The Lizzie Borden Case: An Acquittal, and a Question Nobody Closed.

What the Borden case is, in a paragraph.

Andrew Jackson Borden was a 69-year-old Fall River property owner and bank director, wealthy by the standards of the mill city he lived in and famously unwilling to spend any of it. He shared a cramped house at 92 Second Street with his second wife Abby, 64; his two unmarried adult daughters, Emma and Lizzie; and a live-in Irish maid, Bridget Sullivan. On the morning of Thursday, August 4, 1892, Abby was killed in an upstairs guest room by roughly eighteen or nineteen blows from a hatchet-like weapon. Somewhere between an hour and ninety minutes later, Andrew was killed on a downstairs sofa by ten or eleven more. The house was small, the interior doors were habitually locked, and the murders happened in broad daylight with people in the building. Lizzie Borden, then 32, was arrested a week later, indicted that December, and tried the following June before three judges in New Bedford. The prosecution's case was entirely circumstantial. Two rulings gutted it: the judges excluded her contradictory inquest testimony because she had given it without counsel, and excluded evidence that she had tried to buy prussic acid the day before the killings. The jury acquitted her in about an hour and a half. She inherited a share of her father's estate, lived out her life in Fall River as a social outcast, and died in 1927. No other suspect was ever charged, and the case remains formally unsolved — which is the part the rhyme leaves out.

The documented record.

The household, and why it mattered

The composition of the Borden house is not background detail; it is most of the case. Verified Lizzie Andrew Borden was born in Fall River on July 19, 1860. Her mother, Sarah Anthony Morse Borden, died in March 1863, when Lizzie was two. Andrew remarried in 1865, to Abby Durfee Gray. Abby was therefore Lizzie's stepmother, not her mother — a distinction that popular accounts, including a great deal of the coverage published in 2026, still routinely get wrong, and one that matters because the friction in that house ran along exactly that line. Lizzie addressed Abby as “Mrs. Borden.” Asked later whether their relationship was cordial, she declined to say plainly, and stated her belief that Abby had married her father for his money [1][2].

The physical house compounded it. Andrew Borden was wealthy and lived as though he were not: the Second Street house had no indoor plumbing to speak of and no gas lighting in an era when his peers had both, and it was arranged so that rooms connected through locked doors rather than a hallway, meaning the family effectively moved through the building in segregated paths. Bridget Sullivan testified that Lizzie and Emma rarely took meals with their father and stepmother [1][3].

The property quarrel

There was a specific, documented financial grievance, and it was recent. Verified Andrew had a habit of transferring real estate to Abby's relatives. When a house went to Abby's sister, Lizzie and Emma pressed a claim of their own and were given a property they had previously lived in — bought from their father for one dollar. Weeks before the murders, they sold it back to him for $5,000. Whatever else it shows, it establishes that the question of who would get Andrew Borden's money was live and contested inside that household in the summer of 1892 [1].

The illness in the house

Something had gone wrong in the days immediately before. Verified The household had been sick — violently so — shortly before August 4. Abby was frightened enough to say she believed they were being poisoned, a fear that had a rational basis given how widely disliked Andrew was in the city. The illness was never satisfactorily explained. It is the reason the prussic-acid evidence mattered so much to the prosecution, and the reason its exclusion mattered so much to the outcome [1][4].

The morning of August 4, 1892

The sequence is unusually well documented, because so few people were present. Verified Andrew, Abby, Lizzie, Bridget Sullivan and a house guest — John Vinnicum Morse, brother of Andrew's first wife and therefore the girls' maternal uncle — were in and around the house that morning. Morse left at roughly 8:48 a.m. Abby went upstairs to make the bed in the guest room, and was killed there between about 9:00 and 10:30 a.m., struck from behind and then repeatedly about the back of the head. Andrew returned home at around 10:30 a.m. and found the front door jammed; Bridget, letting him in, testified that she heard Lizzie laugh from the top of the stairs — significant only because Abby's body was already lying on the floor of the room at the top of those stairs. Andrew lay down on the sitting-room sofa. He was killed there at approximately 11:00 a.m. At around 11:10 a.m., Lizzie called out to the maid: “Maggie, come quick! Father's dead” [1][2][3].

The arrest, the inquest, and the road to trial

The process moved fast and then stalled. Verified An inquest opened on August 9 before magistrate Josiah Blaisdell. Lizzie testified without a lawyer and while, by several accounts, under prescribed morphine; her testimony was erratic, self-contradictory, and at points simply refused. She was arrested on August 11 and pleaded not guilty the next day. At a preliminary hearing on August 22, Blaisdell found her “probably guilty.” A grand jury convened in November and initially declined to indict; it reconvened after new testimony and returned an indictment on December 2, 1892 [4][5].

The trial and the verdict

The trial ran from June 5 to June 20, 1893 at New Bedford, before a three-judge panel: Albert Mason, Caleb Blodgett and Justin Dewey. Verified The Commonwealth was represented by Hosea M. Knowlton and William H. Moody — Moody would later sit on the United States Supreme Court. The defence was led by George D. Robinson, a former Governor of Massachusetts, with Andrew V. Jennings and Melvin O. Adams. The jury acquitted on June 20 after deliberating roughly an hour and a half. Some accounts put the figure lower and report that the jurors had effectively agreed at once and waited before returning, so as not to appear to have treated the matter lightly [1][4][5].

What the case actually turned on.

The Borden case produced no confession, no eyewitness, no fingerprint (the technique was not yet in American police use), and no blood on any garment ever produced in court. What it produced instead was a set of individually suggestive facts, each with an innocent reading available. Here is each in turn.

The prussic acid

Disputed The prosecution sought to establish that on the day before the murders, Lizzie attempted to buy prussic acid — hydrogen cyanide — from a Fall River druggist, giving as her reason that she needed it to clean a sealskin cloak. A medical examiner was prepared to testify that the substance has no such application. The judges excluded the entire line: the deaths were caused by a hatchet and not by poison, they held, so the attempted purchase was insufficiently connected to the crime charged and more prejudicial than probative. This is arguably the single most consequential ruling in the case, because it removed the only evidence suggesting premeditation as distinct from opportunity [1][4][5].

The inquest testimony

Verified Lizzie's inquest answers were, by common agreement, a mess: she gave conflicting accounts of where she had been and what she had been doing, and changed material details between answers. The jury never heard a word of it. The judges ruled it inadmissible on the grounds that she had been, in the court's phrase, “for all practical purposes a prisoner” when she gave it, compelled to answer without the benefit of counsel. On the law this was a defensible — arguably correct — protective ruling. On the facts it removed the prosecution's best material. Both things are true at once, and the case is not well understood without holding them together [4][5].

The burned dress

Verified On Sunday, August 7, 1892 — three days after the murders, with the house under active investigation — Lizzie burned a dress in the kitchen stove. The witness was Alice Russell, a friend, who testified that Lizzie said she was “going to burn this old thing up; it is covered with paint.” Emma was in the room washing dishes, heard her sister say she meant to burn the dress, answered to the effect of “why don't you,” and turned back to the dishes. It was never established whether this was the dress worn on the morning of the murders. The defence did not seriously contest that the burning happened.

Two details give this more weight than it is usually given. First, Alice Russell did not disclose the episode at the inquest — she brought it out later, before the grand jury, and it is part of why that body reconvened and indicted after initially declining. Second, Russell reportedly told her cousin that she had believed Lizzie innocent until the moment she watched her burn the dress, and did not afterwards. That is the testimony of a friend who changed her mind, which is a different evidentiary animal from the testimony of someone who never liked the defendant [4][6].

The handleless hatchet

Disputed Police recovered a hatchet head from the cellar with its handle broken off. Officers described the break as looking fresh, and the ash and dust coating it as having been applied rather than accumulated. The prosecution's theory was that the handle had been destroyed because it would have been soaked in blood. The problem was the police work: officer testimony conflicted over whether the broken handle was found near the head or not at all, and the item was left in the house rather than seized immediately. No weapon was ever forensically tied to the wounds. The hatchet head is simultaneously the closest thing to a murder weapon the case has and an object no one could establish anything about [1][5].

The barn, and the twenty minutes

Disputed Lizzie's account of Andrew's murder was that she had been out in the barn loft — looking for lead sinkers for a fishing line — for twenty minutes or half an hour. Police found the barn loft dust undisturbed and stiflingly hot, and did not believe anyone had recently spent half an hour in it. The defence answered with two witnesses: Hyman Lubinsky, an ice-cream peddler, testified that he saw a woman walking from the barn toward the house at about 11:03 a.m., and Charles Gardner supported his timing. Bridget Sullivan, meanwhile, testified that she had gone up to her third-floor room at about 10:58 a.m., leaving Lizzie and Andrew downstairs. The window is narrow either way, and the evidence for what happened inside it is contested [1][2].

The note that never surfaced

Unverified Lizzie's explanation for why nobody had looked for Abby all morning was that Abby had received a note summoning her to visit a sick friend and had gone out. No note was ever found. No messenger ever came forward. No sick friend ever materialised, despite the case becoming national news within days. It is possible that a note existed and was destroyed or lost. It is also the kind of detail that, unresolved, does a great deal of quiet work against the account it was offered to support [1][4].

The skulls in the courtroom

Verified Both victims' heads had been removed during autopsy and the skulls retained. When they were produced as exhibits at trial, Lizzie fainted in the courtroom. The moment is often reported as if it were evidence of something. It is not: it is equally consistent with guilt, with grief, and with an ordinary person being shown her father's skull in a public room. It belongs in the record as a fact about the trial, not as an inference about the crime [1].

The competing readings, weighed.

The case that Lizzie Borden did it

Claimed The prosecution's argument was one of opportunity and elimination. The house was small and locked; the murders happened ninety minutes apart, which suggests a killer who could remain in or near the house unremarked between them rather than one who entered and left twice; nobody was seen entering or leaving; and Lizzie's own accounts of her movements shifted. Add the property quarrel, the recent unexplained illness, the attempted poison purchase, the burned dress, and the absence of any corroboration for the note or the barn, and the circumstantial pattern is genuinely striking. This remains the majority view among writers on the case, and it is not an unreasonable one. It is also not what the jury was shown — two of its strongest components were excluded before deliberation.

The case that she did not

Claimed The defence's position, and the position of a serious minority of later writers, is that the physical evidence was simply absent. Two hatchet murders of that ferocity produce arterial spray; no bloodstained clothing was ever produced, and the interval between Andrew's death and Lizzie's call to Bridget was too short for a thorough clean-up in a house with no running hot water. Nothing tied her to the hatchet head. The prosecution's own timeline required her to have committed the first murder and then spent an hour in the house with the body. And the case against her rested substantially on the Victorian jury's difficulty imagining the alternative — which is an argument about the defendant's character, not about the evidence.

Bridget Sullivan

Disputed The maid had the same access Lizzie did and was in the house all morning, washing windows on an oppressively hot day after being ill. The theories run from her having killed the Bordens herself to her having known more than she said. There is a persistent claim that Sullivan — who later moved to Butte, Montana, and died there in 1948 — made a deathbed statement to her sister that she had altered her testimony to protect Lizzie. This is not documented in any contemporaneous record; it circulates as family recollection reported long afterwards, and this archive treats it as unverified folklore rather than evidence. Sullivan was never charged with anything, and the suggestion that she was a murderer rests on no more than her presence in the building.

John Vinnicum Morse

Disputed The visiting uncle was investigated. What drew attention was less any evidence than the peculiar quality of his account: police noted that his alibi for the time of Abby's death was, as it has often been described, almost too perfect — detailed to a degree that struck investigators as rehearsed. That is an impression, not a finding. He was cleared and never charged, and no material evidence has ever connected him to the killings.

William Borden and the “wild man”

Unverified Two later theories deserve mention chiefly so that readers encountering them know their standing. The first, advanced by Arnold R. Brown in a 1991 book, holds that an illegitimate son of Andrew Borden named William committed the murders after a failed extortion attempt, and that Fall River's authorities covered it up. The account rests on a secondhand story and has not been corroborated. The second is the “wild man” — a stranger reportedly seen in the area carrying a hatchet, raised at the time and useful to the defence as a source of reasonable doubt. No such person was ever identified. Neither theory has evidentiary support; both are recorded here as part of the case's literature, not its findings.

Where this archive lands

Disputed The honest position is that the case is unsolved and unsolvable on the surviving record. The circumstantial pattern against Lizzie Borden is strong enough that most writers find it persuasive; it is also, demonstrably, not strong enough to have persuaded twelve men who heard the admissible evidence. Both of those facts are load-bearing. What can be said without qualification is that two people were murdered, that the investigation was compromised by the standards of any era, that the person tried for it was acquitted, and that the case was never worked again afterwards — which is why nobody knows.

The unanswered questions.

The weapon

Unverified No implement was ever established as the weapon. The handleless hatchet from the cellar is a candidate that the police handled so poorly it can never be more than that. Modern forensic comparison of tool marks to the wounds was not available in 1892 and the material to attempt it now does not survive intact.

The blood

Unverified The absence of bloodstained clothing is the defence's strongest single point and it has never been answered. Either the killer had a means of avoiding or disposing of heavily bloodied garments that investigators failed to find, or the killer left the house and was never identified. The burned dress may or may not bear on this; that it was burned is established, that it was the murder dress is not.

The hour between the murders

Unverified Nothing accounts for the roughly ninety minutes between Abby's death and Andrew's. Any solution has to explain why the killer waited, in a house with a body in an upstairs room, for Andrew Borden to come home. The waiting is the strangest fact in the case and no theory explains it comfortably — including the theory the prosecution advanced.

What the jury would have done with the excluded evidence

Disputed This is unanswerable and worth stating anyway, because it is the actual hinge. Had the jury heard the inquest contradictions and the attempted prussic-acid purchase, the trial would have been a materially different proceeding. Whether it would have produced a different verdict cannot be known. It is the reason the case sits in the odd category of a formal acquittal that settled the legal question and almost nothing else.

The sequence.

1. July 19, 1860 Lizzie Andrew Borden is born in Fall River, Massachusetts.
2. March 1863 Her mother, Sarah Anthony Morse Borden, dies. Lizzie is two years old.
3. 1865 Andrew Borden marries Abby Durfee Gray, who becomes Lizzie and Emma's stepmother.
4. Weeks before Aug 1892 Lizzie and Emma sell back to their father, for $5,000, a property he had earlier transferred to them for one dollar — the visible end of a running quarrel over Andrew's gifts of real estate to Abby's relatives.
5. Early August 1892 The household falls violently ill. Abby says she believes they are being poisoned. The illness is never explained.
6. August 3, 1892 The prosecution would later allege that Lizzie attempted to buy prussic acid from a local druggist, saying it was for cleaning a sealskin cloak. The evidence was excluded at trial.
7. c. 8:48 a.m., Aug 4, 1892 John Vinnicum Morse, the visiting uncle, leaves the house.
8. c. 9:00–10:30 a.m. Abby Borden is killed in the upstairs guest room, struck 18–19 times.
9. c. 10:30 a.m. Andrew returns to a jammed front door. Bridget Sullivan lets him in and hears Lizzie laugh from the top of the stairs.
10. c. 11:00 a.m. Andrew Borden is killed on the sitting-room sofa, struck 10–11 times.
11. c. 11:10 a.m. Lizzie calls to the maid: “Maggie, come quick! Father's dead.”
12. August 7, 1892 Lizzie burns a dress in the kitchen stove, witnessed by Alice Russell and by Emma.
13. August 9, 1892 Inquest opens before magistrate Josiah Blaisdell. Lizzie testifies without counsel; her account is contradictory.
14. August 11, 1892 Lizzie Borden is arrested. She pleads not guilty the following day.
15. August 22, 1892 At the preliminary hearing, Blaisdell finds her “probably guilty.”
16. November 1892 A grand jury declines to indict, then reconvenes after further testimony — including Alice Russell's account of the burned dress.
17. December 2, 1892 The grand jury returns an indictment.
18. June 5–20, 1893 Trial at New Bedford before Justices Mason, Blodgett and Dewey. The inquest testimony and the prussic-acid evidence are both excluded.
19. June 20, 1893 Lizzie Borden is acquitted after roughly an hour and a half of deliberation.
20. After 1893 Lizzie and Emma buy a house on The Hill and name it Maplecroft. Lizzie begins signing herself “Lizbeth A. Borden.” Fall River society does not readmit her.
21. 1905 After a dispute over a party for the actress Nance O'Neil, Emma leaves Maplecroft. The sisters never see each other again.
22. June 1, 1927 Lizzie Borden dies of pneumonia, aged 66. Emma dies nine days later, on June 10. They are buried side by side in the family plot at Oak Grove Cemetery.
23. September 17, 2026 Netflix releases Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, the fourth season of its true-crime anthology, with Ella Beatty in the title role.

Cases on this archive that connect.

This file is part of the Unsolved Murders & Serial Cases (17 files) collection.

The Villisca Axe Murders (File 348) — eight people killed with an axe in an Iowa farmhouse in 1912; the closest American parallel, and another case destroyed by contaminated scene handling.

The Hinterkaifeck Murders (1922) — six killed on an isolated Bavarian farm, with the same structural problem: a small closed set of people and no provable answer.

The Black Dahlia (File 033) — the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short; the other American case whose fame has almost entirely detached from its evidence.

Unsolved Murders — the archive's collection of cases that were never closed.

Full bibliography.

1. Wikipedia, “Lizzie Borden,” en.wikipedia.org — consolidated biography, household composition, the August 4 timeline, post-trial life and estate.
2. Encyclopædia Britannica, “Lizzie Borden Took an Ax…” — overview of the murders, wound counts and trial outcome.
3. Testimony of Bridget Sullivan, Trial of Lizzie Borden (1893), transcribed in the Famous Trials archive (Douglas O. Linder, University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law).
4. Linder, Douglas O., “The Trial of Lizzie Borden: An Account,” Famous Trials (famous-trials.com) — chronology, evidentiary rulings, Justice Dewey's charge, and case assessment.
5. “Lizzie Borden Trial: 1893,” Great American Trials (Encyclopedia.com) — the three-judge panel, counsel, and the grounds for the two exclusions.
6. Testimony of Alice Russell and Testimony of Emma Borden, Trial of Lizzie Borden (1893), Famous Trials archive — the burned dress.
7. Library of Congress, “Arrest and Trial of Lizzie Borden: Topics in Chronicling America” — contemporaneous newspaper coverage, 1892–1893.
8. National Women's History Museum, “The Lizzie Borden Trial of 1892” — on the trial's social context and the role of Victorian assumptions about women in the verdict.
9. Brown, Arnold R., Lizzie Borden: The Legend, the Truth, the Final Chapter, 1991 — the William Borden theory, recorded here as an uncorroborated claim.
10. Sullivan, Robert, Goodbye Lizzie Borden — a legal analysis of the trial and the conduct of the bench, used for the criticism of Dewey's charge.

Frequently asked questions.

Did Lizzie Borden actually kill her parents?

No court ever found that she did. She was tried in June 1893 and acquitted, and no one else was ever charged, so the case is formally unsolved. Most writers on the case find the circumstantial pattern against her persuasive — the locked house, the shifting accounts, the burned dress, the property quarrel. But there was no confession, no witness, no blood on any garment produced in court, and no weapon ever tied to the wounds. Anyone stating her guilt as fact is stating something the evidence never established.

Was Abby Borden Lizzie's mother or stepmother?

Stepmother. Lizzie's mother, Sarah Anthony Morse Borden, died in March 1863 when Lizzie was two; Andrew married Abby Durfee Gray in 1865. This is not a trivia point — it is close to the centre of the case, because the friction in the household ran along exactly that line, including a documented quarrel over Andrew transferring property to Abby's relatives. Lizzie called her “Mrs. Borden” and believed she had married Andrew for his money. A great deal of coverage, including recent coverage, still miscalls Abby her mother.

How many times were the Bordens actually struck?

Not forty and not forty-one. Abby was struck roughly 18 or 19 times; Andrew roughly 10 or 11. The rhyme — “Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother forty whacks” — is wrong about the number, wrong about the relationship (stepmother), wrong about the order (Abby died first, not Andrew), and arguably wrong about the weapon, since the wounds were made by a hatchet rather than an axe. It is a schoolyard rhyme, not a summary of the case.

Why was Lizzie Borden acquitted?

Principally because two rulings removed the prosecution's strongest material before the jury ever heard it. The judges excluded her contradictory inquest testimony, on the grounds that she had given it without counsel while effectively in custody; and they excluded evidence that she had tried to buy prussic acid the day before the murders, holding it insufficiently connected to deaths caused by a hatchet. What remained was circumstantial and had no physical evidence at its centre. Justice Justin Dewey's charge to the jury also leaned heavily toward the defence — one newspaper called it “a plea for the innocent” — and Dewey had been appointed to the bench in 1886 by George D. Robinson, the former governor who was now leading Lizzie's defence.

What happened to the dress Lizzie burned?

It was burned in the kitchen stove on Sunday, August 7, 1892, three days after the murders and while the house was under investigation. Alice Russell — a friend — watched her do it and testified that Lizzie said it was “covered with paint.” Emma was in the room and raised no objection. It was never established whether this was the dress worn on the morning of the murders. Russell did not mention the episode at the inquest; she disclosed it later to the grand jury, which is part of why that body reconvened and indicted after first declining to.

Who else could have killed Andrew and Abby Borden?

The maid, Bridget Sullivan, had the same access and was in the house all morning. The visiting uncle, John Vinnicum Morse, was investigated and cleared, though police found his alibi oddly over-detailed. Later writers have proposed an illegitimate son named William Borden, and a stranger — the “wild man” — reportedly seen carrying a hatchet. None of these has evidentiary support, none of these people was ever charged, and the last two are essentially literature rather than investigation.

What happened to Lizzie Borden after the trial?

She inherited a share of her father's estate and stayed in Fall River, where she was comprehensively ostracised. She and Emma bought a house on The Hill and called it Maplecroft, and she began signing herself “Lizbeth A. Borden.” In 1905, after a dispute over a party she gave for the actress Nance O'Neil, Emma moved out; the sisters never spoke again. Lizzie died of pneumonia on June 1, 1927, aged 66. Emma died nine days later. They are buried side by side in the family plot at Oak Grove Cemetery, alongside the father and stepmother.

Is the Lizzie Borden house still there?

Yes. The house at 92 Second Street in Fall River survives and operates as a museum and bed-and-breakfast, and is one of the more heavily visited true-crime sites in the United States. Its survival is part of why the case has stayed unusually vivid: the rooms in which the murders happened can still be walked through, which is not true of most nineteenth-century American crime scenes.