5 June: Lizzie Borden

On this date in 1893, Lizzie Borden went on trial for the murder of her parents. The case inspired the popular skipping-rope rhyme: “Lizzie Borden took an axe / And gave her mother forty whacks. / When she saw what she had done, / She gave her father forty-one.”

1. The crime took place in the morning of 4 August 1892. Lizzie's father Andrew and his wife, Abby, Lizzie's stepmother, were killed by an axe murderer in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts. The bodies were “hacked beyond almost beyond recognition”.
2. The Borden family were pretty well off. Andrew was a property developer and furniture maker. At the time of his death, his estate was valued at $300,000, - about $8.17 million in today’s money. That said, Andrew Borden had a reputation as a cheapskate, and was known to have enemies. Lizzie is known to have commented that she feared someone might harm her father because “he is so discourteous to people.” He hadn't, as many wealthy people had at the time, installed plumbing or Electricity in their house. Did Lizzie kill him for his Money? Seems unlikely as she had $1,000 in the bank, had income from rent from a property of her own, and wasn't in debt.
3. A few days before the murders, the family had all been violently ill. While it could have been simply food poisoning from re-heating mutton several times, Abby Borden had feared someone was trying to poison them. To add even more intrigue, at the trial, a local shopkeeper testified that Lizzie had tried to purchase cyanide from his drug store the day before the murders, but he'd refused to sell it to her because she didn't have a prescription.
4. Could there have been a motive other than money? Entirely possible. It doesn't sound like they were a happy family. Abby was Andrew's second wife, Lizzie's stepmother. They didn't get on - Lizzie thought she was a gold-digger and insisted on calling her "Mrs Borden". There had been tensions in the family over gifts of property Andrew had made to Abby's family. Lizzie and her sister Emma rarely ate meals with their parents, according to the maid, and just before the murders, there had been a family argument after which the sisters had gone away to New Bedford in order to get out of the house for a while.
5. Lizzie's sister, Emma, went away again soon after, and was still away when the murders occurred, so no suspicion ever fell on her. However, she did have a key to the house - she could, perhaps, have given the key to someone else and had them do the dirty deed. Could Emma and Lizzie have planned it all while they were on holiday in New Bedford? We'll never know. Emma stood by Lizzie all through the trial and afterwards, until Lizzie invited an actress Emma didn't like to a party. After that, the sisters fell out and never saw each other again.
6. Another theory which has been put forward is that Lizzie, who'd never married, was a lesbian and was having an affair with the family's maid, Bridget Sullivan. Lizzie had been brought up in a churchgoing household - she went to church regularly and used to teach Sunday School. Perhaps, speculated author Ed McBain, she had been caught doing naughty things with the maid by her parents and killed them to protect her secret. While Lizzie was subject to rumours in later life that she was gay, the same wasn't true of Bridget, who got another job and married a man she met at her new position. Not that her marriage rules out a possible dalliance when she was younger. No suspicion ever fell on the maid, either, even though she was in the house at the time of the murders.
7. There is evidence against Lizzie being responsible for the killings. She claimed to have been in the barn at the time of her father's death, and a neighbour did testify to seeing her leaving the barn at about the right time. There was also no Blood on her clothes or on any of the axes in the Borden's cellar. The murder weapon was never found. Could Lizzie have disposed of the weapon and her blood stained clothes in the time she had between the killings and the time the police arrived? There had even been speculation that there were no blood stained clothes because she committed the crime in the nude - but she would still have needed time to clean herself up and dispose of the weapon. She was seen by a friend tearing up a dress the morning after in order to burn it, but claimed she was doing so because the dress had paint on it.
8. In the days before the murders, there had been several visitors to the house, business contacts of Andrew's. An unidentified Portuguese man who was a former employee of Borden’s, and a man who'd called about renting a store front.
9. Lizzie is often portrayed as an odd, reclusive spinster. However, before the murders, she did have friends and was an active member of the community. It was after the trial, even though she was acquitted, that she lost all her friends. The people of the town ostracised her, not wanting to be associated in any way with the scandal. When she died at the age of 66, no-one attended her funeral.
10. The house where the murders took place has been a museum and a bed and breakfast since 1996, capitalising on what happened there. The rooms have photos of the crime scene and signs warning guests to “watch your head.” The room where Abby Borden was killed is allegedly the most requested bedroom.