The Historic Lizzie Borden House Bed & Breakfast

Lizzie Borden: an Imperfect Crime

Welcome to Weird Wednesday! Today we’re visiting 1892 Fall River, Massachusetts. It’s a hot August day, and the house beside us is about to go from inconspicuous to infamous.

I have actually been to Lizzie Borden’s house. It’s a bed and breakfast now. I stayed a night with my oldest kiddo, then 15, with myself in Lizzie’s room, and kiddo in Lizzie’s sister Emma’s room. Neither of us were brave enough to sleep in the murder room.

(Side note: we happened to be there when Buzzfeed Unsolved was filming their Lizzie Borden episode, so if you hear people tromping through the house in the background, that’s probably us!)

You may know the poem: Lizzie Borden took an ax / Gave her mother forty whacks / When she saw what she had done / She gave her father forty-one. Turns out almost none of that is actually true. So let’s take a look at what really happened.

Lizzie Borden was 32 years old when her father and stepmother were brutally murdered in their own home. On the morning of Aug 4, 1892, there were three people in the house: Lizzie, her stepmother Abby, and the maid, Bridget Sullivan. Bridget spent the morning outside, cleaning windows, while Lizzie was inside. Abby spent the morning getting murdered.

Sign over the stairs at the B&B 

Here’s where it gets complicated, and why the case is still so famous. There are some very hard things to explain if Lizzie was not the murderer—and equally hard things to explain if she was. I’ll give you some of the run-down we got at the B&B.

Where was Abby? Lizzie claimed her stepmother Abby had received a note from a sick friend and left on a visit. When the police arrived after Andrew’s body was discovered, Lizzie said she thought she’d heard her stepmother come home and that people should go looking for her. That’s when Abby’s body was found, visible on the floor as soon as somebody got partway up the stairs.

There are four problems for Lizzie with this timeline. First, it was obvious that Abby had been killed up to 90 minutes before Andrew. So she hadn’t left to see a friend, or if she had, she’d returned very quickly. Second, the murderer would have had to be hanging out in the house for an hour or so before Andrew came home and took his ill-fated nap, but made no attack on Lizzie. Third, when Lizzie discovered her father’s body, she didn’t run screaming from the house in fear there might be a deranged killer still around. And fourth, Bridget outside the house and Lizzie inside did not see the murderer come or go at all.

So where was Lizzie, really? At the B&B they did a little test for us: they had us stand in the first-floor dining room while someone in the upstairs guest room dropped a weight that matched that of Abby Borden. When the weight hit the floor, the house shook. There is no way Lizzie could have been in the house and not heard her stepmother fall. (Nor could she have started to climb the stairs for any reason without seeing Abby’s body, though Lizzie didn’t say she’d gone upstairs. But Bridget said she thought she heard Lizzie upstairs at some point.) Lizzie did claim she was out of the house for her father’s murder, in the backyard eating pears from a tree.

So yeah—looking pretty grim for Lizzie.

But then where was the blood? Of course, there’s a major problem with Lizzie as murderer: ax murder is messy, but no bloody clothing or cleaning materials were ever found. (A few days after the murder, Lizzie burned a dress in the stove, saying she’d brushed against some paint. No one was able to confirm if the dress was stained, and by what, but the police didn’t remark on it during their search.)

The timeline would have to go like this: Lizzie kills her stepmother. Some have suggested she does this naked (as in the movie The Legend of Lizzie Borden), or at least barefoot to keep blood off her shoes. She then cleans herself, including her hair and face, and either re-dresses or changes clothes, which was quite a process in 1892 and would have taken some time.

Andrew comes home. Lizzie is dressed and acts normal. Bridget goes up to her third floor room to rest (by the back stairs, so she doesn’t see Abby’s body). Lizzie strips naked or puts her bloody clothes back on, kills her father, washes and redresses, then calls Bridget to say Andrew has been killed—only twelve minutes after Bridget went upstairs.

Could Lizzie have gotten cleaned up that fast? It is worth noting that Andrew was sleeping with his folded coat beneath his head. Perhaps Lizzie could have put on one of her father’s coats to keep her clothes clean, and then hid it in plain sight beneath his head? She would have had to wear it for Abby’s murder also, and conceal it somewhere in between without leaving bloodstains anywhere. And what did she do with the murder weapon? While the police did find axes in the house, none of them were bloody, even in hard to clean places.

And if Lizzie did do it, why would she feel the need for such rush? Did she fear Bridget would come back downstairs and catch her mid-murder? Did she perform the quick-change to give herself an alibi? Or was she really in the backyard the whole time?

In any case, Lizzie went to trial for murder and was acquitted. It was perhaps more surprising that she went to trial at all—it was an especially brutal crime to suspect of a well-respected woman. But while the jury didn’t convict, the town of Fall River certainly did, and Lizzie lived under suspicion for the rest of her life.

So did Lizzie do it? I lean toward yes. But we’ll probably never know.

And now for some deadly writing prompts!

• A woman scorned. The night we stayed at Lizzie Borden’s house, a group of teenage girls in the next room stayed up with a ouija board. I had this terrible idea about setting my alarm for 2 a.m., banging on their door and then jumping back in bed, pretending I hadn’t heard anything. I didn’t do it, but my kiddo thinks it would have been hilarious. In any case, I don’t know if those girls contacted Lizzie via ouija, but if violent murder makes a house haunted, then Lizzie’s house surely would be. 

The question is: was it haunted before the murders? Andrew Borden’s first wife, Sarah, was Lizzie’s mother. She died in 1863, when Lizzie was three years old, and three years later, Andrew married Abby. You could have a plot about a jealous first wife’s ghost murdering her husband and his new wife. But what would happen if their ghosts then joined her in the house?

• Constant replay. A residual haunting is one where the ghosts aren’t really “present,” but reenact their terrible deaths over and over like a video on replay. A residual haunting might provide a way to solve a murder mystery, because the killer might be visible, carrying out the awful deed. What if a detective (psychic or otherwise) becomes obsessed with a residual haunting where they can almost but not quite identify the killer? Perhaps they can see a bloody figure with an ax, but never a clear view of the face. Where would their obsession lead them? What if they were willing to try anything, no matter how ill-advised, to make that haunting clearer?

• Everybody and their mom. So let’s say the murders were committed by a very clever person—or two. Or three. You could have a murder mystery where several people conspire to frame a person whom they think will never be convicted of the crime, meaning no one would be punished for it. A win-win, from their perspective. But how could you take a timeline like Lizzie’s and add three other people to it, without Lizzie seeing any of them or ever suspecting them? Who would these people be? And what if they don’t pull it off and their innocent patsy is convicted? Would they confess to save her?

• John Q.. Public. What if the murder were instead committed by someone completely random? So a person completely unknown to the family or neighbors walks into the house unseen, kills a woman, hides in a closet for a while, then kills a man, then walks out again. No history with the family, no motive, just a perfect stranger. How would this person ever be found? What clues would they leave, if any?

• What is that thing? Okay, we’re back to the paranormal again (nobody is surprised). What if the killer in your nice, normal murder mystery is something incredibly weird? An alien, werewolf, demon, sentient ax with a taste for blood. How would a nice, normal detective react to that? What about the nice, normal family? How would they even come in contact with the paranormal? Did Grandma stubbornly claim there was a portal to hell in the back of the closet but nobody ever believed her? Did a young kid bring back a “stray cat” that turned out to be…not a cat? And now that this thing is here, how do they get rid of it?

Thanks for spending your Weird Wednesday here! Remember to watch your head on the stairs!

Read about an axe murder 20 years later in Villisca, Iowa 

Sources & further reading:

Lizzie Andrew Borden Virtual Museum and Library

The Hatchet: A Journal of Lizzie Borden & Victorian Studies

Lizzie Borden: Wikipedia

How Lizzie Borden Got Away With Murder: Smithsonian Magazine

The Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast

My favorite book on the case: The Borden Murders: Lizzie Borden and the Trial of the Century by Sarah Miller

Other than the portrait of Lizzie Borden, photos in this post were taken by Dannye