Killer TV
The new season of the Ryan Murphy-produced anthology series will explore the 1892 murders that captured the nation
Ryan Murphy’s production house may be churning out more shows these days than most folks can keep up with, but that doesn’t mean there’s no excitement around his new fare.
In a teaser released Tuesday for Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, we hear the well-known nursery rhyme — ”Lizzie Borden took an axe / gave her mother forty whacks / when she saw what she had done / she gave her father forty-one” — over a montage of Lizzie Borden (Ella Beatty) in various bloodied states. It’s the most thorough look we’ve seen so far at the new entry in the Murphy-produced anthology show, which comes out Sept. 17. Unlike other seasons, however — which focused on Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers, and Ed Gein — Borden is the only one not to be convicted of the crimes that made her famous.
In August 1892, Borden’s father, Andrew, and her stepmother, Abby, were brutally murdered in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts. Both were bludgeoned to death with a hatchet (though it wasn’t quite as extreme as the schoolyard rhyme makes it out to be; Andrew was hit 11 times, while Abby received 18 or 19 blows). Andrew had been a prominent, if not widely liked, member of the community, and in the aftermath of his death, several theories came up: Could it have been a business rival? A roving, ax-wielding maniac? The one that the community — and the police — settled on was that it was their younger daughter, Lizzie, then a 32-year-old unmarried woman living at home under Andrew’s harsh rules, and was ready to get her inheritance. Yet her 1893 trial, which was breathlessly covered by newspapers around the globe, found her innocent.
