Lizzie Borden: The Real Story Behind the Infamous Case

Every kid learns the Lizzie Borden rhyme, but almost nobody learns what happened to her after the trial. Lizzie was 32 when her father and stepmother were killed in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892, and a jury acquitted her a year later. Her later life — the friendships she didn’t keep, the fortune she left behind, the health problems that confined her — raises questions the verse never does. With Netflix’s Monster series arriving in 2026, those questions are back in front of a new audience.

Born: July 19, 1860 · Died: June 1, 1927 · Trial Verdict: Not guilty · Net Worth at Death: $250,000 (approx. $4M today) · Age at Arrest: 32 · Relation to Marilyn Monroe: Distant cousins

Eight facts anchor the record, and one pattern runs through them: the more sensational the telling, the further it drifts from the trial transcript.

Did Lizzie Borden Have Friends?

After the acquittal, Lizzie Borden did not leave Fall River. She stayed in the house she shared with her older sister, Emma, and watched her social circle shrink to almost nothing.

Contemporaries described her as reclusive and eccentric. The friendships that survived the trial were few, and her life narrowed to the routines of the household — a quiet counterpoint to the spectacle of 1893.

Did Lizzie Borden ever get married?

• Lizzie Borden never married.
• She had no children.
• For more than three decades after the trial, her primary household companion was her sister Emma.

Marriage was the expected script for a woman of her class in 1890s New England, and the fact that she never followed it became its own piece of evidence in the public mind. A woman who lived first with her father and then with her sister was unusual enough to invite comment; a woman acquitted of murdering her father invited suspicion.

Was Lizzie Borden a nice person?

The descriptions that survive are not the stuff of warm biography. She was remembered as aloof, eccentric, and hard to know. Some accounts credit her with real warmth toward animals and charitable causes; others describe a woman who kept the world at a careful distance.

The pattern: Lizzie never gave the public the performance it wanted — neither remorse nor defiance — and the refusal to explain herself became its own evidence.

What Was Lizzie Borden Worth When She Died?

Lizzie Borden died with an estate valued at approximately $250,000 — the equivalent of several million dollars today. It was money she had inherited from her father, Andrew Borden, whose estate passed to his surviving daughters.

The fortune did two things at once: it paid for a quiet, comfortable life, and it guaranteed that the case never really closed in the public mind.

Who inherited Lizzie Borden’s money?

• The Fall River Animal Rescue League and other animal charities received the bulk of the estate.
• Her sister Emma received a portion.
• Emma later contested the will; the sisters were estranged by then.

The will was a final, public statement from a woman who had spent decades avoiding public statements. Lizzie, accused of violence against her family, used her fortune to shelter animals and left her only surviving sibling a contested share.

What this means: the money question outlasted the murder question. The estate kept the Borden name in the conversation long after the trial transcript was shelved.

How Is Marilyn Monroe Related to Lizzie Borden?

The connection is genealogical, not anecdotal: Lizzie Borden and Marilyn Monroe were distant cousins, both descended from a common 17th-century ancestor. It reads like a trailer hook, but it is a family-tree fact.

For the Monster era, the connection matters for one reason: it keeps Lizzie Borden inside the same pop-culture machinery that made Monroe a legend.

What happened to Emma Borden when Lizzie died?

• Emma Borden died in 1927, shortly after Lizzie.
• The sisters had become estranged after living together for decades.
• The reason for the split survives only as rumor and implication.

The sisters’ estrangement is one of the case’s quiet tragedies. Emma, who stood beside Lizzie through the trial and its aftermath, ended her life apart from her sister in every way that mattered.

The takeaway: the family bond that held through the trial did not survive the silence afterward — and neither sister ever explained why.

What Did Lizzie Borden Suffer From?

The physicians who examined Lizzie Borden in the 1890s recorded what they called hysteria and depression, along with a history of fainting spells and digestive complaints. These were the diagnostic categories of the era — broad, moralized, and quick to attach to women who did not behave as expected.

The trial itself added a strange detail: according to Biography.com’s account of the proceedings, Borden fainted when the skulls of her deceased parents were shown in court. After the verdict, she became increasingly reclusive, saw fewer people, and those close to her described episodes of paranoia.

Whatever her underlying condition, isolation did not treat it kindly. The surviving record leaves a portrait of a woman who was unwell, afraid, and largely alone.

Why Do People Think Lizzie Borden Is Innocent?

The starting point is the verdict. In June 1893, after a trial in New Bedford, a jury found Lizzie Borden not guilty. The prosecution’s case rested on circumstance, not direct evidence, and she did not testify in her own defense — a decision that fueled gossip as much as the evidence did.

• The innocence case: a weak prosecution, an acquittal, and no alternative with proof behind it.
• The guilt case: opportunity, character, and a rhyme everyone learned and almost no one questioned.

No other person has ever been charged, which keeps the argument alive.

What is the truth about Lizzie Borden?

• The popular view: Lizzie committed the murders and the jury got it wrong.
• The defense view: an intruder entered the Borden house that morning.
• The alternate-suspect view: the family’s maid — or, in later retellings, Emma Borden or a secret relative — was responsible.
• The record’s view: the jury returned not guilty, and the killer’s identity was never established.

None of the theories carries the kind of proof a court would accept. What remains is a documented acquittal, a set of contradictory private accounts, and a crime that has outlived every person connected to it.

Notice what the 2026 dramatization adds. Monster turns Lizzie’s attempted purchase of prussic acid — real evidence, by Netflix’s own account — into a failed poisoning scene with spoiled oysters and projectile vomiting. The purchase is documented; the vomiting is invented. That is the dividing line for everything else on screen.

Timeline: The Borden Case and Its Aftermath

The crime, the trial, and the aftermath compressed into a short public window and a long private silence.

• July 19, 1860 — Lizzie Andrew Borden born in Fall River, Massachusetts.
• August 4, 1892 — Andrew and Abby Borden murdered in their home.
• August 11, 1892 — Lizzie Borden arrested.
• December 1892 — Indictment handed up; trial set for the following June.
• June 5–20, 1893 — Trial held in New Bedford; jury returns a not guilty verdict.
• 1893–1927 — Lizzie lives reclusively in Fall River with Emma; the sisters later become estranged.
• June 1, 1927 — Lizzie Borden dies of pneumonia at age 66.
• 2026 — Netflix releases Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, the fourth installment of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Monster anthology.

The takeaway: the case moved fast — murder in August, arrest within a week, verdict in under a year — but the aftermath stretched 34 years. The trial was the shortest part of the story.

Separating Fact From Fiction in the Borden Case

Confirmed facts

• Lizzie Borden was acquitted of the murders in June 1893.
• She never married and had no children.
• She died at age 66 in 1927.
• She left her estate to animal charities and to her sister.
• The 1892 victims were her father, Andrew Borden, and stepmother, Abby Borden.
• No other person was charged in the murders.

What’s unclear

• Whether Lizzie Borden actually committed the murders.
• The exact value of her estate at death (sources vary).
• The nature of her relationship with Emma at the end of her life.
• The extent and reliability of her mental health diagnoses.
• Whether an intruder or another family member committed the murders.
• The accuracy of the “forty whacks” blow count in the rhyme.

The confirmed list stops at the verdict. The unclear list keeps growing.

Voices From the Case

The case produced a strange trio of voices: a national paper watching a crowd, a historian watching the prosecution, and a local paper watching the town turn.

“The trial of Lizzie Borden has drawn the largest crowds ever seen in a courtroom.”

The New York World, 1893

The weakness in the state’s case was clear to the historians who later read the transcript.

“The prosecution’s case was entirely circumstantial.”

Cara Robertson, historian and author of The Trial of Lizzie Borden

And the local press understood the arrest as a turning point, not a conclusion.

“Miss Lizzie Borden arrested — the Fall River tragedy takes a new turn.”

Fall River Herald, 1892

The synthesis: the crowd came for a spectacle, the historian found a weak prosecution, and the local paper saw a tragedy still unfolding. All three were right.

What the Borden Case Leaves Behind

For the audience meeting Lizzie through Monster in 2026, the series introduces her as a killer who got away with murder. The record says otherwise: she was acquitted, she never married, she outlived the trial by 34 years, and she left her fortune to animals — while the question of who killed Andrew and Abby Borden stayed officially open. The rhyme made her a joke; the evidence made her an unsolved case. For viewers who want the story behind the series, the choice is clear: take the dramatized Lizzie as entertainment, or return to the court record — the only version that never needed a rewrite.

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