate times and leading separate lives. Lizzie had moved furniture to block the door connecting her room to her father’s and stepmother’s, while Andrew and Abby were said to keep their own bedroom door locked.

There was also conflict over money. Andrew Borden gave property to Abby’s relatives, and during the trial friends testified that Lizzie disliked living in the family’s modest home. Their father was stingy with his daughters, giving them the weekly allowance of a factory worker despite his considerable wealth.

But was that enough to turn her into a double axe murderer?

To the people of Fall River, Lizzie was considered a quiet, churchgoing lady who lived a respectable life, but evidence from the scene was enough to charge her.

Police found a bucket of bloody rags in the basement, although Lizzie said they were menstrual towels, and the day before the murders, she had tried to buy prussic acid, a deadly poison.

Lizzie claimed to need it to clean a sealskin coat, despite the fact that it was the middle of summer, but was refused. Plus, she had no alibi.

A respectable prisoner

As she awaited trial in prison, Lizzie was afforded privileges that would have been denied to other murder suspects.

‘She spent about eight months in a jail cell that was quite well appointed and with a lot more creature comforts than any other inmate would have been given,’ Cara tells Metro.

‘Lizzie was allowed to keep to her own schedule, had comfortable furniture that was brought in for her, and she had meals delivered from a local restaurant. She was allowed visitors, gifts sent in, and she essentially kept Daisy, a male cat in the jail, as a pet, who became her companion.’

The following June, the trial began to great spectacle. Lizzie dressed well and appeared calm in court, bringing a bunch of fresh flowers with her every day, which contrasted starkly with the horrific nature of the crimes.

Some news reports portrayed her as the innocent, refined daughter who could never commit such a brutal crime, while others suggested that beneath the woman’s respectable exterior was a calculating killer.

It was this intense media coverage that helped propel Lizzie Borden into one of the most famous figures in American criminal history.

At the trial, the public heard how Andrew’s body was found with an eyeball hanging out. At one stage, the autopsy doctor retrieved a piece of his skull to show the all-male jury, causing Lizzie to faint.

Because Abby was killed first, Lizzie was set to receive all her father’s money, which meant she could hire an excellent defence team. After two weeks, she was acquitted – but public opinion was split.

The wrong decision?

‘People in the wider US apparently applauded the verdict. But the press had really split along class lines,’ says Cara who is also consulting on a musical about Lizzie.

‘Put simplistically, the working class, the Irish Catholics, the mill workers thought this was a pretty clear case of somebody with resources getting away with murder. They didn’t like the sympathy that was accorded her versus the way that someone from a less elevated background would have been treated.’

As a free woman, Lizzie spent her inheritance on a grand house overlooking the town, which she moved into with her sister.

‘The expectation was that she was going to live down her notoriety and devote herself to good works. Instead, she started living it up, going out to the theatre and moving to a much grander house,’ explains Cara.

‘She used to ride around in a chauffeur-driven car with the back seats built up so that her dogs could look out of the window. She lived out her life like a woman of means and leisure.’

Despite having supported her throughout the trial, the townspeople of Fall River started to turn their backs on Lizzie.

‘When she returned to church, the pews around her were empty. People in her class only backed her during the trial because it would have implicated them on some level. It would have cast doubt upon the essential goodness of a certain kind of womanhood.

‘They wanted her acquitted because what did it mean for a town like that if someone like Lizzie Borden could have committed that kind of murder?

‘But in the end, they exacted their own punishment through that kind of ostracism,’ says Cara.

Emma later moved out of their fancy home and the sisters became estranged – although no one really knows why. Lizzie died at the age of 66 from pneumonia.

134 years on, the murders still fascinate true crime fans. Today, curious visitors can stay at the Borden house, which is run as an Airbnb. They like to sit downstairs while a friend falls in the bedroom above them to see what kind of noise the murder could have made.

And Lizzie Borden’s notoriety lives on in a much simpler format: a nursery rhyme which Cara used to sing while jumping rope in kindergarten, and is still known to this day:

‘Lizzie Borden took an axe, she gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one…’

It is one of the reasons that Lizzie’s innocence has never been truly accepted, adds Cara. And maybe why she has joined the ranks alongside Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein and the Menendez brothers, in Netflix’s Monster series.

‘Most people assume, based on the rhyme, that she was convicted.

‘The vision of Lizzie Borden is not of someone who has endured this terrible ordeal of both having her father and stepmother killed and then being accused and finally acquitted and forced into being a recluse.

‘The way most people think of her now is as a Halloween horror figure.’