If the million-dollar contract that united producer Ryan Murphy and Netflix for several years yielded a success, that was undoubtedly Monster. The series about Jeffrey Dahmer later gave rise to a serial killer anthology whose creators maintain that it rests on one question: Do monsters get made or born? And in the search for the answer we reach its fourth season, centered on the famous Lizzie Borden.
This story not only distinguishes itself from the previous ones (those about Dahmer, the Lyle and Erik Menéndez brothers, and Ed Gein) in that it is the first about a woman, but it has another substantial difference: it is the first time that Monster tackles an unsolved case. No, it is not known whether Lizzie Borden is a murderer and, therefore, a monster as the series’ title suggests, which has landed today on Netflix with this batch of episodes.
August 4, 1892. It was a hot midsummer morning in Fall River, Massachusetts, when the crime occurred, still unsolved today. The victims: Andrew Jackson Borden, the father of the series’ protagonist, 69 years old, and his then second wife, Abby Durfee Gray Borden, 64. Both were taken from life with a sharp object, possibly an axe, with which several blows were delivered.
The Axe-Wielding Murderer
Although the Lizzie Borden myth would be linked to the label “the axe-wielding murderer”, the murder weapon was never found. The public imagination identifies her with a large-ax figure, though the wounds actually suggested that, in any case, it would have been a small one that could be wielded with one hand. And although there was a popular little song that claimed they received 40 and 41 blows, there were far fewer.
Ella Beatty y Viky Krieps en una imagen de Monstruo: la historia de Lizzie Borden.
Whoever killed the Bordens attacked Abby first, since that morning Andrew had gone out to run errands to the bank and the post office. In the house were, besides the victim, Lizzie Borden, who was 32 at the time, and the maid, Bridgette Sullivan. The other sister, older than Lizzie, Emma, was on vacation. When he returned home, Andrew was murdered and half an hour later his daughter called the police. Bridgette insisted that she had been resting in her room and that it was Lizzie’s screams that alerted her after the murders had already taken place.
Regarding the possible motive for the crime there are, of course, several theories. One points to a matter of money: Andrew was stingy, especially with his daughters, to whom he gave hardly any comforts. There wasn’t even hot water and, in fact, Andrew and Abby used different stairs to access the first floor than the daughters. They, it seems, felt displaced. In addition, that day the Bordens’ maternal uncle, John Vinnicum Morse, was at home to reach an agreement regarding his sister’s inheritance.
Another theory, explored for the first time in the 1984 novel Lizzie, written by Ed McBain, would suggest that Lizzie Borden was a lesbian and had a romance with the maid. Some, even, pointed to this as the instigator of the murder that the daughter would have committed.
A Trial That Left the Case Unresolved
Lizzie Borden was not, at first, considered a suspect in the double homicide, but two factors influenced this perception: on the one hand, she changed her version of the events and came across as incoherent; on the other, the statements of a local pharmacist. He said that Lizzie tried to buy prussic acid supposedly to clean a fur coat but, days earlier, Abby had gone to his shop saying she was ill from something she had eaten and suspected that she might have been poisoned. The pharmacist suspected that the acid was for that and did not sell it to Lizzie.
Ella Beatty en una imagen del primer episodio de Monstruo: la historia de Lizzie Borden.
On August 11, Lizzie Borden was arrested and imprisoned awaiting a trial that would take place the following year. However, with no murder weapon (an axe was found in the basement, but it had no blood) nor smeared clothing, with the pharmacist’s testimony dismissed and with no other evidence, the woman could not be found guilty. It is also said that she hired a good team of lawyers who advised her to present herself to the jury as “an innocent maiden” in a black dress, to project the image that she would be incapable of such atrocity, neither by strength nor by character.
The lack of resolution of the case thus configured the Lizzie Borden myth that reaches us today through the Netflix miniseries, but there had already been other literary and audiovisual versions (notably Angela Carter’s book The Machete Slaughter in Fall River or the films starring Elizabeth Montgomery, Christina Ricci, and Chloe Sevigny in 1975, 2014 and 2018 respectively). And not only that, the fascination with the story has turned the house where the crime occurred into a pilgrimage site: you can book a one-hour tour for 30 dollars or spend the night there for 125. “The most haunted house in America,” reads its website.
