Who Is Lizzie Borden? Ryan Murphy’s Upcoming Monster in Season 4

The director of the popular Netflix show Monster, Ryan Murphy, is coming back with another gut-wrenching American crime story that garnered widespread publicity in the United States and has remained a topic in the American pop culture.

This time the protagonist is not a young man who creepily amuses himself by killing his dates in his room and sleeps next to them staring into their eyes searching for the souls that have already fled the scene.

Monster: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story IMDb

It isn’t another media trial like the Menendez brothers found themselves amidst after they commit a parricide in their house in California. The center of Murphy’s story this time is an American woman, Lizzie Borden, who was tried and acquitted in 1892 for axing, literally, her father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts. 

No one else was charged with the murders and, despite ostracism from other residents, Borden spent the remainder of her life in Fall River and died of pneumonia at age 66, just days before the death of her older sister Emma.

The Borden murders have not been too far from scrutiny and a wave of conspiracy theories around the who killed the Bordens if not Lizzie, the only prime suspect in the trials. She has been reported to be the next target picked by the controversial crime series’ monster.

A picture of Lizzie BordenThe Guardian

But here’s the thing. We are still waiting on the season 3 of the series which received six Primetime Emmy nominations for season 1 in 2022, with Nicey Nash (played Dahmer’s neighbour) winning for Supporting Actress in a Limited Series or Movie.

Titled The Original Monster: Sons of Anarchy starring Charlie Hunnam, the much-awaited series will focus on the serial killer Ed Gein in the upcoming season.

However, you’d be surprised that Netflix has not announced a renewal of the series for a fourth season. Yet Variety has And though season three does not yet have a release date, Variety has reported  that season four of Monster will be ‘The Lizzie Borden’ story.

Reps for both Netflix and Murphy declined to comment on the report. So now, we wait in this limbo until we get any new updates. What we do know is about the highly public trials around the Borden murders that have been televised before, part of a folk rhyme (yes, you read that right) and has been one of the popular murder cases that bring some of the most bizarre conspiracies theories!

Monster: Jeffery Dahmer IMDB

What Was The Folk Rhyme?

The 1892 Borden Murders were so bizarre for the Era given that they were not hit once or twice but around 18 or 19 times that the case became memorialised in a popular skipping-rope rhyme and was sung to the tune of the then-popular song "Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay."

Apparently, the rhyme was created by an anonymous writer as a tune to sell newspapers. Others have attributed it to the ubiquitous, but anonymous, Mother Goose.

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

Andrew Borden now is dead,
Lizzie hit him on the head.
Up in heaven he will sing,
on the gallows she will swing.