The Lizzie Borden Hoedown

Fall River, Mass. Late August, 1892. Something dreadful happens at Andrew and Abby Borden’s. Both were literally chopped to death by someone wielding a hatchet. Who that was has never been determined.

What is known is that five people occupied 92 Second St. on Aug. 4, 1892: Andrew Borden, 70; his second wife, Abby, 63; his daughters from his first marriage, Emma, a spinster at 41; Lizzie, 32, also unmarried; and Bridget Sullivan, the Irish maid.

Emma was withdrawn, shy and a spinster. Lizzie was, in many ways, the opposite of her older sister. She was more outgoing, not at all timid, but also unmarried. Bridget, who had worked for the Bordens for two years, was outspoken about how strange the Borden family was.

Included in the list of suspects are Lizzie, where most evidence pointed, Emma, Bridget, Uncle John Morse, Andrew’s illegitimate son William, and several unnamed people cited by newspapers. Lizzie, however, is arrested and charged with the murders.

June 6, 1893. Lizzie’s trial begins. It is held in New Bedford rather than Fall River. The reason? There is so much negative publicity in the newspapers that a change in venue is deemed necessary for a fair trial. Fair or not, in the biggest case of the 19th century the jury finds Lizzie innocent of the murders.

Over the years, Lizzie is rarely out of the news. Papers continue to report her various activities, including an arrest for shoplifting, a rumored marriage, a supposed lesbian relationship with an actress and her death in 1927. One newspaper, the Fall River Daily Globe, never forgets the murders, and never relinquishes its belief that Lizzie is the murderer. Up to her death each year on the anniversary of the murders, the paper editorializes about Lizzie’s guilt.

Even now Lizzie remains in the news. In 1994 a play titled A Musical Tragedy in Two Axe was produced as was the 1996 opera, Lizzie Borden. A current newsletter, The Weekly Hatchet, is based upon the 1892 murders, and in 1996 the Borden House opened as a bed and breakfast. For years after the murders, children jumped rope to various versions of the “Fall River Hoedown”:

Elizabeth Borden took an ax

And gave her mother 40 whacks

And when the job was nicely done

She gave her father 41!

Stories appeared in newspapers all over the world. In the media’s drive to find material, no fact or rumor, however minute, was beyond inclusion in the latest report. As the case wore on, planted stories and even planted rumors and evidence from all sides became the order of the day.

Abby was a spinster at 38 when she married Andrew and took on the role of mother in the household. Abby was viewed by Lizzie and Emma as the classic stereotype of the stepmother, an interloper with designs on the children’s birthright. The daughters’ hate for Abby seemed obvious to everyone. Lizzie and Emma had not spoken to their stepmother in perhaps two years except to maintain a smooth order in the small house, and relations with their father also had been strained in recent years.

Emma was an enigma. Apparently reconciled to spinsterhood, she was withdrawn from life outside the Borden house, hated her stepmother with a passion that was remarked on both before and after the murders, was estranged from her father, but was devoted to her younger sister, Lizzie.

Lizzie on the other hand, was in many ways the opposite of her sister. She was more outgoing, not at all timid, was still able to talk with her father, but was unmarried at 32, shared Emma’s hate for her stepmother and could be arrogant and outspoken.

A bungled job of reporting also greased that precipitous slide in public opinion against Lizzie. The newspaper with the largest circulation in New England, the Boston Daily Globe, was tricked by a detective hired by the Fall River police into running a story it had not independently verified. On page 1 of the Aug. 10 edition, a 13-column story offered up a motive and proclaimed 25 new witnesses had been found that pointed to Lizzie’s guilt.

Among the claims were that Lizzie was pregnant by Uncle John Morse, that she had admitted it to her father the night before the murders, that a witness had seen Lizzie in the upstairs bedroom where Abby Borden died looking out the window at the time of her murder, that Bridget said Lizzie had promised her money if she would not talk to the police, that Lizzie had committed the murders during an epileptic seizure and that Lizzie murdered her parents because her father had killed her pet pigeons some months before.

When the Globe admitted its mistake, public sentiment and support shifted to Lizzie and the state never regained its momentum. The public began to admire the hard edge that Lizzie showed to the world.

It took the jury one vote and one hour to find Lizzie innocent of the murders.

Lizzie was free but not forgotten. Inside and outside the courtroom the crowds cheered when Lizzie was found innocent. Her triumph lasted until Sunday when Lizzie made her first attempt to reenter Fall River society by going to church. When she sat on the pew purchased by her father years before, those churchgoers nearby moved away. She remained isolated for the rest of her life.