The Trial of Lizzie Borden

In the summer of 1892, Fall River, Massachusetts, was the third-largest city in the state and a major textile-production center, its population divided along lines of class, ethnicity, and religion. The Borden household at 92 Second Street consisted of Andrew Borden, a sixty-nine-year-old businessman worth over a quarter million dollars; his second wife, Abby; his grown daughters, Emma (forty-one) and Lizzie (thirty-two); and their domestic servant, Bridget Sullivan. Despite Andrew's wealth, the family lived modestly, far from the Hill district where his wealthier Borden cousins resided. About five years before the murders, Andrew purchased a half-interest in a house and put it in Abby's name for the benefit of her half sister. His daughters demanded equal treatment, and though Andrew transferred another property to them, the gesture failed to heal the rift. Lizzie stopped calling Abby "Mother," began referring to her as "Mrs. Borden," and told friends Abby was deceitful and mean-spirited. The family ate in two sittings, and the house was elaborately secured with locks and bolts, even between bedrooms.

On August 3, 1892, a clerk at a local drugstore refused to sell a woman he identified as Lizzie ten cents' worth of prussic acid, a diluted form of the deadly poison hydrocyanic acid. That evening, Lizzie visited her friend Alice Russell and expressed foreboding, declaring, "I feel as if something was hanging over me that I cannot throw off" (12). The next morning, neighbor Adelaide Churchill found Lizzie inside the Bordens' screen door. Lizzie said someone had killed her father. Police arrived to find Andrew's body on the sitting room sofa, his face destroyed by multiple hatchet blows. Lizzie said she had been in the barn looking for iron to make a fishing sinker and that Abby had received a note from a sick friend and gone out. Shortly afterward, Bridget and Adelaide discovered Abby's body in the upstairs guest bedroom, struck nineteen times. Dried blood indicated Abby had died well before Andrew, likely around 9:30 a.m., while Andrew was killed between 10:45 and 11:45 a.m. The doors were locked or bolted from inside. The central question became how a murderer committed both killings, an hour and a half apart, without attracting the attention of Lizzie or Bridget, the only other people known to be in the house.

Police initially pursued immigrant suspects in keeping with prevailing criminological theories that associated criminality with foreigners and the lower classes, eliminating various foreign workers and strangers. Andrew's brother-in-law, John V. Morse, drew suspicion because his visit coincided with the murders, but he had an airtight alibi. Officers grew suspicious of Lizzie after interviewing her on the evening of August 4: Her calm demeanor struck them as remarkable, and a search of the barn loft turned up nothing that could have detained her for twenty minutes. No note from a sick friend was ever found.

An inquest began on August 9, with District Attorney Hosea Knowlton questioning Lizzie over three days. Lizzie's lawyer, Andrew Jennings, was denied permission to represent her. Lizzie gave contradictory answers, first saying she was downstairs all morning, then placing herself upstairs when her father came home. She described spending fifteen to twenty minutes in the stifling barn loft eating pears and looking for lead for fishing sinkers. Knowlton noted she had placed herself in the only spot where she could not have seen someone entering the house. Three drugstore employees testified Lizzie had attempted to buy prussic acid; Lizzie denied visiting the store. Knowlton privately described her testimony as her "confession" (52). On August 11, Lizzie was arrested and charged with Andrew's murder.

Judge Josiah Blaisdell presided over the preliminary hearing and ordered Lizzie held for superior court, reasoning that if a man had been found in the same circumstances, no one would hesitate to hold him. On December 2, 1892, a grand jury indicted Lizzie on three counts of murder. Jennings hired former governor George D. Robinson as lead defense counsel. Prosecutors privately doubted they could secure a conviction but felt obligated to proceed.

The trial opened on June 5, 1893, at the Bristol County courthouse in New Bedford, attracting an unprecedented press corps. Three judges presided, including Justice Justin Dewey, who had been appointed to the bench by Robinson during Robinson's term as governor. Jury selection produced twelve men, mostly farmers and tradesmen. When prosecutor William Moody produced the victims' skulls during his opening statement, Lizzie fainted, the first dramatic display of emotion she exhibited during the trial.

Bridget confirmed the locked doors and testified she heard Lizzie laugh from the upstairs landing as Andrew struggled to enter the bolted front door, directly opposite the open guest room where Abby lay dead. Alice Russell, whom reporter Elizabeth Jordan characterized as Lizzie's "turncoat friend" (130), testified that on the Sunday after the murders, she saw Lizzie burning a cheap cotton Bedford cord dress in the kitchen stove, claiming it was covered in paint. When Alice protested, Lizzie later asked, "Oh, what made you let me do it?" (134). Medical experts agreed the wounds could have been inflicted by a woman of ordinary strength and that the assailant would have been spattered with blood, a critical point given the absence of blood on Lizzie. Police witnesses contradicted each other about a handleless hatchet head found in the cellar: One officer claimed its missing handle had been in the evidence box all along, while another denied seeing it, undermining the prosecution's theory that Lizzie had broken and burned the handle.

The defense won two major evidentiary rulings that crippled the prosecution. The judges excluded Lizzie's inquest testimony as involuntary, ruling she had been effectively in custody even though no warrant had been served. They also excluded the prussic acid evidence after Robinson prevented witnesses from establishing that the poison had no legitimate household uses. The prosecution rested without its most damaging evidence.

The defense presented witnesses who described suspicious strangers near the Borden house and contradicted police testimony about conditions in the barn loft. Emma Borden, the key defense witness, denied Matron Reagan's claim to have overheard Lizzie tell Emma "you've given me away" (63), listed Lizzie's assets to dispel the motive theory, and testified that she herself had told Lizzie to destroy the paint-stained dress.

Robinson's closing argument cast Lizzie as a defenseless woman and argued the murders were "morally and physically impossible" (245) for her, asking jurors to imagine Lizzie as their own wife or daughter. Knowlton countered that no station in life provides immunity from crime, that the time gap between murders proved only an insider could have committed them, and that Lizzie's composure afterward revealed consciousness of guilt. Justice Dewey's charge to the jury was widely perceived as favoring the defense. After approximately ninety minutes of deliberation, having found themselves unanimous on an initial ballot, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. The courtroom erupted in cheers.

Lizzie and Emma moved to a larger house in the Hill district, which Lizzie named "Maplecroft." Lizzie renamed herself "Lizbeth," dropped her church charities, and developed a friendship with actress Nance O'Neil that reportedly drove Emma from the household in 1905; the sisters never spoke again. Public sympathy in Fall River quickly evaporated: Working-class residents expressed indignation at the verdict, and the elite who had supported Lizzie eventually shunned her. Lizzie died at Maplecroft on June 1, 1927, leaving instructions to be buried at her father's feet. Emma died ten days later. The case endures as a cultural phenomenon, immortalized in the children's rhyme "Lizzie Borden took an ax."