The True Story of Lizzie Borden

There are certain playground rhymes that turn out to be darker than they appear when first heard. “Ring Around the Rosy,” skipped and sung by generations of children, initially sounds like it’s about flowers, but is widely believed to describe the symptoms of the Black Plague. The one about Lizzie Borden, however, was always exactly as dark as the lyrics read. It just got the details wrong.

For those who haven’t heard it, it goes: “Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one.” The rhyme is inaccurate on almost every count. To start, the murder weapon was a hatchet, not an axe. Secondly, the victim was her stepmother, not her mother. Finally, the number of blows was closer to half that. But why let facts get in the way of a true crime story?

Yet, the rhyme has persisted, and Lizzie Borden has spent nearly a century and a half as one of the most famous accused murderers in the United States, despite the fact that a jury found her not guilty. But to this day, the case has never been officially solved, and no one else was ever charged, leaving members of the public to fill in their own blanks.

Still, the question of what actually happened on the morning of August 4, 1892 in Fall River, Massachusetts remains as unresolved as it was the day the bodies were found. Here’s what we do know:

Who was Lizzie Borden?

Lizzie Andrew Borden was born on July 19, 1860, in Fall River, Massachusetts, approximately 50 miles south of Boston. She was the younger of two daughters of Andrew Jackson Borden, a self-made businessman who had built a fortune in finance and real estate. By the time of his death, his estate was valued at roughly $300,000, equivalent to more than $10.2 million today.

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An undated portrait of Lizzie Borden.

Despite his enormous wealth, Andrew lived frugally. The family home lacked indoor plumbing, which many affluent homes in the area did have by that point in time. But he reportedly refused to move to the more upscale neighborhood where Fall River’s wealthy families lived. This was said to have been a source of frustration for Lizzie, who craved that kind of social standing.

Lizzie’s mother died when she was two. Her father remarried a woman named Abby Gray, whom Lizzie would later say in court that she referred to as “Mrs. Borden.” A story in the Boston Daily Globe at the time of the trial reported rumors that “Lizzie and her stepmother never got along together peacefully, and that for a considerable time back they have not spoken,” but also said family members insisted the two women had a normal relationship. A dressmaker was also reported to having accidentally described Abby as Lizzie’s mother, which prompted Lizzie to say, “Don’t call her that to me. She is a mean thing and we hate her.”

Abby Borden

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Andrew Borden

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Lizzie taught Sunday school, served as secretary-treasurer of the Christian Endeavor Society, and was active in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. She was, by every outward appearance, a model of Victorian propriety. At the time of the murders, she was 32 years old, unmarried, and living at home. Lizzie’s older sister Emma, who was nine years older than her, was already married and living out of the home by then.

What happened on the morning of the murders?

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The Bordens’ home in Fall River, as seen in the 1950s.

On August 4, 1892, Andrew and Abby Borden were killed in their home, approximately 90 minutes apart. Abby was found first, face down on the floor of the upstairs guest room, struck 18 times with a hatchet-like weapon, according to the police report. Andrew was found shortly after on the sitting room sofa, where it was assumed he had went for a nap. Although he was struck 11 times (so just a few less than Abby), he was described to have been bludgeoned beyond recognition, and one of his eyeballs was chopped in half.

The only people in the house that morning were Lizzie and the family’s Irish maid, Bridget Sullivan, who also went by Maggie. Lizzie was the first person to find the bodies, and later told police she had been in the barn when her father and stepmother were killed. Officers arrived to find Lizzie calm and composed, and several of them seemed perturbed that she did not cry. Her answers to their questions shifted and contradicted each other; responses on her whereabouts ranged included, “in the back yard, “…in the loft getting a piece of iron for sinkers” and “…up in the loft eating pears.”

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A map of the area published the Police Gazette in 1892.

That Thursday had been the hottest day of the year so far, and investigators noted that the loft of the barn, in particular, was suffocating that morning. Additionally, the dust on the floor was undisturbed, meaning it was unlikely she had been there or there would have been markings or footprints of some kind. A week after the murders, police arrested Lizzie. Her sister Emma had been ruled out as a suspect because she was 15 miles away from town while visiting friends, and only returned after receiving a telegram, giving her a solid alibi.

What happened at the trial?

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A sketch of the courtroom done from 1893.

The trial took place in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in June 1893, and drew reporters from across the country. Hotels were full for miles around, and crowds had to be held back from the courthouse. If the trial of Charles Guiteau, who assassinated President James Garfield in 1881, was the first “Trial of the Century,” then the hearing for Lizzie Borden was arguably the second. According to Smithsonian Magazine, “Borden’s arrest provoked an uproar that quickly became national. Women’s groups rallied to her side, especially the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and suffragists. Borden’s supporters protested that at trial, she would not be judged by a jury of her peers, as women did not have the right to serve on juries.”

Thus, from the start, the deck was stacked against the prosecution in ways that went beyond evidence. The presiding judge, Justice Justin Dewey, had been appointed to the bench by Lizzie’s defense attorney, who happened to be the former governor of Massachusetts. Judge Dewey’s instructions to the jury were later described by other judges as a “plea for the innocent.”

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A photograph of William Henry Moody, the prosecutor on the case, dated to 1904.

Key evidence was thrown out before the jury ever heard it. Lizzie’s testimony from the inquest—the one full of contradictions—was ruled inadmissible. Evidence that she had tried to buy prussic acid, a deadly poison and another name for hydrogen cyanide, from a local drugstore the day before the murders was also excluded. Without those two pieces, the prosecution was left largely with circumstantial evidence and no murder weapon.

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Sketches of Lizzie, Emma, and other people in the courtroom.

The defense played a different strategy entirely. Lizzie appeared in court dressed in black, holding flowers and a fan: the picture of a grieving daughter. Her attorneys argued, in terms the all-male jury understood and accepted: that a woman of her class and character was simply incapable of such an act. Lizzie’s attorney, George Robinson, asked the jury in his closing argument, “To find her guilty, you must believe she is a fiend. Does she look it?” It took the jury less than two hours to acquit her.

What happened to Lizzie after the trial?

Lizzie was acquitted, but she was never truly free after that. Paradoxically, everyone who had rallied to her defense during the trial almost immediately disappeared. She moved into Maplecroft, a 7-bedroom Victorian house on The Hill, the fashionable neighborhood she had always wanted to live in. She basically assumed a new identity, also changing her name to Lizbeth.

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Nance O’Neil in an undated photo.

Society still shunned her anyway. Time said “children threw gravel at her windows, pelted her house with rotten eggs, and rang her doorbell in the middle of the night.” She was accused of shoplifting in Providence in 1897. In 1905, Lizzie and Emma had a falling out following a party that Lizzie had for a Boston actress named Nance O’Neil. There had been rumors about the two unmarried women having an intimate relationship given their close friendship, especially as Lizzie was also said to have spent lavishly on Nance. Either way, Emma moved out and the two sisters never spoke again.

Lizzie died on June 1, 1927 at age 66 of heart disease and acute bronchitis. Emma died nine days later from chronic nephritis. Both were buried in the family plot at Oak Grove Cemetery in Fall River, alongside Andrew and Abby Borden. Few people attended Lizzie's funeral.

Did she actually do it?

Most historians and legal scholars believe so, though no one has ever been able to undeniably prove it. The circumstantial evidence against her was substantial, and she was one of only two people in the house when both murders occurred.

But it’s difficult to overlook how Lizzie’s answers to police questions contradicted each other repeatedly, not to mention the purchase of highly-lethal hydrogen cyanide. (It’s mostly used in industrial purposes, like manufacturing plastic, but not for things at home.) Additionally, one of Lizzie’s friends testified that she watched Lizzie burn a dress in the kitchen stove three days after the murders. And the hatchet head found in the basement, freshly rubbed with ashes to make it look old, had a handle that appeared to have been recently broken off.

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A woman placing flowers on Lizzie’s grave in 1958.

Other suspects have been proposed over the years, including the maid Bridget Sullivan, Lizzie’s uncle John Morse, whose alibi struck investigators as suspiciously detailed, and even an illegitimate son of Andrew Borden named William, a theory for which no hard evidence has ever been found.

A compelling alternative theory involves Emma, who some writers have suggested secretly returned from her vacation to commit the murders, knowing a jury would never convict her younger sister. She also might have had a stronger motive than Lizzie. “Emma was old enough to know her mother and feel her loss more keenly,” Cara Robertson, author of The Trial of Lizzie Borden, told Vanity Fair. “She's the one who’d been supplanted in the house by Abby in a way that Lizzie is not.” However, there is no evidence pointing toward Emma.

What is clear is that the murders were planned. Someone waited more than an hour between killing Abby and killing Andrew. Someone also knew the layout of the house and the family’s routine. “His death was so recent that his injuries were noted to have been oozing wet, liquid blood. He was also warm to the touch,” Andrew Schweighardt, a criminalist at the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, told CBS News in 2021. “On the other hand, Abby, who was upstairs, had matted, coagulated blood, dark blood on her injuries. She was also cold to the touch.”

Why has the case fascinated us for more than a century?

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Elizabeth Montgomery in the 1975 ABC TV movie, The Legend of Lizzie Borden.

The easiest answer is the most obvious one: people are obsessed with unsolved mysteries. Nobody was ever convicted in the murders of Andrew and Abby Borden, so to this day, the case remains mysterious.

The trial was also a bellwether for the media circuses that would come to define future high-profile American courtroom cases. From the moment the bodies were discovered, public sentiment ran ahead of the evidence, and the press largely followed. By the time the jury deliberated, the question of what Lizzie had or had not done mattered less than the story people had already decided to believe.

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A revival of Agnes de Mille’s ballet Fall River Legend at the Palais Garnier in Paris in 2014.

The case has proven irresistible to storytellers for more than a century. Agnes de Mille turned it into a ballet, Fall River Legend, in 1948, and Jack Beeson adapted it into an opera in 1965. Bewitched star Elizabeth Montgomery played Lizzie in a 1975 ABC television film; it was later discovered after Montgomery’s death that she and Lizzie were sixth cousins once removed. Christina Ricci took on the role for the 2014 Lifetime film Lizzie Borden Took an Ax, while Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart starred in the 2018’s Lizzie, which depicted a secret affair between Lizzie and the family maid as the motive for the murders.

Netflix

Ella Beatty as Lizzie in Monster.

Ryan Murphy’s true crime anthology series Monster, now airing its fourth season on Netflix, is the latest project to turn its lens on Lizzie Borden, with Ella Beatty in the lead role. Charlie Hunnam, who starred in a previous season of Monster as the infamous murderer Ed Gein, plays Lizzie’s father Andrew, while Rebecca Hall portrays her stepmother, Abby.

“I think we’re still fascinated by the case to this day largely because it has all the elements of a Greek tragedy or a Victorian melodrama, and the fact the case is unsolved gives it cultural longevity,” Richard Behrens, host of The Lizzie Borden Podcast, told Rolling Stone in 2016. “Lizzie Borden has been elevated to an American tragedy at the same level as the sinking of the Titanic.”

Rachel King (she/her) is a news writer at Town & Country. Before joining T&C, she spent nearly a decade as an editor at Fortune. Her work covering travel and lifestyle has appeared in Forbes, Observer, Robb Report, Cruise Critic, and Cool Hunting, among others. Originally from San Francisco, she lives in New York with her wife, their daughter, and a precocious labradoodle. Follow her on Instagram at @rk.passport.

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