At 11.10 on the morning of August 4, 1892, Lizzie Borden called the family maid downstairs. Her father was dead.
Andrew Borden lay on a sofa in the sitting room of his Fall River home, his head and face battered by repeated blows. Upstairs, his wife Abby was sprawled face down in the guest bedroom. She had been attacked even more savagely.
There had been no obvious robbery, no stranger seen fleeing the house and no commotion loud enough to alert the neighbourhood. Yet someone had killed two people in broad daylight, apparently moving through the Borden home without being noticed.
Lizzie, Andrew’s 32-year-old daughter, soon became the focus of the investigation. She would be arrested, tried for both murders and acquitted by a jury less than a year later. No one else was ever charged.
That is why the question has survived for more than 130 years: did Lizzie Borden kill her father and stepmother-and walk free?
Netflix’s Monster anthology has returned to the case in Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, the fourth installment of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s true-crime series. It revisits a murder that became part of American folklore, helped along by a nursery rhyme that was memorable, gruesome and not especially accurate.
The real story did not need embellishment. It already had a divided family, missing time, a burned dress, an alleged attempt to buy poison and a hatchet found in the basement.
A Family Divided
Long before the murders, the Borden home was marked by tensions over money and loyalty. Lizzie was born on July 19, 1860, the youngest surviving daughter of Andrew and Sarah Borden. Her mother died when she was three, and her older sister Emma reportedly promised to take care of her.
Andrew later married Abby Durfee Gray. She became the girls’ stepmother, although accounts suggest neither daughter fully accepted her in that role. Emma and Lizzie reportedly called her Mrs Borden or Abby rather than Mother.
Lizzie offered a gentler account when questioned after the killings. “We were friendly, very friendly,” she said, according to testimony cited by PEOPLE. Other reports described a household in which civility sat uneasily beside resentment.
Andrew was wealthy but famously frugal, and the family lived more modestly than his fortune might have allowed. His daughters wanted a more comfortable life and reportedly disliked the influence Abby appeared to have over him. In 1887, when Andrew bought property for Abby’s half-sister without telling them, the grievance sharpened.
“What he did for her people he ought to do for his own children,” Lizzie was alleged to have complained, according to American Heritage. Andrew later bought property for his daughters as well, but the concession did not necessarily repair the relationships inside the house.
The Morning Everything Changed
The Bordens woke on August 4, 1892, to what appeared to be an ordinary summer morning. Andrew, Abby, Lizzie and the maid, Bridget Sullivan, whom the family called Maggie, were at home. Emma was away.
Abby is believed to have been killed first. She had gone upstairs to make the bed in the guest room when her attacker struck. A later examination suggested she had died roughly 90 minutes before her husband.
Andrew, meanwhile, had left the house to conduct his morning business. When he returned, he settled on the sofa in the sitting room. He may have been resting or asleep when the killer came close enough to strike him around 10 or 11 times in the head and face.
Soon afterwards, Lizzie called Sullivan and told her that Andrew was dead. The maid went for help, and neighbours and Dr Seabury Bowen arrived at the house. Amid the shock, another question surfaced: where was Abby?
Lizzie initially said her stepmother had received a note asking her to visit a sick friend. The note was never found. She later suggested that Abby might have returned, prompting a search of the house.
Upstairs, a neighbour looked into the guest room and saw Abby’s body. She had been lying there while Andrew was still out, and possibly while he returned home and rested downstairs, unaware that his wife had already been killed.
The timing transformed the case. This was not a single burst of violence followed by a hurried escape. The murderer appeared to have struck, waited and then killed again.
Why Police Began To Suspect Lizzie
Investigators initially considered the possibility of an intruder, but the theory raised more questions than it answered. There was no obvious forced entry, nothing valuable appeared to have been taken and nobody had seen a stranger running from the property.
Lizzie said she had been in the barn around the time her father was killed, looking for fishing equipment and eating pears. Investigators found parts of her account inconsistent and wondered how she had remained unaware of two violent attacks under the same roof.
Her behaviour in the days that followed drew further scrutiny. A dress associated with her was burned in the kitchen stove. Lizzie said it had been stained with paint; to the authorities, its destruction looked suspiciously like the disappearance of evidence.
Blood-stained clothing was also found in the basement, although Lizzie said the blood was connected to menstruation. Once again, there was an explanation, but not one capable of ending suspicion.
The poison claim deepened it. Two pharmacists said Lizzie had tried to obtain prussic acid shortly before the murders. One said he refused to sell the deadly substance without a prescription. The allegation never became decisive evidence, but it gave prosecutors another disturbing detail to place beside the others.
Then police found a hatchet head in the basement, apparently mixed among other tools and covered in ash. Investigators believed it might have been connected to the killings. They could not, however, conclusively prove that it was the murder weapon or that Lizzie had ever used it.
This weakness would shadow the entire case. The authorities had a series of troubling circumstances, but no eyewitness, no definitive physical evidence and no direct link between Lizzie and the moment either victim was killed. Smithsonian Magazine has noted that the prosecution’s case ultimately depended on how those circumstances and Lizzie’s behaviour were interpreted.
The Daughter In The Dock
Lizzie was arrested on August 11, one week after the murders. What had begun as a grisly local crime became a national sensation: a respectable, churchgoing woman from a wealthy family stood accused of slaughtering her father and stepmother inside their home.
Her background complicated the prosecution’s case. In the Victorian imagination, a woman of Lizzie’s class and social standing did not fit the picture of a killer capable of such brutality. Newspapers and spectators became preoccupied with her clothes, expression and demeanour, reading guilt or innocence into the way she carried herself.
Her trial began on June 5, 1893, in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Prosecutors assembled the details that had made her look suspicious: the strained family relationships, the alleged poison purchase, her changing account, the burned dress and the hatchet in the basement.
But when those details were stripped of their drama, the holes were difficult to ignore. No one had seen Lizzie attack either victim. The alleged weapon could not be definitively tied to her. There was no conclusive forensic evidence placing her beside the bodies at the time of death.
The defence pressed those weaknesses while presenting Lizzie as a daughter trapped inside an appalling event rather than its author. Emma stood by her sister and disputed parts of the prosecution’s interpretation of Lizzie’s conduct.
The case became a contest between two plausible stories. The prosecution saw a woman whose resentment and behaviour pointed towards guilt; the defence saw investigators turning suspicion into certainty because the real killer had left them nothing else.
The assumptions of the era hung over the courtroom. Women could not serve on Massachusetts juries, so 12 men were asked to decide not only whether the evidence was sufficient, but whether a woman like Lizzie could have committed such a crime.
Not Guilty
On June 20, 1893, the jury returned its verdict after a relatively short deliberation. Lizzie Borden was found not guilty.
The verdict freed her, but it did not solve the murders. No alternative suspect was successfully prosecuted, and no later discovery established who had killed Andrew and Abby. The Library of Congress records the case’s stark chronology-the murders on August 4, Lizzie’s arrest a week later, the trial the following June and her acquittal 15 days after it began-but the most important line remains missing.
The name of the killer.
Lizzie stayed in Fall River after the trial. She and Emma bought a large Victorian house in the affluent Hill district and named it Maplecroft. It offered more of the life the sisters had once wanted, but money could not purchase Lizzie a place back in respectable society.
Neighbours watched her, children reportedly harassed the house and the community continued to treat her as though the jury’s verdict had settled nothing. She travelled, attended the theatre and entertained guests, but wherever she went, the murders went with her.
Even her relationship with Emma eventually broke apart. In 1905, after an unexplained dispute, Emma left Maplecroft. The sister who had defended Lizzie during the investigation and trial reportedly never reconciled with her.
Lizzie died at Maplecroft on June 1, 1927, aged 66. Emma died nine days later. Both were buried in the Borden family plot, close to Andrew and Abby.
The Mystery The House Kept
By then, the murders had escaped the courtroom and entered folklore. The famous rhyme gave Lizzie an axe, called Abby her mother and exaggerated the number of blows. The facts were less tidy and, for that reason, more unsettling.
Two people were killed inside their own home in daylight. The daughter who became the only accused was tried and acquitted. No one else was brought to justice, and no alternative account has ever explained every gap in the story.
Perhaps Lizzie killed them. Perhaps suspicion gathered around her because she was the one person investigators could not eliminate. The evidence created a legend, but not a conclusion.
More than a century later, the Borden house still holds the same secret: not how Andrew and Abby died, but who was standing over them when they did.
