‘Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story’ Recap and Ending Explained: What Happens to Lizzie, Maggie, and Aileen Wuornos

‘Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story’ arrived on Netflix on September 17, and its eight episodes dropped all at once, giving viewers an immediate look at how Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s anthology series chose to close out its fourth chapter. The season centers on Lizzie Borden, who was accused of killing her father, Andrew Borden, and her stepmother, Abby Borden, with a hatchet at the family home in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892.

The real case captivated the country and produced the well known schoolyard rhyme about forty whacks, though the jury ultimately acquitted Borden of both murders, and no one else was ever charged, leaving the crime officially unsolved. Borden died of pneumonia in 1927, but public fascination with her story never really went away. The Netflix series revisits that fascination through a fictionalized lens, and its final episode has viewers asking exactly how the show chose to end things for Lizzie, her household, and one surprising crossover character.

‘Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story’ Recap Of The Final Episode

The eight episode season ends with an installment titled Carnival, which focuses on the aftermath of the murders and Lizzie’s legal battle. The prosecution tries to connect her to the deaths, but the case against her remains largely circumstantial, and the finale brings the trial to its historical conclusion without offering a definitive answer to who actually killed Andrew and Abby Borden.

The finale opens not with Lizzie but with Aileen Wuornos, who sits for an interview and maintains her innocence before the episode returns to the fallout of Lizzie’s own trial. That structural choice sets up the season’s final stretch, which spends its remaining time on what happens to Lizzie once the courtroom drama has ended rather than lingering on the verdict itself.

Netflix has described the finale as the point where Lizzie’s monstrous legacy begins to overwhelm her as she tries to figure out what comes next, and the episode leans into that idea by showing how getting away with the crime is not the same thing as escaping it. The people around Lizzie keep disappearing, and even the sister who stayed by her side throughout the ordeal eventually leaves, so Lizzie ends the season having won her independence but with very little left to share it with.

How The Ending Explains Lizzie Borden’s Trial Outcome

Lizzie Borden is acquitted of murdering Andrew and Abby Borden, and the series follows the historical outcome of her actual trial, in which a jury found her not guilty after prosecutors failed to establish her guilt. Despite contradictions in Lizzie’s account of events, what ultimately saves her in the show’s version of the so called trial of the century is a collective assumption that a woman could not be capable of committing such a violent crime.

In the courtroom, Lizzie’s freedom hinges on weak physical evidence, her carefully managed performance of innocence, and her sister Emma’s loyalty, while her friend and actress Nance O’Neil helps turn the proceedings into something closer to a performance for the jury. The series frames the acquittal less as a mystery solved and more as a demonstration of how easily the era’s assumptions about women could be turned into a legal advantage.

Following the acquittal, Lizzie and Emma inherit money from their father’s estate, and the sisters eventually leave the family home for a larger property in Fall River, which they name Maplecroft, with Lizzie beginning to go by the name Lizbeth. The finale makes clear that being acquitted does not end Lizzie’s connection to the case, since her name remains tied to the murders even though she was never convicted.

What Happens To Maggie And Emma By The End

Bridget known as Maggie Sullivan, played by Vicky Krieps, is the Borden family’s maid and the series imagines a romantic relationship between her and Lizzie, with the show making that bond central to Lizzie’s arc and having Maggie help destroy evidence tied to the crime. By the finale, that relationship becomes the emotional anchor of Lizzie’s isolated new life.

Emma eventually reaches a breaking point, telling Lizzie that she has become the boogeyman now, and Emma announces that she is leaving for good, giving Lizzie a final parting line hoping that she admits to what she did on her deathbed. Meanwhile, Maggie’s own marriage back in Ireland is falling apart, and her husband grows suspicious about where the money for their home came from, with his treatment of her becoming bad enough that she briefly imagines killing him with an axe before choosing instead to simply leave him.

When Maggie returns to Lizzie, she decides she is done hiding, and the two reunite as Lizzie continues living under the name Lizbeth. In a quiet late moment, Lizzie admits she has never told anyone the truth and still sometimes feels like the young girl who did something she cannot admit to, and when she asks Maggie if she regrets what happened, Maggie answers no and turns the question back around, telling Lizzie that she must make peace with it in order to move on.

The Aileen Wuornos Twist Explained

The extended trailer had already teased this connection by showing Sarah Paulson as Aileen Wuornos visiting the Lizzie Borden home while a museum curator notes that no one really knows what happened that day, with the inclusion of Wuornos suggesting the season would span multiple timelines the way ‘Monster: The Ed Gein Story’ did the year before.

The season’s final scene returns to Aileen Wuornos, whose story was previously covered in a separate Netflix documentary, and the show imagines Aileen becoming fascinated with Lizzie and visiting the former Borden home, using Lizzie as a figure through whom she understands her own rage and violence. Before her execution, Aileen requests that the song ‘Carnival’ by Natalie Merchant be played as she is prepared for lethal injection, a detail that also gives the finale episode its title.

After Aileen is executed by lethal injection, her eyes suddenly open, and waiting for her are Maggie and Lizzie, offering her the same grace Lizzie herself had once sought, with Lizzie telling her that all is forgiven and all is understood. The vision links the three women as figures the series portrays as responding violently to abuse and exploitation, with Lizzie and Maggie becoming almost mythological guides welcoming Aileen into a grim historical lineage. Ella Beatty told Netflix’s Tudum that the series explores a legacy of female rage and reaction to the hand these women were dealt, and that connecting Lizzie’s story to Aileen’s helped the show examine why women kill in the first place.

With Lizzie’s fate settled by history and the show’s final vision tying her story to Aileen Wuornos across a century, viewers now have plenty to unpack about what ‘Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story’ was really trying to say about the women it chose to center, and Lizzie’s own ending seems designed to invite exactly that kind of conversation in the comments.