The Lizzie Borden case: what the 1892 and 1893 record shows, and where the legend took over
An SC360 Special for Halloween: the Fall River killings and the New Bedford trial as the testimony of the time recorded them, with the legend marked where it leaves the record.
FALL RIVER Andrew J. Borden and his wife, Abby, were killed in their home at 92 Second St. in Fall River on the morning of Thursday, Aug. 4, 1892, and his younger daughter, Lizzie, was charged with both deaths. A jury in New Bedford found her not guilty on June 20, 1893. The inquest, the preliminary hearing and the trial left a long written record; the jump-rope rhyme and the ghost tours at the house on Second Street came later, and they do not always agree with it.
Most of the record here comes from Edwin H. Porter's The Fall River Tragedy: A History of the Borden Murders, written after the trial and now in the public domain, which reprints testimony from the hearings and the trial at length. Porter spells the stepmother's name Abbie. The verdict is also confirmed in a New York newspaper's extra edition the same day, and Lizzie Borden's death in an Associated Press obituary from 1927.
The morning of Aug. 4
City Marshal Rufus B. Hilliard was in his office at 11 a.m. when a telephone message from John Cunningham reported "a stabbing affray" on Second Street, Porter wrote. More than half the department was away at Rocky Point on its annual excursion. The marshal sent Officer George Allen, the only officer on duty at the station, who ran to the house and saw Andrew Borden's body lying on the sitting room sofa.
Lizzie, 32, and her older sister, Emma, were Andrew Borden's daughters by his first marriage, and their mother died when Lizzie was 2. Emma was visiting friends in Fairhaven that day and came home that evening after a telegram from Dr. S. W. Bowen. Porter counted Andrew Borden among the wealthy men of Fall River and wrote that people who knew his affairs put his estate at $300,000.
Lizzie told the first people to arrive that she had spoken with her father when he came home from his errands in the city, saw him settled on the sofa and went out to the barn, and found his body when she came back, Porter wrote. Bridget Sullivan, the family's only servant, had finished washing the windows and was lying down in her attic room. Lizzie sent her for Bowen, who was out, and then for Alice Russell, a family friend who lived two blocks away. A neighbor, Adelaide B. Churchill, came over, and she and Sullivan found Abby Borden's body in the guest chamber on the second floor.
Medical Examiner William A. Dolan testified at the preliminary hearing that a hatchet or axe was, in his opinion, the weapon, and that "a weapon weighing four or five pounds could easily have made the cuts." Porter wrote that when the bodies were found, the blood around Abby Borden's head had clotted while her husband's was still fresh, and that she appeared to have died about two hours before he did.
Inquest, arrest and indictment
Police went from drugstore to drugstore asking who had tried to buy poison. Eli Bence, a clerk at D. R. Smith's pharmacy at South Main and Columbia streets, told them that on the Wednesday before the killings a young woman had asked for hydrocyanic acid, also called prussic acid, Porter wrote. At the preliminary hearing, Frank H. Kilroy, who was in the store, testified that he heard Bence tell her, "I can't sell prussic acid without a prescription," and said he was sure the defendant was the woman. When the district attorney read Lizzie Borden's inquest testimony aloud at the same hearing, it included her answer: "I did not go to Smith's drug store to buy prussic acid."
The inquest was held in secret at the Central Police Station before Judge Josiah C. Blaisdell. Andrew J. Jennings, the Fall River lawyer the Borden sisters had retained, asked to attend and was refused, and Lizzie Borden spent an afternoon on the witness stand, Porter wrote. Police arrested her the evening the inquest closed. After the preliminary hearing, Blaisdell found her "probably guilty" of her father's murder and held her for the grand jury, and she was taken to the county jail in Taunton.
On Dec. 2, 1892, a Bristol County grand jury returned three indictments: one for the murder of her father, one for the murder of her stepmother and a third charging both. On May 8, 1893, she was taken from the Taunton jail to New Bedford and arraigned before Superior Court Judge J. W. Hammond. Her plea on each charge was not guilty.
The trial in New Bedford
The trial opened in New Bedford on Monday, June 5, 1893, before three Superior Court justices: Chief Justice Albert Mason and Associate Justices Caleb Blodgett and Justin Dewey. On the first day the room held 150 men called as possible jurors, court officers, a few of the defendant's friends and 35 newspaper correspondents, Porter wrote. The 12 jurors all came from Bristol County. The foreman was Charles I. Richards of North Attleboro, and the others came from Taunton (three), Westport, Somerset, Raynham, Easton, New Bedford, Attleboro, Seekonk and Dartmouth.
District Attorney Hosea M. Knowlton of New Bedford tried the case for the Commonwealth with William H. Moody, the Essex County district attorney. The defense was Jennings, Col. Melvin O. Adams of Boston and former Gov. George D. Robinson. Moody opened for the government on the second day: "Upon the fourth day of August of the last year, an old man and woman, husband and wife, each without a known enemy in the world, in their own home, upon a frequented street," he began. Moody told the jury that the bloody weapon was not found beside the victims, on the premises or near them, and said: "The Government does not insist that these homicides were committed by this handleless hatchet. It may have been the weapon." That afternoon the jury visited the house in Fall River.
In his closing argument, Knowlton reminded jurors of Alice Russell's testimony that, in the days after the killings, she found Lizzie at the kitchen stove with a dress skirt and heard her say, "I am going to burn this old thing up. It is all covered with paint." Knowlton told jurors that Emma Borden had testified she was the one who told her sister to destroy the dress.
Robinson gave the closing argument for the defense, and he told the jury that the stakes were a life. "You are trying a capital case, a case that involves a human life, a verdict in which against her calls for the imposition of but one penalty, and that is that she shall walk to her death," he said, as Porter printed it. Given the chance to address the jury herself before the charge, Lizzie Borden stood and said, "I am innocent. I leave it to my counsel to speak for me."
Dewey delivered the charge. The jury was out one hour and 10 minutes, Porter wrote, and when the clerk asked for the verdict the foreman broke in: "Not guilty." Spectators burst into applause, and officers checked it at once. Knowlton asked that the two remaining indictments be dropped because of the verdict, and the court ordered her discharged. The Evening World in New York put it on the front page of an extra edition the same day: "NEW BEDFORD, June 20. The jury finds Lizzie Borden not guilty of the murder of her father and stepmother."
After the trial
She stayed in Fall River, where she went by Lisbeth A. Borden, and died at her home there on the night of June 1, 1927, according to an Associated Press dispatch printed in the New Britain Herald the next day. The dispatch said she had lived quietly in the city since her acquittal, had undergone an operation about a year earlier and never fully recovered, and made frequent trips to other cities, mainly Washington. It said Bridget Sullivan had gone home to Ireland and that it was not known in Fall River whether she was still living.
Where the legend leaves the record
As Crime+Investigation UK prints the jump-rope rhyme, it says Lizzie Borden "gave her mother forty whacks" and then "gave her father forty-one." Crime+Investigation traces the rhyme to vaudeville doggerel that surfaced around the turn of the 20th century, years after the trial. The record differs on each count. Abby Borden was her stepmother, not her mother. Dolan testified at the preliminary hearing that there were 18 distinct wounds on Abby Borden's head and 10 on her husband's, though Porter reported that the first partial autopsy counted 13 on Andrew Borden. And the jury found her not guilty.
The 1927 Associated Press obituary repeated parts of the legend. It said the couple had been "hacked to death with an axe" and called them her father and mother. Dolan had said a hatchet or an axe, and Abby Borden was her father's second wife.
The house itself now runs as an inn and museum, open daily from 10 a.m. to midnight, and its website calls it "America's Most Haunted House" and sells ghost tours. The same site says its house tours share "the true, evidence-based story" of the case, and adds that "it has a haunted reputation for a reason." The ghost stories are the house's own telling and form no part of the 1892 and 1893 record.
The house held its Victorian funeral program, In Mourning, earlier this month. SC360 covered its final Sunday.
Label: Reported by us, from the town's posted records.
Notes
The account of Aug. 4, 1892, the inquest, the preliminary hearing, the indictments, the arraignment and the trial comes from Edwin H. Porter's The Fall River Tragedy: A History of the Borden Murders, which reprints the testimony, the arguments and the verdict; it is cited by chapter in our evidence file. The verdict is also confirmed by The Evening World of June 20, 1893, and Lizzie Borden's death by an Associated Press obituary printed in the New Britain Herald on June 2, 1927, both read from the Library of Congress. The rhyme is quoted as Crime+Investigation UK prints it. The house hours and wording come from the Lizzie Borden House website. We read them on Oct. 31, 2026. We checked each date and weekday against a calendar. Every person named in this story died long ago; Lizzie Borden was acquitted, and nothing here says otherwise. Not heard: we interviewed no one for this history; it rests on the printed record of the time.
Corrections
No corrections to this story. If something here is wrong, tell us. Every correction is dated on the story and listed in our public log.
Sources (5)
- Edwin H. Porter, The Fall River Tragedy: A History of the Borden Murders | Project Gutenberg eBook 57939Released Sept. 22, 2018; images courtesy of Cornell University Law Library, Trial Pamphlets Collection. Public domain in the U.S. Preface, Chapters I to III, XI, XIV, XX, XXII, XXXI, XXXII and the verdict read in full; testimony passages used read in context. Read Oct. 31, 2026.
- The Evening World (New York), June 20, 1893, second sporting extra, page 1 | Library of Congress, Chronicling AmericaVerdict dispatch datelined New Bedford, June 20, read from the Library of Congress full text. Read Oct. 31, 2026.
- New Britain Herald (New Britain, Conn.), June 2, 1927, page 10: Associated Press obituary of Lisbeth A. Borden | Library of Congress, Chronicling AmericaRead from the Library of Congress full text. Read Oct. 31, 2026.
- 'Lizzie Borden took an axe': How a grisly rhyme became an American legend | Crime+Investigation UKUsed only for the text of the rhyme and the network's account of where it came from. Read Oct. 31, 2026.
- Official Lizzie Borden HouseHome page: hours, inn and museum, "America's Most Haunted House" and tour wording. Read Oct. 31, 2026.