Classic Case: Lizzie Borden Took an Axe
What really happened the morning that Andrew and Abby Borden were murdered with an axe, and why is it still unsolved? Let's dive into the real story, full of the twists and turns that make that day one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in American history.
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Adelaide Churchill was washing dishes in the one morning in Fall River Massachusetts. It was almost time for lunch and the new England air was quickly heating in the early august Sun. From her kitchen window, she could see the three story house of her neighbors, the Bordens. They were a quiet and polite family, but this morning, Adelaide could see the shadow of someone through their front door screen pacing back and forth, as if in a panic. at once she realized it was Lizzie, the youngest daughter of the family.
Something didn’t seem right, so Adelaide opened her window and called out across the yard. Is everything ok, Lizzie?
Lizzie stopped pacing and stood at the screen door. Oh Adelaide, she yelled. Come quick, father’s been killed.
Welcome to heart starts pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings and mysteries. I’m your host, Kaelyn Moore
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That fateful day of August 4th, 1892 would go down in american history as one of the most brutal and disturbing days of the 19th century. echos of the murder of Andrew and Abby borden can still be heard today. I’m sure you recognize the old schoolhouse rhyme.
Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother 40 whacks, when she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41.
The rhyme depicts Lizzie Bordon as a murderous psychopath, killing her mother in cold blood and then turning around to do the same to her father. But have you heard the real story of Lizzie Borden?
Because in reality, Lizzie was never convicted of the murder of her father and step-mother in 1892. The jury just didn’t believe there was enough evidence that pointed directly to Lizzie, and to be fair, at the time, there really wasn’t.
I want to pull apart this case today. I want to tell you the story, the REAL story of Lizzie Borden and the tragic day of August 4th, 1892. Listener discretion is advised. Let’s dive in.
The night before Lizzie Borden found her parents brutally murdered, everyone in the Borden household was throwing up.
Something about dinner hadn’t sat right in any of their stomachs. Inside the house was Andrew Bordon, Lizzies father, Abby Bordon, Lizzies Step-mother, Bridget their housekeeper, John V Morse, Andrews brother in law, Lizzie who was 32 at the time, and Emma, her older sister, who was 41.
After dinner, everyone retired to their respective bedrooms without speaking, clutching their stomachs. Getting sick after dinner was a rare occurrence in the household, but going to bed without speaking was not.
There were two distinct groups in the Borden household. There was Andrew and Abby, who had gotten married 26 years prior, just two years after the death of Lizzies biological mother, and there was
Lizzie and Emma, the sisters. The two groups never ate together and hardly spoke at all.
Whenever Uncle John Morse visited, which was becoming frequent, he would mostly hang out with Andrew and Abby, rarely seeing Lizzie and Emma unless it was to exchange the most basic of pleasantries. Bridget, the house keeper, tended to float between the groups, helping out whenever she was asked. It’s unconfirmed, but Bridget may have had a favorite member of the household. See, though Bridget had been with the Bordens for a few years, Lizzie, Emma and Andrew, all referred to her by their last housekeepers name, Maggie. Abby, the stepmother, was the only member of the house to call her by her real first name, Bridget.
In this episode, I will be referring to Bridget by her real name. Because to do otherwise would be rude, Lizzie. That’s a rude thing to do.
It sounds odd that these two groups had little to do with each other under the same roof, But it was easy to ignore each other. The Borden residence was a three story home in Fall River Massachusetts. And while not extravagant, it was very comfortable for it’s five residents and one guest. Everyone had their own room And Bridget lived in the quarters upstairs
Let me be very clear here, the Bordens could have lived in a MUCH bigger house if they wanted to. They were not in want of more money. Andrew Borden’s grandfather was an incredibly successful business man in his day, and boy oh boy did that money trickle down the borden blood line. Andrew had a brother who lived a life of decadence and risk, turning his inheritance into a large fortune, but Andrew was the exact opposite. He thought there was honor in hard work, and he chose to work a typical 9-5 as a cabinet maker, working his way up to furniture maker later in life, and eventually becoming the director of the Merchants Manufacturing company. He saved his money, never spending more than he needed to and boasting that he had never once borrowed money from anyone.
But the night of August 3rd, the last night of his life, none of that mattered, as he was doubled over with stomach cramps. All he could think about was getting up early to go to work So everyone in the house retired early.
The morning of the tragedy August 4th was just like any other morning at the borden house. Let’s run through the sequence of events.
Abby and Andrew awoke early and ate breakfast at 7:00am with Uncle John Morse. All of them were still suffering from the food poisoning, but they still at cold mutton, pancakes, coffee and tea. At 8:45 Uncle John left to go visit a relative that lived nearby.
A few minutes later, Lizzie came downstairs to eat breakfast by herself. Her sister had been out of town for two weeks at that point visiting friends, so Lizzie dined alone.
At 9:15 am, Andrew left the house to go attend to some business downtown.
Around the time that Andrew left, Abby asked the housekeeper Bridget to wash the downstairs windows from the outside while Abby went upstairs to make the guest bedroom. Lizzie remained downstairs.
At 10:45 Andrew returned home from downtown, but was unable to unlock the front door because it had been bolted from the inside. Bridget ran over to help him and yelled out an expletive that made Lizzie laugh. Lizzie had been coming down the stairs from the second floor when she heard Bridget yell out.
When he entered the house, andrew went upstairs to his bedroom, then came back downstairs and asked Lizzie where Abby was. Llizzie replied that abby got a note from a friend and was out of the house.
He then went into the sitting room to take a nap on the couch. Lizzie, on the other hand, went out back to a shed to get a sinker for a fishing line. As she was coming back into the house, she heard a strange groan from the drawing room. It was when she came back to the house that she found Andrew lying on the couch, dead.
The first police officer on the scene was Chief Hilliard. He was told there was trouble at the Borden house, but he was not prepared for what he was about to see. Upon entry, he didn’t recognize that it was Andrew laying on the couch. He was laying on his right side on the couch, his legs still dangling off the front. The left side of his head had 10 deep and brutal wounds from some sort of sharp, small object. Whatever was used was sharp enough to completely bisect his left eye socket. Chief Hillard described Andrew as having been “hacked to pieces”
But he noticed that the scene around andrew was very clean. No specks of blood anywhere aside from where his head had been bashed in on the pillow.
Lizzie summoned for Dr. Bowen, the family doctor, and told him to write to her sister Emma who was staying 30 miles away. She told him to not tell him all of the gruesome details of her fathers murder.
Other’s needed to be made aware of Andrew’s passing, namely Abby. Chief Hilliard was told that Abby had received a note asking her to visit a friend. He asked Lizzie if she could bring him the note, but Lizzie said that she didn’t know where it was.
Bridget was getting antsy. She didn’t hear Mrs. Borden leave, and she had been upstairs in her quarters lying down when Andrew was killed. The house was big , but it wasn’t THAT big, how was she not aware of what was going on.? Bridget insisted they needed to find Abby NOW and tell her what had happened.
That’s when Lizzie offered up some information. Lizzie told everyone that actually, she thought she heard Abby return, and that she went upstairs.
Bridget ascended the stairs with Adelaide Churchill, the neighbor from the beginning. She came over after hearing all of the commotion. The two women slowly tip toed up the stairs. If abby was home, she would have heard all of the commotion and come downstairs. Now, they feared the worst.
Mrs. Churchill only cleared the stairs enough to see the guest bedroom, but from where she stood, she could see Abby lying on the floor
The women ran down the stairs and told Dr. Bowen to go look, they couldn’t bear seeing Abby like that. Upon first glance, Dr. Bowen thought Abby had died of fright. She was lying on the floor, face down but slightly on her left cheek, with her arms above her head. But as he got closer, he could see the blood, dark maroon around her head. he Abby had suffered more than Andrew, she had 19 wounds to the head with what looked like the same weapon that was used on Andrew. There was one thing about Abby’s scene that was very odd however.
The blood around Abby’s head had congealed. Like, reallly congealed. Andrews wounds were so fresh that blood still dripped down his face when Dr. Bowen arrived. This lead him to make a shocking realization about the murder. Abby had been murdered an hour and a half earlier than Andrew.
When you think about it, this is WILD. The murderer killed Abby without Bridget OR Lizzie hearing or seeing anything strange, and then came back and hour and a half later, and did the same thing. It’s starting to not look too good for the only other two women in the house.
This fact also changes a lot about the timeline of events I gave you earlier. But guess what, that timeline was constructed from Lizzie and Bridget’s testimony. And not only was it now really suspicious, but it was changing. Let’s run through the timeline again now knowing what we know.
So, if abby was killed at around 9:15, that meant that Bridget and Lizzie were downstairs when someone hit Abby in the back of the head with a hatchet, watched her collapse, and then kept hitting 18 more times. Abby was a short and very stocky woman. It was shocking to investigators that her dead weight fell face first, and no one on the downstairs floor heard a thud.
And not only that, but the door to the guest bedroom was left open, and Adelaide. Churchill confirmed that you could see the dismembered body from the stairs. According to the timeline, this means that both Lizzie AND andrew went upstairs, passed the guest bedroom, and never saw a thing.
Lizzie and Bridget were both questioned that day. Bridget was frantic and panicked, while Lizzie remained composed as she normally was, not crying once. Bridget’s version of events never changed, and her story put her outside washing the windows when Abby was killed, and up the back staircase in her servants quarters lying down when Andrew was killed. She used a separate staircase that didn’t go past the guest bedroom. So Bridget was technically in a position to not see or hear anything strange. She would, however, have been able to see an intruder enter at the time of Abby’s murder, and she never saw a thing. Bridget’s story was confirmed by Lizzie’s account of events.
Lizzie’s account of what Lizzie was doing, however, started changing. When asked where she was when Andrew came home, she calmly recounted that she was already downstairs waiting for an iron to heat up, not that she was coming down the stairs. Bridget insisted that Lizzie had been descending the staircase from the second floor when she laughed at Bridget trying to let andrew in, but Lizzie said no, actually she had been downstairs the entire time.
There was also the issue of where Lizzie had been during Andrews murder. Lizzie claimed that she had gone out to a shed to get a lead sinker for a fishing line. Police asked lizzie if she fished. No, she replied. They asked her why it took her so long to get the lead sinker. Wouldn’t that task have taken all of 20 seconds? Lizzie explained that she didn’t know where they were in the shed. She remembered seeing them 5 years ago, but couldn’t remember if they still had them. She also picked a pear from a tree and sat down and ate it inside of the shed.
To police, this story seemed unrealistic. Why was she dawdling out in the shed for so long? Was this a cover up. But its interesting here to note the life that lizzie was living. She was an upper class, unmarried and childless woman. There was, objectively, not much for a woman in her position to do every day. Spending upwards of 30 minutes eating a pear and looking around a shed mid morning was completely possible.
The next order of business was to search the house. Based on their wounds, Investigators assumed a small axe or hatchet was used to murder Andrew and Abby, and they needed to find it. It wasn’t until they got to the basement that they found anything that even looked suspicious. In a box of tools, police found a handless hatchet. The handle looked like it had been recently separated. Could it have come off during the attack? The hatchet, however, did not have any blood on it, and the few strands of hair on it was later determined to be cow. So it was something, but was it the murder weapon?
Also downstairs was a barrel full of water and a few bloody rags. When asked about it, Lizzie said that she was menstruating and they were rags she was using. Bridget mentioned that she didn’t know when the rags had been placed down in the barrel but it could have been days prior.
Disposable pads for menstruation weren’t available until the late 1880’s, so it’s not unlikely that these were reusable menstruation pads that Lizzie was using. I know it sounds suspect today, but context is important here.
Speaking of blood, The crime scenes were shockingly clean considering how gruesome they were, there was no trail of blood on the floor, not even blood splatter on the walls or carpet near the bodies. But Surely, whoever committed this crime must have SOME blood on them, right? Well, investigators were already suspicious of Lizzie, but she was spotlessly clean, and Bridget confirmed that Lizzie hadn’t changed clothes that day. They searched her closet and made meticulous notes about her dresses, but couldn’t find anything that was consistent with blood from the crime scene.
The perimeter of the house was then searched to see if there was any damage from a break in or tracks from someone escaping. But no. there was nothing.
So let’s take stock of the physical evidence we have. One 3 inch hatchet found in the basement, that was missing a handle and didn’t even have any blood on it. That’s it.
It’s not much to go off of, but Lizzie was still arrested for the double homicide, and would spend the next nine months in jail awaiting trial. Yes, her story of what she did that day did change a bit, and she was shockingly calm for someone who stumbled upon the mangled body of her father. But the biggest piece of evidence against Lizzie wasn’t something she had done that day, it was something she had done the day before. After the break.
BREAK
Two years before his murder, had sent Lizzie on an all expenses paid trip to Europe for unmarried women, and upon her return he had gifted her a beautiful seal skin cape.
It wasn’t like Andrew to spend his money extravagantly, especially on his own daughters. For having amassed a large fortune, the allowance he gave to lizzie each week was less than what a woman would make as a spinner in town.
On August 3rd, the day before the murders, Lizzie walked into a local drug store and told the clerk that she needed something to fix up her seal skin cape, and to do that, she said she would need prussic acid.
Prussic acid is an incredibly deadly poison, and the pharmacist had never heard of it being used for clothing. But Lizzie insisted she needed the prussic acid for the task. When asked later if she had ever used prussic acid on seal skin cape before, she replied that she hadn’t. The pharmacist continued to refuse Lizzie the poison, and eventually, she left.
Upon learning this, alarms went off in investigators heads. Lizzie was trying to buy poison the DAY before her father and step mother are mysteriously murdered. And did this have anything to do with their food poisoning that night? The morning of the murders, Abby was so concerned by how sick everyone in the house had been, that she ran across the street to the doctor and told him she thought they had been poisoned.
So now they had reason to believe that she was intending on killing her family, but they still didn’t know WHY.
Well, when I mentioned earlier that the two sets of Borden’s lived separate lives, there was a reason for that. And during Lizzies trial, which started on June 5th, 1893, more information was revealed about the nature of Lizzies relationship with her step mother.
Lizzies birth mother, Sarah Borden, passed away when Lizzie was just 2 years old from Uterine Congestion. Again with the old times causes of death that don’t tell us anything. Andrew and Abby got together just two years later.. In some ways, Abby was the only mother that Lizzie knew, but that didn’t stop Lizzie from complaining about her a lot. At her trial, multiple people commented on nasty remarks they heard Lizzie make against Abby previously. That she was mean, that she was after her fathers money. A few months before Abby’s death, Lizzie snapped at a dressmaker who referred to Abby as Lizzie’s mother.
The root of some of these complaints seemed to stem from a dispute that was had 6 years prior. Abby’s half sister wanted to buy their fathers house from her mother after their fathers death, but she lacked the funds to do so.
So Andrew stepped in and purchased the house outright for Abby’s half sister, putting the house under Abby’s name. This infuriated Emma and Lizzie. Their father had always been incredibly stingy with them. He refused to live the high society life that he was financially able to do so and give his daughters higher status in town. and now he was buying up property for the half sister of someone who wasn’t even their mother.
It was after this event that they all started eating separately. Emma had never referred to Abby as mother, and now Lizzie started referring to her as just “abby”.
But at the end of the day, this was a dispute that happened six years ago, and to the jury of all men that were deliberating Lizzies fate, they didn’t seem so convinced that this was enough to put Lizzie away for the crime. In fact, very little evidence during the trial seemed to put the blame on Lizzie.
Probably one of the most shocking things to happen during the trial was on day two, when the prosecution brought in the actual skulls of Andrew and abby, cleaned and defleshed, for the jury to see the brutal damage done to them. Upon seeing the skulls, Lizzie fainted. As would many people, I’d believe. Both skulls had about 1/4th of the bone missing, just gaping holes where some maniac butchered them.
That was the most emotional Lizzie got during the trial, for the most part, she was as calm and collected as she was every other day of her life. In reality, Dr. Bowen had prescribed Lizzie morphine for her nerves, so Lizzie was really, really high while the trial was happening. In general, however, Lizzie had an incredibly composed nature. Looking at the skulls, it seemed like a rage filled psychopath committed this crime, not a mild mannered woman.
For example, just a few months before Lizzies trial, just up the road, another axe murder happened
On May 30th, 1893, Bertha Manchester died from “23 distinct and separate axe wounds on the back of the scuss and it’s base” local headlines read “the man with the axe has once again come to the front in Fall River” suggesting that whoever was responsible for bertha’s murder may have also been the perpetrator in the Borden case. But there were some distinct differences in the Manchester murder.
For one, the murderer confessed immediately. Jose Correa deMello was a Portuguese farm hand who had grievances about his wages. Bertha’s father owned the farm, and to get revenge on the farmer, he attacked his daughter with an axe. deMello had arrived only a few months prior, and there was no way he was responsible for the Bordens slaying but Everyone in town had heard about this crime, and they thought that this was the typical axe murder. Passionate, hateful, messy, impulsive. All of the things that the quiet and composed Lizzie Borden was not.
And don’t get me wrong, some of this had to do with the fact that she was a woman, and women didn’t typically commit axe murders, but at the time there were a loooot of crazy beliefs about women and violence.
For one, it was believed that menstruating made women more violent. So minus a few points for lizzie because she had told police she was menstruating around the time of the murder.
Women were also believed to have less rational control over their actions, especially their sexuality, but at the same time they were less prone to criminal activity. Therefore, women who did commit crimes were seen as more morally depraved than their male counterparts. But this didn’t extend to prostituion, which was seen as a understandable, natural crime for the sexually aggressive woman.
Basically if Lizzie was found guilty she would be viewed as an untamed, morally depraved monster, worse than any man who committed this crime. So the defense needed to prove her innocence.
Then there was the issue of the hatchet. The only physical evidence they had for the crime. It was brought up by the defense that the blade of the hatchet was 3.5 inches long. However, and this is really important. Some of the wounds on abby were only 2 inches long. They couldn’t have been made by that hatchet. It was also suggested that to get enough leverage to make the wounds as deep as they were, the hatchet would need a handle that was at least 14 inches long. The missing handle for the hatchet was estimated to be 12 inches long. It’s not a huge discrepancy but it was starting to feel like the one thing the prosecution had, the murder weapon, wasn’t even legit.
Then there was the medical examiner, who, upon doing an autopsy on Andrew and Abby, ruled that there in fact WASN”T poison in their stomachs. They all did happen to get food poisoning that night, Lizzie included. There was no evidence that Lizzie had tried to poison them that night.
It was looking like things were going to go in Lizzie’s favor, there just wasn’t enough to prove that it was her.
But then Alice Russel took the stand. And she had witnessed something that did NOT look good for Lizzie.
Alice Russel, Lizzies older, spinster friend, took the stand as a witness. She had seen Lizzie both the night before the murder, and stayed in the borden house for a few nights afterwards to help out Lizzie and Emma.
The night before the murder, Alice said Lizzie mentioned feeling like she was slipping into a depressive episode. Lizzie had mentioned that she felt as if something was hanging over her that followed her around wherever she went. Lizzie also spoke of her fathers enemies, mentioning that a man had come by to ask Andrew about renting a property but was turned away. He left the borden house sneering.
After the murder, Alice remained in the Borden household, and slept there overnight. On Sunday morning, she came down to find Lizzie behaving strangely.
She and Emma were stuffing something into the oven. Alice asked what they were doing, and Lizzie responded that she had a dress that was covered in paint and she was just going to burn it. Alice responded that she shouldn’t let anyone see her doing that because it looked suspicious as hell, but Lizzie just ignored her.
When investigators went through their notes on Lizzies dresses, they didn’t see anything about a dress covered in paint. And they would have taken note of that. And on top of that, Emma took the stand to testify that it was HER idea to burn the dress, not Lizzies.
The dress felt damning. Was this the blood soaked piece of evidence that the prosecutors needed to put Lizzie away? The only problem was they didn’t have the dress. And Alice didn’t see what was on it. It was another weak lead against lizzie.
The trial went on for three week in the sweltering heat of the summer and Lizzie never testified for any of it. Reporters couldn’t believe that everyone inside the courtroom had survived the mid 90’s heat wave for over a week.
The prosecutors argued that while there was no physical evidence, all of the circumstantial evidence pointed towards Lizzie. There weren’t any other suspects, it had to be her.
But that’s not how our justice system works. For lizzie to be found guilty, she’d need to be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. And When it came time to render a verdict, the jury gave a resounding, NOT GUILTY.
The courtroom full of mostly female spectators erupted in cheers. Lizzie fell to her knees and rested her head on the rail. It seemed that no one could believe Lizzie had committed this crime.
Though the crowd celebrated her aquittal, their support dwindled over the years. Lizzie remained in Fall River, buying a much nicer home with her sister Emma in the nice part of town. But she was shunned by the community. Lizzie became a recluse, and later in life, even Emma turned her back on her. Lizzie Borden died on June 1st, 1927 and asked to be laid at her fathers feet.
We’ve had 130 years to speculate about this case, and every theory you can think of has been posed. Lizzie was epileptic and didn’t remember committing the murders, Uncle John Morse, who had a perfect alibi, only got his alibi so he could come back and commit the murders. He was a butcher, mind you, and had been known to carry a cleaver on him. One that sounded more reasonable to me was that Lizzie intended on poisoning her stepmother to make sure she wasn’t in her father’s will, and then when the poison wasn’t available, did it by other means. After she saw what she had done, she panicked that her father would know it was her and killed him as well.
None of these theories sound like home runs to me, however. but maybe that’s because I don’t want to think Lizzie committed these murdesr. Because that’s the scariest thing of all. If Lizzie Borden, the most unassuming person in this story, who never even raised her voice, sat on a grudge she held for 6 years, waiting, until one day she enacted her revenge on her own father, for no reason. That, is going to keep me up tonight.
This has been heart starts pounding, written and produced by me, Kaelyn Moore. Music by artist. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jernigan, the team at WME and Ben Jaffe. Have a heart pounding story or a case request?
Until next time, stay curious. Woooooooooooooo