She was acquitted, and no one else was ever charged.
On 4 August 1892 Andrew Jackson Borden and his second wife were killed with an axe in their house in Fall River, Massachusetts. Andrew's daughter Lizzie Andrew Borden, then 32, was tried for the murders and found not guilty. Nobody else was ever charged. She stayed in Fall River for the rest of her life and died of pneumonia at 66, nine days before her older sister Emma.
The family had money and it was recent. Andrew Borden grew up in modest surroundings and struggled financially as a young man despite descending from a wealthy and influential family. He made his money manufacturing and selling furniture and caskets, moved into property development, directed several textile mills, owned a good deal of commercial property and was president of the Union Savings Bank. Lizzie was his third child, born on 19 July 1860 to Sarah Anthony Morse; an older sister, Alice Esther, had died of hydrocephalus at 22 months.
The case became one of the most heavily reported in American history, and it has stayed in the culture ever since through films, plays, books and a folk rhyme that most people can recite without knowing where it came from.
The best way into it is the newspapers. The Library of Congress maintains a research guide to the arrest and trial within Chronicling America, its archive of historic American newspapers, with selected articles and search strategies for finding more. Reading the coverage as it was published, before the verdict, is a different experience from reading the legend backwards.
The house at Fall River operates today as a bed and breakfast and museum.
PUBLIC tours daily; book well ahead for the overnight.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
