Did Lizzie Borden Take an Ax . . . ?

Borden around the time of the murders.

(Fall River Police Department)

On June 20, 1893, a jury filed into a Massachusetts courtroom crammed with reporters from all over the country, and announced a verdict in a case that had gripped the nation for nearly a year. Lizzie Borden, age 32, stood accused of murdering her wealthy father and stepmother with a hatchet.

It had all begun on a hot summer morning at the Borden family’s house in the town of Fall River, Massachusetts, on August 4, 1892. The Bordens’ maid, Bridget Sullivan, was resting in her upstairs room after complaining of feeling ill. At about 11:10 a.m., Lizzie Borden called to Bridget from downstairs. “Come down quick,” Lizzie said. “Father’s dead! Someone came in and killed him.”

The body of Lizzie’s father, 70-year-old Andrew Borden, lay on a couch in the sitting room. He had been killed by 10 hatchet blows to his face and head. Bridget ran across the street to get the local doctor. A neighbor who saw her came in and asked where Lizzie’s stepmother, 65-year-old Abby Borden, was. Lizzie coolly told her she thought her stepmother had gone to visit a sick friend earlier that morning but might be back home. Before long Abby Borden’s bloodied remains were found in the upstairs guest bedroom. She had been struck about 20 times with a hatchet at least an hour earlier.

Authorities were at first convinced that an intruder had committed the murders. Lizzie, a well-born, wealthy Christian woman, couldn’t be capable of such brutality, many surmised. But further investigation aroused suspicions. Policemen were struck by her strangely calm, even emotionless demeanor on the day of the murder. Under questioning, she gave conflicting accounts of her location when the murders had been committed. She told one person she had been out in the yard and had heard a groan come from the house; to others she said she’d been in the barn near the house and heard nothing. Police found no evidence that Abby Borden had been out visiting a sick friend, as Lizzie had claimed. They also discovered that Lizzie had visited a local pharmacist the day before and asked to buy prussic acid—a deadly poison.

It also become clear that relations between her and her stepmother had been chilly for years; among other things, she and her older sister, Emma, had resented the fact that their miserly father had bought part of a house for her stepmother’s half-sister. At the inquest Lizzie, who had been sedated with morphine, rambled and made statements that contradicted other witnesses’ as well as her own. In the face of the mounting circumstantial evidence, she was arrested for both murders on August 11, 1892. By then the story was a national sensation and would lead to one of the most famous murder trials in American history.

As it neared, a few points in Lizzie’s favor emerged. Although several hatchets and axes were found on the grounds of the Borden house, including one with a broken handle, none showed any trace of human blood, nor was there evidence of their blades having been washed. And five days before the trial began—while Lizzie was in police custody—a 22-year-old Fall River resident named Bertha Manchester was ax-murdered in her home by a Portuguese farm laborer. For many middle-class Massachusetts citizens of the time, it was easy to believe that a foreign-born madman had killed the Bordens. (Later investigation showed that Correiro hadn’t yet arrived in the country at the time of the Borden murders.)

During the trial, Lizzie’s friend Alice Russell testified that three days after the murders she had seen Lizzie burn a dress, saying it was “covered with paint,” and Lizzie’s sister Emma confirmed that a dress had been burned. A professor of chemistry at Harvard University, Edward S. Wood, testified that blood was found on Lizzie’s underskirt. The defense claimed that this was menstrual blood, and, perhaps because of Victorian delicacy, the topic was not pursued. Frank W. Draper, a medical expert, scored a prosecution coup as he exactly fitted the blade of one of the Bordens’ hatchets into a hole in the preserved skull of Andrew Borden. The prosecution’s case was circumstantial, but it seemed solid.

However, the defense, headed by former Massachusetts governor George Robinson, had a few cards up its sleeve. First Robinson managed to have Lizzie’s only testimony on record—her odd and inconsistent ramblings at the inquest—ruled inadmissible. She had not been advised of her rights at the time, nor had her attorney been allowed to be present. The defense followed this exclusion with an able attempt to create reasonable doubt. Numerous witnesses gave contradictory testimony about what Lizzie had been wearing, what time various events had occurred, and what sort of character she had. “To find her guilty, you must believe she is a fiend,” said Robinson to the jury in his closing remarks. “Does she look it?”

One of the three judges in the case, Justin Dewey—who had been appointed a judge by defense attorney George Robinson himself—spoke with the jury at length to guide its deliberations. He clearly sympathized with Lizzie, extolling her high moral standards and denigrating the prosecution’s case. The jurors deliberated for an hour and a half before coming back with a verdict of not guilty.

Newspapers across the country applauded the verdict, and thousands of Fall River residents gathered that night outside the Borden house to welcome Lizzie home. But not long after, public opinion began to tilt against her, and many started to believe she was guilty after all. In 1894 the journalist Edwin Porter published The Fall River Tragedy, the first book to make a case for her guilt. After that, former friends, and eventually even her sister Emma, distanced themselves from her, and she was effectively ostracized from Fall River society. A children’s rhyme began to catch on: “Lizzie Borden took an axe/ and gave her mother forty whacks./ When she saw what she had done,/ she gave her father forty-one.”

Lizzie Borden continued to proclaim her innocence until her lonely death in 1927 at the age of 66. Interest in the case hasn’t waned in the decades since. Films, plays, operas, and even comic books have been inspired by the story. And of course piles of books have been written, many reflecting the views of the time when they were published. In the 1970s, for example, Lizzie Borden held great appeal for some feminist authors, who saw her as a victim of her age’s archaic ideas about gender roles. In the 1980s and ’90s other writers, including the historian Marcia R. Carlisle in the pages of American Heritage, theorized that incestuous sexual abuse and recovered memory might lie at the heart of the tragic story.

Everyone, it seems, loves a mystery—and the tangled mystery surrounding Lizzie Borden still shows no sign of ever being solved.

—David Rapp has written about history for American Heritage, Technology Review, and Out.