Monster

She was acquitted in forty minutes. She spent the next thirty-four years paying for it anyway.

In August of 1892, Andrew and Abby Borden were found hacked to death in their own home, and their daughter Lizzie became the only suspect anyone ever seriously considered. A jury cleared her. Fall River never did. She lived out the rest of her life in a grand house on the town's most fashionable hill, wealthy, isolated, and permanently unable to outrun a rhyme that turned her into a monster before the ink on her acquittal had even dried.

Monster pulls apart everything the schoolyard song left out: the fortune her father hoarded rather than spent, the hour of that August morning that nobody can ever fully account for, the dress that went up in flames while police stood watch outside, and the sister who shared a childhood, a trial, and a fortune with her, then never spoke to her again. It follows her case through a century of retellings, novels, ballets, films, and finally to Netflix's Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, weighing what that adaptation gets right against everything the record still can't prove.

This is a story that has never actually ended. The jury delivered a verdict. History never did.

Turn the page, and decide for yourself.