Now summer’s done, we can finally start talking about Halloween. Not that Tesco needs telling: the Superstore near me already has a “Spooky Season” aisle, more than six weeks ahead of the Big Night. Nor does Netflix . Right on cue, the streamer’s Monster anthology is knocking again. The franchise has built its name on prestige actors vanishing into real-life American villains: Charlie Hunnam gave us a skin-prickling performance of menace and isolation as a velvet-voiced Ed Gein ; before him, Cooper Koch and Nicholas Alexander Chavez played the patricidal Menendez brothers; and before them, Evan Peters delivered a throat-tighteningly sinister Jeffrey Dahmer . Now the torch passes to Ella Beatty (daughter of Hollywood titans Warren Beatty and Annette Bening), who steps into the axe-wielding shoes of Lizzie Borden. But was Borden a clear-eyed killer, or just a woman framed for someone else’s crime? What’s the Lizzie Borden story? Readers of a certain vintage, and nationality, might remember the old playground rhyme about Lizzie Borden: Lizzie Borden took an axe, / And gave her mother forty whacks. / When she saw what she had done, / She gave her father forty-one. Its childlike rhythm belies one of the most chilling of stories: the 1892 axe massacre of Andrew and Abby Borden in the quiet mill town of Fall River, Massachusetts. Suspicion fell instantly on Andrew’s 32-year-old daughter, Lizzie, a respectable, churchgoing woman who lived in the house and claimed to have discovered her father’s body. A crime passionnel , prosecutors said. She had the means, motive and opportunity, not to mention her suspicious behaviour before and after the murders. And yet her trial ended in acquittal. But not absolution. The case has since curdled into pop-cultural fixation (ghost tours still operate out of the Borden house), suspended between folklore, misogyny and the queasy unease of a crime that has never been properly resolved. Who was Lizzie Borden? She was, by most outward measures, entirely unremarkable. Lizzie was a respected member of the community in Fall River, Massachusetts, active in the church and various charities. Her father, Andrew, was worth a half-million dollars, a multimillionaire by contemporary standards, and a man of high social standing. Despite the wealth, the family lived modestly: Andrew was a miser who sold eggs from a basket to his business associates and refused to install running water on the second floor of the family home. So Lizzie grew up with a slop bucket and chamber pot in her bedroom, a fact that would come up at her trial. Lizzie and her older sister Emma, both unmarried, lived at 92 Second Street alongside their stepmother, Abby, their biological mother having died when Lizzie was a toddler. Relations in the house were tetchy, mainly over money: tensions rose after Andrew began gifting real estate to branches of Abby’s family, prompting Lizzie and Emma to demand, and receive, a rental property of their own. There were serious tensions at home Lizzie and Emma resented Abby, it was said. They saw their father lavish cash on his wife, cash his daughters saw as the frittering of their inheritance. In 1891, there appeared to be a break-in. Jewellery and cash were taken from Andrew and Abby’s bedroom. There was a brief police investigation, but suspicions centred on Lizzie. After that, relations creaked, then buckled. “Everybody quietly bought lots of locks,” wrote Florence King in an article for the National Review . “To supplement the key locks, there were bolts, hooks, chains, and padlocks.” They all locked the doors connecting their rooms in the big house. Bridget Sullivan, the family’s Irish maid, said she never heard raised voices. Lizzie tried to buy poison The day before the murders, three men in a Fall River drugstore said a woman fitting Lizzie’s description asked to buy prussic acid, a deadly poison typically sold only on prescription. She was, they claimed, turned away. It would become one of the prosecution’s most damning threads: with the household already sick for days, blamed at the time on leftover mutton, it raised the possibility that this wasn’t Lizzie’s first attempt on her parents’ lives. The defence called it mistaken identity: the clerk, Eli Bence, had never met her before. The judges ultimately ruled the testimony inadmissible at trial, but by then the rumour had already done its damage in the press. On the morning of 4 August, the Borden household sat down to a meal that had barely changed in days: reheated mutton, mutton broth, johnnycakes and coffee, eaten by Andrew, Abby and visiting relative John Morse. The family had been ill for nearly a week, a sickness some blamed on the meat, left unrefrigerated and recycled across meals in the summer heat. Lizzie didn’t join them. She stayed upstairs, later explaining that it was her habit when tensions in the house ran high. Morse finished eating and left around 8.45am to run errands, planning to return for lunch. He would come back to a house surrounded by police. The day of the murder Abby Borden was killed first, sometime mid-morning, as she tidied the upstairs guest room, struck around 18 times with a sharp, heavy blade. Andrew returned from his morning business rounds shortly before 11am and lay down on the sitting-room sofa for a nap. He never woke up. Lizzie said she found him, axed in the head 11 (not 41) times.

His face was unrecognisable, and Lizzie screamed for the maid, Bridget Sullivan, to get help. No weapon was ever conclusively identified, though a hatchet with a broken handle was later found in the basement. No one else was seen entering or leaving the house all morning. Lizzie’s trial opened in New Bedford in June 1893 and became a national sensation. The prosecution leaned on circumstantial evidence: her changing accounts of her whereabouts and the fact she had burned a dress. But the case had holes: no bloodied clothing was ever found, no murder weapon was conclusively identified, and no witnesses placed her at the scene. Did Lizzie’s period save her from the gallows? This is a key question many historians have asked in the years since. Crucially, Lizzie had been on her period that week. So when police found a pail of blood-soaked rags in the basement, she claimed they were simply sanitary napkins used by women of the time, not rags she had used to clean the floors and weapon of her victims’ blood. Because 1892 science could not differentiate between menstrual blood and blood from a violent bludgeoning, investigators took her word for it and didn’t even examine the rags, potentially letting the primary piece of physical evidence slip from right under their noses. Her defence argued that a respectable, churchgoing woman was simply incapable of such savagery, which the all-male jury seemed to accept. After barely an hour’s deliberation, they returned a verdict of not guilty. Lizzie walked free, but in the court of public opinion, the case was far from closed. Lizzie was never the only name in the frame. The main alternatives were: Bridget Sullivan , the maid, had been ill and made to wash windows in punishing heat, a plausible motive, and she was one of only two people confirmed on the property. John Morse , Andrew’s visiting brother-in-law, had reportedly clashed with the family over inheritance, though his alibi, running errands across town, held up. The most persistent theory centres on William Borden , an alleged illegitimate son who supposedly killed his father after failed extortion attempts, possibly aided by Lizzie herself. None of it was ever proven. All three theories remain circumstantial, but they’ve kept the case’s other doubts alive for more than a century. What happened to Lizzie after her acquittal? Acquittal didn’t bring Lizzie peace. Fall River largely shunned her; old friends kept their distance, and rumours followed her for the rest of her life. Weeks after the trial, she and Emma bought a grand new house they named Maplecroft, where Lizzie began going by “Lizbeth”. She struck up a close, much-gossiped-about friendship with actress Nance O’Neil in 1904, which reportedly triggered a rift with Emma, who moved out the following year, and it’s thought that they never spoke again. Lizzie remained in Fall River until her death in 1927, at 66, taking whatever she knew about that August morning to the grave. The Lioness Finale Sets Up a Killer Cliff-Hanger Lanterns Episode 6 Confirms Batman’s Place in the New DCU The Blame Episode 1 Recap & Ending Explained Rogue Agent is James Norton’s “superb” spy series A Mother's Son is Nicola Walker's "5-star" drama 'MobLand' S2 Ep1 Recap & Ending Explained The Trailer for Legal Divorce Drama War is Here MobLand Season 2: Everything We Know Stream Keeley Hawes' "Twisty" Thriller for Free 7 “Superb” Detective Dramas to Watch This Week ‘Ted Lasso’ Can’t Stop Stepping on Rakes Anna Maxwell Martin's Downton Abbey parody is trending