Lizzie Borden: The Hatchet Murders Everyone Got Wrong
Support Mugshot Mysteries and unlock 12+ bonus episodes on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MugshotMysteries You know the rhyme. Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother forty whacks. Almost every word of it is wrong. It wasn't an axe, it was a hatchet. Not her mother, her stepmother. Not forty whacks, nineteen for Abby Borden and ten for Andrew. But the rhyme got one thing right, the name, and Fall River has been singing it for over a hundred and thirty years. On a sweltering August mornin...
Support Mugshot Mysteries and unlock 12+ bonus episodes on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MugshotMysteries
You know the rhyme. Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother forty whacks. Almost every word of it is wrong. It wasn't an axe, it was a hatchet. Not her mother, her stepmother. Not forty whacks, nineteen for Abby Borden and ten for Andrew. But the rhyme got one thing right, the name, and Fall River has been singing it for over a hundred and thirty years. On a sweltering August morning in 1892, two people were hacked to death inside a locked house on Second Street with two other people home. A church-going Sunday school teacher was tried for it, and acquitted by twelve men in about ninety minutes. No one else was ever arrested. Not then. Not ever.
This week on Mugshot Mysteries, Kathryn and Gabriel go to Fall River, and argue that everything strange about this case started long before the murders, two doors down, decades earlier.
We build the world first: the boomtown of "Spindle City," and Andrew Borden, a genuinely wealthy bank president so miserly he sold eggs from a basket and kept his family in a plumbing-free house on the flat, noisy part of town instead of the mansions on The Hill. We walk the sick architecture of the home itself, no upstairs hallways, rooms opening into rooms, bedroom doors barricaded on both sides, a family that ate in shifts to avoid each other, and the money tensions curdling under it: the property Andrew put in Abby's name, the two grown, unmarried daughters waiting on an inheritance a healthy stepmother stood in front of, and the 1891 daytime burglary of a locked house that Andrew quietly told police to drop, as if he suspected who did it. And we tell the detail that haunts the whole episode: two doors down at that same address, in 1848, a Borden relative drowned her three children in the cellar cistern and cut her own throat.
Then the week itself. The whole household violently ill; Abby crossing the street to say she believed she'd been poisoned; a woman matching Lizzie's description trying to buy prussic acid, cyanide, at a local pharmacy the day before the killings, turned away for lack of a prescription. And August 4th, told carefully from the trial record: Abby killed first, upstairs, nineteen blows to a woman already down, an hour before Andrew came home to a nap and ten more blows on the sitting-room sofa. The vanished note no one ever wrote. The barn loft with undisturbed dust where Lizzie said she'd stood. The spotless dress. And the blue dress Lizzie was seen burning in the kitchen stove three days later, "old paint," she said.
We lay out the trial that turned on gender: the suppressed inquest testimony and suppressed cyanide evidence, the defense attorney who had appointed one of the judges, and the closing that fit in a single line, "You must believe she is a fiend. Does she look it?" We make the case's most interesting argument, that Victorian America knew female killers well but only as quiet poisoners, so a jury looked at a hatchet and concluded no woman could have swung it, never considering that the poison had simply been tried first and failed. And we close on the aftermath: Maplecroft, the house on The Hill she bought and refused to leave for thirty-four years while the town threw eggs at it; the sister who moved out and never spoke to her again; and the bed-and-breakfast that same murder house has become, where guests pay to sleep beside where Abby died and report a figure in Victorian dress still making the bed, and children's voices no child in that house ever owned.
This is Lizzie Borden.
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SOURCES:
Contemporaneous coverage and the surviving court records of the 1892 murders of Andrew and Abby Borden and the 1893 New Bedford trial of Lizzie Borden, including the inquest testimony, the rulings excluding that testimony and the prussic-acid evidence from the jury, the trial witnesses (among them maid Bridget Sullivan, pharmacy clerk Eli Bence, and friend Alice Russell), and the June 20, 1893 acquittal; the documented biographical record of the Borden family, Andrew's wealth and frugality, the property disputes, and the 1891 household burglary; the historical record of the 1848 deaths at the neighboring Borden property; Lizzie Borden's later life at Maplecroft, the 1897 Tilden-Thurber matter, her estrangement from her sister Emma, and her 1927 death; and accounts of reported paranormal activity at the Lizzie Borden House (operating as a bed-and-breakfast museum since 1996) and at Maplecroft, drawn from guests, staff, and televised paranormal programs. Because this case has generated well over a century of folklore and dramatization, the episode distinguishes the documented trial record from the legend where the two diverge.
DISCLAIMER:
Content warning: This episode describes a graphic double murder, including detailed descriptions of the injuries, and discusses the historical deaths of children. Please take care while listening.
The Mugshot Mysteries podcast is independently produced and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by any individual, business, or production referenced in this episode, including the Lizzie Borden House or any television program named.
This episode recounts a historical case from 1892-1893; all parties are long deceased. Lizzie Borden was tried for these murders and acquitted on all counts, and the case remains officially unsolved. Nothing in this episode is a legal assertion that Lizzie Borden, or any other specific person, committed these crimes; where the hosts discuss the evidence and offer their own interpretations and opinions about who was responsible, those are their views and their reading of a contested historical record, not statements of established fact, and a jury reached the opposite conclusion. Much of the popular Lizzie Borden story includes folklore, later dramatization, and disputed detail, and the episode aims to separate the documented record from legend where possible. Reports of paranormal activity at the properties are presented as the claims and experiences of guests, staff, and investigators, not as established fact, and listeners are left to draw their own conclusions. The victims of these crimes were real people, and they are discussed with respect for the fact that a real, brutal killing occurred. References to any person are made in the context of public records and historical reporting and are not intended to defame or cause harm. Any third-party names and trademarks remain the property of their respective owners and are referenced under fair use for purposes of commentary, criticism, and reporting.
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