The reason Aileen Wuornos is in Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story despite being born almost 100 years later
Viewers of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story got a surprise in the closing episode: a completely different serial killer, executed a century after Borden's alleged crimes, suddenly walks into the story.
The eighth and final episode of the Netflix anthology series, which began streaming on September 17, features Sarah Paulson playing Aileen Wuornos, the woman convicted of killing seven men in Florida between 1989 and 1991.
Wuornos was executed by lethal injection in 2002, more than 100 years after the 1892 axe murders Lizzie Borden was accused of and later acquitted of.
Showrunners Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan use the episode to draw a line between the two women, despite the fact they have no documented connection and lived a century apart.
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Wuornos appears in a jailhouse interview insisting her killings were self-defence, on the stand describing alleged abuse from a client, and finally speaking to a visitor ahead of her execution.
She says in the clip that she's: 'Just another woman put to death for something a man would've gotten away with.'
Who was Aileen Wuornos?
Wuornos was born in 1956 and had what she described as a chaotic, abusive childhood in Michigan.
In an archival prison interview featured in the 2025 Netflix documentary Aileen: Queen of the Serial Killers, she said she was abandoned by her parents and endured repeated beatings before running away from home at 15. She spent the next four years hitchhiking and working as a sex worker, during which she says she was raped roughly 30 times.
At 20, she said, she shot herself in the stomach in a suicide attempt and survived.
She later settled in Florida, supporting a relationship with hotel maid Tyria Moore through her work as a sex worker. Beginning in 1989, she killed seven men across the central part of the state over a 12-month stretch. Arrested in 1991, she initially claimed the men had raped her and threatened her life, before pleading no contest to three of the murders in 1992 and later admitting in a 2000 interview that her self-defence claim wasn't true. She was sentenced to death and executed on October 9, 2002.
Charlize Theron won a Best Actress Oscar for playing Wuornos in the 2003 film Monster, and Wuornos's adoptive mother, Arlene Pralle, insisted in the 2025 documentary that 'she is a very caring, compassionate, feminine human being with a heart of gold.'
Is there an actual link between Aileen Wuornos and Lizzie Borden?
There is no factual link between the two. But Ella Beatty, who plays Borden, told Netflix the show is deliberately drawing a thematic thread between them.
"The show is exploring a legacy of female rage and reaction to the set of circumstances that they are presented with," she said, adding: "I think there's a connection [between Borden and Wuornos] that Ryan and Ian were interested in mapping and exploring."
The episode leans into that idea with a dream sequence in which Wuornos wakes on the table where she was executed to find Borden and the Borden family's housekeeper waiting for her. "You're going someplace safe," Borden tells her. "All is forgiven. All is understood. At last."
Natalie Merchant's 1995 song Carnival plays over both Wuornos's execution and the finale's closing moments, a deliberate touch, given Wuornos was reportedly a fan of Merchant's and had asked for her music to be played at her funeral.
As Beatty put it: "Every season of Monster has been an exercise in understanding the person's psychology. Are they born or are they made?"
Topics: Netflix, True crime, Ryan Murphy
Thomas Bamford