Credit: Netflix

Lizzie Borden has been dead for over what, nearly a century, yet here she is again, dragging an axe through popular culture as though 1892 happened yesterday. Yep, we know you’re still processing a “century”, so take a minute there. Netflix has now hauled her back into the spotlight with Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, the latest instalment of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s anthology, with Ella Beatty taking on one of America’s most infamous murder suspects.

And yes, you probably know the rhyme. Everyone does. It claims Lizzie gave her “mother” forty whacks before giving her father forty-one, which is quite catchy if we’re being honest, but as history, it’s hopeless.

Abby was her stepmother, and she suffered 19 blows, while her father Andrew received around 10 or 11. Even the famous axe needs an asterisk, because the weapon involved is generally described as a hatchet.

And all that matters because the real case never gave anyone the cookie-cutter ending television loves. Lizzie went on trial and was acquitted in 1893, while nobody else was charged with the murders. So before, if you are here after watching the blood-soaked version of Netflix, here is what really happened.

The morning Lizzie Borden became infamous

On August 4th, 1892, Abby Borden was killed upstairs at the family home in Fall River, Massachusetts, before Andrew was attacked while resting on a sofa downstairs. Lizzie was in the house, and so was Bridget, while Lizzie’s sister Emma was away. You can see it was right in front of the police’s nose.

Ooh, and then things got awkward. Lizzie’s accounts of her movements did not sit together well, and investigators learned that she had tried to buy prussic acid from a chemist the day before the murders. A friend also testified about seeing Lizzie burn a dress afterwards, so, you know, as plain as day.

But hang on, because suspicion is not proof. Nobody saw Lizzie commit either murder, and prosecutors could not produce physical evidence that put a murder weapon in her hands. The prussic-acid testimony was excluded from the trial as well, while Victorian assumptions about whether a respectable woman could commit such violence worked in her favour. The jury acquitted her, but Fall River? Oh, that town was nowhere near finished with Lizzie Borden.

Where Monster starts making its own rules

Netflix does not like the word ‘uncertainty’, you see. The series makes Lizzie the murderer and portrays Maggie as both her lover and accomplice, despite there being no historical evidence that Bridget Sullivan helped kill Andrew or Abby. There is no proof of the sexual relationship shown on screen either, so this is Monster taking one of history’s blank spaces and deciding to fill the blanks with its own perception.

The same thing happens with the prussic acid, which becomes part of an attempted poisoning in the series, while the burnt dress receives a much more incriminating context. Monster even puts neighbour Bertha Manchester’s murder on Lizzie’s fictional ledger, although Manchester was killed after the Bordens and the real crime was not connected to Lizzie.

Then there is actress Nance O’Neil, played by Jessica Barden, helping Lizzie through her trial. Great television device, one rather inconvenient snag: the real O’Neil did not become close to Lizzie until years after the acquittal, around 1904. Sarah Paulson’s Aileen Wuornos also turns up as part of the season’s wider story, though Netflix itself acknowledges there is no evidence Wuornos had the Borden fixation depicted in the series.

So, did Lizzie Borden do it? And there is the nuisance that has kept this case alive for more than 130 years: Monster can give you an answer because television gets to choose one, while history is still standing there with an acquittal and a bloody great question mark.