The morning of August 4, 1892, was the hottest day of one of the hottest summers New England had seen in a decade. In the gray, narrow row house at 92 Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts, the windows were closed against the heat and the air inside hung thick and still.

At about 11:10 that morning, Andrew Jackson Borden, the wealthiest banker in town, came home for a midday rest. He was seventy years old, lean, and famously stingy. He lay down on the horsehair sofa in the small first-floor sitting room and closed his eyes.

Less than half an hour later, his thirty-two-year-old unmarried daughter Lizzie ran into the kitchen and called out to the family’s Irish maid, Bridget Sullivan, who was resting on the third floor.

Maggie, Lizzie called — she sometimes called Bridget by the wrong name — come quick. Father’s dead. Somebody came in and killed him.

The body in the sitting room had been struck with a hatchet, by a person of considerable strength, between ten and eleven times in the head and face. Andrew Borden had died, almost certainly, on the first or second blow. Upstairs, in the guest bedroom, Lizzie’s stepmother Abby was already dead. Abby had been killed somewhere between an hour and ninety minutes earlier. She had been struck nineteen times.

The only adults known to have been in the locked, three-story house that morning were Andrew, Abby, Lizzie, and Bridget. By the end of the week, Lizzie Andrew Borden was the only realistic suspect the Fall River police had. By the end of the year she had been indicted on two counts of murder. By the following June she had been tried by an all-male New England jury and acquitted in just over an hour.

One hundred and thirty-four years later, the case is the most famous unsolved double murder in American history, and the longest-running argument about female guilt and middle-class respectability that the country has ever had.

A wealthy family in a cramped house

Andrew Borden was, by 1892, one of the richest men in Fall River — a director of two banks, the president of the Union Savings Bank, and the owner of several textile mills and a string of commercial properties along Main Street. His personal estate was estimated at the time of his death at around $300,000, an enormous sum then equivalent to roughly $10 million today.

And yet the family lived, by the standards of his peers, in startling discomfort. The house on Second Street was a converted two-family building with no electricity, no central heat, no indoor plumbing apart from a single kitchen tap, no bathroom, and a single shared chamber pot. The wealthier mill owners of Fall River lived a few blocks uphill, in the gracious Hill section of town. Andrew refused to move. He liked Second Street’s proximity to the bank he ran on Main, and he resented spending money on what he considered show.

The household at the time of the murders had six people. Andrew. Abby, his second wife, whom he had married a few years after Lizzie’s mother Sarah died in 1863. Lizzie, thirty-two, a Sunday-school teacher in the local Central Congregational Church and an active member of the temperance movement. Lizzie’s older sister Emma, forty-one. Bridget Sullivan, the Irish maid in her mid-twenties. And, for the night before the murders only, Lizzie and Emma’s uncle John Vinnicum Morse, who was staying in the guest bedroom — the same room in which Abby would be killed the next morning.

The relationships in the house were tense in ways that became important later. Lizzie had not called Abby “Mother” in years; she addressed her, formally and pointedly, as “Mrs. Borden.” Earlier that summer, Andrew had transferred ownership of a piece of property to Abby’s family without telling Lizzie or Emma, and the sisters had reportedly considered it a betrayal. Several witnesses would testify that Lizzie had been ill at ease with the family arrangement for some time. Emma was not in the house on the morning of August 4; she had been visiting friends in Fairhaven, fifteen miles away.

The day before

On August 3, the day before the murders, several members of the household had been violently ill — a fact that was discussed at the inquest and at trial but never fully resolved. Abby had told a neighbor, a Dr. Bowen, that she suspected they had been poisoned. The remains of the previous night’s mutton soup were eventually tested and showed no toxins, but the family’s nausea was real and frightening enough that it remained part of Abby’s mind.

That same afternoon, August 3, a customer at S.R. Smith’s drugstore at the corner of South Main and Columbia Streets in Fall River later testified that Lizzie Borden had come in and tried to purchase ten cents’ worth of prussic acid — a highly toxic compound used in small quantities to clean fur capes. The pharmacist, Eli Bence, refused to sell it to her without a prescription. Lizzie denied at trial that she had ever been in the store. Bence held to his testimony.

Uncle John Morse arrived for an overnight visit that evening. He and Andrew sat up late discussing a business matter. They both went to bed early.

Two hours, one weapon

The timeline the Fall River police were able to reconstruct from witnesses and the medical evidence is short and almost airtight. John Morse left the house at about 8:45 a.m. on August 4 to visit relatives across town. Andrew left at about 9:00 a.m. to attend to business at his bank and walk Main Street. Bridget Sullivan went outside to wash the first-floor windows at Abby’s instruction, working on the porch and the front lawn for about an hour and a half. Lizzie remained inside the house. Abby was alive when she instructed Bridget about the windows, sometime around 9:00 a.m. By the time Andrew came home at 10:45, Abby was already dead upstairs.

That means a person had been able to kill Abby Borden in the second-story guest room with multiple loud hatchet strikes, without Bridget hearing it from the windows outside or Lizzie hearing it from anywhere in the small downstairs. Bridget, on the stand, said she had heard nothing unusual all morning. Lizzie said she had been ironing handkerchiefs in the kitchen, then briefly in the barn looking for fishing weights at the time of her father’s murder.

The barn detail mattered. Lizzie testified that she had spent twenty to thirty minutes in the barn loft, in temperatures that reached well over a hundred degrees that afternoon, looking for lead sinkers. Two police officers who went into the barn loft the same afternoon noted that the dust on the loft floor was undisturbed. No one had been up there recently.

A hatchet with a broken handle was found in the basement during the police search the next day. Forensic examination found no blood, but the head of the hatchet had recently been washed and rubbed with ashes — a fact that some observers thought damning and others thought meaningless. No bloody footprints were found on the stairs. Lizzie’s clothing, when she was first questioned, was reported to be clean. Three days after the murders, however, Lizzie burned a dress in the kitchen stove, in front of her sister Emma and Bridget. She said the dress had been ruined by paint earlier in the summer. The destruction of that dress, at that moment, would become one of the most quoted facts of the trial.

The trial that fascinated a country

The trial opened in New Bedford on June 5, 1893, and ran for thirteen days. It was covered, daily, on the front page of every major newspaper in the United States. Telegraph wires from New Bedford were so overloaded that newspapers had to set up dedicated lines. Reporters came from London and Paris. The courtroom was packed every day with men and women in their summer Sunday clothes, fanning themselves in the heat and craning to see Lizzie Borden in the dock.

The prosecution, led by district attorney Hosea Knowlton, argued opportunity, motive, and means. Lizzie had been in the house. She had a financial grievance against her father and stepmother. She had recently tried to buy poison. She had burned a dress.

The defense, led by Lizzie’s family attorney Andrew Jennings and joined by the former governor of Massachusetts, George Robinson, hammered three points. First, that the prosecution’s case was entirely circumstantial — no physical evidence directly tied Lizzie to either body or to the hatchet. Second, that the inquest testimony Lizzie had given in the days after the murders — in which she had given several contradictory accounts of her morning — should not be admitted at trial because she had not been formally represented by counsel during that questioning. The judges agreed and excluded the inquest. Third, that Lizzie was a respectable Christian woman of good family who could not possibly have done what she was accused of doing.

The jury, twelve white Protestant men from rural Massachusetts, took just over an hour to acquit her on June 20, 1893. The verdict was met with applause in the courtroom. Lizzie wept.

The rest of a life, and a rhyme

With Andrew Borden’s estate divided between Lizzie and Emma, Lizzie was now wealthy. She bought a large stone Queen Anne house in the better part of Fall River, named it Maplecroft, and moved in. She changed her first name from Lizzie to Lizbeth. She lived in Fall River for the next thirty-four years.

She was not, by most accounts of those years, happy. The town that had thrown a parade for her acquittal in 1893 cooled toward her quickly. Old friends from her Sunday-school days stopped calling. The Central Congregational Church, where she had taught for years, did not invite her back to a leadership role. She traveled. She spent extravagantly on art and on a young actress named Nance O’Neil, with whom she became briefly close and then estranged. Her sister Emma quarrelled with her in 1905 and moved out of Maplecroft, never to speak to her again.

Lizzie Borden died of pneumonia on June 1, 1927, at the age of sixty-six. Emma died nine days later, in the same hospital. They are buried in the Borden family plot in Oak Grove Cemetery, alongside their father, their stepmother, and their mother.

The children’s playground 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 — first appeared in print in 1893, while the trial was still ongoing. It is wrong about the weapon, wrong about the number of blows, and arguably wrong about the killer. It has outlived every other piece of writing about the case.

The house at 92 Second Street — renumbered 230 in the 1890s — is still there. It has been a bed and breakfast since 1996. Guests can spend the night in the same upstairs guest room where Abby Borden was killed. It is, year after year, the most requested room in the house.

Sources: Trial transcript of Commonwealth v. Lizzie A. Borden, New Bedford, MA, June 1893 (Lizzie A. Borden Virtual Museum and Library); David Kent, The Lizzie Borden Sourcebook (1992); Sarah Miller, The Borden Murders: Lizzie Borden and the Trial of the Century (Schwartz & Wade, 2016); Cara Robertson, The Trial of Lizzie Borden (Simon & Schuster, 2019); Fall River Historical Society archives.