Lizzie Borden’s period blood became a legal shield during her 1893 murder trial, a detail now dramatized in Ryan Murphy’s new Netflix series.
Ella Beatty, 24, stars as the 19th-century Massachusetts woman accused of axe-murdering her father Andrew and stepmother Abby in 1892. Charlie Hunnam, 44, and Rebecca Hall, 42, play the victims in the eight-episode drama Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, which follows events before and after the killings. Vicky Krieps, 50, appears as Bridget Sullivan, the maid who cleans up a pivotal mess.
The series opens with Beatty’s Lizzie suffering cramps while entertaining a suitor, then accidentally staining her stepmother’s expensive couch with menstrual blood. Krieps’s Bridget swiftly removes the mark and secures her position in the household. The scene establishes bodily functions as both domestic hazard and narrative engine in a household already thick with tension.
What Murphy dramatizes as awkward social comedy had deadly serious legal consequences three years later. When police searched the Borden home after the August 4, 1892 murders, they found no blood linking Lizzie directly to the crime scenes. In the basement they discovered only a pail of bloody cloths and a single spot on her underskirt. Questioned by officers, Borden attributed the blood to menstruation. The family doctor confirmed her claim. Police dropped the line of inquiry entirely.
Her defense lawyer George Robinson weaponized this biological fact at trial. Robinson argued Lizzie was “unbalanced” because her “illness was continuing,” framing her menstrual cycle as a state of diminished capacity. The defense team pinpointed her period as ending August 3, the day before the murders, and leveraged Victorian squeamishness about female anatomy into reasonable doubt.
Historical records cited in the book The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation note Lizzie experienced “peculiar spells” during her monthly cycle. Victorian medical culture pathologized ordinary hormonal fluctuations, and Borden’s legal team exploited that ignorance to humanize their client as physically compromised rather than criminally violent.
The source material leaves ambiguous whether Murphy’s period-couch incident draws from documented history or creative invention. Records do not indicate Borden suffered any particular menstrual condition beyond the normal range. What is verified is how her unremarkable biology became extraordinary legal theater.
Borden’s acquittal in June 1893 has never settled popular fascination with her guilt. The case generated immediate national sensation and sustained 134 years of speculation, fueled by the brutal method—hatchet blows to the skulls of both victims—and the apparent absence of conclusive physical evidence. The murders occurred in the Borden family home in Fall River, Massachusetts, where Lizzie, 32, lived with her wealthy but frugal father and his second wife.
The 1892 investigation faced immediate obstacles. No witness saw Borden attack either victim. No murder weapon was definitively identified, though a hatchet head found in the basement was suspected. The timeline allowed brief windows for the killings between Lizzie’s known movements that morning. Into this evidentiary vacuum, her defense poured every available alternative explanation, including the menstrual defense that redirected attention from blood evidence to biological necessity.
Murphy’s Monster anthology has previously examined Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez brothers. Borden marks its first alleged female perpetrator, and the creative choice to foreground her embodied experience signals how the franchise approaches historical crime through intimate rather than procedural lenses.
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is streaming on Netflix.