Lizzie Andrew Borden died on June 1, 1927, at the age of 66 in Fall River, Massachusetts — nearly 34 years after her acquittal in the 1892 axe murders of her father and stepmother. The death certificate listed pneumonia as the cause. She had undergone gallbladder surgery the previous year and had been in declining health. Her sister Emma, who had shared the family home at 92 Second Street before their estrangement, died nine days later in Newmarket, New Hampshire, at age 76 from chronic nephritis.
The acquittal in 1893 did not shield Lizzie from public suspicion. She continued to live in Fall River, largely withdrawn from society. After the trial, she began using the name Lizbeth A. Borden — a detail that appears in her 1926 will and in probate records identifying her as "Lizbeth A. Borden otherwise called Lizzie A. Borden." She never married. After her father's death, the estate passed to her and Emma, and the sisters eventually moved from Second Street to Maplecroft on French Street. Pre-murder tensions had centered on Andrew and his wife Abby, and on family money, but the sisters themselves remained close through the trial and into the early 1900s; their estrangement developed later, around 1905, when Emma left Maplecroft. The split was never fully reconciled before Emma died in June 1927, just nine days after Lizzie.
The murders themselves had occurred on the morning of August 4, 1892, when Andrew Borden and his wife Abby were struck multiple times with an axe in the family home. Lizzie, who was home at the time, claimed to have no knowledge of the killings. She reported finding her father's body to a neighbor. The investigation quickly centered on her. She was arrested and tried in New Bedford in June 1893, with Fall River excluded from the jury pool, and ultimately acquitted. The trial lasted two weeks. She never explained what happened that morning.
After her acquittal, Lizzie faced an uncomfortable life in Fall River — a city that had largely concluded she was guilty despite the verdict. She and Emma eventually moved from Second Street to Maplecroft on French Street, but the sisters' relationship, which had frayed after 1905, never recovered. At her death in 1927, the obituaries noted the acquittal and the enduring controversy with equal weight, as if unable to fully commit to either framing. She was buried at Oak Grove Cemetery in Fall River beside her father and stepmother.
Her death certificate recorded the cause as pneumonia, following a period of illness that had begun after her gallbladder operation the prior year. The 1892 murders remained officially unsolved. No one was ever convicted. The case remains one of the most analyzed in American criminal history, with endless retellings that have never produced consensus on what actually happened on the morning of August 4, 1892.