How Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story Turns Gaps in History Into Convincing Truth

I expected a horror story from MONSTER: THE LIZZIE BORDEN STORY. What I got was eight hours of television so persuasive that, by the finale, I was ready to call it the official version of a murder case nobody has actually solved.

That is the part I cannot stop thinking about.

The broad facts of Lizzie Borden are familiar even if the details have blurred into folklore. Andrew and Abby Borden were killed in their Fall River home in 1892. Lizzie was charged, tried and acquitted the following year. She remained the only person formally charged in the murders, and the case remains officially unsolved.

MONSTER knows all of that. It simply decides uncertainty is not enough.

It gives Lizzie a psychology. It gives the household a specific kind of cruelty. It gives her a forbidden relationship, a breaking point and, eventually, a reason. By the time Ella Beatty’s Lizzie starts swinging an axe, the series has built such a complete emotional argument that the question of whether she did it almost feels settled.

Then you start checking the evidence.

That is when the show becomes more interesting than I expected.

Charlie Hunnam is a big reason the illusion works. Holy crap, hello there, Charlie. Apparently I have missed him since the end of HAMLET. Sorry, SONS OF ANARCHY.

As Andrew Borden, Hunnam is extraordinary. The stutter, the social discomfort, the sudden rage, the vomiting, the blood, the way Andrew seems almost physically incapable of existing comfortably around the women in his house. It is a highly specific performance, the kind that feels researched even when you have no idea which details came from history and which came from the actor.

That distinction matters because MONSTER is unusually open about the fact that much of its Lizzie is constructed.

Netflix’s own true-story guide describes the abused, repressed Lizzie as the series’ version of events, while Beatty is even more direct about the character she played. She calls her a “very fictionalized version” of the real woman, built by using historical details to fill the enormous gaps in what we actually know.

That difference is not small.

The show does not merely suggest that Lizzie may have killed Andrew and Abby. It supplies a reason so complete that the violence begins to feel like the end of a story we have already been told.

Then there is Maggie.

I had never heard of her before this series, and I assumed she was one of those historical characters assembled from several people because television needed somebody in the room.

She was real.

In her June 7, 1893 trial testimony, the Borden maid gave her full name as Bridget Sullivan. She had worked for the family for nearly three years and was inside the house on the morning of the murders.

Even the name “Maggie,” one of those tiny details that sounds almost too perfect to be true, comes directly from the record.

At trial, Sullivan was asked whether she was sometimes called Maggie in the Borden household.

“Yes, sir.”

Asked who called her that, she answered Lizzie and Emma.

That is exactly how a show like MONSTER gets into your head.

One strange little detail turns out to be completely authentic, so you begin trusting the material around it.

The romance is another matter.

A review of the historical record published by PEOPLE identifies both the romantic relationship between Lizzie and Bridget and Bridget’s participation in the murders as fictional elements created for the series. Sullivan’s own testimony places her elsewhere in the house during crucial portions of the morning, and no established historical record ties her to the killings as Lizzie’s accomplice.

Lizzie’s sexuality is similarly unresolved.

Her later relationship with actress Nance O’Neil was close enough to create gossip at the time and speculation ever since. When Vanity Fair asked historian Cara Robertson, author of THE TRIAL OF LIZZIE BORDEN, how she understood the relationship, Robertson described it as probably romantic while stopping short of calling it necessarily sexual. The surviving record simply does not give us enough to assign Lizzie a sexual identity with certainty.

The chronology is clearer: Lizzie and O’Neil appear to have met in 1904, more than a decade after the murder trial.

MONSTER moves Nance backward into the trial and lets an actress teach Lizzie how to perform innocence for a jury.

Historically, it does not work.

Dramatically, it is one of the smartest ideas in the season.

A television series that is constructing its own Lizzie Borden gives Lizzie an actress who teaches her how to construct a version of herself.

We are also capable of horrific things, and those things come with consequences.

The fact that I could be placed in somebody else’s shoes for eight hours and come away feeling something for them does not erase a murder. It tells me the storytelling worked.

There is another strange echo running through the Aileen story that the series does not even need to invent.

Charlize Theron played Wuornos in Patty Jenkins’ 2003 MONSTER and won the 2004 Academy Award for Best Actress.

Sarah Paulson is now playing Wuornos inside another production called MONSTER.

There is no evidence that Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan named the anthology as some deliberate reference to Jenkins’ film, and it would be irresponsible to pretend otherwise.

But the coincidence is impossible to miss.

Theron gave us one Aileen Wuornos.

Paulson gives us another.

Beatty gives us one Lizzie Borden.

Hunnam gives us one Andrew Borden.

History gives us fragments of all of them.

That gap between the person and the performance is where this season lives.

I began MONSTER expecting horror and finished it convinced I had watched the definitive Lizzie Borden story. Researching it afterward dismantled that certainty almost immediately.

Maggie was real.

The nickname was real.

The murders were real.

The trial was real.

Nance O’Neil was real.

Aileen Wuornos was real.

But many of the relationships, motives and psychological explanations that made those eight hours feel so complete were not.

Oddly, that did not make me think less of the series.

It made me understand what it had actually accomplished.

MONSTER: THE LIZZIE BORDEN STORY does not finally tell us what happened inside the Borden house in 1892. Nobody can.

What it shows, sometimes intentionally and sometimes simply by being so convincing, is how easily the empty spaces in history become stories, and how quickly a good enough story starts to feel like memory.

I went looking for the official Lizzie Borden story.

There isn’t one.

There is evidence, rumor, speculation, an acquittal, a maid named Bridget who really was called Maggie and more than a century of people trying to make the pieces fit.

MONSTER makes them fit beautifully.

That is not the same thing as making them true.

For once, that difference made the story more interesting.

Kazoo.