Crime Overview

While Abby’s body lay motionless in the dim room upstairs, her husband, 69-year-old Andrew Borden, a bank president and successful real estate developer, returned home at 10:40 a.m. from a walk into town to attend to his business interests. He sat down for a bit with a handful of papers, talked to his daughter, Lizzie Borden, then soon settled onto the sofa in his sitting room for a nap. He reclined against the arm of the sofa just before 11 a.m. and presumably fell asleep. Minutes later, the person who had already killed his wife stood at the end of the sofa and delivered 10 hatchet blows to the side of his head and face, slicing his eyeball in half, smashing through bone and arteries at his temple and killing him dead.

These are the incontrovertible facts about the Borden murders; most everything else that happened before and after those murders, including the identity of the person who wielded the hatchet, became hotly debated at the time, and has been hotly debated in the decades since. Andrew’s daughter, 32-year-old Lizzie Borden—who admitted to being in the house at the time Abby was killed but had gone out to the barn during the time Andrew was killed—quickly attracted the suspicion of the police and she was arrested for the murders seven days later.

Yet, after standing trial the following June, Lizzie was declared “not guilty” by a jury and walked free, probably due to a lack of direct physical evidence she did the deed: no blood on her person and no weapon to be found. While still considered guilty in the eyes of history, in the light of cold, hard objectivity there is simply no way to know for certain that Lizzie was the one who killed her father and stepmother. Not that numerous people haven’t tried to puzzle through the case and come up with an answer; oh, how they have tried. But as there was no easily discernible motive for the attack—no one who knew the Bordens could fathom why anyone would want those two harmless old people dead—it is not easy to pin down bare facts from within the thick fog of opinions.

But for those (like this writer) with a burning curiosity to understand what happened, we can start with the events in the Borden Household in the Summer 1892, in which the family’s vacation plans went awry—the elder Bordens did not go to Swansea as expected, nor did Lizzie go with friends to stay at a cabin in Marion as expected—and Lizzie’s trip to New Bedford was rumored to have included her first search for poison.

We can move on to the week before the murders, a stretch of days in which the Bordens became violently ill on Tuesday night; Lizzie allegedly visited yet another drug store on Wednesday morning in search of poison; Lizzie’s uncle, John Morse showed up unexpectedly that afternoon for an overnight visit; and, Lizzie went to visit her friend Alice Russell and spoke of her fears that something terrible was going to happen.

From there, we can look at the conflicting stories of Lizzie and Bridget, the two people who were left alive in the house after the murders, about the seemingly mundane events of the the morning of August 4th, a warm morning in which Lizzie said she was engaged in reading a magazine, ironing handkerchiefs and poking  around the barn, while Bridget cooked and cleaned and spent an hour outside to washing windows.

We can also examine the grisly particulars of Abby’s murder as determined by the medical experts at trial, then find out how the murder of Andrew Borden is believed to have unfolded as well.

A closer look at the frantic and confusing minutes after the murders were discovered is especially revealing in the effort to understand how and why Lizzie became so quickly suspected by police.

Once police were involved, we can follow the steps of their investigation as it unfolded in the hours after the murders, to the quiet Friday in which the Borden sisters tried to grasp what had happened, to the busy Saturday of the funeral as well as the intensive police search and following visit from the police marshal and mayor in which Lizzie learned she was officially suspected. We can then move on to a Sunday in which Lizzie suspiciously burned a dress in the kitchen stove.

More searches were conducted on Monday, the day in which the district attorney arrived in Fall River and began leading the investigation, starting with an inquest into the murders that began on Tuesday and culminated with Lizzie’s arrest on Thursday, which ended a week of near unbearable suspense for Fall River citizens.

A few weeks later, a can follow the preliminary hearing in which the prosecution presented its evidence, argued its case, and Lizzie’s attorneys defended her passionately. This proceeding resulted in a finding from the judge that Lizzie was “probably guilty” of the murders of her parents. This sent Lizzie back to jail and the case forward to the deliberations of the grand jury.

For a comprehensive in-depth look at what the grand jury likely heard from witnesses that caused them to indict her, see the Evidence section.

Yet, whether one is drawn to delving into every detail of the case, or just skims the brutal facts of it, we will be able to see that the murders of Andrew and Abby Borden were not only horrific—“there is that in it all which lacerates the heartstrings of humanity,” said Knowlton—but so implausibly done that no matter who committed them they still remain officially unsolved over 130 years later.