It’s just another day – or so you thought. Working on your day’s chores, you take to the barn, looking for fishing sinkers. But it’s so warm, you climb up to the loft for a break to snack on a delicious pear. It’s easy to lose track of time in such a place, and what does it matter after all? You’re 32, still living with your father and his wife, and have no prospects of your own. When you do finally emerge, life, as you knew it, will have forever changed. Poor Lizzie Borden.
On August 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts, Lizzie Borden entered her family home, to find her father, Andrew Borden, dead on the sofa. His face so badly beaten with a sharp object that he was almost impossible to identify. But Lizzie knew it was him. She called for the help of the family maid, Bridget.
Bridget ran across the street to seek the aid of Dr. Bowen. The commotion alerted the neighbors and a crowd began to gather on the lawn. Someone notified the police, and the neighbor, Mrs. Churchill approached Lizzie and inquired as to what was wrong. Upon hearing the news that Mr. Borden had been killed, she asked about Mrs. Borden.
Bridget and Mrs. Churchill carefully climbed the stairs to seek out Abby Borden. What they found both shocked and horrified them. Mrs. Borden was lying, face down, on the floor of the guest room, her body little more than the form of a person. Dark and congealed blood led investigators to believe that she had been killed first.
What exactly happened, here, we may never know. The annual Fall River Police Department picnic was taking place at the same time at Rocky Point. As such, the only officer dispatched to the house was Officer George W. Allen. He ran 400 yards to the house, saw that Mr. Borden was dead, then ran back to the station house to inform the city marshal. No one was left in charge of the crime scene.
While Officer Allen was away, neighbors overran the house, comforting Lizzie and gawking at the gruesome sight, that was Andrew Borden. A county medical examiner by the name of Dolan, also happened by the house during this time. He looked in and examined the bodies. Dr. Bowen informed him that both Mr. and Mrs. Borden had complained of being violently ill the day before. Later that day, he had the bodies photographed, then removed their stomachs and sent them, along with a sample of milk, to the Harvard Medical School for analysis. Neither tested positive for poison.
Clues discovered over the next few days ultimately led nowhere. A boy reported seeing a man jump the back fence of the Borden property, and when a man was found, matching the description, he had an airtight alibi.
A bloody hatchet was found on the Sylvia Farm in South Somerset, but blood analysis proved it to be chicken blood.
Bridget, the maid, was considered a suspect for a short time as well, as was the spinster Sunday School teacher. Ultimately, the investigation came to center on Lizzie though.
But why would she do it?
Andrew Borden was a wealthy man, having a net worth of almost $10 million in today’s money. Yet he was frugal to a fault. His family of 4, lived in a modest home, with no indoor plumbing on the cheap side of town. His daughters, Emma and Lizzie both wanted for extravagant things, and were denied regularly. Prior to their murders, tensions had grown in the family. Andrew had gifted various branches of the family various things. His wife Abby’s relatives received a house.
Sarah Borden, the mother of Emma and Lizzie, died in 1863, when Lizzie was just 3 years old. Andrew remarried in 1866 to Abby Gray, and the girls were not happy. They would never call her mother, instead, referring to her only as “Mrs. Borden.” They worried that her family was only after their father’s money. Now, in their 30’s, Lizzie and Emma were considered spinsters by society, which only furthered their feelings of resentment and frustration. Lizzie even began exhibiting signs of mental illness.
The day before the murders, Lizzie attempted to purchase prussic acid, a highly poisonous liquid, for the sake of killing moths in a sealskin cape. She was refused, however, as she did not have a prescription.
Her account of the events the day of the murders also did not line up. First of all, she claimed her stepmother had received a note asking her to visit a sick friend. No such note has ever been found. Lizzie claimed that she might have, inadvertently, burned it. Mrs. Borden’s time of death was placed at 9:30 in the morning.
Mr. Borden was out when his wife was killed. Upon his return home, the maid, Bridget, claimed to have let him in, as their screen door had 3 locks on it. During this time, she reported hearing Lizzie laughing upstairs, yet Lizzie told investigators that she was in the kitchen when her father returned home.
On the afternoon of the murders, Lizzie was asked if there were any hatchets in the house. She had Bridget show investigators where they could be found. 4 were discovered in the basement. 1 had dried blood and hair on it, which was later discovered to belong to a cow. Another hatchet was rusted, and one was covered in dust. One hatchet, however, was without a handle and covered in ashes. The broken handle appeared to be recent, and it was taken into evidence.
Mr. and Mrs. Borden were to be laid to rest on August 6 1892, but the service was halted when police informed the minister that an additional autopsy needed to be performed. This time, the heads of Mr. and Mrs. Borden were removed from their bodies, their skin removed from their skulls, and plaster casts were made of the skulls.
While Lizzie had claimed to be in the loft of the barn when her father was killed, investigators found the loft floor to be covered in thick dust, with no sign that anyone had been up there. The Deputy Marshal, John Fleet, asked Lizzie who she thought might have committed the murders, and she could think of no one. He asked directly, if her Uncle John Morse, or even Bridget could have killed her mother and father, and she said they couldn’t have, and pointedly reminded Fleet that Abby was not her mother, but her stepmother.
A few days later, Lizzie was found burning a dress in the kitchen sink by her friend, Alice Russell. When asked why she was burning it, Lizzie claimed it was covered in paint, and not worth saving.
Lizzie was arrested on August 7, 1892 and charged with the murder of her father. It wasn’t until December 2, that she was charged with 3 counts of murder. 1 for her father, 1 for Mrs. Borden, and 1 for the pair of them.
The trial began on June 5, 1893 and lasted only 14 days. The trial was scheduled to begin on June 5, 1893. A single day was spent putting together a jury, which consisted of twelve middle-aged farmers and tradesmen. The next 7 days, the prosecution presented its case. They presented only three arguments. First, that Lizzie was predisposed to murder her father and stepmother because of their animosity toward one another. Second, that she planned the murder and carried it out and third, that her behavior, and her contradictory testimony, after the fact was not that of an innocent person.
The prosecution went into detail about how Mr. and Mrs. Borden were killed. Mrs. Borden had been struck from behind, more than a dozen times – 19 to be exact – likely from the same hatchet that later killed Mr. Borden.
Mr. Borden had a gash in his face. One eye had been cut in half and his nose severed. The majority of the blows had been struck within the area that extended from the eyes and nose to the ears. Blood seeped from the wounds and splashed on the wall above the sofa, onto the floor and even onto a picture hanging on the wall. Evidence suggested he had been attacked from above and behind as he slept.
At one point during the trial, the prosecution even brought out the severed heads of Mr. and Mrs. Borden.
The defense, on the other hand, took only 2 days to present their case. Their argument was simple. She could not have done it and the evidence is all circumstantial and inconclusive. The jury agreed, because after only 90 minutes of deliberation, they came back with a verdict of “Not Guilty.”
Lizzie and her sister inherited a great bit of wealth and moved on with their lives. Lizzie remained in Fall River, but moved into a different, more substantial home and began going by “Lizbeth”. Lizzie died of Pneumonia on June 1, 1927.
Their former residence at 92 Second Street has since become the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast Museum. Guests from all over the country come to stay in the master bedroom, that Andrew and Abby once shared, or even the same room where Abby Borden was killed. Unfortunately, not all of them sleep peacefully.
Guests and Staff have both reported strange experiences in the house. There have been reports of hearing a woman weeping, or seeing a woman in Victorian era clothing, dusting and straightening covers on the beds.
There have been reports of footsteps going up and down the stairs, or heard above when the house is empty. Doors open and close on their own, and muffled conversations can be heard coming from inside of vacant rooms.
One man accompanied his wife to the inn one night and took their luggage upstairs. The room was perfectly made when he entered, the bed smooth and everything in its place. Over the course of a few minutes of unpacking, he glanced over at the bed again and saw that it was now rumpled, the folds of the comforter had been moved so that they corresponded to the curves of a human body. On the pillow, there was an indentation in the shape of a human head.
His wife found him a few minutes later in the downstairs sitting room. He was pale and visibly nervous. When she asked him what was wrong, he took her upstairs to show her, however when he opened the door, the pillow had been plumped and the comforter looked just as it did when he first entered the room. Turns out, it was the room where Abby Borden had been murdered.
Lee-Ann Wilber, the former proprietor of the B&B said it’s not unusual for guests to run out of the inn in fright. She recalls a night where she too, was too afraid to sleep in the house.
It was in 2004, just after she had bought the house. She had nodded off on the couch in the parlor room and awoke at 3 a.m. She peeked down into the front entryway and took in the shadows cast by a special old chandelier that was always lit; the chandelier could only turn off if someone got up on a ladder to remove the bulbs.
She said she made sense of all the shadows in the hallway, except for one. “And as I’m looking at it, it walked up the staircase.”
As her mind started to process what she was seeing, the power in the chandelier surged for about three seconds and then everything went black. Each light bulb had burned out. “I said to no one in particular, ‘You win tonight,’ and went to sleep in my car.”
Living here,” she said, “very quickly, I became a believer.”
Don’t forget the ever popular jump-roping rhyme:
Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.
Or the slightly more gruesome variation;
Lizzie Borden took an axe
And Gave her mother forty whacks.
When her body hit the floor,
She gave her father forty more.
The Lizzie Borden House is currently for sale, listed for $2M.
After you spend a night at the Lizzie Borden House, why not hop on a plane to Colorado and stay at the Stanley Hotel?
