On the morning of August 4, 1892, the citizens of Fall River, Massachusetts, awoke to an ordinary summer day. By midday, they would be speaking of nothing else.
At the Borden home at 92 Second Street, sometime before noon, two people were beaten to death with a hatchet. Abby Borden, the stepmother, was found in the upstairs guest room, her head struck repeatedly. Andrew Borden, her husband and a prosperous local businessman, was found in the downstairs sitting room, having been attacked while resting on the sofa. Both killings happened in the middle of the morning, in a house on a busy urban street, and not a single neighbor or passerby reported hearing or seeing anything unusual.
Andrew Borden, 70, was among Fall River's most successful men — his wealth accumulated through real estate investments, banking connections, and business dealings that had made him a familiar name in town. His second wife Abby, 64, had been part of the household for years, though her standing with Andrew's two daughters had always been uneasy. Lizzie and Emma had long viewed Abby as an outsider; Abby was said to feel unwelcome in return. Andrew was known for keeping his money close, and the modest brick house on Second Street was a quiet point of resentment among a community that knew just how wealthy its owner was.
The morning of the murders, Emma was away visiting friends out of town. Lizzie, 32, was the only family member at home. She later told police she had spent the morning in the barn behind the house and in the yard when the killings took place. Under questioning, her account shifted. She reported hearing nothing, seeing no one enter or leave, noticing nothing out of place — despite being alone in a house where two people had apparently been killed within the same few hours.
Investigators focused quickly on Lizzie. The sequence of events resisted innocent explanation: two victims attacked at different times, no apparent witnesses, no obvious intruder. In the days that followed, Lizzie was observed burning a dress in the kitchen stove, telling a neighbor the garment had been stained with paint. Police also found a hatchet head in the basement — its handle freshly broken and its blade strangely clean of blood — a detail that investigators found more suspicious than exculpatory. On August 11, exactly one week after the murders, Lizzie Borden was arrested and charged with both deaths.
The trial, among the most heavily covered legal proceedings in nineteenth-century America, began on June 5, 1893, in New Bedford — moved from Fall River due to concerns about finding an unbiased jury in the community where the murders had occurred. District Attorney William H. Moody built the prosecution's case on circumstantial evidence: Lizzie's proximity to the victims, the inconsistencies in her account, the dress burned in the days after the deaths. Her defense team, which included former Massachusetts Governor John D. Long, argued that no blood had ever been found on Lizzie's person or clothing and that no witness could place her near either victim at the time of the attacks. Judge Justin Dewey presided.
On June 20, 1893, after barely an hour of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. The acquittal rippled across the country and immediately sparked debate that has never fully quieted.
Lizzie Borden lived the rest of her life in Fall River. She and Emma moved to a larger home on a quieter street, and Lizzie eventually took the name Lizbeth. The sisters had a falling out in later years and never reconciled. Lizzie died on June 1, 1927, at the age of 66. Emma died nine days later.
The murders were never officially solved. No one else was ever arrested or charged. The house at 92 Second Street still stands today, operating as a bed and breakfast and museum that draws visitors from across the country year-round — a place where the question of what happened on that August morning has been asked so many times it has become part of the architecture.
A children's rhyme attached itself to the case not long after, with numbers that were wrong and a tone too light for what happened. It stuck anyway. More than a century after that summer morning in Fall River, the murders of Andrew and Abby Borden remain officially unsolved.