Lizzie Borden took an ax
And gave her mother forty whacks,
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.
The legend of Lizzie Borden began on the morning of August 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts. On that day, it was later charged in court, Lizzie Borden quietly slipped into a second-floor guest bedroom where her stepmother was completing the final touches to making a bed. At that moment the two women were alone in the house; the family maid was outside washing the first-floor windows. In her hands Lizzie carried an ax or hatchet.
Nineteen times she flailed away in fury at the older woman, giving vent to long-suppressed hatred, hacking out a five-inch hole in the skull and chopping much of the head to ribbons. With her bloodletting lust satisfied at last, she let the body remain where it had fallen, quickly cleaned herself and the weapon, and then, for almost ninety minutes, calmly engaged in such homely chores as carrying up clothes from the cellar laundry, sewing a loop on a dress, ironing several handkerchiefs and leafing through a magazine. She was waiting.
When her elderly father arrived home, Lizzie greeted him with seeming serenity, told him Mrs. Borden had received a note and had gone out on a sick call, and, with disarming daughterly concern for his fragile health, urged him to rest against the enveloping heat, even assisting him to stretch out on his favorite sofa in the sitting room. Lizzie next tried to lure the maid into leaving the house by telling her of a sale of cheap cotton goods, but the servant, instead, went to her attic room, safely out of sight and sound. Soon after her father fell asleep, Lizzie returned to the sitting room, the same ax or hatchet in her hands.
Now the weapon of death descended ten times, once with sufficient force to slice through her father's cheekbone, sever an eye completely in half and continue on its path deep into his skull. As the weapon rose and, fell in its rhythm of destruction, blood splashed onto the walls and even spattered the ceiling of the room. The bone-crushing blows may have snapped the handle of the weapon and ended the attack.
With the completion of the second murder, Lizzie dawdled no longer. In ten minutes or less she removed any and all traces of blood from her face, her hands, her hair; from her dress, her shoes, her stockings. And during that interval she also managed to scour the keen blade and the remaining stub of the handle so thoroughly that later scientific tests failed to show the slightest trace of blood even in hidden crevices. Confident that she was safe from detection, Lizzie Borden, who up to that first lethal moment had lived a blameless life, raised her voice to cry out the first alarm, her story all prepared.
Reports of the investigation that followed added substance to the legend. Lizzie Borden had shed no tears and had not shown any signs of visible grief even though she claimed she had found her father's body upon returning from a trip to the barn. In fact, as friends, neighbors, officials and others hurried into the charnel house, Lizzie easily was the least excited person there, coolly correcting an officer who referred to Mrs. Borden as her mother instead of stepmother.
The story of her laugh added a further touch of the macabre. When her father arrived home, all the doors of the house were locked. While the maid was unbolting the front door to admit him, Lizzie, who was standing on the second-floor landing within a few feet of the open door to the guest room, suddenly laughed out loud. Whether it was the sight of the butchered body of her stepmother in a wide pool of coagulating blood or her pleased anticipation of the impending slaughter of her father that caused her glee, the legend leaves to the imagination.
Lizzie gave varying reasons for her trip to the barn. To police, she elaborated on her story. She had not visited just the barn, but had gone up into the hayloft, this on the hottest day of the year; she claimed she remained in that stifling atmosphere from twenty to thirty minutes while she searched through a small box for some lead she could use as sinkers, simple fishing equipment readily obtainable at a shop for only a few pennies. It was revealed in later testimony that as soon as an officer learned of her story, he visited the hayloft and saw no footprints in the heavy dust on the floor, although his own shoe impressions were clearly visible when he moved about.
Lizzie, by her own story, had to be in the house when her stepmother was murdered, yet she was unable to explain why she had neither seen nor heard anything. She simply said she thought Mrs. Borden had gone out in response to the note. No such note was ever found, no one ever saw it delivered, and public pleas and the offer of a large reward failed to produce anybody who wrote such a note or delivered it. The prosecutor stated flatly that there never had been a note, that it existed, along with her trip to the hayloft, only in Lizzie's imagination.
Further evidence quickly piled up. The very day before the murders Lizzie tried to buy the quickest-acting poison known; she was positively identified by the local druggist. That same night she visited a friend and, during the course of a strange conversation, dolefully predicted that "something" soon would happen at their home, a prediction which was fulfilled with remarkable speed. Three days after the murder Lizzie burned a dress in the kitchen stove, an act which did not become known until some time later. She gave police a silk dress and told them it was the garment she had been wearing the morning of the murders. Since no properly brought-up New England girl wears a silk dress in the morning while doing household chores, it obviously was not the one she had been wearing. And the burned dress, of course, was beyond recall. Her motive for the double murder was clear-cut: there had been a long smoldering feud with her stepmother over her father's fortune and Lizzie feared that he was rewriting his will against her.
It is little wonder, with a crime so gruesome, a suspect so unlikely, and a hatred so deep against her own father and the only woman she had ever known as a mother, that Lizzie Borden became a part of American folklore, a legend celebrated in verse, song, drama, ballet and literature.
Yet even today Lizzie Borden remains little known as a person; it is the woman of the ninety-minute murders we see, hear and read about. Who was Lizzie Borden? What was she like? What kind of life did she lead? These and many more questions remain largely unanswered in the legend. And since Lizzie Borden was acquitted by a jury there is still another question:
Did she commit the murders?
Her supporters said it was impossible for a well-bred woman to have been responsible for such atrocious murders and pointed to the absence of any bloodstains on her person as proof of her innocence. Some believers in her guilt suggested that the first observers at the scene had been too excited to notice traces of blood on her dress, the one she later destroyed.
Others speculated that she could have removed her clothes and wielded the ax while naked. Meanwhile, neighbor quarreled with neighbor, friends disputed vehemently, and even members of families found themselves sharply divided as they debated the one and only question:
Did she or didn't she?
