Lizzie Borden
- This article is about the woman made famous by a nursery rhyme; for other women named Lizzie Borden or Lizzy Borden, see Lizzy Borden
Lizzie Andrew Borden (July 19, 1860 - June 1, 1927) was a New England spinster who was tried for the brutal axe murders of her father and stepmother in the late 19th century. Although she was acquitted, she is remembered chiefly as the subject of the following doggerel, sung to the tune of Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Aye.
- Lizzie Borden took an axe
- And gave her mother forty whacks.
- When she saw what she had done
- She gave her father forty-one.
The anonymous rhyme is erroneous, both in its presumption of guilt and its gross over-estimate of the number of wounds — her step-mother suffered 19, her father, 10 — but has served to ensure Lizzie Borden's place in American folklore.
Before the murder
Lizzie was born on July 19, 1860 — the youngest child of Andrew Jackson Borden and Sarah Morse Borden. Andrew was a well-to-do banker who owned considerable property in his home town of Fall River, Massachusetts. Lizzie's mother died when Lizzie was two years old, and a few years later Andrew married Abby Durfee Grey. It was rumored that Lizzie and her older sister, Emma (who was out of town at the time of the murders) never felt warmly towards their step-mother and both admitted during their testimony that there was considerable ill-feeling when, a few years prior to the crime, Andrew put a piece of property in Abby's name. Prior to the rift, Emma Borden referred to her father's wife as "Abby", while Lizzie politely called her "mother". After Andrew Borden's first transfer of property into his wife's name his daughters stopped acknowledging Abby altogether. When Andrew tried to smooth the waters by giving an equal amount of property to each daughter, both showed their gratitude by henceforth referring to their stepmother as "Mrs. Borden".
The murder and the trial
On August 4, 1892, Lizzie Borden discovered the body of her father Andrew J. Borden, in the home at 92 Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts, and called to the family's maid Bridget Sullivan (who had been resting in her third floor room) to "come downstairs...father is dead...somebody got in and murdered him." After the arrival of family friend Alice Russell and "Dr. Bowen" neighbor Adelaide Churchill asked Lizzie where her mother was. "I don't know," Borden replied, continuing on "but what's she's been killed, too, for I thought I heard her come in." Russell suggested that someone look for Mrs. Borden, and Sullivan and Churchill were sent to the second floor. The two returned shortly thereafter confirming that Lizzie's stepmother, Abby Durfee Gray Borden, was indeed upstairs and dead as well.
Both Bordens had been slain by multiple axe blows.
Although the exact weapon was not named, and witnesses saw no trace of blood on Lizzie moments after the murder, a circumstantial case was mounted against her. At the inquest, a local pharmacist claimed that Lizzie attempted to purchase prussic acid from him a day before the crime. Then, at the grand jury hearing, incriminating evidence came from her friend, Alice Russell, who testified that Lizzie burned a blood-stained dress three days after the murders. But the most damning evidence came at the trial, when medical experts appeared to prove that Abby Borden was killed approximately an hour and a half before her husband — making it seem that the perpetrator was more likely to have been a member of the household than an outsider.
The Preliminary hearing was held in late August 1892, and the grand jury heard testimony in late November and early December of the same year. The trial of Lizzie Borden began on June 5, 1893 and lasted two weeks. A turning point in the trial was the dramatic unveiling of the victims' rotting skulls; Lizzie fainted and won much sympathy from the all-male jury, who acquitted her on June 20, 1893, after only sixty-eight minutes of deliberation. The trial received a tremendous ammount of national publicity, a relatively new phenomena for the times. It has been compared to the later trials of the Bruno Hauptmann and O.J. Simpson as a landmark in media coverage of legal proceedings.
Later life
After the trial, Lizzie and Emma split their inheritance and bought a much larger house up on the hill which Lizzie christened Maplecroft. She also changed her name from Lizzie to Lizbeth. Apparently Lizzie was a great lover of the theater, animals, and poetry. Above her fireplace in Maplecroft was emblazoned the following:
- And old-time friends & twilight plays,
- And starry nights, and sunny days
- Come trooping up the misty ways
- When my fire burns low.
Many Fall River residents still believed in her guilt and as a result, she was ostracized to some degree. More than a dozen years after the murders, she and her sister became estranged – and after Emma left Maplecroft in 1905, the two lived apart until their deaths in 1927.
Lizzie had an intense relationship with Nance O'Neil, an actress. While it has never been proven that the two were intimate - O'Neil was married at the time - the termination of the relationship was a significant loss to Borden.
Lizzie Borden died of complications from gall bladder surgery on June 1, 1927, at the age of sixty-six. Emma died nine days later. One-seventh of Lizzie's considerable estate was left to the Animal Rescue League of Fall River and the remainder to those friends and servants who stayed loyal to her over the years.
Legacy
Despite her acquittal, Lizzie Borden remains in popular imagination as a brutal murderess. This is due in part to the following:
- The murders were never solved.
- For a number of years, on the anniversary of the murders, the more sensational press re-accused her of the crime.
- The infamous doggerel endured — insinuating her guilt into the public mind thereafter.
Artistic depictions
A number of books expounding different theories have been written about the crime. These include:
- Brown, Arnold R. Lizzie Borden: The Legend, the Truth, the Final Chapter." Nashville, TN: Rutledge Hill Press, 1991. (ISBN 1558530991)
- de Mille, Agnes. Lizzie Borden: A Dance of Death. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1968. (ISBN unavailable)
- Kent, David Forty Whacks: New Evidence in the Life and Legend of Lizzie Borden. Yankee Books, 1992. (ISBN 0899093515)
- Kent, David The Lizzie Borden Sourcebook. Boston: Branden Publishing Company, 1992. (ISBN 0828319502)
- King, Florence. WASP, Where is Thy Sting? Chapter 15, "One WASP's Family, or the Ties That Bind." Stein & Day, 1977. ISBN 0-5529-9377-8 (1990 Reprint Edition)
- Lincoln, Victoria. A Private Disgrace: Lizzie Borden by Daylight. NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967. (ISBN 0930330358)
- Masterton, William L. Lizzie Didn’t Do It! Boston: Branden Publishing Company, 2000. (ISBN 0828320527)
- Spiering, Frank. Lizzie: The Story of Lizzie Borden. Dorset Press, 1991. (ISBN 0880296852)
- Sullivan, Robert. Goodbye Lizzie Borden. Brattleboro, VT: Stephen Greene Press, 1974. (ISBN 0140114165)
There is a scholarly journal published on Lizzie Borden, Fall River, and Victorian era America:
- The Hatchet: Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies. PearTree Press.
There is also a 1975 film adaptation of the crime:
- 'The Legend of Lizzie Borden' at IMDb starring Elizabeth Montgomery.
She was the subject of the opera, Lizzie Borden, (1965), by Jack Beeson.
Rick Geary used a journal written by a Fall River resident as the narrative device of his comic book "The Borden Tragedy: A Memoir of the Infamous Double Murder at Fall River, Massachusetts, 1892." NY: NBN Pub., 1997 -- an entry in his series, "A Treasury of Victorian Murder."
Miss Borden also appears as a character in Monkeybone (2001), Joe Killionaire (2004), and Saturday the 14th Strikes Back (1988), played by Shawnee Free Jones, Alice Alyse, and Lauren Peterson, respectively; these depictions fall into the Victorian Evil category.
Borden was depicted on the episode "Treehouse of Horror IV" of The Simpsons (1993), as a member of the Devil's hand picked "Jury of the Damned". The Jury was convened to render a verdict on the Devil's claim over Homer Simpson's soul.
Adoptions of the name
Because of the notoriety associated with it, several women have later adopted the name "Lizzie" or "Lizzy Borden"; see Lizzy Borden for a list.