Spoiler Alert: This article contains major spoilers for Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story on Netflix.
Netflix’s Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story takes one of America’s most infamous murder mysteries and turns it into a dark psychological drama about repression, rage, murder and the consequences that follow.
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story Ending Explained: Did Lizzie Kill Her Parents & What Happens to Aileen Wuornos?
At the centre of the series is Lizzie Borden, played by Ella Beatty, whose father Andrew Borden and stepmother Abby Borden are brutally murdered. While the real Lizzie Borden was acquitted of their murders, the Netflix series takes a much more definite approach to what happened inside the Borden home.
But Lizzie’s trial isn’t where the story ends.
The finale makes an unexpected connection between Lizzie Borden and serial killer Aileen Wuornos, played by Sarah Paulson. So, what really happens at the end?
Here’s the Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story ending explained.
Did Lizzie Borden Kill Her Parents in Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story?
Yes. In Netflix’s version of the story, Lizzie is involved in killing both Abby and Andrew Borden.
The show spends its early episodes building towards the murders by depicting Lizzie as trapped inside an intensely restrictive household.
Her relationship with her father Andrew and stepmother Abby becomes increasingly difficult, while the arrival of the family’s new maid, Bridget “Maggie” Sullivan, changes Lizzie’s life.
Lizzie and Maggie grow extremely close, and the series imagines their relationship becoming romantic as well as dangerous.
Things take an even darker turn after Abby kills Lizzie’s beloved doves.
Lizzie wants revenge, but there is another motive at play too: her inheritance.
Lizzie and Maggie initially attempt to kill Andrew and Abby by giving them spoiled oysters. When that plan fails, they turn to a far more violent solution.
How Does Lizzie Kill Abby and Andrew Borden?
Before attacking her parents, Lizzie has already crossed the line into murder.
The series shows her killing neighbour Bertha Manchester with a hatchet after Maggie’s experience working for Bertha turns abusive. The murder essentially becomes a horrifying rehearsal for what follows.
When the Bordens become their targets, both Lizzie and Maggie participate.
Lizzie delivers the opening attack on Abby, while Maggie strikes Andrew first. Lizzie then joins in.
The show therefore leaves little ambiguity about its fictional interpretation of the Borden murders: Lizzie and Maggie kill Andrew and Abby together.
Afterwards, they work to hide their involvement. They burn their blood-covered clothes and deliberately make themselves visible washing windows, helping establish an apparent alibi.
Why Does Lizzie Kill Her Parents?
The series doesn’t reduce Lizzie’s motive to one simple explanation.
Instead, Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story presents the murders as the culmination of several forces building inside her.
Lizzie feels controlled by her father and suffocated by the expectations placed upon women in the Victorian era. Her increasingly intense relationship with Maggie gives her an outlet for feelings and desires she previously had little freedom to express.
Abby’s killing of Lizzie’s doves pushes her anger further, while money and inheritance also become part of Lizzie’s plan.
The result is a fictionalised psychological interpretation of why Lizzie might have committed the murders rather than a claim that history has definitively established her guilt.
That’s an important distinction because the real Lizzie Borden was found not guilty at her 1893 trial.
Does Maggie Betray Lizzie?
Despite the danger surrounding them, Maggie doesn’t expose Lizzie after the murders.
Their relationship has developed far beyond that of employer and maid. In the show’s version of events, they are lovers as well as accomplices, and Maggie helps Lizzie conceal what they have done.
The romantic element is part of the series’ fictional interpretation of the historical figures rather than an established historical fact.
It also gives the murders another emotional dimension: Lizzie is no longer acting entirely alone. She and Maggie have created their own secret world, and murder becomes part of it.
Why Is Lizzie Borden Arrested?
The authorities don’t immediately focus solely on Lizzie.
Suspicion also falls on Lizzie’s maternal uncle, John Morse, who has his own complicated connections to the family.
Eventually, however, investigators turn their attention towards Lizzie.
That leads to the trial that has made the real Borden case famous for more than a century.
Yet Monster emphasises something important about the period: many people struggle to imagine that a woman of Lizzie’s social position could be capable of committing such horrific murders.
Those assumptions ultimately become part of the environment surrounding her case.
How Does Lizzie Borden Get Acquitted?
One of the show’s bigger departures from history involves actress Nance O’Neil.
In Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, Nance helps Lizzie understand how to present herself during the trial. Lizzie effectively learns that surviving the courtroom isn’t only about evidence — it is also about how the jury sees her.
The strategy works.
Lizzie is acquitted.
However, the show changes the real timeline here. Historically, Lizzie Borden met Nance O’Neil after her trial, not before it.
The series uses their relationship creatively to make Lizzie’s courtroom battle part of the larger story about identity, performance and how society perceives women.
What Happens to Lizzie After the Trial?
Winning her freedom doesn’t give Lizzie the life she might have expected.
Her relationship with her sister Emma deteriorates badly, eventually leaving Lizzie increasingly alone.
She does, however, retain something extremely important: her inheritance.
Lizzie has escaped a murder conviction and gained financial independence, but the consequences of everything that happened continue to follow her.
Yet the finale doesn’t end with Lizzie.
Instead, Monster jumps forward decades and introduces another notorious woman whose crimes became part of American history.
Why Is Aileen Wuornos in Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story?
The inclusion of Aileen Wuornos initially feels like an entirely different story.
Played by Sarah Paulson, Aileen appears in a storyline beginning in 1988 — almost a century after the Borden murders.
In the series, Aileen is fascinated by Lizzie Borden and even stays at the former Borden family home, which later became a bed and breakfast.
The connection isn’t meant to suggest that the two women actually knew one another.
Instead, Monster uses Aileen to extend one of the season’s central themes across generations: how trauma, violence, gender and rage can become intertwined.
Lizzie’s story becomes a kind of shadow hanging over Aileen’s.
What Happens to Aileen Wuornos at the End?
Unlike Lizzie, Aileen doesn’t escape punishment.
The finale takes viewers to Aileen’s execution.
But Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story gives the moment a surreal twist.
As Aileen approaches death, she sees Lizzie and Maggie beckoning her towards them.
It isn’t presented as a literal historical encounter. Instead, the scene symbolically brings the women’s stories together.
Lizzie escaped conviction.
Aileen didn’t.
Yet the show connects them through its larger exploration of women whose lives became inseparable from acts of extreme violence.
What Does the Ending of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story Mean?
The final scene helps explain why the season spends time on Aileen Wuornos despite ostensibly being the story of Lizzie Borden.
The show isn’t interested only in answering the question, “Did Lizzie do it?”
Instead, it asks a much larger question: What creates a monster?
Lizzie and Aileen come from completely different periods and circumstances, and their stories have very different endings. But the series places them beside each other to explore how environment, trauma, repression and personal choices can contribute to violence.
Lizzie walks free after being accused of killing her parents. Aileen is eventually executed for her murders.
By bringing them together in Aileen’s final moments, Monster creates a symbolic bridge between two notorious women separated by almost a century.
Is Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story Based on a True Story?
Yes, but viewers shouldn’t treat everything shown in the Netflix series as historical fact.
The real Andrew and Abby Borden were murdered in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892, and Lizzie Borden was charged with their murders. She went on trial the following year and was acquitted.
However, the question of who actually killed the Bordens remains one of America’s most famous unsolved mysteries.
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story therefore mixes historical events with fictional interpretation and speculation.
The series’ portrayal of Lizzie and Maggie as lovers and accomplices, for example, goes beyond what has been historically established. Similarly, its use of Nance O’Neil during Lizzie’s trial changes the real chronology.
So while the Netflix drama draws heavily from real people and events, its answer to the mystery should be understood as the show’s version of what happened, not a definitive solution to the real Borden murders.
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Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story Ending Explained in Short
By the end of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, the Netflix series gives viewers an answer that history never could.
In the show’s interpretation, Lizzie and Maggie murder Andrew and Abby Borden and successfully cover up their involvement. Lizzie is arrested and put on trial but ultimately acquitted.
She survives the scandal and keeps her freedom, although her relationship with Emma falls apart.
Decades later, the story shifts to Aileen Wuornos. Unlike Lizzie, Aileen is convicted of murder and eventually executed. In her final moments, she sees visions of Lizzie and Maggie calling to her.
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That final image connects the two stories and leaves viewers with the question at the heart of Monster: are people simply born capable of terrible things, or can their circumstances help shape who they eventually become?
For Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, there is deliberately no easy answer.