The Lizzie Borden House

Almost every word of that playground rhyme is wrong.

It wasn’t an axe; it was almost certainly a hatchet. Abby Borden wasn’t Lizzie’s mother; she was her stepmother. Abby was struck about nineteen times, not forty. Andrew Borden was struck about ten or eleven times, not forty-one. And a jury of twelve men found Lizzie Borden not guilty.

But the rhyme has outlived every one of them, and so has the question at its heart. More than 130 years after that sweltering August morning in Fall River, Massachusetts, nobody has ever been able to prove who walked through the narrow house on Second Street with a hatchet in their hand.

The Narrow House

Andrew Jackson Borden was one of the richest men in Fall River, and he lived as though he were one of the poorest.

He had made his money as an undertaker, then in real estate, banking and the textile mills that made the city hum. By 1892 he was worth something in the neighborhood of half a million dollars — many millions today. Yet he kept his family in a cramped, plain house on Second Street, in an unfashionable part of town near the business district, while the city’s other wealthy families lived in mansions up “the Hill.” The house had no indoor plumbing upstairs, no electricity, and a strange, almost hostile floor plan: the bedrooms connected through one another, with no hallways, so that the family’s private spaces could be locked off from each other. And they were.

Andrew’s first wife, Sarah, had died in 1863, leaving him with two daughters: Emma, then about twelve, and Lizzie, then not yet three. A few years later he married Abby Durfee Gray, a quiet, heavyset woman who was by most accounts kind enough, but whom the girls never accepted. Lizzie called her “Mrs. Borden.” The sisters ate meals separately when they could. The doors between Lizzie’s bedroom and her father and stepmother’s bedroom were kept locked from both sides.

By 1892, Lizzie was thirty-two, unmarried, active in her church, and living a life of slow, stifling sameness under her father’s roof. There had been arguments over property, over money, over Andrew’s habit of signing over real estate to Abby’s family. That summer, the family’s tension had grown so thick that the house felt, as one visitor later put it, like something about to burst.

The Days Before

In the days before August 4, the household was sick.

Andrew and Abby were seized with violent vomiting. Abby was frightened enough to walk across the street to the family doctor and tell him she believed they were being poisoned. Bridget Sullivan, the family’s twenty-six-year-old Irish maid, who the sisters called “Maggie,” was sick too. The doctor suspected spoiled food — the family had been eating reheated mutton for days in the summer heat.

On August 3, according to a clerk at a local pharmacy, a woman he identified as Lizzie Borden came in and asked to buy prussic acid — a deadly poison — saying she wanted it to clean a sealskin cape. He refused to sell it to her without a prescription. (Lizzie denied she was ever there. The evidence would later be excluded from her trial.)

That same evening, Lizzie visited a friend, Alice Russell, and talked darkly about her fears. She said she felt something was hanging over her. She said her father had enemies. She said she was afraid someone would burn the house down over their heads.

The next morning was Thursday, August 4, 1892. It was already hot.

The Morning of August 4

Here is what is known.

At around nine o’clock, Abby Borden went upstairs to make the bed in the guest room, where Andrew’s brother-in-law, John Morse, had stayed the night. (Morse had left the house earlier to visit relatives.) Emma Borden was away, visiting friends in the nearby town of Fairhaven. Andrew had left for his morning rounds downtown. Bridget Sullivan was outside, washing the windows, as Abby had asked her to.

Sometime between about nine and half past ten, someone came into that guest room and killed Abby Borden. She was struck in the head roughly nineteen times. She fell face down on the floor between the bed and the dresser. No one in the house reported hearing anything.

At about a quarter to eleven, Andrew Borden came home early. He found the front door locked — not just locked, but bolted and secured with three separate locks, as was the household’s habit. Bridget let him in, fumbling with the locks and swearing under her breath. She later testified that, at that moment, she heard a laugh from the top of the stairs. Lizzie was standing there.

Lizzie came down. She told her father that Abby had received a note asking her to go visit a sick friend, and had gone out. (No such note was ever found. No sick friend ever came forward.)

Andrew, tired and unwell, lay down for a nap on the sitting room sofa, his feet still on the floor. Bridget went up to her attic room to rest.

At about 11:10, Bridget heard Lizzie shouting from downstairs.

“Maggie, come down! Come down quick! Father’s dead! Somebody came in and killed him!”

Andrew Borden was still lying on the sofa. His face had been struck about ten or eleven times — so violently that one eye had been cut in half. The blood was still fresh.

It was only later, when a neighbor went upstairs to fetch a sheet, that anyone discovered Abby’s body.

Where Was Lizzie?

The case against Lizzie came down, more than anything, to one problem: there was no good reason anyone else could have done it, and no good account of where she had been.

The house was locked. The neighbors, many of whom had been out in their yards on that hot morning, saw no stranger enter or leave. Bridget had been outside washing windows, then in the attic. That left Lizzie.

When police asked where she’d been when her father was killed, Lizzie said she had been out in the barn, in the hayloft, looking for lead to make fishing sinkers — and eating pears. One officer climbed to the hayloft soon afterward and testified that the dust on the floor appeared undisturbed, as if no one had been there for days. It was also, he said, unbearably hot.

Lizzie’s accounts shifted. At different moments she said she had been in the barn, in the yard, in the kitchen. She said she heard a groan, or a scraping noise, or nothing at all.

In the basement, police found a hatchet head with a freshly broken handle. It had been covered, they said, in ash, as if to hide that it had been washed. It was never proven to be the weapon, but it fit the wounds.

And then there was the dress. On the Sunday after the murders, Alice Russell walked into the kitchen and found Lizzie tearing up and burning a blue dress in the stove. Lizzie said it was stained with paint. Russell later told the grand jury about it. It was, for many people, the moment the case turned.

Lizzie Borden was arrested on August 11, 1892.

The Trial

The trial began in New Bedford in June 1893, and it was one of the first great media sensations in American history. Reporters came from across the country.

The defense was formidable — it included a former governor of Massachusetts — and the evidence was circumstantial. No bloody clothing was ever found. No witness saw the killings. Lizzie’s inquest testimony, full of contradictions, was ruled inadmissible. The prussic acid evidence was excluded. The judge’s instructions to the jury were, many historians have argued, practically an argument for acquittal. And the men on the jury, it has been suggested, simply could not believe that a respectable, churchgoing woman of good family could commit such an act.

On June 20, 1893, after deliberating for about an hour and a half, the jury found Lizzie Borden not guilty. She reportedly let out a cry and sank into her chair.

After

Lizzie and Emma inherited their father’s fortune. They bought a large Victorian house on the Hill — the kind of house Andrew had refused to buy — and named it Maplecroft. Lizzie began calling herself Lizbeth. She went to the theater, kept dogs, and became more and more isolated as Fall River turned its back on her. The church congregation shunned her. Children chanted the rhyme outside her windows.

In 1905, Emma moved out abruptly and never came back. The sisters never spoke again.

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

The House Today

The house on Second Street has been a bed and breakfast for decades. You can sleep in Lizzie’s bedroom. You can sleep in the guest room where Abby fell. The furnishings have been arranged to match crime scene photographs, and a replica of the sofa where Andrew died sits in the sitting room.

Guests and staff tell stories. They hear a woman weeping in the night. They hear footsteps on the stairs and in the rooms overhead, and doors opening and closing. Some report the indentation of a body on a freshly made bed. Some have described seeing a woman in Victorian dress tidying the guest room, as if she were still making that bed — still, forever, at nine o’clock on a hot August morning.

Others say the strangest thing about the house is the silence. It is a small house. The walls are thin. Standing in the sitting room, you can hear a footstep upstairs, a cough in the next room, a page turning in the kitchen.

And yet on August 4, 1892, as far as anyone would ever admit, nobody heard a thing.