Killing of Andrew and Abby Borden

On the morning of August 4, 1892, Andrew Jackson Borden and his wife Abby Durfee Gray Borden were killed in their home at 92 Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts. Andrew, a 70-year-old property investor and bank director, and Abby, 64, were each struck repeatedly with a hatchet-like weapon. Investigators determined that Abby was attacked first, in an upstairs guest room, and that Andrew was killed roughly an hour and a half later as he rested on a sitting-room sofa on the ground floor.

The household was small. Andrew and Abby lived with Andrew's two adult daughters from his first marriage and a live-in maid; on the morning of the killings only some members of the household were present, and one daughter was away visiting relatives. The maid was occupied with chores when the attacks occurred. There were no reported eyewitnesses to either killing, and no weapon was ever conclusively identified, though hatchets and axes recovered from the basement were examined.

Suspicion soon centered on Andrew's younger daughter, Lizzie Andrew Borden, who was at the property that morning. Police noted inconsistencies in her account of her movements, and she was arrested on August 11, 1892. A grand jury indicted her in December 1892, and her trial opened in New Bedford in June 1893. The prosecution's case was largely circumstantial, and several pieces of proposed evidence were excluded by the court. On June 20, 1893, after a short deliberation, the jury found her not guilty of both killings.

The acquittal was final. Lizzie Borden was never retried, and no other person was ever charged. She returned to Fall River, where she and her sister later bought a larger house, and she lived there until her death in 1927. Public opinion remained divided, and over the following decades writers and researchers proposed alternative theories and other possible suspects. None of these theories has been proven, and the identity of the person responsible has never been established.

The case became one of the most widely discussed unsolved crimes in American history, in part because of the violence of the attacks, the standing of the family, and the unusual spectacle of a woman of Lizzie Borden's background standing trial. It has been retold in books, films, plays, and a well-known folk rhyme, much of which departs from the documented record. As a matter of law and of the historical record, the killings of Andrew and Abby Borden remain unsolved: a jury acquitted the only person ever tried, and no verified account explains who was responsible.