Every piece of evidence against Lizzie Borden that Netflix’s Monster left out

Ryan Murphy’s Monster shows Lizzie Borden being accused of killing her parents and eventually getting acquitted, but there was actually quite a lot of evidence against her that the Netflix show left out.

Lizzie Borden was accused of killing her father, Andrew, and stepmother, Abby, with a hatchet in 1892. She was arrested, went to trial and was eventually found not guilty.

Some of the evidence against Lizzie was never allowed at her trial. Other details were mentioned only briefly or have become so buried under the mythology around the case that they are easy to miss.

She was acquitted in 1893 and nobody else was ever convicted. But these are some of the major pieces of evidence and circumstances that made Lizzie the prosecution’s central suspect.

Lizzie had a story for where she was, but it kept changing

One of the biggest issues for the prosecution was Lizzie’s account of her movements on the morning of August 4, 1892. Lizzie said she had been downstairs earlier in the morning, but later went to the barn to look for lead sinkers because she was planning to go fishing.

During her inquest, Lizzie said she stayed in the barn loft for roughly 15 to 20 minutes. She said she was looking for lead and also ate three pears while looking out of a window.

The problem was that this was the period when her father, Andrew, was killed. The questioning became quite detailed. The prosecutor repeatedly challenged Lizzie about why she would spend so long in a hot barn loft looking for sinkers when she had not even bought the fishing lines or hooks she planned to use.

Lizzie said, “I went up to get some sinkers if I could find them. I did not intend to go to the farm for lines. I was going to buy some lines here.”

And when asked how she could have spent around 20 minutes there, she said she had eaten pears and looked out of the window. Her inquest testimony was later ruled inadmissible at the murder trial, so the jury did not hear this questioning as evidence against her. The surviving transcript shows just how closely prosecutors had questioned her about the story.

Bridget Sullivan heard something upstairs

Bridget Sullivan, the Borden family’s maid, was outside washing windows that morning. In her testimony, she said that when Andrew Borden returned home, she went to open the front door. As she struggled with the locked door, she said she heard Lizzie laughing upstairs.

She apparently then saw Andrew come inside and later heard Lizzie talking to him. Lizzie told him that Abby had received a note and gone out. Sullivan said she had not seen anyone deliver a note to Abby.

The note Lizzie said Abby received was never found

Lizzie told people that Abby had received a note asking her to visit a sick friend. That explained why Lizzie said she believed her stepmother had left the house.

But investigators never found the note. During the trial, Alice Russell, one of Lizzie’s friends, gave evidence about conversations surrounding the supposed note. The issue was that if Abby had received a note calling her away from the house, where was it?

The missing note became another problem with Lizzie’s account.

The day before the murders, Lizzie tried to buy prussic acid

On August 3, the day before the murders, Lizzie went to a local drug shop and asked about buying prussic acid. According to druggist Eli Bence’s testimony, Lizzie asked for ten cents’ worth and said she wanted it for cleaning a sealskin cape.

Bence refused to sell it to her. The substance was highly poisonous, which made the request particularly suspicious after the murders.

But since Andrew and Abby had not been poisoned, the court excluded Bence’s evidence from the murder trial because it was considered too remote from the actual killings.

Lizzie told Alice Russell she was worried something terrible was coming

The night before the murders, Lizzie visited Alice Russell. According to accounts of Russell’s evidence, Lizzie spoke about her worries over her father’s situation and the possibility that something could happen to the family.

One account records Lizzie saying, “I feel depressed. I feel as if something was hanging over me that I cannot throw off, and it comes over me at times, no matter where I am.”

She also spoke about people who might have had problems with her father.

The dress she burned became a huge problem

Three days after the murders, Lizzie was seen destroying a light-coloured Bedford cord dress. Alice Russell was there and later testified about what happened. According to Russell, Lizzie was holding the dress near the kitchen stove.

When asked what she was doing, Lizzie said, “I am going to burn this old thing up; it is covered with paint.”

Russell later testified that she did not see blood on the part of the dress she observed. She said, “I saw no blood on that dress. Not a drop.”

Lizzie’s decision to destroy the dress so soon after the murders naturally became a major issue for the prosecution.

There was also testimony about Lizzie’s clothing on the morning of the murders. Dr Seabury Bowen, the Borden family’s doctor, went to the house after Andrew was found. According to the surviving trial record, Bowen testified about Lizzie’s account of what she had been doing and about her clothing.

The fact that Lizzie changed clothes became relevant because of the huge amount of blood at the crime scenes. But there was never proof that her original clothing was covered in Andrew or Abby’s blood.

There was a hatchet in the basement with its handle missing

The prosecution also had physical evidence to work with. Investigators found several chopping implements in the Borden house, including a hatchet head with the handle broken off.

The state argued that the hatchet could have been the weapon used against Andrew and Abby. Medical witnesses were asked whether the hatchet head could have produced the injuries found on the victims. But the weapon was never conclusively connected to the murders.

There was no DNA testing, blood-pattern analysis or modern forensic examination that could establish beyond doubt that it was the murder weapon.

Nobody saw an intruder

Abby was killed first, and Andrew was killed roughly an hour and a half later. Lizzie was at the Borden house during the crucial period. Her sister Emma was away, John Morse had left the house, and Bridget Sullivan was outside washing windows for part of the morning.

No eyewitness saw a stranger enter the house and kill either victim. Obviously, that did not make an outside killer impossible. But it made the timeline difficult to explain.

An unknown killer would have had to enter the house, kill Abby, remain hidden or leave and return, kill Andrew later, and then get away without being identified.

So, did Lizzie get away with murder?

Well, she was found not guilty. And more than 130 years later, there is still no court-established answer to who killed Andrew and Abby Borden.

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