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Lizzie Borden

Crime Files
Lizzie Borden

Lizzie Borden was born July 19, 1860 in Fall River, Massachusetts. Lizzie's world changed when her father remarried three years after the death of her mother. Lizzie and her sister started having difficulties with her father and stepmother over finances. On August 4, 1892 Lizzie claimed to have discovered the bodies of her father and stepmother beat to death. She was arrested, but acquitted of murder in 1893.

The Crime

I did not see his face, because he was all covered with blood. Lizzie BordenAmerican woman suspected of murdering her stepmother and father; her trial became a national sensation in the United States. Borden was the daughter of a well to do businessman who married for a second time in 1865, three years after Lizzie's mother died. Lizzie was popular and engaged in charitable work. Her father, by contrast, was reputedly dour and parsimonious as well as eminently wealthy and Lizzie and her elder sister Emma were ever at odds with him and their stepmother, often over financial matters. On a Thursday morning, August 4, 1892, Mr. Borden left home to conduct his business, leaving in the house, besides his wife, an Irish maid (Bridget Sullivan) and Lizzie. (Emma was away visiting.) On his return, he settled on a couch for a nap. About 11:15 , Lizzie (according to her testimony) discovered her father dead, repeatedly struck in the head with a sharp instrument. Upstairs his wife's body was found, even more brutally mutilated; examination proved that her death had preceded her husband's by an hour or so. It was found that Lizzie had tried to purchase prussic acid (a poison) on August 3, and a few days later she was alleged to have burned a dress in a stove.Sullivan, who also has been suspected, later that evening reportedly left the house carrying an unexamined parcel. No weapon was found, though an axe found in the basement was suspected.Lizzie was arrested and tried for both murders in June 1893 but was acquitted, given the circumstantial evidence. She was nonetheless ostracized thereafter by the people of her native Fall River, Massachusetts, where she continued to live until her death in 1927. The grisly murders inspired a great many books, both serious studies and fiction; Fall River Legend (1948), a ballet by Agnes de Mille; an opera, Lizzie Borden (1965), by Jack Beeson and Kenward Elmslie; and one immortal, if slightly inaccurate, quatrain: 'Lizzie Borden took an axe And gave her mother forty whacks; And when she saw what she had done She gave her father forty-one.'