Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story Is Ryan Murphy’s Next True Crime Drama On Netflix

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Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story Is Ryan Murphy’s Next True Crime Drama On Netflix · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Close your eyes for just a second. I want you
• 0:02
  to imagine a truly stifling, humid August morning in New England.
• 0:08
  Speaker 2: Well, the kind of heat where the air is just entirely.
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: Still exactly, and you are standing in the sitting room
• 0:14
  of a cramped, darkwood Victorian house. Right and right in
• 0:18
  front of you is a crime scene so completely drenched
• 0:22
  in blood, so like surgically brutal, that it defies logic,
• 0:27
  It really does. Now, I want you to take that
• 0:29
  horrifying visceral image and smash it right up against the
• 0:33
  sing song rhythm of a children's nursery rhyme. We all
• 0:36
  know the one, right, Lizzie Borden took an axe and
• 0:38
  gave her mother forty wax. When she saw what she
• 0:41
  had done, she gave her father forty one.
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: We all chanted its skipping rope on the playground.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: We did. But we need to shatter that childhood myth
• 0:48
  right now, because practically every single word of that rhyme
• 0:52
  is factually.
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: Incorrect, Yeah, literally almost all of it.
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: She didn't use an axe, the victim wasn't hit forty times,
• 0:58
  and the woman who was killed was even her mother.
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: No, she wasn't. And you know the reality of the
• 1:03
  violence in that house is far more intimate and far
• 1:07
  more calculated than a playground rhyme. Right, when you look
• 1:11
  at the actual forensic reports from eighteen ninety two, you
• 1:14
  aren't looking at a frantic, blurry frenzy.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: No, it's not like that at all.
• 1:18
  Speaker 2: You are looking in a deliberate, targeted extermination of two
• 1:23
  specific human.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: Beings committed in broad daylight, exactly.
• 1:27
  Speaker 2: In broad daylight, in a house with locked doors, surrounded
• 1:29
  by neighbors.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: Okay, so let's untack this. We are diving into a
• 1:33
  massive stack of historical sources, trial transcripts, and contemporary production
• 1:39
  notes today.
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: Because the Lizzy Borden Story is about to be resurrected
• 1:42
  in a massive way.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: It is Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, you know, the
• 1:45
  creators behind the true crime Juggernaut Monster anthology series.
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: Right the Netflix shows.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they are bringing this one hundred and thirty year
• 1:52
  old bloodbath to Netflix in late twenty twenty six. It's
• 1:56
  officially titled The Lizzy Borden Story.
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: Which is so such a fascinating left turn for that franchise.
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: It really is, because until now they've spent all their
• 2:05
  capital dissecting modern male serial killers.
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is the deliberate shift in the timeline
• 2:12
  and the sociology of the subject, right. I mean, if
• 2:15
  you trace the trajectory of the Monster universe, Season one
• 2:18
  deconstructed Jeffrey Dahmer in the grim Neon lt nineteen eighties
• 2:22
  and nineties.
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and then season two tackled the Menendez Brothers.
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: Right navigating Beverly Hill's wealth and abuse. And then season three,
• 2:30
  which just wrapped, gave us Charlie Hunnam as ed guyne.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: Oh in the desolate postwar Midwest.
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: Exactly. These are late twentieth century American nightmares. But by
• 2:41
  winding the clock back to eighteen ninety two, Murphy is
• 2:44
  abandoning the modern forensic era entirely.
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: He's moving to a female led narrative.
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, to explore Gilded Age family secrets, paralyzing class tensions,
• 2:53
  and honestly, the both of the American media circus.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: And we are not just going to talk about what
• 2:57
  Hollywood is building on those sound stages right now, No, because.
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: To understand why Ryan Murphy is spending millions of dollars
• 3:03
  to recreate a Victorian parlor, you have to understand the
• 3:06
  claustrophobic reality of that parlor in eighteen ninety two.
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: We are going to walk through the actual timeline of
• 3:12
  the murders, dissect the completely bizarre legal loopholes of the trial,
• 3:17
  and figure out how like a thirty two year old
• 3:21
  Sunday school teacher managed to walk away from a double homicide.
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: A homicide that essentially birthed the true crime genre for
• 3:28
  you and me.
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: So let's start with the victims and the absolute pressure
• 3:32
  kicker of a town they lived in. The date is
• 3:35
  August fourth, eighteen ninety two, in Fall River, Massachusetts.
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: Right. So, Fall River at this time was a boom town.
• 3:41
  It was known as the spindle City.
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: Because of the textile industry.
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: Exactly. It was the epicenter of the American textile industry.
• 3:47
  You have to picture a skyline dominated by massive sustained
• 3:51
  brick mills.
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: The air is just thick with smoke, yeah.
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: And the constant deafening roar of mechanical looms. Economically, this
• 3:58
  was the absolute height of.
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: The gilt, meaning massive inequality.
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: Oh completely. You had a massive influx of immigrant labor,
• 4:05
  mostly Irish, French, Canadian and.
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: Portuguese, working grueling hours for pennies.
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: Right, juxtaposed against a tiny, hyper elite class of Yankee
• 4:13
  mill owners and bankers who controlled practically all the wealth.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: And sitting right near the top of that Yankee elite
• 4:19
  is Andrew Borden. Yes, he's sixty nine years old. He
• 4:23
  is a self made man who started out as a
• 4:26
  casket maker, which is fitting, and eventually a massed of
• 4:29
  fortune in banking, real estate, and mill ownership.
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: By the standards of eighteen ninety two, he is incredibly wealthy.
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, if you adjust for inflation, the man is a
• 4:39
  multimillionaire several times over. But here is the bizarre contradiction.
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: He forces his family to live like they are utterly destitute.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: It's so weird.
• 4:48
  Speaker 2: Andrew Borden's frugality wasn't just a quirk, you know, it
• 4:52
  bordered on a psychological pathology.
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: Right. The sources detail how he chose to live at
• 4:57
  ninety two Second Street, which.
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: Was shifting from a residentialighborhood to a noisy, dusty commercial zone.
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it wasn't the prestigious hill district where the other
• 5:05
  wealthy mill owners built their sprawling mansion, not at all.
• 5:08
  Speaker 2: But more importantly, despite having staggering wealth, Andrew refused to
• 5:12
  install indoor plumbing or electricity in the house.
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: I really want you listening right now to conceptualize this.
• 5:19
  Indoor plumbing wasn't some futuristic sci fi concept for the
• 5:22
  rich in eighteen ninety two.
• 5:24
  Speaker 2: No, the wealthy families in Fall River had running water,
• 5:27
  they had gas lighting.
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: Right but Andrew Boorden essentially forced his sixty four year
• 5:31
  old second wife Abby and his two adult daughters, thirty
• 5:35
  two year old Lizzie and forty one year old Emma,
• 5:38
  to use a bucket in the basement, a bucket.
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: In the basement, and an outhouse in the backyard.
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: It's insane. It's like imagine a modern day tech billionaire
• 5:47
  with a massive stock portfolio. Right, but he forces his
• 5:51
  adult children to live in a windowless studio apartment with
• 5:54
  no Wi.
• 5:54
  Speaker 2: Fi and a communal bathroom down.
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: The hall, exactly just to save a few dollars on
• 5:58
  HOA fees.
• 5:59
  Speaker 2: That is a perfect mechanical analogy, honestly, because it illustrates
• 6:03
  the concept of artificial scarcity as a means of control.
• 6:07
  By restricting their access to basic standard comforts, Andrew was
• 6:11
  constantly asserting his dominance over them.
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: You have two adult, unmarried women Lizzie and Emma, who
• 6:17
  are just.
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: Trapped wrapped in Victorian society. Upper class women didn't just
• 6:22
  go out and get jobs to assert independence.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: Their social standing and their financial survival were entirely dependent
• 6:28
  on their.
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: Father, and that dependency bred an intense simmering paranoia in.
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: That house, specifically directed at their stepmother, Abbey, right.
• 6:37
  Speaker 2: Because Andrew had married Abby decades earlier after Lizzie and
• 6:40
  Emma's biological.
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: Mother died, but the sources indicate the sisters never accepted her.
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: No, they still called her missus Borden, which is so cold.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: And the tension was reaching a boiling point in the
• 6:50
  summer of eighteen.
• 6:51
  Speaker 2: Ninety two because Andrew started quietly transferring property and assets
• 6:56
  to Abbey's side of the.
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: Family, which, in the minds of Lizzie and Emma was
• 6:59
  a wrecked existential threat.
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, I mean if Andrew died and a significant
• 7:05
  portion of his wells bypassed them and went to Abbey,
• 7:07
  they would be left socially and financially vulnerable.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: This wasn't just petty family bickering.
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: No, this was a high stakes battle for survival in
• 7:15
  a society that offered women very few safety nets.
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: Outside of inheritance, which brings us to the morning of
• 7:21
  the murders. The timeline here is crucial.
• 7:24
  Speaker 2: It's Thursday, August four, it is sweltering.
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: The house is like an oven. Emma is actually out
• 7:30
  of town visiting friends.
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: Which leaves four people at ninety two Second Street. You
• 7:34
  have Andrew, Abby, Lizzie, and the family made Bridget Sullivan.
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: Right, Bridget, who the sisters condescendingly called Maggie.
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, which was a somewhat generic dismissive moniker often applied
• 7:48
  to Irish immigrant domestics at the time.
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: It's so disrespectful. But Bridget's presence.
• 7:52
  Speaker 2: Is key, right, It is because she provides the baseline
• 7:55
  timeline for the entire morning.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: Okay, So Andrew leaves the house around nine one year
• 8:00
  am to go downtown for his morning business walk right.
• 8:03
  Abby tells Bridget to wash the windows, and then Abby
• 8:06
  heads upstairs to make the bed in the guest room.
• 8:09
  Speaker 2: The room where Lizzie's uncle John Morris, had slept the
• 8:12
  night before.
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So this leaves Bridget washing windows on the outside
• 8:16
  of the house and Lizzie downstairs on the inside.
• 8:18
  Speaker 2: And sometime between nine am and ten thirty am, while
• 8:21
  Abby is in that upstairs guest room. She is ambushed.
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: Let's correct the nursery rhyme again here. It wasn't forty.
• 8:27
  Speaker 2: Wax, No, it was nineteen nineteen.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: And the mechanics of the attack are chilling.
• 8:32
  Speaker 2: The autopsy show that she was facing away from her attacker.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: She was struck from behind on the side of the head,
• 8:38
  right above.
• 8:39
  Speaker 2: The ear, and the force of that first blow knocked
• 8:42
  her flat onto her stomach on the floor, and.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: Then the killer stood over her and delivered eighteen more
• 8:48
  blows directly into the back of her head and neck.
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: The pathology of that attack tells a very specific story.
• 8:54
  It's so personal it is. It is a crime of
• 8:58
  immense passion and targeted rage. But it also demonstrates a
• 9:02
  clear element of surprise.
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: Right there were no defensive wounds on Abby's hands or arms.
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: She didn't fight back because she never saw it coming.
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: The killer was someone she was entirely comfortable turning her
• 9:11
  back on in a small room, and.
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: The weapon wasn't a heavy, long handled lumberjack axe like
• 9:17
  in the rhyme.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: It was a hatchet. The police later found a hatchet
• 9:20
  head in the basement, ashes with.
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: Its handle deliberately broken off.
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: Presumably to hide blood evidence.
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: During Right, and a hatchet changes the physical requirements of
• 9:29
  the crime how so Well, an axe requires a massive
• 9:32
  two handed swing from the shoulders. A small household hatchet
• 9:36
  like the kind used to chop kindling for the kitchen stove,
• 9:39
  requires a fast, repetitive, one handed chopping motion.
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: So it requires less brute strength.
• 9:46
  Speaker 2: Less brute strength, but far more sustained close quarters physical exertion.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: Oh wow, and here's where it gets really interesting and
• 9:54
  completely terrifying. Yeah, after hacking Abby to death in the
• 9:57
  guest room, the killer doesn't flee.
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: They wait.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: They just wait for roughly ninety minutes. The killer just
• 10:03
  waits inside that sweltering house.
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: Well, Bridget is outside washing windows.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: It's so creepy. So at around ten thirty am, Andrew
• 10:11
  Borden comes home.
• 10:12
  Speaker 2: Right and his key doesn't work in the front door lock,
• 10:15
  so Bridget has to let him in.
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: He is feeling unwell, so he goes into the sitting room,
• 10:19
  lies down on the sofa, and falls asleep.
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: And this is where Lizzie's timeline becomes highly scrutinized.
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: Right, Bridget testifies that she went upstairs to her own
• 10:28
  room on the third floor to rest because she was
• 10:30
  feeling sick from the heat.
• 10:31
  Speaker 2: And Lizzie claims that right around this time she decided
• 10:34
  to go out to the barn in the backyard, and.
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: Her excuse for going out to the barn is objectively absurd,
• 10:40
  completely absurd. She claimed she went up into the sweltering
• 10:43
  hayloft of the barn in the middle of a historic
• 10:46
  August heat wave to.
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: Look for lead fishing sinkers.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: Or maybe some iron for a project. I'm sorry, but
• 10:52
  nobody decides to go rummage around in one hundred and
• 10:55
  ten degree barn loft for fishing waits while wearing a
• 10:58
  heavy Victorian dress.
• 11:00
  Speaker 2: It strains credulity to its absolute breaking.
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: Point, it really does.
• 11:04
  Speaker 2: So.
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: While Lizzie claims to be in the barn, the killer
• 11:07
  enters the sitting room where Andrew is sleeping, and.
• 11:10
  Speaker 2: The killer strikes him ten or eleven times in the
• 11:13
  face and head with the hatchet.
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: The violence was so extreme that one of his eyes
• 11:18
  was split perfectly in half.
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: Just horrific, And according to her own testimony, Lizzie leisurely
• 11:24
  wanders back.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: From the barn, enters the house and discovers her father's
• 11:28
  mangled body at roughly eleven ten.
• 11:30
  Speaker 2: Am, right, she yells up the stairs for Bridget.
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: The alarm is raised, neighbors rush over, and eventually they
• 11:35
  go upstairs and find Abby's body in the guest room,
• 11:38
  and the.
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: Blood had already congealed, proving she died over an hour earlier.
• 11:42
  If we connect this to the bigger picture of criminal investigation,
• 11:46
  this is the quintessential locked room mystery.
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: Because there was no forced entry.
• 11:51
  Speaker 2: Exactly, nothing of value was stolen from the home. The
• 11:54
  timeline is incredibly tight.
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: So when you have a closed loop like that.
• 11:58
  Speaker 2: The mechanics of opportunity dictate that the suspect pool is
• 12:02
  limited to the people who were demonstrably present.
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: Which leaves Bridget the maid and Lizzie the daughter.
• 12:08
  Speaker 2: And Bridget simply doesn't fit the profile, not at all.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: She has no financial motive and no demonstrated animosity toward
• 12:15
  the family to justify such overkill.
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: Precisely, I mean, if Bridget wanted to rob them, she
• 12:21
  could have if she was enraged by her working conditions.
• 12:24
  A sudden explosive attack might be plausible.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: But a calculated double murder with a ninety minute cooling
• 12:30
  off period in between.
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: That requires a deeply rooted, highly specific motive. Yeah, all logical,
• 12:36
  circumstantial vectors pointed inward directly at the thirty two year
• 12:40
  old spinster daughter.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: But I want to push back on the idea that
• 12:43
  the police immediately accepted this. Well, they didn't, because if
• 12:46
  you are the Fall River police in eighteen ninety two,
• 12:49
  this completely breaks your.
• 12:51
  Speaker 2: World view, doesn't it absolutely?
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: I mean, the suspect is an upper class, white church teaching,
• 12:56
  respectable Victorian woman, right, how did they even begin to
• 13:00
  investigate her? Because it seems like the entire system just
• 13:03
  short circuited.
• 13:04
  Speaker 2: It absolutely did. The nineteenth century justice system was not
• 13:07
  built to process female suspects in brutal crimes of this nature.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: But they couldn't ignore the evidence.
• 13:14
  Speaker 2: Right, No, the police couldn't ignore the mounting pile of
• 13:16
  inconsistencies when they conducted the initial inquest.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: Which is essentially a formal questioning before official charges are filed.
• 13:24
  Speaker 2: Exactly when they did that, Lizzie's narrative was incredibly fractured.
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: She couldn't keep her timeline straight regarding where she was
• 13:32
  in the house.
• 13:32
  Speaker 2: Or when she went to the barn, or what she
• 13:34
  was doing.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: And then the police uncover the poison incident.
• 13:37
  Speaker 2: Oh, this is huge.
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: The day before the murders, on Wednesday, Lizzie walked into
• 13:41
  a local pharmacy and attempted to buy prussic acid.
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: Which is essentially hydrogen zyonide.
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: It is exceptionally lethal, and Lizzie claims she needed it
• 13:50
  to clean a sealskin cape.
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: Now to explain the mechanics of that excuse, highly diluted
• 13:55
  prussic acid was occasionally used in the Victorian era as
• 13:59
  an insecticide.
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: Okay, to kill mobs or bugs in delicate furs without
• 14:03
  damaging the pelt.
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: Right, so the excuse wasn't entirely fabricated at a thin air. Sure. However,
• 14:09
  because of its extreme toxicity, the pharmacist refused to sell
• 14:13
  it to her without a doctor's prescription.
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: Right. But think about the timing here. You try to
• 14:19
  buy a lethal, fast acting poison on Wednesday, you are denied.
• 14:23
  On Thursday, your parents are brutally hacked to death with
• 14:26
  a hatchet.
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: From a prosecutorial standpoint, that establishes clear, unassailable premeditation. Yeah,
• 14:32
  it suggests that murder was the primary objective and the
• 14:35
  method simply shifted based on resource availability.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: Like poison was Plan A.
• 14:40
  Speaker 2: Clean, quiet, and easily disguised as a sudden illness, right.
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: And when Plan A failed, the perpetrator resorted to Plan B, which.
• 14:48
  Speaker 2: Was messy, loud, and infinitely more risky.
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: And speaking of MESSI let's talk about the burn dress,
• 14:54
  because if I am on a jury, this is the
• 14:57
  piece of evidence that convinces me.
• 14:58
  Speaker 2: It's a huge red flag.
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: A few days after the murders, while the police are
• 15:02
  literally inside the house conducting their investigation, Lizzie's close friend
• 15:07
  Alice Russell, walks.
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: Into the kitchen and what does she find.
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: She finds Lizzie tearing up a blue cotton dress and
• 15:13
  shoving it into the kitchen stove.
• 15:15
  Speaker 2: To burn it right in front of her.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: When Alice asks what on earth she is doing, Lizzie
• 15:21
  nonchalantly says, the dress got stained with paint, so she's
• 15:24
  destroying it.
• 15:25
  Speaker 2: Which is an astonishing display of hubris or desperation, depending
• 15:29
  on how you view it. The destruction of physical evidence,
• 15:33
  specifically clothing, mere days after a blood spatter heavy crime
• 15:38
  is practically screaming consciousness of guilt.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: So why didn't that convictor? I hear the argument about
• 15:43
  Victorian sexism, which we will get into. But I have
• 15:45
  to ask, was the forensic case actually just garbage by
• 15:49
  modern standards?
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: Oh?
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: Completely, because even today prosecutors struggle to win cases without
• 15:54
  a murder weapon definitively tied to the suspect or direct
• 15:57
  DNA evidence. Was the evidence genuinely just weak?
• 16:01
  Speaker 2: That is a crucial distinction to make. Yes, by modern standards,
• 16:05
  the forensic case was entirely circumstantial and severely lacking.
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: Tell me about the blood spatter.
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: Let's explain the mechanics of blood spatter in a hatchet murder.
• 16:15
  When you strike a body with a blade, blood pools
• 16:19
  right when you lift the blade back for a second strike,
• 16:22
  centrifugal force flings the blood off the blade. Okay, this
• 16:27
  is called cast off spatter. It hits the ceiling, the walls,
• 16:30
  and critically, it rains down on the attacker's clothes, face,
• 16:33
  and hair.
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: So it is physically impossible to swing a hatchet nineteen
• 16:38
  times into a human skull and walk away clean.
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: Impossible.
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: So they should have been looking for the bloody clothes exactly.
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: But in eighteen ninety two, forensics were incredibly primitive. There
• 16:47
  was no concept of fingerprinting.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: Liminal didn't exist.
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: Right, luminol, which detects washed away blood didn't exist. DNA
• 16:53
  profiling was a sentry away. The police searched the house,
• 16:57
  but they didn't do a systematic microscopic grid search. They
• 17:01
  missed things.
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: They allowed people to come and go.
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, when Alice Russell saw the dress burning, a modern
• 17:07
  investigator would have immediately seized the.
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: Ashes and analyzed the drain pipes for washed.
• 17:12
  Speaker 2: Blood exactly and secured the scene. But the Fall River
• 17:15
  police didn't have the scientific mechanisms to definitively prove the
• 17:19
  dress was covered in cast off spatter, not paint.
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: Right. They couldn't prove the broken hatchet in the basement
• 17:24
  was the murder weapon either.
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: No, it was a purely circumstantial case.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: So despite the weak forensic science, the sheer weight of
• 17:33
  the circumstantial evidence, the timeline the poison the dress leads
• 17:37
  to her indictment.
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: And in June of eighteen ninety three, the trial of
• 17:41
  the century begins in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: This trial essentially birthed the modern media circus. We're talking
• 17:47
  about national and international journalists descending on this town.
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: It was an absolute frenzy. Newspapers realized they could monetize
• 17:54
  this tragedy on an unprecedented scale.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: Right, they had telegraph lines running constantly.
• 17:59
  Speaker 2: Providing hourly updates to cities across the country. It was
• 18:02
  the Victorian equivalent of a two hundred and forty seven
• 18:05
  cable news cycle.
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: We're like live tweeting a high profile celebrity trial today, exactly.
• 18:11
  Speaker 2: They recognized that a story featuring massive wealth, brutal violence,
• 18:15
  and a female suspect was a highly lucrative product.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: Now, I noticed a really bizarre anomaly in the source
• 18:22
  material regarding the trial, and I need to ask you
• 18:24
  about it because it made me do a double take.
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: Okay, what is it?
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: So the sources note that the prosecution was led by
• 18:30
  George Robinson and Josea Nolton, Right, but then the very
• 18:33
  same document states that the defense team was comprised of
• 18:36
  Andrew Jennings and George Robinson.
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: Ah. Yes, Wait, did.
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: They seriously have a guy named George Robinson prosecuting the
• 18:44
  case and a totally different guy named George Robinson defending her?
• 18:47
  Or are the historical records just hopelessly tangled?
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: It's so funny. It highlights a fascinating reality of nineteenth
• 18:53
  century Massachusetts power structures Okay, the historical record here can
• 18:56
  sometimes feel like a typo, but it underscores the insular,
• 19:01
  heavily interconnected nature of the legal and political elite. You
• 19:05
  had incredibly prominent men, former governors and former mayors battling
• 19:10
  it out in that courtroom. Oh wow, it wasn't just
• 19:13
  a local murder trial. It was a clash of titans
• 19:16
  within the state's highest political echelon.
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: And the defense team Lizzie bought with her father's money
• 19:21
  was elite, very elite. They also had a deeply favorable judge,
• 19:25
  Judge Justin Dewey, who gave very specific defense leaning instructions
• 19:30
  to the jury.
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: Well, let's talk about that jury. It was comprised of twelve.
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: Men because women were not allowed to serve on juris
• 19:37
  in Massachusetts at the time.
• 19:38
  Speaker 2: Right, And this is where the lack of hard forensic
• 19:41
  evidence collides spectacularly with the sociology of the era. How So,
• 19:46
  the defense leaned entirely into the intense sexism and paternalism
• 19:50
  of the nineteenth century.
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: Oh right.
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: The prevailing belief was that women, specifically upper class white
• 19:55
  Christian women, were biologically and psychologically fragile.
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: They were deemed constitutionally incapable of the sheer, brutish, sweaty
• 20:04
  savagery required to hack two people to death. So the
• 20:08
  defense basically just pointed at her and said, look at
• 20:10
  this gentle Sunday school teacher in her corset. Do you
• 20:13
  really believe she has the monstrous strength and depravity to
• 20:17
  do this?
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: Precisely, they weaponized the era's misogyny in her favor.
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: That's wild.
• 20:23
  Speaker 2: They exploited reasonable doubt by hiding behind the societal assumption
• 20:27
  of female fragility.
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: And Lizzie wasn't just sitting there passively either, No, she wasn't.
• 20:32
  During the trial, she had a massive, highly dramatic fainting
• 20:35
  spell right in the middle of the courtroom.
• 20:37
  Speaker 2: Which caused total chaos.
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and it garnered incredible sympathy in the press. Do
• 20:42
  we think that was genuine exhaustion or was she actively
• 20:45
  manipulating the room?
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: Well we can never know for sure. The heat in
• 20:49
  that courtroom was oppressive and this stress was unimaginable. Right,
• 20:53
  But given how shrewdly she managed her affairs before and
• 20:56
  after the trial, it is incredibly easy to view that
• 21:00
  fainting spell as a calculated performance.
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: It was a strategic deployment of the exact physical frailty
• 21:07
  those twelve men expected to see. Well, the performance worked flawlessly.
• 21:12
  After a thirteen day trial that captured the attention of
• 21:15
  the entire world, the jury deliberated for a grand total
• 21:18
  of ninety minutes. Ninety minutes, and they came back with
• 21:22
  a verdict of not guilty.
• 21:24
  Speaker 2: The speed of that deliberation is staggering, it really is.
• 21:27
  Ninety minutes tells you that they didn't spend time agonizing
• 21:30
  over the.
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: Timeline, or debating the burned dress, or trying to understand
• 21:34
  the Prussic acid.
• 21:35
  Speaker 2: Right, they had fundamentally rejected the premise that she could
• 21:38
  be the killer before they even walked into the deliberation room.
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: The systemic sexism of the era acted as an impenetrable shield.
• 21:45
  It did, so she walked out a free woman. But
• 21:48
  the absolute lack of resolution meant the mystery never died. No,
• 21:51
  it never died, And that empty space, that lack of
• 21:54
  a definitive, court mandated truth, is exactly why a creator
• 21:58
  like Ryan Murphy is reviving her story over a century later. Right, So,
• 22:03
  let's explore how the Monster Maker is meeting the ultimate
• 22:06
  Victorian spinster.
• 22:08
  Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture of Ryan
• 22:10
  Murphy's career. He has built an empire by dissecting the dark,
• 22:15
  heavily stylized underbelly of American culture.
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the Monster franchise is built on examining not just
• 22:22
  the killer but the societal failures that surround them.
• 22:25
  Speaker 2: But the Monster franchise is also incredibly controversial.
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: So there are massive ethical debates surrounding it. People accuse
• 22:32
  Murphy of exploiting real life trauma, of glamorizing horrific killers.
• 22:37
  Speaker 2: And taking wild factual liberties just to make good television.
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, the families of Jeffrey Dahmer's victims were furious,
• 22:44
  saying their trauma was commodified for Netflix subscriptions.
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: And the Menendez family, who are still alive and actively
• 22:50
  seeking appeals, heavily criticized the portrayal in season two.
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: Right. Murphy always defends the shows by saying they are
• 22:57
  meant to spark difficult, necessary conversations about systemic abuse and
• 23:01
  the flaws and the justice system.
• 23:02
  Speaker 2: But here's why the Lizzie Bordon pivot is brilliant from
• 23:05
  a production standpoint. Okay, why the one hundred and thirty
• 23:08
  year distance completely neutralizes the immediate ethical blowback.
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: Oh right, because there are no direct descendants of Andrew
• 23:17
  and Abbey Bordon protesting outside Netflix headquarters.
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: Exactly. The trauma has cooled into American folklore. It belongs
• 23:25
  to the public domain.
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: That has to be incredibly liberating for Murphy as a creator.
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: It is it allows him to lean fully into his
• 23:32
  greatest strength, which is ambiguity.
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: Because the case is technically unsolved, right, he isn't bound
• 23:37
  by a definitive historical verdict.
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: He could explore the gray areas without being accused of
• 23:42
  rewriting recent, painful history.
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: And shifting to a female centric narrative opens up massive
• 23:48
  creative avenues too, right.
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: Oh absolutely. Murphy has a long celebrated history of writing complex, thorny,
• 23:55
  deeply flawed female characters.
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: Look at Jessica Lange's entire run on American for.
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: The women in Feud and Pose. He excels at portraying
• 24:04
  women who are trapped by oppressive circumstances.
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: And resort to extreme, often destructive measures.
• 24:09
  Speaker 2: To break free. Exactly.
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: I am so curious about the post me two lens
• 24:13
  they are going to apply to Lizzie. Are they going
• 24:15
  to frame her as a proto feminist anti.
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: Hero, It's a real possibility.
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: The source material suggests they might explore various historical theories
• 24:23
  that historians have debated for decades, right, things.
• 24:25
  Speaker 2: Like deep dogs into her mental health.
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: Rumors that she suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy.
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: Or whispers of clandestine lesbian relationships that her father forbade, or.
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: Even theories of severe financial and physical abuse within that house.
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: It is important to clarify, though, that hard historical evidence
• 24:42
  for sexual abuse or epilepsy in the Borden home is
• 24:46
  very scant and highly speculative. Sure, However, in the context
• 24:51
  of a dramatic narrative, those theories provide the psychological underpinning
• 24:55
  that Murphy needs to build a compelling character.
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: He isn't interesting in a one dimensional villain.
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: No, he will likely present a multifaceted Lizzie. Was she
• 25:05
  a victim of crushing patriarchal constraints The architectural.
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: And financial structure of her life strongly suggests she was.
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: Was she also a cold blooded perpetrator of shocking violence?
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: The circumstantial evidence heavily points in that direction.
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: Right. Murphy's thesis is usually that a character can be
• 25:20
  both a victim and a monster simultaneously.
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: He's going to force the audience to ask the ultimate question,
• 25:26
  which is in a Victorian society that forces adult women
• 25:29
  to live like prisoners and a justice system that lets
• 25:33
  a killer go free simply because they can imagine a
• 25:36
  woman lifting a hatchet, who is the real monster?
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: Is it the killer, the oppressive society or the blind
• 25:42
  justice system exactly? This raises an important question about the
• 25:45
  visual and auditory translation to that theme. How do you
• 25:49
  physically portray Victorian repression on screen in a way that
• 25:53
  feels visceral to a modern audience.
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: Well, according to the production sources, we should expect Murphy's
• 26:00
  signature maximalist style.
• 26:02
  Speaker 2: Meaning the violence will not be offscreen.
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: No, it will be brutal, visceral, yet likely shot with
• 26:08
  a stylized, almost artistic flare.
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: And we can expect a narrative structure that relies on
• 26:13
  rotating flashbacks.
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: Right, we won't just see the events from Lizzie's perspective.
• 26:17
  Speaker 2: We will likely see the timeline unfold from the point
• 26:19
  of view of Bridge At the.
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: Maid, or Emma, the sister, and the townspeople who turn
• 26:23
  the trial into a circus.
• 26:25
  Speaker 2: But to execute a vision that historically dense and psychologically complex.
• 26:30
  You cannot just rely on a clever script.
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: No, you need a powerhouse cast capable of profound nuance.
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: And a crew that can build an entire world from.
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: Scratch, which perfectly transitions us into the Hollywood talent, bringing
• 26:43
  this Gilded Age nightmare to life. I completely geeked out
• 26:46
  when I saw the casting sheet. Oh it's amazing they
• 26:48
  cast Elabedi to play Lizzie.
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: It is a daring, inspired choice.
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: It is huge for those who aren't familiar. Elebedi was
• 26:56
  born in two thousand. She is literal Hollywood royalty.
• 27:00
  Speaker 2: The daughter of Warren Beatty and Annette Beaning.
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: Yes, she's a Jilliard graduate and she just made her
• 27:04
  screen debut and another Ryan Murphy project Feud Capodi versus
• 27:09
  the Swans.
• 27:09
  Speaker 2: But taking on Lizzie Bordon is a massive career defining
• 27:13
  breakout role.
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: Think about the mechanical acting challenge here. She has to
• 27:17
  balance absolute stoicism with terrifying intensity.
• 27:21
  Speaker 2: Right during the courtroom scenes. She has to convince the
• 27:23
  audience that she is an innocent, fragile victim.
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: While simultaneously making us believe she possesses the physical and
• 27:31
  psychological capability to swing a hatchet nineteen times into a
• 27:35
  human skull.
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: Her theatrical training at Juilliard is crucial here. Playing a
• 27:41
  Victorian woman requires a masterclass an emotional restraint because the
• 27:45
  dialogue is formal and the physical movements are restricted by
• 27:48
  the clothing, and the emotion has to boil just under
• 27:51
  the surface without spilling over until the critical moment.
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: Wow, and the ensemble Murphy has built around her is phenomenal.
• 27:58
  You have Rebecca Hall play Abby Borden, the stepmother.
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: Rebecca Hall is incredible, she really is. She is brilliant
• 28:04
  at playing women dealing with severe psychological pressure and societal repression.
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: Right look at her profound work in Christine or The Prestige.
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: Then you have Vicki Creeps playing Bridget Sullivan the Maid.
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: Oh perfect casting.
• 28:16
  Speaker 2: Creeps is a master of subtle, watchful, internalized performances.
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: Which is exactly the skill set required for a maid
• 28:23
  who saw everything, knew the dynamics of the house intimately,
• 28:26
  but claims she heard and saw nothing unusual exactly. And
• 28:31
  we absolutely have to talk about Charlie Huntum. Yes, I
• 28:34
  have a huge question about this casting choice because it
• 28:37
  feels incredibly deliberate Oh so, Charlie Hunum just anchored season
• 28:41
  three playing Ed Game, a man who dug up corpses
• 28:44
  and made skin suits.
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: One of the most praised serial killers in American history.
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: Right, and now immediately in season four he is returning
• 28:52
  to the franchise to play the victim Andrew Borden.
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: It's interesting why cast.
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: Him back to back? Is there a metal layer happening here?
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: Murphy? The metal Layer is entirely the point in his
• 29:03
  American horror story universe. He constantly reuses the same repertory
• 29:07
  of actors in different roles to create subconscious thematic echoes
• 29:12
  for the viewer.
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: Ah. Right.
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: By taking the actor who just portrayed the ultimate grotesque abuser,
• 29:18
  Ed Gain and placing him into the role of the domineering,
• 29:21
  miserly patriarch Andrew Borden, you are subconsciously linking the two men.
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: It suggests a thematic continuity of abuse.
• 29:30
  Speaker 2: Yes, Andrew Borden didn't commit physical atrocities like Guyin, but
• 29:33
  his relentless financial and emotional control over his daughters was
• 29:37
  its own form of cruelty.
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: It blurs the line between the monstrous killer and the
• 29:41
  monstrous victim. Is brilliant it really is rounding up the cast.
• 29:46
  We have Billy Lord playing the older sister Emma Borden,
• 29:49
  and Jessica Barden playing the actress Nance O'Neil, who becomes
• 29:52
  a massive part of Lizzy's later life.
• 29:54
  Speaker 2: So the cast is incredibly stacked. Let's look at the
• 29:57
  production itself.
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they began filming in a fall of twenty twenty
• 30:01
  five in Los Angeles, directed by Max Winkler, aiming for
• 30:04
  a late twenty twenty six release.
• 30:06
  Speaker 2: Probably September or October, to hit that prime true crime
• 30:10
  Halloween sweet spot for sure. But the world building and
• 30:13
  production design challenges here are staggering.
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: They are shooting on modern day Los Angeles soundstages.
• 30:19
  Speaker 2: And they have to completely transform that environment into a booming,
• 30:23
  smog choked nineteenth century New England textile town.
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: They have to recreate the dirt streets, the horse drawn carriages,
• 30:30
  the dim gas lighting.
• 30:32
  Speaker 2: The massive industrial brick mills dominating the horizon, and.
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: Then contrasts that massive industrial scale with this suffocating, cramped,
• 30:39
  unair conditioned interior of ninety two Second Street.
• 30:42
  Speaker 2: It's a huge undertaking.
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: I was reading the notes on the costume designer lou Eirich,
• 30:46
  who is a frequent and highly awarded Murphy collaborator.
• 30:50
  Speaker 2: She isn't just making pretty period dresses. The costumes are
• 30:53
  active storytelling tools.
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: Think about the mechanics of Victorian clothing. She has to
• 30:59
  use the these incredibly rigid corsets.
• 31:01
  Speaker 2: The heavy, suffocating wolf fabrics, and the high lace collars to.
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: Visually represent the extreme Victorian modesty that is violently clashing
• 31:10
  with the underlying passions, the greed and the rage of
• 31:14
  these characters.
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: The clothes are literally designed to trap them, to restrict
• 31:18
  their breathing and their movement exactly.
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: The wardrobe is a physical manifestation of the societal prison
• 31:23
  they lived in.
• 31:24
  Speaker 2: And the sources also mentioned a heavy reliance on practical
• 31:27
  effects for the murders, actively avoiding an overreliance on cgi
• 31:31
  blood that.
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: Is crucial for making the violence feel visceral and grounded.
• 31:35
  Speaker 2: Imagine the sound design they're engineering.
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: For this oh. The constant, distant mechanical clatter of the
• 31:40
  textile mills outside.
• 31:42
  Speaker 2: Leading through the thin walls of a house that is
• 31:44
  otherwise terrifyingly silent.
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: The heavy creak of a footstep on a wooden floorboard.
• 31:49
  Speaker 2: The oppressive silence right before the hatchet falls terrifying.
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: It does, but as much as we focus on the
• 31:58
  murders and the dramatic trial, the actors eventually get to
• 32:01
  step off the set, take off those corsets, and go
• 32:04
  home to their modern lives.
• 32:05
  Speaker 2: Right, the real Lizzie bordon did not.
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: No, she lived the entire rest of her life in
• 32:10
  the long dark shadow of those murders.
• 32:13
  Speaker 2: Which brings us to the chilling aftermath and her completely
• 32:17
  bizarre modern legacy. Yeah, the post trial chapter of Lizzie
• 32:21
  Borden's life is often glossed over in pop culture summaries,
• 32:25
  but it is deeply fascinating because it entirely defies the
• 32:28
  expected narrative. How So, society wanted her to be a
• 32:31
  ruined repentance center hiding in the shadows, but she refused.
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: Right after the trial, Lizzy and Emma inherited the fortune.
• 32:39
  All that money Andrew was hoarding the bank while making
• 32:41
  them use an outhouse.
• 32:42
  Speaker 2: It became theirs.
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: They inherited roughly one hundred and seventy five thousand dollars
• 32:46
  each in today's money, we are talking about millions upon
• 32:49
  millions of dollars.
• 32:50
  Speaker 2: And what do they do? They don't flee fall river
• 32:52
  in disgrace to start a new life under assumed names.
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: They stay right there in town.
• 32:56
  Speaker 2: They buy a massive, beautiful, modern mansion with all the
• 33:00
  latest amenities in the wealthy section.
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: Of town, and Lizzie names it Maplecroft.
• 33:05
  Speaker 2: It's an incredible, almost defiant power move.
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: It really is. She rebrands herself. She demands to be
• 33:11
  called Lizabeth instead of Lizzie.
• 33:13
  Speaker 2: She lives this somewhat reclusive yet weirdly socially active life.
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: She never married, but she traveled, She threw parties, She
• 33:21
  employed a full staff.
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: She developed very close, intense friendships with theater people and
• 33:26
  traveling actresses.
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: Most notably Nance O'Neil right.
• 33:29
  Speaker 2: Right, which fueled endless local gossip about romantic entanglements.
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: And that friendship with Nance O'Neil is reportedly the catalyst
• 33:36
  for the final, permanent falling out between Lizzie and her
• 33:39
  sister Emma.
• 33:40
  Speaker 2: After living together and surviving the trial together, Emma abruptly
• 33:43
  moved out of Maplecroft in nineteen.
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: Oh five, and the sisters allegedly never spoke another word
• 33:48
  to each other for the rest of their lives.
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: Lizzie lived at Maplecroft until she died of pneumonia in
• 33:52
  nineteen twenty seven at the age of sixty six.
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: Emma, strangely enough, died just nine days later.
• 33:58
  Speaker 2: It is the ultimate tragic, hollow ending.
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Lizzie died incredibly wealthy. She finally possessed the absolute
• 34:07
  financial freedom she supposedly swung a hatchet nineteen times to.
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: Acquire, but she was entirely isolated.
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: Despite the legal acquittal, she faced constant, quiet, brutal societal
• 34:19
  ostracism from the Fall River elite for the rest of
• 34:21
  her life.
• 34:22
  Speaker 2: They acquitted her in a court of law, but they
• 34:24
  convicted her in the drawing rooms.
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: She became the living embodiment of the Spinster trope, a
• 34:29
  localized ghost story.
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: In a cautionary tale about the unreliability of memory.
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: And justice, and that legacy has just exploded. Over the decades.
• 34:37
  The cultural impact of this case is insane.
• 34:40
  Speaker 2: The source material lists a dizzying array of adaptations.
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: There are rock operas, classical ballets, and nineteen sixties folk
• 34:47
  song You have.
• 34:47
  Speaker 2: The incredibly famous nineteen seventy five TV movie The Legend
• 34:51
  of Lizzie.
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: Borden starring Elizabeth Montgomery from Bewitched, which absolutely terrified an
• 34:57
  entire generation of television viewers.
• 34:59
  Speaker 2: You have Christina Ree playing her in a twenty eighteen Lifetime.
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: Film and now a massive prestige Netflix series.
• 35:05
  Speaker 2: And the obsession goes beyond just consuming media. It extends
• 35:08
  into physical spaces. Right the original house at ninety two
• 35:12
  Second Street, which was renumbered to two thirty Second Street,
• 35:15
  is now a fully operational bed breakfast and a true
• 35:18
  crime museum.
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: This is where I have to ask you listening right now,
• 35:21
  would you do it? Would you spend a night at
• 35:23
  the bored In B and B?
• 35:25
  Speaker 2: People literally pay hundreds of dollars to sleep in the
• 35:28
  exact room, in a replica bed where Abby Borden was
• 35:31
  hacked to death.
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: They take midnight ghost tours. So what does this all mean?
• 35:35
  Speaker 2: Well, think about it.
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: In a modern era where we have advanced forensic tools,
• 35:39
  where we use DNA phenotyping to predict a suspect's eye
• 35:43
  color from a single hair, or genetic genealogy to build
• 35:46
  family trees and solve forty year old cold cases. Why
• 35:50
  are we still so intensely obsessed with a case from
• 35:52
  eighteen ninety two that modern profiling can never ever definitively solve.
• 35:57
  Speaker 2: We are obsessed precisely because it forces us to con
• 36:00
  front the ethical boundaries of our own true crime consumption.
• 36:03
  Our fascination with macob space is like pain. To sleep
• 36:05
  in a murder room is a psychological mechanism for touching
• 36:08
  the void safely.
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: It allows us to brush up against pure horror while
• 36:11
  knowing we can check out at eleven zero am.
• 36:14
  Speaker 2: But more importantly, the lack of definitive scientific resolution is
• 36:18
  a feature of this story, not a bug.
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: Because we can't exhume the bodies and swab the hatchet
• 36:24
  for touch DNA, the case remains an open, endlessly adaptable vessel.
• 36:28
  Speaker 2: Exactly. The lingering theories just keep spinning and everyone gets
• 36:32
  to play armchair detective.
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: Was it a drifter, an intruder who magically slipped in
• 36:36
  and out unnoticed without stealing a dime?
• 36:38
  Speaker 2: Was it a grand conspiracy involving their uncle John Morse,
• 36:41
  who conveniently happened to visit that exact day.
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: Or did the sheer, suffocating pressure of that house, the
• 36:47
  lack of plumbing, the stifling heat, and the greed of
• 36:49
  her father finally cause a Sunday school teacher to just
• 36:53
  completely snap.
• 36:54
  Speaker 2: We don't know the mechanical truth, and barring a miracle
• 36:57
  we will never know in.
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: That absolute void of certain is exactly why the story
• 37:01
  endoors it is. Okay, let's pull all of this together.
• 37:04
  We have covered incredible ground today. We started in the sweltering,
• 37:08
  claustrophobic heat of August eighteen ninety two, exploring a brutal,
• 37:13
  hatchet wielding double homicide inside a cramped mansion driven by
• 37:17
  extreme greed and festering resentment.
• 37:19
  Speaker 2: We walk through the resulting investigation and a completely unprecedented
• 37:24
  media frenzied trial where a.
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: Woman was essentially saved from the gallows by the intense
• 37:30
  sexism and Victorian gender stereotypes of an all male jury.
• 37:34
  Speaker 2: And we've mapped out exactly how Ryan Murphy and a
• 37:37
  cast of Hollywood heavyweights are taking this one hundred and
• 37:40
  thirty year old folklore and resurrecting it on lavish Los
• 37:44
  Angeles soundstages for a whole new generation.
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: And as we wait for the Lizzie Borden's story to
• 37:49
  hit our screens in late twenty twenty six, it is
• 37:52
  crucial to remember that this upcoming season of Monster isn't
• 37:55
  just going to be about jump scares or meticulously tailored
• 37:58
  period costumes.
• 37:59
  Speaker 2: If Murphy does his job bright. The show will act
• 38:01
  as a mirror.
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: It is going to reflect our own modern societal flaws.
• 38:04
  Our ongoing class divides.
• 38:06
  Speaker 2: The restrictive boxes, society still attempts to put.
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: Women into it, and fundamentally, our deeply rooted, highly profitable
• 38:12
  obsession with true crime itself. Absolutely, and before we go,
• 38:16
  I want to leave you with one final lingering thought.
• 38:18
  Tam all over on your own. We've established that the
• 38:21
  Lizzibordon mystery endures precisely because it lacks a definitive answer.
• 38:25
  Speaker 2: The empty space allows every single generation to project their
• 38:29
  own contemporary anxieties onto her story.
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: But I want you to imagine this scenario. Imagine if
• 38:35
  tomorrow morning, a team of historians renovating Maplecroft uncovered a
• 38:39
  hidden diary in the floorboards. Wow for a one hundred
• 38:43
  percent authenticated, scientifically verified confession letter from eighteen ninety two,
• 38:48
  A letter that definitively, without a shadow of a doubt,
• 38:52
  proved exactly who swung that hatchet and mapped out exactly
• 38:55
  why they did it.
• 38:56
  Speaker 2: The century old mystery would evaporate.
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: Overnight, exactly. But here's the question. Would true crime fans
• 39:02
  actually be happy? That's a great question, or would the
• 39:05
  discovery of the absolute, unvarnished truth ruin the legend entirely.
• 39:09
  It really forces you to consider, is our cultural obsession
• 39:12
  with true crime actually about a noble pursuit of justice
• 39:15
  and truth.
• 39:16
  Speaker 2: Or, if we are being completely honest with ourselves, do
• 39:20
  we secretly prefer the endless entertainment of an eternal, unsolvable mystery.
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: Think about that next time you find yourself humming that
• 39:27
  old nursery rhyme. Thank you so much for joining us
• 39:29
  on this deep dive into the bloody history and the
• 39:31
  cinematic future of Lizzie Borden.
• 39:34
  Speaker 2: We will catch you on the next one.