Did Aileen Wuornos Really Know About Lizzie Borden? Monster's Connection Explained

Spoiler warning: This piece discusses the ending of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story and its connection to Aileen Wuornos.

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story jumps nearly a century forward in its final episodes, introducing Aileen Wuornos (Sarah Paulson) as a thematic successor to Lizzie — a woman whose violence the show frames as another chapter in the same “legacy of female rage.” It’s a striking structural choice. It’s also, by Netflix’s own admission, not something that actually happened.

Who Aileen Wuornos really was

Between November 1989 and November 1990, Aileen Wuornos, a sex worker operating along Florida highways, killed seven men. She was convicted in six of those murders. Arrested in January 1991, she went to trial the following year, was convicted in January 1992, and sentenced to death. Wuornos was executed by lethal injection in Florida on October 9, 2002. Her case drew national attention for its unusual profile — female serial killers are exceedingly rare in the documented history of the crime — and remains a subject of ongoing debate about her treatment by police and the courts.

What the show depicts

In Monster, Wuornos ends up staying at the Borden house in Fall River — by this point in the show’s timeline, a bed and breakfast — with her partner Shelby, who reads to her the way Maggie once read to Lizzie. The show uses this staged parallel to suggest Wuornos found some kind of personal connection to Lizzie’s story.

What’s actually confirmed: no such connection existed

Netflix’s own companion material for the show states this directly: “There’s no evidence that the real Wuornos was fixated on the Borden killings.” There is no documented biographical record — no interviews, letters, or accounts from those who knew her — indicating Aileen Wuornos ever expressed interest in, was inspired by, or stayed at the Lizzie Borden house. This is a fictional device the show uses to draw a thematic line between its two subjects, not a claim about Wuornos’s actual life.

What is true: the house really is a bed and breakfast

One detail in the show’s Wuornos scenes checks out completely: the real Borden home at 92 Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts, does operate today as a bed and breakfast and museum, where guests can stay overnight in the rooms where the murders took place. That part of the show’s setting is accurate, even though Wuornos’s presence there is invented.

Why the show draws this parallel at all

Monster co-showrunner Ian Brennan has described the season as building a case that “female rage” runs through history rather than existing as isolated, unrelated incidents — connecting Lizzie’s story to both Elizabeth Báthory (in flashback) and Wuornos (in the modern-day scenes). It’s worth noting Wuornos has also been the subject of her own dramatization before: Charlize Theron won an Academy Award playing her in the 2003 film Monster — a different project from Ryan Murphy’s anthology series, despite the shared title. For the Báthory side of that same thematic thread, see our explainer on her role in the show. For the complete list of what’s real and invented across the season, see our true-story-vs-Netflix breakdown.