“Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks, when she saw what she had done she gave her father forty-one”
There is a house on Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts, that is anything but ordinary.
You would expect a mansion behind wrought iron fences. Instead, you are standing in front of a narrow, greenish clapboard two-family-style house wedged onto a lot that is too small. On one side is a driveway that used to have a barn on it. By outward appearances, it’s a profoundly ordinary house. Andrew Borden was a wealthy man, worth about $300,000 at the time, estimated roughly $9 to $10 million in today’s money. He was a frugal man who didn’t even have an upstairs bathroom because he didn’t believe in spending his fortune.
Those frugal reasons may be why the house is still standing today. That fateful morning on August 4, 1892, went down in history. The house still has the same layout it did 134 years ago.
You can book a room overnight, or the whole house, if you dare.
The Morning
What we do know is that the Bordens, as well as their maid Bridget Sullivan, had been sick a few days prior, on August 2, 1892, with a stomach bug that caused vomiting. Abby walked across the street the next day, August 3, to visit Dr. Seabury Bowen and told him she suspected they were being poisoned. The doctor brushed it off as bad mutton broth — it had been on the menu a few days before, and in the August heat, it surely must have spoiled. Refrigeration existed by then, but not much of it at the Borden house.
The day before the murders, Lizzie Borden walked into Smith’s Drug Store, on South Main Street in Fall River, and tried to buy ten cents’ worth of prussic acid. Lizzie claimed it was for cleaning a sealskin cape. Eli Bence, working the counter that day, refused her request since it was unusual for a woman to come in asking for hydrogen cyanide to clean a cape. He later testified in court against her, but for some reason his testimony was deemed inadmissible.
On August 4th, John Vinnicum Morse, who was the brother of Andrew’s first wife, and so Lizzie and Emma’s uncle, was visiting and staying with the Bordens. Morse had left after breakfast that morning to visit relatives on the other side of town. Lizzie’s sister Emma had also been away about fifteen miles away in Fairhaven, staying with friends. Andrew Borden, Lizzie’s father, was downtown tending to business errands. Who was left inside the house that morning? Abby (Lizzie’s stepmother), Lizzie (herself), and Bridget (the maid).
Abby had gone upstairs to the guest room where John was sleeping so she could change the pillowcases. What we know is that she was standing on the far side of the bedroom, facing away from the door. She was struck on the side of her face with a hatchet. We don’t know if she turned or fell as the blows continued. At autopsy, nineteen blows to the head were counted. Abby was just sixty-four years old and around two hundred pounds when she fell face down between the bed and the dresser.
“Nobody reported hearing a thing.”
Bridget, the maid, was outside washing windows. Andrew Borden came home around 10:45 a.m. and discovered that the front door had been bolted by spring lock, key lock, and slide bolt. He had to be let into the house. Bridget later testified under oath that she cursed at the stuck lock and heard Lizzie laughing from the top of the stairs. What we know today is that when you’re standing at the top of the stairs, you can see straight into the guest bedroom which Abby had been lying dead for hours.
Lizzie later denied ever having been upstairs at all.
Andrew lay down on the sitting room sofa in his Prince Albert coat, boots still on, and fell asleep. Sometime between 11:00 and 11:10, someone stood over him and brought the hatchet down ten or eleven times. The first blow probably killed him. The rest destroyed his face. One eye was cut cleanly in half.
At 11:10, Lizzie called out to the maid:
“Come down quick, father’s dead, somebody came in and killed him!“
The Aftermath
Officer George Allen was the first to respond, and word spread through Fall River within the hour. When Bridget and a neighbor went upstairs to fetch a sheet for Andrew’s body, they found Abby’s body wedged between the bed and the dresser, and realized this was not one murder, but two.
Lizzie’s own account of that morning kept shifting. She told police she had been in the barn loft looking for lead sinkers for a fishing trip, then later said she couldn’t recall exactly where she’d been. Investigators found no footprints in the dust of the barn loft floor, and it was a hot August day, not a likely afternoon for a fishing trip.
Despite the sheer amount of blood at both scenes, no blood was ever found on Lizzie’s clothing, her hands, or anywhere on her person. This became one of the case’s enduring mysteries, and one reason many still argue for her innocence.
Three days after the murders, Lizzie burned a dress in the kitchen stove while her sister Emma and family friend Alice Russell looked on. Lizzie said it was ruined with paint and no longer needed, even though a police officer was stationed just outside at the time. It became one of the most damning details of the case, even though the dress was never proven to be connected to the murders at all.
Lizzie Andrew Borden was arrested on August 11, 1892, and charged with the murders of her father and stepmother.
The Trial
The trial opened on June 5, 1893, and became a national sensation. Reporters from New York and Chicago packed into the New Bedford courthouse, and the case dominated newspapers for weeks.
The defense caught several breaks. Eli Bence’s testimony about Lizzie trying to buy prussic acid was ruled inadmissible. So were her own inconsistent statements from the inquest, given without a lawyer present. The handleless hatchet found in the basement was theorized as the murder weapon, but no blood or hair was ever conclusively tied to it, and the “missing handle” theory was never proven.
After deliberating for about ninety minutes, the all-male jury returned a verdict of not guilty on June 20, 1893.
The Legend vs The Facts
The skipping-rope rhyme that opens this story isn’t accurate, and never was. Abby was struck somewhere around eighteen to nineteen times, not forty. Andrew was struck ten or eleven times, not forty-one. Still brutal, just not quite the number history decided to sing about.
Emma was cleared early in the investigation. She had been fifteen miles away in Fairhaven for over a week and had a solid alibi. No one else was ever charged, and the case remains officially unsolved to this day.
After the Verdict
Lizzie inherited a substantial share of her father’s estate and used it to buy Maplecroft, a large house on French Street, in the fashionable part of Fall River where the old-money families lived. She began signing her name Lizbeth A. Borden.
Acquittal did not mean acceptance. Fall River society largely shunned her for the rest of her life. She died of pneumonia on June 1, 1927, at age sixty-six. Emma died just nine days later, at a nursing home in New Hampshire. They are buried side by side in the family plot at Oak Grove Cemetery, not far from the parents they were tried for killing.
What Lingers
The house at 92 Second Street is a museum today, and you can spend the night in it. Guests book the same rooms where Andrew and Abby were killed, sleep in period-furnished bedrooms, and eat the same breakfast menu, including bananas, sugar cookies, and johnnycakes served the morning of the murders.
People who stay there tend to come away with a story. Guests and staff have reported the sound of a woman crying, most often from the guest room where Abby’s body was found. Others describe footsteps crossing empty rooms overhead, doors that swing shut on their own, and a recurring cold spot on the second-floor landing that shows up on thermal readings even in the height of summer.
A few visitors say they’ve seen a woman in old-fashioned dress standing at the top of the stairs, gone by the time they look twice. Whether that’s Abby, Lizzie, or just the house doing what old houses do to overtired imaginations is not something anyone can prove. What’s certain is that the Borden house has never quite been able to close the case on its own.
