“No one really knows what happened that day,” a voice intones at the end of the trailer for Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story. 

“Oh, I fuckin’ know what happened,” Aileen Wuornos (Sarah Paulson) responds. 

Wuornos, the woman some credit as the first female serial killer, is not a direct part of the story of Lizzie Borden, the woman accused of the 1892 axe murder of her parents. But in the tradition of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s anthology series, Lizzie’s influence trickles down through the ages. Wuornos plays a major role in scenes set decades later. 

“She's such a fascinating character,” Brennan says. “She could easily be her own season of the show.” Instead, Wuornos serves as an inheritor of Lizzie’s bloody legacy. 

“The show is exploring a legacy of female rage and reaction to the set of circumstances that they are presented with,” says star Ella Beatty, who plays Borden. “I think there’s a connection [between Borden and Wuornos] that Ryan and Ian were interested in mapping and exploring.” 

Between 1989 and 1990, Wuornos, a sex worker, killed seven men in Florida; she was eventually convicted of six of the murders. The killer’s unlikely profile drew national attention, and the ensuing court case sparked debate over her treatment. 

Wuornos was executed by the state of Florida in 2002, but her story endures. Charlize Theron won an Academy Award in 2004 for playing Wuornos in Patty Jenkins’s film Monster. And Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers, a documentary that retells Wuornos’s story using archival footage and prison interviews, hit Netflix in 2025.

Wuornos plays a crucial part in the thematic focus of this season of Monster. The series’s previous installments center on Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez Brothers, and Ed Gein; The Lizzie Borden Story is the first to center on a female killer. It’s a role that Beatty took seriously. “Every season of Monster has been an exercise in understanding the person’s psychology,” she says. “Are they born or are they made? I knew from the beginning that Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan were really interested in exploring what brings a woman to the point of violence.”

Wuornos’s presence in The Lizzie Borden Story helps thread that needle. “I think the story of Aileen Wuornos also served that question and that exploration of why women kill,” Beatty says. 

The role also offered Sarah Paulson an opportunity to steal scenes, after previously teaming with Murphy on Ratched, American Horror Story, American Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. Simpson, and more. “You'd say career defining, but she already has such a defined career,” Brennan says of Paulson’s performance. “It seems second nature that Sarah Paulson comes in and whips out a performance like that, but it's really breathtaking.”

Beatty already had a connection to the Emmy-winning star. “I love Sarah Paulson so very much,” she says. “We met doing a play together three years ago [Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate, for which Paulson won a Tony Award] and became very close. She was such a part of the creative process for me from the very beginning.” Monsters have to stick together.

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is now streaming on Netflix.