Lizzie Borden: The True Story Behind the 1892 Fall River Murders
Two people were hacked to death in their own house on a hot Thursday morning in August 1892. Andrew Borden and his wife Abby. The killings happened about ninety minutes apart, in a small home where other people were awake and moving around the whole time.
Nobody was ever convicted.
The woman who went on trial was Andrew’s younger daughter. Lizzie was thirty-two, taught Sunday school, and had never been in trouble in her life. The jury needed about an hour and a half to let her go.
That verdict ended the court case and changed nothing else. People argued about Lizzie Borden in 1893 and they’re still arguing now, over drinks, in classrooms, in comment sections. Here’s what the record actually says, and where the storytelling takes over.
Who Was Lizzie Borden?
Born in Fall River, Massachusetts, on 19 July 1860. Her mother died when she was two. Three years later her father remarried, and Lizzie spent the rest of her life calling the new wife “Mrs. Borden.” Not mother. Mrs. Borden. She said it under oath.
Andrew Borden had money. Real money, from property, banking, and the undertaking trade. He was also tight with it in a way the whole city noticed. His business partners lived in big houses up on the Hill. He kept his family at 92 Second Street, in a place with no bathroom and no electric light.
The house is worth picturing, because it explains a lot. Upstairs there was no hallway. You walked through one bedroom to reach the next. And the doors got locked, from both sides, by people who shared meals.
A Lizzie Borden family split down the middle
The bad blood wasn’t a rumour and it wasn’t new. In 1887 Andrew transferred a property to his wife’s half-sister. His daughters, Lizzie and her older sister Emma, took it as theft from their inheritance. They pushed back hard enough that he handed them property of their own to shut it down.
It didn’t shut down. Five years later the two sisters and the two parents were eating at different times, in the same small house.
What Happened in Fall River, 4 August 1892
The week before
Most of the household got sick in the days leading up to it. Vomiting, stomach pain, the lot. Abby walked to the family doctor and told him flat out that she thought somebody was poisoning her. He told her it was bad food in August heat. Reasonable enough in 1892.
Uncle John Morse arrived on the 3rd and took the guest room. That same evening Lizzie went to see her friend Alice Russell and talked about a bad feeling, a sense that something was going to happen to the family.
Thursday morning
Bridget Sullivan, the maid, was outside washing windows. Andrew went off downtown around nine. Abby went upstairs to tidy the guest room.
She was attacked in there, hit from behind, and she went down face-first between the bed and the dresser. Whoever it was kept swinging after she stopped moving. Probably around half past nine.
Andrew came home near quarter to eleven, struggled with the front lock, and Bridget let him in. He stretched out on the sitting room sofa for a nap, still in his coat.
A few minutes past eleven, Lizzie shouted up the stairs. Bridget came down. Andrew was on the couch with his face opened up. Abby turned up a little later, upstairs, found by Bridget and a neighbour.
The autopsies counted the wounds carefully. Nineteen on Abby, eleven on Andrew. The rhyme everyone knows gets the number wrong, the weapon wrong, and the relationship wrong.
What the police found, and what they didn’t
Lizzie said she’d been out in the barn loft, maybe twenty minutes, looking for lead sinkers for a fishing trip. Officers climbed up to check. The dust on that loft floor looked like nobody had walked on it.
They searched the house over several days. In the cellar they found a hatchet head with a handle snapped off recently, dusted in ash.
Here’s the part that broke the case. No blood on Lizzie. None in her hair, none under her nails, none on any clothing she handed over. No forced entry either. Nothing stolen. Andrew’s watch and cash were still in his pockets.
Then on 7 August, Alice Russell came into the kitchen and found Lizzie pushing a dress into the stove. Paint stains, Lizzie told her. Russell said nothing about it for months.
The Evidence Against Lizzie Borden, and the Stories People Added
Do one thing with this case and it should be this. Keep the trial record in one pile and everything invented afterward in another.
What’s actually in the record
Opportunity, first. Two people were reliably inside or beside that house across both killing windows. Lizzie and Bridget. And with ninety minutes between the deaths, a stranger slipping in and out twice is a hard sell.
Her own account is the second problem. Where she was, what she heard, whether she went to the barn at all, how long she was gone. The details moved between her first statements and her sworn testimony.
Then the dress. Three days into a murder investigation, with police still coming through the house, she burned a garment.
And the poison. A drugstore clerk was prepared to swear that a woman he recognised as Lizzie had come in the day before the murders asking for prussic acid.
The cellar hatchet fit the wounds. Fit is as far as it ever got. Nobody proved it had touched either body.
What people made up later
A lot of what gets repeated as Lizzie Borden facts simply isn’t in any document from the time. Her father killing her pet pigeons with a hatchet and setting her off. Weeks of rotten mutton at every meal. Lizzie doing the killings naked to stay clean. Medical theories about seizures or her monthly cycle.
None of that comes from the case. It comes from a hundred years of people needing the story to make sense.
Arrest, Indictment, and the Lizzie Borden Trial
The inquest ran from 9 to 11 August. Lizzie answered questions with no lawyer beside her, while taking morphine her doctor had prescribed after the shock. Her answers contradicted each other repeatedly, and the police read that as guilt rather than as a sedated woman falling apart. She was arrested on the 11th and indicted that December.
The trial opened on 5 June 1893 in New Bedford, in front of three judges. The state sent its district attorney and a future federal prosecutor. Lizzie’s money bought her a former governor of Massachusetts to lead the defence.
The prosecution’s case
Motive, opportunity, access. A locked household nobody could cross unseen, a resented estate, and a defendant whose story of that morning wouldn’t hold together.
All circumstantial. No weapon in evidence, no bloodied clothes, no witness to either killing.
The defence’s case
The former governor built his whole argument around blood. Thirty blows with a hatchet throw it everywhere, onto walls, onto the ceiling, onto whoever is swinging. So where was it? Not on her dress, not on her skin, not anywhere the police looked, and they looked hard.
He also worked the jury’s instincts about what a churchgoing woman of that class was capable of. Openly. And it worked.
The two rulings that ended it
The court threw out Lizzie’s confused inquest testimony because she’d had no attorney present. Then it blocked the drugstore clerk from telling the jury about the prussic acid. Between them, that removed the state’s two strongest items before the jury heard a word of either.
The judge’s closing instructions then leaned so far toward the defence that reporters in the room commented on it.
The acquittal
20 June 1893. Not guilty, after roughly ninety minutes. The case was never reopened. Nobody else was ever charged with it.
What Happened to Lizzie Borden After the Trial
She inherited, and she spent it fast on the one thing her father had always refused her. She and Emma bought a fourteen-room house up on the Hill, in the neighbourhood Andrew had spent his whole life declining to move to. She named it Maplecroft and began signing herself Lizbeth.
Fall River never let her back in. People crossed the street. An 1897 shoplifting accusation in Providence, never prosecuted, put her name back in the papers anyway.
Later she became friendly with an actress and started hosting people at the house, and something about that finished her relationship with Emma. Emma moved out in 1905 and never explained why, to anyone, ever.
Lizzie died on 1 June 1927, aged sixty-six, after surgery. Emma died nine days later. They were buried in the family plot, close to the father one of them had been tried for killing. Lizzie left a large sum to a local animal rescue league, and money to keep Andrew’s grave tidy.
The Lizzie Borden House, and the Century of Retellings
Where is the Lizzie Borden house?
Still there, at 230 Second Street in Fall River. The number changed from 92 when the city renumbered in the 1890s. It’s run as a bed and breakfast since the mid-nineties, and as a museum alongside it, put back roughly to how it looked in 1892.
You can book the guest room where Abby died. People do, constantly, which says something about us more than about her.
Maplecroft is still standing too, a few streets away, and has changed hands several times.
Books, films, documentaries
The retellings started while she was still alive and have never stopped. There’s a ballet from the 1940s. There’s a shelf of books, some careful and some wild, including a solid modern account focused entirely on the trial itself.
On screen, Elizabeth Montgomery played her in 1975, Christina Ricci in 2014, and there was a 2018 film with Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart. In September 2026 Netflix released an eight-episode series about the case, the first time its true-crime anthology had built a season around a woman.
Watch any of it with one eye open. Drama needs a motive, and the actual record refuses to hand one over, so adaptations invent.
Did Lizzie Borden Really Do It?
Nobody knows. That’s not me hedging, that’s the honest state of the evidence.
The case for guilt is opportunity plus behaviour. She was there. The timing is almost impossible to explain with an intruder. Her story shifted. She burned a dress during an active investigation. Most people who go through the full record end up leaning this way, and I’d say they’re leaning on the strongest part of it.
The case against is physical. Thirty hatchet blows make a mess of whoever swings. Nothing of that ever turned up on her. And the gap between Andrew’s death and Bridget coming downstairs was a matter of minutes, in which somebody had to kill a man, clean themselves completely, and hide a weapon in a house that was searched for days.
The other suspects are thinner than their supporters admit. Bridget had the same access and no reason anyone has ever found. Uncle John had an alibi that checked out. The theory about a secret illegitimate son rests on material most people who’ve examined it don’t trust. The theory that Emma did it and Lizzie covered for her is built on what nobody said rather than on anything anyone did.
One thing worth stating plainly. An acquittal isn’t a declaration of innocence. It means the state didn’t prove its case. Based on what that jury was allowed to hear, they got it right.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Lizzie Borden?
A woman from Fall River, Massachusetts, born in 1860, tried in 1893 for the hatchet killings of her father and stepmother and found not guilty.
Did she kill her parents?
Never proven. She was acquitted, nobody else was charged, and the case is still unsolved.
When did it happen?
The morning of 4 August 1892, inside the family home on Second Street.
How many blows were there?
Nineteen to Abby, eleven to Andrew. The forty-whacks version is wrong.
What was the murder weapon?
Never identified. A hatchet head with a broken handle was shown at trial but never tied to the bodies.
Why was she acquitted?
No weapon, no bloodstained clothing, a purely circumstantial case, and two rulings that kept her inquest testimony and the poison evidence away from the jury.
Where is the Lizzie Borden house?
230 Second Street, Fall River. It operates today as a museum and bed and breakfast.
What happened to her afterwards?
She inherited, bought a house she named Maplecroft, went by Lizbeth, lived cut off from the town, and died in 1927.
Was Abby her real mother?
No, her stepmother. Lizzie’s mother died in 1863.
Is the schoolyard rhyme accurate?
Only about the town. It was a cheap verse sold to crowds during the trial.
Why This One Stuck
Plenty of Victorian murders went unsolved and nobody remembers them. This one survived because the paperwork did. The full trial, the inquest, the autopsies, the letters between the men prosecuting it. All of it still exists, and after reading every page of it people still walk away disagreeing.
It’s also the case where American newspapers worked out that a murder trial could be sold like a serial novel, one instalment a day.
And underneath the whole thing sits a question a courtroom answered badly in 1893 and never really closed. Whether being respectable counts as evidence.
That’s why people still drive to a plain green house on Second Street, more than a century after twelve men let her walk.
