Lizzie Borden: The True Story of the 1892 Fall River Murders, Explained

On the morning of 4 August 1892, two people were killed with a hatchet in a house on Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts. Nobody was ever convicted.

The daughter of one of them was tried and acquitted. More than a century later the case is still open, and most of what people think they know about it comes from a piece of doggerel that gets four separate things wrong.

What happened on 4 August 1892?

Five people were connected to the house that morning. Andrew Borden, a 70-year-old property owner and one of the wealthier men in the city. Abby Borden, his second wife and Lizzie’s stepmother. Lizzie, then 32. Bridget Sullivan, the maid, known in the household as Maggie. And John Morse, an uncle by Andrew’s first marriage, who had arrived to stay the previous day.

Abby was killed first, upstairs in the guest room. She was struck from behind while the front of the house was quiet.

Andrew came home late that morning and lay down on the sitting-room settee. He was killed there.

Shortly after eleven, Lizzie called Bridget down. Bridget went for a neighbour, Mrs Churchill, and it was Churchill and Bridget — not Lizzie — who went upstairs and found Abby’s body in the guest room.

The ninety minutes

This is the fact the whole case rests on, and it came from the bodies rather than from anyone’s account.

When Andrew was found at about 11:15, his blood was still warm, red and liquid. Abby’s was dark, cold and thoroughly congealed, and rigor mortis had begun to set in. The doctors concluded that Abby had been dead for at least an hour and a half before her husband was attacked.

So the killer did not strike twice and leave. Whoever it was killed Abby, then stayed in or close to that house for ninety minutes, waited for Andrew to come home, and killed him too. That is not a burglary interrupted. It is the single hardest thing in the case to explain away, and it is the reason suspicion settled on the household rather than on a stranger.

Was it an axe, and was it forty whacks?

No, and no.

Four lines, four errors.

The numbers were not always forty

This is the part almost nobody knows. The rhyme did not start at forty.

The earliest printings that have been traced are newspaper filler from February 1894, eight months after the acquittal — one of them the Hillsboro, Ohio News-Herald of 15 February — and they say twenty and twenty-one. The forty-and-forty-one version is the one Edmund Pearson put into Studies in Murder in 1924, and that is the version that stuck.

Look at what that means. Twenty was nearly right for Abby and already about double for Andrew. Then the whole thing doubled again. The number everyone can recite is a doubling of a doubling of a figure that was only ever half accurate.

Historians are fairly confident it was written by a newspaperman to sell papers around the time of the trial. What nobody can produce is a first appearance everyone agrees on — a 2026 newspaper feature on the question could document the verse no earlier than 1933.

Why was she a suspect?

Several things pointed at Lizzie, and they are worth stating plainly because the trial turned on what the court did with them.

• The ninety minutes. A stranger who killed Abby would have had to remain in an occupied house for an hour and a half to kill Andrew.
• The prussic acid. A drugstore clerk testified that she had tried to buy it the day before the murders, saying she needed it to clean a sealskin cape.
• The burned dress. Her friend Alice Russell testified that she saw Lizzie burn a dress on 8 August, four days after the killings. Lizzie said it had paint on it. It was never established whether it was the dress she had worn that morning.
• The inconsistencies. Her account of where she had been shifted between tellings at the inquest.
• The money. Neither Andrew nor Abby had made a will.

The inheritance point is stranger than it looks

Because there were no wills, the order of the deaths decided who inherited.

Had Andrew died first, Abby would have taken a share of his estate, and that share could afterwards have passed to her own relatives. Because Abby died first, her property passed to Andrew — and on his death everything went to his daughters.

The sequence that actually happened was the one that kept the Borden money with Lizzie and Emma. That is a documented feature of the estate. It is not evidence that anyone killed for it, and it should not be read as any.

Why was she acquitted?

Because two rulings removed the prosecution’s best material, and what was left was circumstantial.

Her inquest testimony was thrown out. She had testified over three days in August without a lawyer, at a point when she was already the focus of suspicion. The judges held that admitting statements obtained that way would violate her protection against self-incrimination. The contradictions the prosecution most wanted the jury to hear were never heard.

The prussic acid was excluded. The court held that the state had not connected an attempt to buy poison with murders committed using a blade.

And the physical evidence never arrived. No one saw the attacks. No bloodstained clothing was ever tied to the crimes. A hatchet head was found in a box in the cellar, its handle apparently freshly broken off — but every hatchet and axe taken from the house tested negative for human blood, and the defence pointed out that using it would have meant snapping off a thick handle and disposing of it, in a house full of people, twice.

The judge’s charge to the jury leaned hard on the presumption of innocence, and was criticised at the time for sounding like a third defence lawyer.

The jury retired at 3:24 in the afternoon on 20 June 1893 and came back at 4:30. They took one ballot on entering the room. Much of the hour in between went on lunch and paperwork.

If not her, who?

No one has ever been charged, and every alternative has a hole in it.

• John Morse, the visiting uncle, was suspected in the press almost immediately — but he was with relatives across town when the murders happened, and had no clear motive.
• Bridget Sullivan was in the house. She was the prosecution’s own witness, was never charged, and no evidence against her was produced. She is reported to have said in later life that she had not told everything and had “helped Lizzie out” — but no letter or statement supporting that has ever come to light, and it is hearsay about hearsay.
• A stranger. Twelve days after the murders a farmer testified to meeting a man outside Fall River muttering about “poor Mrs Borden” and carrying a hatchet. The judges told the jury to disregard it, and no unidentified man was ever connected to the case.

Once she was acquitted, double jeopardy meant Lizzie could not be tried again whatever turned up afterwards. Nothing did.

What happened to Lizzie Borden afterwards?

She inherited, and she stayed.

Two months after the verdict she bought a house in The Hill, the part of Fall River she had wanted to live in, and named it Maplecroft. Emma moved in with her. She began calling herself Lizbeth.

In 1905 the sisters fell out for good. Emma left Maplecroft and the two never spoke again. Neither ever said publicly what the quarrel was about.

Lizzie lived in the house until she died there of pneumonia on 1 June 1927, aged 66. Emma died nine days later, on 10 June, of chronic nephritis. Lizzie is buried in the family plot — in the same ground as the father and stepmother she was tried for killing.

Her will left $30,000 to the Fall River Animal Rescue League, along with her entire holding in a local manufacturing company, and a further $2,000 to the Animal Rescue League of Washington, D.C. She set out her reason in the document itself: that she had been fond of animals, that their need was great, and that so few people cared for them.

Bridget Sullivan

Bridget was outside cleaning windows for part of that morning, which makes her the last person known to have seen either victim alive and put her at the centre of the timeline.

Afterwards she left Fall River. She settled in Anaconda, Montana, married a John Sullivan — no relation — in 1905, and was widowed in 1939. As her health failed in the mid-1940s she moved to Butte to be near her nieces, and died at the county hospital there on 25 March 1948. She is buried beside her husband in Anaconda.

Her age at death is usually given as 82, which implies a birth around 1866; a cemetery record gives her birth year as 1869, which would make her 78 or 79. The date is agreed and the age is not, so only the date is stated here.

The bottom line

The record contains a hatchet, two bodies, a ninety-minute gap that nobody has ever explained, a daughter who could not account for herself consistently, a court that excluded the words she used to do it, and a jury that needed one ballot.

It does not contain a conviction, or a confession, or a weapon anyone could tie to the crime. Everything beyond that is inference — including the inference tucked inside a rhyme that was made up by a journalist and got the weapon, the count, the relationship and the verdict wrong.

If you have come here from the Netflix dramatisation, our guide to Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story sets out, scene by scene, which parts of that series the record supports and which it invents.