Lizzie Borden: Maiden of the Hatchet
One hundred and thirty-four years ago, on the morning of August 4, 1892, the most talked-about murders in American history happened inside one of the plainest houses on the street.
Ninety-two Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts was a narrow, hardworking home, and by late morning it held two dead bodies, a family in shock, and a question that has outlasted everyone who ever tried to answer it.
The case intrigues me for the same reason a certain kind of true-crime fan can’t stand it. It won’t close. We want a monster, and what the record hands us instead is a respectable household, a fortune held tight, a family quietly at odds with itself, and a silence no verdict has ever managed to fill.
The Perfect Family on Second Street
Andrew Jackson Borden was a wealthy Fall River businessman with rental properties around the city, and by the accounts at trial he kept his family in a modest house and a careful life (Famous Trials). His second wife, Abby Durfee Gray Borden, had been stepmother to his two grown daughters for most of their lives. Emma, the elder daughter, was away from home that week. Lizzie, thirty-two, was there (Britannica), along with the maid, Bridget Sullivan, whom the family called Maggie, and a visiting uncle, John Morse, who had eaten breakfast in the house that morning before heading out on errands (Famous Trials).
Money and tight family quarters ran at cross-purposes under that roof, the way they do in a lot of families. Lizzie’s relationship with her stepmother had cooled to the point that, by later testimony, she called Abby a mean good-for-nothing and kept her distance, while others in the home described things as pleasant (Famous Trials). And there was a small, strange detail waiting in the background: Andrew and Abby had both been sick to their stomachs the day before they died (Famous Trials). None of it looked like much at the time.
Morning Killings
The death investigation timeline investigators pieced together is precise in outline and haunting in its gaps.
Sometime in the nine o’clock hour, Abby went up to tidy the guest room and was struck down from behind. She lay there, undiscovered, while the ordinary business of the morning went on below her. Andrew came home from his rounds late that morning, was let in, and lay down to rest on the sitting room sofa. There he was killed, his face turned toward the room. The whole thing unfolded inside a window from nine o’clock to just past eleven (Britannica).
The house filled fast with a neighbor, a doctor from nearby, and then the police. Only when the search moved upstairs did anyone find Abby, already cold in the guest room, dead well before her husband. Two killings, one small house.
Limitations of early forensic science
It’s easy, from a distance of more than a century, to be smug about what the Fall River police could or couldn’t do in 1892. Truth is, forensic science as we understand it in 2026 was emerging, but nascent.
There was no fingerprinting admissible in American courtrooms yet. DNA was nearly a century from being used to solve crimes. And there no way to tell if blood was human or animal.
Medical Examiner Dr. William Dolan stepped into the case early and worked it with real care. Autopsies were done, samples were preserved, and the evidence went to Professor Edward Wood, a chemist at Harvard Medical School, for analysis (Famous Trials, Wood testimony). Those investigators used the science they had.
That effort produced the single most important finding in the case. By comparing how far breakfast had digested in each victim, Wood placed the two deaths about an hour and a half apart, a gap he stood behind at no less than an hour under cross-examination (Famous Trials, Wood testimony). Abby had died first. That reordered everything, because it meant the killer had been in or near that little house in the morning. Investigators also pulled a hatchet head with a broken handle from the cellar, a plausible weapon, given their fatal injuries (Britannica).
A few details gave the investigators pause. A druggist named Eli Bence reported that Lizzie had tried to buy prussic acid, a deadly poison, the day before the murders, saying she wanted it to clean a garment. Days later, a friend named Alice Russell watched Lizzie burn a blue dress in the kitchen, which Lizzie explained as ruined by paint (Famous Trials).
A trial the whole country eyed
Lizzie was arrested, and her trial opened in the summer of 1893 at the courthouse in New Bedford, with the nation reading along by telegraph. The Commonwealth was led by District Attorney Hosea Knowlton and William Moody. Lizzie’s defense was formidable, anchored by former Massachusetts governor George Robinson alongside her family attorney Andrew Jennings (Famous Trials).
The prosecution built a wholly circumstantial case. The defense answered every strand with reasonable doubt and won two crucial rulings. The court excluded Lizzie’s own inquest testimony, which had shifted each time she told it. They gave grounds that she’d given it without counsel and without the protections a defendant is owed. It kept the prussic acid story from the jury as well (Famous Trials). The state was left arguing a hatchet that they couldn’t prove she had wielded.
There was one moment of pure courtroom theater. When the prosecution brought out evidence and the victims’ skulls came into view, Lizzie fainted and stayed out for several minutes (Famous Trials).
And who can forget the little playground song based on the case. The rhyme says Lizzie Borden gave forty whacks for her stepmother and forty-one for her father. The autopsy record is grim, but smaller than the legend. Abby was wacked closer to eighteen or nineteen blows to Abby, and ten or eleven to Andrew (Britannica). Folklore got it wrong, but it makes for a great legend.
On June 20, 1893, the jury took about an hour to acquit her (Britannica). She walked out a free woman, bought a fine house up on the hill in Fall River that she named Maplecroft, and lived there until her death in 1927 (Famous Trials). No one else was ever charged.
Secrets and Silence
Here’s what’s interesting. The modern read leans toward Lizzie being guilty of murder; and the acquittal shows how it played out in the late 1800s. Both of those can be true at once.
A late last century jury (all men by the way– women weren’t allowed on juries in the U.S. until the 1950s) did its job the best they could with the evidence they had.
The creep factor is that the house on Second Street looked like every other house on the street. Ordinary rooms keep extraordinary secrets. The paradox here is a minefield for writing and what makes this case stick with us today.
If you want it proved in physical evidence, the wounds, the stomach contents, the hatchet… we’re a hundred years too early. I lay it out more in the companion piece, The Forensic File: Lizzie Borden. This one is the story. That one is the science.
Lessons from the house on Second Street
- For anyone drawn to true crime: an acquittal and a strong likelihood can live side by side.
- For readers of history: judge the investigators by their era, not ours. The 1892 team preserved samples, ordered a Harvard analysis, and established the order of the two deaths, all without the tools we now take for granted.
- For writers, this one’s for you: the Borden house is a master class in letting a setting become another character and use circumstantial evidence to lead your plot.
- For all of us: the pull of this case was never the gore. It’s the unbearable ordinariness of the setting and its victims, and the reminder that the people closest to us live lives we only half see.
Next in the Forensic File, I trade the storyteller’s chair for the examiner’s table and walk the physical evidence step by step. Until then, mind the quiet houses. You never really know what goes on inside a family’s private life!
Stay curious. Jen
