My History with Lizzie Borden

When I first heard about the Borden murders and the general situation surrounding it, I imagined them taking place on a dark and stormy night in an old Victorian mansion. A woman in the house suddenly snaps for no reason, grabs a nearby ax, and chops up her parents in a violent rage. She is caught red-handed and spends the rest of her life in jail.

The truth is so much more complex and ambiguous. Instead, Andrew Borden and his wife, Abby, Lizzie’s stepmother, are found slain in separate rooms in their modest home in broad daylight during a summer heatwave. Lizzie is eventually arrested because she’s the only one without a solid alibi, but she’s acquitted months later. A hatchet is likely suspected as the murder weapon, though none was ever found, nor was a concrete killer.

Did Lizzie Borden get away with murder, or is she completely innocent? We’ll likely never know, but we’ll probably always speculate about it. That speculation and its mountain of evidence to comb through and analyze makes it a perfect historical event for true crime enthusiasts to keep returning to.

In returning to this crime throughout the years, I’ve teetered back and forth on my own personal opinions about what happened, taking into consideration every theory. I’ve also discovered an even larger history that points to a potential curse that plagues the extended Borden family. And to my surprise, I found that I myself am a member of that extended family. Below I chronicle my own history with the Borden murders and break down what makes it such a fascinating historical true crime story.

The basic facts

For the general rundown of the murder, the investigation, and the trial, you can turn to a number of sources from books to articles to podcasts, TV series, movies, and YouTube videos. One of my favorite true crime YouTubers, Kendall Rae, has a very thorough video about the Borden murders on her channel. I also recommend A Treasury of Victorian Murder: The Borden Tragedy, a graphic novel by Rick Geary that provides a fully illustrated version of the events leading up to the murders all the way to the death of Lizzie Borden, but I’ll break them down here as well.

On the morning of August 4, 1892, in Fall River, MA, Abby Borden was attacked while cleaning the guest bedroom. Her body remained there undetected for the next few hours.

Late that morning, Andrew returned home from conducting some business and decided to take a nap on the couch in the sitting room. The family had been ill recently, and that, along with the heat, had worn them out. The maid, Bridget, was also napping in her room after washing the windows that morning.

Andrew was attacked while asleep. The photo of his mutilated body is still very gory, even by today’s standards and even with the protective cover of black and white photography.

Lizzie, who claimed to be in the barn, comes inside and discovers her father’s body. She calls out to Bridget for help. She then runs out into the street and alerts others that her father has been murdered. She’s dazed but not hysterical much to the townspeople’s confusion.

A neighbor named Mrs. Churchill comforts Lizzie and eventually finds the body of Abby in the bedroom. Investigators are called and locate two axes, a hatchet, and lots of ax heads, though none can definitively be detected as the murder weapon.

The Bordens’ funeral is held two days later. An inquest into the murders is then opened. Lizzie’s conflicting details along with the fact that she’s the only household member without a definitive alibi leads to her arrest exactly one week later on August 11^th.

Lizzie’s trial begins the following year on June 5, 1893. She is acquitted 15 days later on June 20, 1893. Lizzie and her sister, Emma, sell their father’s house and move into a mansion called Maplecroft. The two have a falling out in 1905, and Lizzie lives in isolation at Maplecroft until her death in 1927.

The players

We usually think of victims as completely innocent, angelic people and murders as purely evil and irredeemable monsters. The thing about the Borden murders is that everyone is human, each with their own character flaws and a mixture of qualities.

Andrew, despite his wealth, was known to be very miserly. You’ll see that the Borden house is large but also fairly modest. They had a maid, but the women in the house were expected to pitch in with the chores.

This didn’t go over well with Lizzie. She was frustrated by her father’s modest lifestyle, and she wanted a more lavish lifestyle. She wasn’t married, and it didn’t look like she was going to get married. So, she knew that she was going to be at her father’s mercy for as long as he was alive.

It is believed that Lizzie didn’t get along with her stepmother, Abby, who wasn’t much older than Lizzie. Abby had married well above her social class. And despite Andrew’s death being the more talked about murder, she received twice as many blows to her body as her husband, 20 to his 10, not 40 and 41 as the schoolyard nursery rhyme that had developed around their murders suggests.

The gossip

The problem with a lot of the facts of this case is that they are based on word of mouth rather than cold, hard evidence. Those who have alibis have so because the townspeople backed up the theories that people were where they say they were at the appropriate times.

There’s talk about a mysterious man lurking around the property at the time of the murders. Was there really?

Word spread that Lizzie was attempting to buy poison in the days leading up to the murders. Around this time, the family was sick, presumably with some sort of food poisoning. Was Lizzie trying a more civilized method of murder prior to the bloodier, much more intense one that befell her parents?

Just before Lizzie’s trial was to start, a young woman named Bertha Manchester was also murdered by an ax on her father’s farm, leading to speculation that there was an ax murderer on the loose. This actually worked in Lizzie’s favor and may have led to her acquittal.

Gossip and rumors still persist to this day into saturating the public opinion around a major news story. However, the hearsay sways is the way that society will remember a story rather than the facts. And this can grow into major conspiracy theories.

One summer, I read a book called Lizzie Borden: The Legend, the Truth, the Final Chapter by Arnold R. Brown. It alleges that Lizzie’s father, Andrew, fathered an illegitimate son named William. When William tried and failed to extort money from his father, he murdered them, and Lizzie covered it up.

This version, known as the Brown theory, is very detailed and seems as plausible as any theory, considering that we don’t know for sure what happened. But a lot of Brown’s sources also come from town gossip. So, it too has to be taken with a grain of salt.

My personal connection to the Bordens

While researching my mother’s genealogy on Ancestry.com, I found that her mother’s side was related to the Cornell Family. These were the founders of Cornell University. Attached to one relative was an article from the History Channel’s website titled “Family Tradition: Did Lizzie Borden’s Ancestor Kill His Mother Too?” by Jennie Cohen.

The article has since been taken down, but I copied and pasted it for my research. It details how a member of the Cornell family, Thomas Cornell, was put on trial for burning his mother to death. He was convicted and hanged in Rhode Island in 1673.

Thomas’ wife, Sarah, was pregnant at the time of the execution. She later gave birth to a daughter who she named Innocent. Innocent grew up to marry Richard Borden, a direct ancestor of Lizzie’s father, Andrew.

Lizzie was acquitted centuries later in 1892. But honestly, both trials could have gone either way.

Thomas had the misfortune of the gossip not going his way. It didn’t help that his mother had gone around town talking about how bad Thomas and his wife were treating her prior to her death.

Another piece of evidence that was stacked against him was a dream that his sister claimed to have had which alleges that her mother came to her in a dream and provided a vague description of her death. This was interpreted to mean that she was pointing the finger at Thomas. The unfairness of his trial, whether he caused his mother’s death or not, shows how far we’ve come in deciding what counts as evidence and how it determines the fate of a person on trial.

In any case, thanks to Innocent, I now have a genetic connection to Lizzie Borden. Having hoped to find someone famous after gathering branch after branch of family trees from all four grandparents, the Borden connection may not be something to brag about in a particular social circle, but it’s still very intriguing, given my personal fascination with their story.

More on the Cornell/Borden connection

Not too long ago, I listened to a podcast called Tenfold More Wicked which dedicated their entire final season to the Cornell and Borden family and the possible “curse” that surrounds them and their history in Fall River. In fact, you can throw a stone from the Borden house and hit other tragic events that have befallen the town throughout the years.

A supernatural theory as to why the family is curse involves a family member accidentally desecrating an indigenous man’s gravesite. There are also more biological explanations such as untreated mental illness that runs rampant through the family and continues to this day, admittedly seeping into my own direct family line.

Whether supernatural or not, the history of this bloodline is riddled with fascinating, yet horrific stories, and it’s so interesting to put these connections together and see how a series of events can culminate into unforgettable historical events. Whether it’s corruption of wealth, gender politics, mental illness, or simply a random act of violence, there’s so much to unpack with this family that I’m sure it’s going to continue to be dissected for a long time to come.

Final thoughts on Lizzie Borden

I’ve noticed that, even when we acquit the main suspect of a crime, we still associate the crime with that person. And this fuels the speculation and cements it as fact. For example, we call the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman the O.J. Simpson murders, even though Simpson was acquitted because he was at the forefront of speculation surrounding their deaths and the subject of the trial that attempted to give these two justice. Because we don’t know the definitive answer, that original theory and all the evidence for it, prevails.

You can say that the Bordens had to have been murdered by someone they knew due to the severity of the crime. But we know tons of serial killers who have chosen their victims at random and have mutilated these strangers without any personal vendetta against them.

Would we find definitive evidence to solve the Borden murders today, it does nothing to bring justice to anyone involved. The Bordens remain dead. Lizzie remains infamous, and the story would still be a tentpole American true crime story.

I recently heard that the Jack the Ripper story prevails because it’s unsolved, and there is no solving it because at this point, nobody wants it to be solved, and not everyone would want to believe the truth. Because when it comes to unsolved mysteries, it’s the research that’s the most compelling, particularly for armchair detectives. It’s the Rubik’s Cube that you keep working on even though you get no closer to solving it.

At the end of the day, though, we risk dehumanizing real people, both the victims and villains. This was not a Hollywood horror scene. This was a real nightmare come to life on a hot, sunny American day that affected the lives of everyone around it and continued to trickle down through history, not even as a cautionary tale or something that we could learn from, but simply a sensational chain of events that thrill those of us who are able to watch it unfold from a comfortable distance.

I think, even before finding out my biological relationship to these characters, this story taught me to respect others’ history. Don’t let the sensationalism take over. And, above all, respect the idea that, while it probably won’t happen, anything as devastating as this story could happen to any one of us under the right, or wrong circumstances.

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Buy a copy of The Fall River Tragedy: A History of the Borden Murders here, and help support local bookstores! This is an affiliate link, and I will earn a commission on any sales.

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