Why 19th-Century Axe Murderer Lizzie Borden Was Found Not Guilty

On August 4, 1892, Sunday school teacher Lizzie Borden's father and stepmother were murdered with an axe in Fall River, Massachusetts. Borden was arrested a week later, tried, and acquitted. An excerpt from the article:

"The Lizzie Borden murder case abides as one of the most famous in American criminal history. New England’s crime of the Gilded Age, its seeming senselessness captivated the national press. And the horrible identity of the murderer was immortalized by the children’s rhyme passed down across generations.

Lizzie Borden took an axe,
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.

While there is no doubt that Lizzie Borden committed the murders, the rhyme is not quite correct: sixty-four-year-old Abby was Lizzie’s stepmother and a hatchet, rather than an axe, served as the weapon. And fewer than half the blows of the rhyme actually battered the victims—19 rained down on Abby and ten more rendered 69-year-old Andrew’s face unrecognizable. Still, the rhyme does accurately record the sequence of the murders, which took place approximately an hour and a half apart on the morning of August 4, 1892.

Part of the puzzle of why we still remember Lizzie’s crime lies in Fall River, Massachusetts, a textile mill town 50 miles south of Boston. Fall River was rocked not only by the sheer brutality of the crime, but also by who its victims were. Cultural, religious, class, ethnic, and gender divisions in the town would shape debates over Lizzie’s guilt or innocence—and draw the whole country into the case.

In the early hours after the discovery of the bodies, people only knew that the assassin struck the victims at home, in broad daylight, on a busy street, one block from the city’s business district. There was no evident motive—no robbery or sexual assault, for example. Neighbors and passersby heard nothing. No one saw a suspect enter or leave the Borden property.

Moreover, Andrew Borden was no ordinary citizen. Like other Fall River Bordens, he possessed wealth and standing. He had invested in mills, banks, and real estate. But Andrew had never made a show of his good fortune. He lived in a modest house on an unfashionable street instead of on “The Hill,” Fall River’s lofty, leafy, silk-stocking enclave.

Thirty-two-year-old Lizzie, who lived at home, longed to reside on The Hill. She knew her father could afford to move away from a neighborhood increasingly dominated by Catholic immigrants.

It wasn’t an accident, then, that police initially considered the murders a male crime, probably committed by a “foreigner.” Within a few hours of the murders, police arrested their first suspect: an innocent Portuguese immigrant.

Likewise, Lizzie had absorbed elements of the city’s rampant nativism. On the day of the murders, Lizzie claimed that she came into the house from the barn and discovered her father’s body. She yelled for the Bordens’ 26-year-old Irish servant, Bridget “Maggie” Sullivan, who was resting in her third-floor room. She told Maggie that she needed a doctor and sent the servant across the street to the family physician’s house. He was not at home. Lizzie then told Maggie to get a friend down the street.

Yet Lizzie never sent the servant to the Irish immigrant doctor who lived right next door. He had an impressive educational background and served as Fall River’s city physician. Nor did Lizzie seek the help of a French Canadian doctor who lived diagonally behind the Bordens. Only a Yankee doctor would do.

These same divisions played into keeping Lizzie off the suspect list at first. She was, after all, a Sunday school teacher at her wealthy Central Congregational Church. People of her class could not accept that a person like Lizzie would slaughter her parents.

But during the interrogation, Lizzie’s answers to different police officers shifted. And her inability to summon a single tear aroused police suspicion. Then an officer discovered that Lizzie had tried to purchase deadly prussic acid a day before the murders in a nearby drugstore.

Another piece of the story is how, as Fall River’s immigrant population surged, more Irishmen turned to policing. On the day of the murders, Irish police were among the dozen or so who took control of the Borden house and property. Some interviewed Lizzie. One even interrogated her in her bedroom! Lizzie was not used to being held to account by people she considered beneath her."