The story of the Borden murders was so horrifying that it was, in its time, given the media equivalent of modern trials like the OJ Simpson case, and the Rosenberg spy trial. It has gone down in history thanks to the children’s rhyme that was invented at the time of the case. Virtually every child has heard of Lizzie Borden and know what she did. But did she?
The myth: Lizzie Borden murdered her mother and father by hitting them 40 and 41 times with an axe.
Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done she gave her father forty-one. — Popular Rhyme
The short answer to the question posed in the introduction is “no” – Lizzie Borden did not kill her father (Andrew) and step-mother (Abby). Also untrue is the number of blows each received from the famous axe used to kill them. Her father was hit 11 times and her stepmother 18 or 19 times. Lizzie was seen minutes after the murders and had no blood on her at all. Furthermore, a month previous a man had committed axe murders very similar in style to the Borden killings. He claimed to have been outside of the country when Andrew and Abby were killed but it seems too much a coincidence to make his story believable.
Lizzie was put on trial for the murder but after only one hour of jury deliberations she was found innocent. No one else was ever tried for the murders and Lizzie went on to live a relatively peaceful life and died 35 years after the famous case. She left $30,000 to an animal welfare league and the remainder of her estate (which was quite large for the time) was left to a friend and cousin. You can stay in the house where the Bordens were killed as it is now a bed and breakfast and the home that Lizzie lived in after the murders until her death offers tours (by appointment only).
Some circumstantial evidence does seem to suggest that Lizzie may have killed her parents, but no evidence was ever given to prove it. While her clothing had no blood on it, she did burn a dress after the killings because she said it had paint on it. She also tried to purchase poison a week before the murders and the entire household became very sick the day before due – this was put down to food poisoning. At the time, forensics were not as trusted as today and so the axe was not fingerprinted even though the technology to do so existed at the time and could have given proof that Lizzie was innocent (or guilty).
Interesting Fact: Lizzie Borden and actress Elizabeth Montgomery (of Bewitched fame), who coincidentally portrayed Lizzie in a television movie about the murders and trial, were sixth cousins once removed. Both women descended from 17th-century Massachusetts resident John Luther. Rhonda McClure, the genealogist who documented the Montgomery-Borden connection, said, “I wonder how Elizabeth would have felt if she knew she was playing her own cousin.”
Related Video
Related Books
 The Borden Tragedy  |
 Lizzie Borden: The Final Chapter  |
 The Hunt for Lizzie Borden  |
 Forty Whacks: New Evidence  |
Further Reading
Listverse: Top 10 Common Historical Myths
Listverse: Top 10 Most Evil Women
Google WDYL: Lizzie Borden
Wikipedia: Lizzie Borden
Wikipedia: Bridget Sullivan (Borden family maid)
Wikipedia: Andrew Borden’s body
UMKC Law: Lizzie’s inquest testimony
32 Comments
First !!
Regardless of the myth…history portrays her as a total whack-job. Forgive the pun.
Well played (except the “first” bit)
i think lizzie borden is non gulity. maby somone came in and hit them with a axe so they could rob them. poor lizzy and emma, espechuly abby
What a gruesome weapon of choice. Maybe it was the only one available to the killer to choose, but it would seem that the decision points to someone that had a personal interest in seeing the Bordens dead.
To quote the movie Se7en “When you want somebody dead, you drive by and shoot them. You don’t risk the time it takes to do this…unless the act itself has meaning.”
I am sure they did – there was another suspect – a man who had argued bitterly with Andrew a week before the murders – he wanted to move into a shop Andrew owned but Andrew wouldn’t let him.
It is also believed that Andrew Bordon’s illegitimate son was responsible as he did pen a letter of confession. He was wanting to be acknowledge by his father and was refused.
Always wondered about the fingerprinting. I didn’t know they had the technology to do it then. Wonder why they didn’t……
It hadn’t become accepted yet – lots of people thought it to be not conclusive so it was of no use to the courts. Unfortunately.
Just one minor issue-”Lizzie was put on trial for the murder but after only one hour of jury deliberations she was found innocent.”
Technically she was acquitted which means that legally she was not convicted, but it doesn’t mean she was innocent. Not guilty is not the same thing as innocent. It is a pet peeve of mine when people say OJ (or whoever) was found innocent. There is no doubt in my mind that OJ Simpson killed his wife, but legally he was found “not guilty”
I forgot to mention, I LOVE the new site!
The same can be said for Amanda Knox. She’s guilty as well, or at least she indirectly participated in it.
I thought it was a commonly known fact she was acquitted!! I have read elsewhere that she had a tedious relationship with Abby and she had a lot to gain by both of them dying!! If she did do it, it’s a bit gruesome, women liked to poison back then, normally!!
Wait…
Lizzie Borden did not killer her father (Andrew) and step-mother (Abby). Also untrue is the number of blows each received from the famous axe used to kill them. Her father was hit 11 times and her stepmother 18 or 19 times.
She didn’t kill them?
Plus, bad spelling.
Hey Jamie, are readers free to contribute to this site as well?
Lizzie Borden did not killer her father — Could use some proofreading here…
I have to say that this article is not as well-written as it is interesting. But I love the new site!
How do you know she did not do it? The article did not say.
This article offers no proof whatsoever of its assertion that Lizzie Borden was innocent of the murders. In fact, she most certainly was not innocent but performed them willingly and in premeditated fashion for a very clear purpose, and her guilt is provable as well as her motive demonstrable. In her inquest testimony when asked by D. A. Knowlton where she was after 9:30 on the morning of the murders, when her stepmother was killed, and before 11am when her father was killed, she said she was upstairs in her bedroom, which is directly opposite the guest room where Abby Borden’s bloody body lay for over an hour. On the bed lay a bloody rag used to wipe the hatchet and Abby’s hairpiece which she had ripped from the back of her head. And the door to the room was not closed but open — neighbor Alice Russell saw the body under the bed when she ascended the stairs later on. It is impossible for Lizzie “not to have noticed” the bloody evidence or the body, particularly if she went up and down the stairs herself as she said she did. Bridget Sullivan, the housekeeper, both saw and heard Lizzie standing upstairs at the landing directly opposite the guest room doorway when her father came home at 10:45. At which time Lizzie gave out a laugh at Bridget’s inability to open the lock. Lizzie was at this time “guarding” the body and on guard in case she had to block anyone’s attempt to ascend the stairs. I have been in the house on Second Street in Fall River Mass. and can confirm that you can see directly under the guest room bed as you reach the top of the stairs and that no one could miss seeing a bloody body underneath it on the way up. Lizzie admitted without objection not only that she had gone up and down these stairs multiple times during the morning after breakfast but even that she was once in the guest room where the sewing machine was AFTER her stepmother had been killed. And the sewing machine was against the far wall of the guest room, with Abby Borden’s body lying directly in front of it, between the sewing machine table and the bed. Why was Lizzie not called on this and convicted? The answer is that at the time of the inquest, it was assumed that both parents were killed at the same time, which turned out later not to be true, but by the time this was discovered, her inquest testimony had been ruled inadmissible as evidence since a lawyer was not present when she gave it. Lizzie’s attempts to suggest that the guest room was free of any dead bodies until after 11am was an attempt to support the idea that the parents were killed at the same time but her lies, provable after the medical examiner determined that Abby Borden died sometime between 9:30 and 10:00, not later, now are easily recognizable as thoroughly incriminating. Lizzie is absolutely guilty of the murders, which were performed to prevent Mrs. Borden’s family from inheriting property that her father was dispersing BEFORE his death instead of allowing it to fall to his daughters afterward. She apparently also destroyed Borden’s will so that she and her sister would inherit all his remaining property. The Borden parents and daughters were not on speaking terms at the time of the murders; after a bitter screaming argument two weeks earlier about the property dispersal between the daughters and their father, if not the stepmother also, both daughters left the house to stay elsewhere in protest. Whether Emma approved of the murders isn’t known, but Lizzie took action to resolve the inheritance problem in her own favor, first by attempting to use some sort of homemade poison which sickened the parents but did not kill them, then when that didn’t work, a hatchet.
It’s also notable that Lizzie’s alibi for her whereabouts immediately preceding Andrew Borden’s murder is inconsistent and unbelievable. At different times she placed herself outside the side door of the house, close enough to have heard her father “groan,” before she went inside, eating pears by the pear tree in the side yard, then in the second floor of the barn eating pears while sitting at the window from which she could see the side door and therefore any intruder who might have gone in or out of the house (the front door was locked the entire morning). She could not have been in the loft of the barn because when the police inspected it they found undisturbed dust on its floor. Her story about looking for lead for fishing sinkers there was ridiculous in that a box of lead sat right by the door of the barn on the lower floor. These stories seem to have been conjured to try and put forth the suggestion that the only other person in the house at the time the murders were committed, Bridget Sullivan, was responsible for the killings. In other words, to blame it all on the help.
However, Bridget had been provably outdoors washing windows and chatting with a neighbor for virtually the entire morning, coming in and out only to fill her water buckets, and what is more had no motive to kill the Bordens. Only Lizzie’s testimony in the case is provably full of fabrications and inconsistencies and only she and Emma had enough animosity toward the Borden parents to want to murder them, or anything to gain by their deaths. And Emma was in the next town at the time they were committed.
Lizzie also tried to purchase cyanide from a local druggist (and was refused) a few days before the killings, and this fact was also inexplicably dismissed as admissable evidence in the trial.
Finally, blood does not spurt from head wounds, it tends to leak, and drops of blood which would have been on the hatchet would not have gone backward toward the killer but instead have flown forward onto the wall opposite where it was being swung, and that is exactly where bloodstains were found in this case — on the walls Lizzie had faced as she swung the weapon. She would not have been covered in blood as people are in horror movies any more than you might get covered in cantaloupe juice after you chop up a melon.
One can make a case for a sort of voluntary “semi-cover-up” in the Lizzie Borden case which took place because people may not have wished that it be stated officially that a daughter of a wealthy adult male citizen could be guilty of patricide any more than people in our time might have wished to consider O. J. Simpson the beloved sports hero might be capable of double murder. In both cases, the result was an initial acquittal, followed by, . essentially, informal acknowledgment of guilt by the killer’s peers which manifested itself in other ways. At any rate, acquittal in a murder trial and innocence of the suspect are in no way the same thing and the author of this article would do well to read a fact-oriented book or two on the case such as GOODBYE LIZZIE BORDEN and THE KNOWLTON PAPERS, assembled by Fall River Historical Society director Michael Martins, and revise this page to include facts rather than simply unsupported assertions.
Has there ever been a trial that garnered ridiculous media attention where the jury actually found the suspect guilty? Cassie Anthony, OJ Simpson, and here, way back in the day, Lizzie Borden.
Mr. E, the Lizzie Borden case is still a mystery (no pun intended). We’ll never know the answer because the case is so old and the forensics were so primitive. The only evidence that she probably did not commit the murders is that she never murdered anyone afterwards. But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything, when you consider that OJ Simpson hasn’t committed another murder.
Even modern forensics fails sometimes. The blood and DNA evidence failed to convince a jury in the Simpson trial because they had a jury filled with the last twelve people in America who didn’t know what DNA was. The Anthony trial fell apart when the prosecution built their case around proving that the suspect was just an awful human being, never actually proving that a murder even took place. That failed because the jury saw a pretty girl being abused by a zealous prosecutor, not a psychopath capable of murdering her own child.
Troy Davis was executed.
I live one street over from her house.
YAY!
I have heard that after the court ruled in her favour, Lizzie had given her lawyer the skull of her deceased father. I cannot remember if this included the axe, as well.
Why are there no new entries?
New entries Jamie?
So, is this site already done…?! There haven’t been any new entries for over a month now…
I was just thinking the same thing MILE, done already
This is cruel. I thought we had another great site, and now it’s dead without warning.
Please update this site as much as listverse! I would love that.
Nu a fost niciodată dovedit dacă Lizzie ucis de fapt părinţii ei şi totuşi ea va fi pentru totdeauna cunoscut ca un criminal. Cât de trist.
Great site, looking forward to reding more.
The film says that she helped her father take off his shoes, and when he is struck with an ax, his feet kick up and his shoes are on. Just an observation.
i like poop!!!!!1