She was arrested amid a swirl of controversy. Her alibi for the time of the murders was filled with contradictions, her hatred of Abby, her step-mother, was hardly a secret, and her icy demeanor was not that of a grieving "Victorian gentlewoman." Besides, the deaths made Lizzie (along with her older sister Emma, who was away at the time of the murders) the benefactors of a sizable fortune. Yet the murder weapon was never found, and there were no eye witnesses to the crimes.
The local, and soon the national press were obsessed with the case, and reported each new development with unprecedented voracity. Sometimes the first 10 pages of a paper were devoted exclusively to the trial. Public opinion was sharply divided over Lizzie's guilt. However, insiders knew her eccentric reputation in the town: she was a known shop-lifter, a rabid social climber, and a constant target of derision among Fall River's more conspicuously wealthy citizens. For, much to her humiliation, Andrew's wealth was matched only by his miserliness.
But she was still a lady. In Victorian America, ladies swooned, ladies sewed, and ladies served, but ladies did not reign over twenty combined hatchet blows on the heads of a parent and a step-parent. And so, despite some very damning circumstantial evidence, Lizzie Borden was acquitted on both counts.
The judgment of her all-male jury was fully exculpating; the sentence by her peers was just the opposite. She returned to Fall River after her trial, even buying the "house on the hill" she had always coveted, but remained isolated and ostracized, until she died in 1927, a town legend of the most shameful sort. But Lizzie Borden is also an American legend... The case was closed immediately after the acquittal, a clear signal to the world that the authorities felt they had the guilty party, but that the justice system, and the societal conventions of the world in which Lizzie Borden lived, let her slip through their fingers.
"Lizzie Borden took an axe/And gave her mother forty whacks/When she saw what she had done/She gave her father forty-one." This children's rhyme, invented so long ago, is still recited today. New books continue to be written; new theories continue to be advanced. The real Lizzie Borden took her secrets with her to the grave -- but the myth of Lizzie Borden refuses to die.
Children Sing
"Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one."
Lizzie
"That's not true, It wasn't an ax, it was a hatchet. Abby Borden wasn't my mother, she was my stepmother. I only gave her 20 whacks. And I only gave my father 10
