The Axe Murders Behind The Nursery Rhyme

On this day, 4 August 1892, in the town of Fall River, Massachusetts, two people were hacked to death in their own home in broad daylight — and the case became one of the most famous unsolved murders in American history. You already know it, even if you think you don’t, because it comes wrapped in one of the most recited rhymes in the English language:

“Lizzie Borden took an axe, And gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, She gave her father forty-one.”

Almost every single line of that rhyme is wrong. And the truth is far darker and stranger than the playground chant.

The Horror

The victims were Andrew Borden, a wealthy, notoriously frugal 69-year-old businessman, and his second wife, Abby, aged 64. And the first correction to the rhyme is this: Abby was not Lizzie’s mother. She was her stepmother — and Lizzie and her sister Emma were reportedly on cold, resentful terms with her, partly over money and their father’s property. Lizzie’s own mother had died when she was a small child.

That August morning began ordinarily. The maid, Bridget Sullivan, was doing chores. Andrew went into town, then returned and lay down on the sitting-room sofa to rest. And somewhere in that quiet, respectable house, on an ordinary hot morning, someone picked up a hatchet — not an axe, as the rhyme claims, but a smaller hatchet-like weapon — and committed an act of staggering brutality.

The killings happened roughly ninety minutes apart, which is part of what makes the case so chilling. First, upstairs, Abby Borden was attacked while she was making the bed in the guest room. She was struck repeatedly about the head — usually estimated at around eighteen or nineteen blows — and left dead on the floor between the bed and the wall, where she would lie undiscovered for more than an hour.

Then, later that morning, downstairs, Andrew Borden was attacked as he lay resting on the sofa. He was struck around ten or eleven times with such savagery that his face was terribly mutilated. So the rhyme’s tally of “forty” and “forty-one” — eighty-one blows in total — is wildly exaggerated. The likely total was closer to thirty. But around thirty hatchet blows to two people’s skulls, delivered in a family home in the middle of the morning, hardly needs exaggerating.

It was Lizzie, Andrew’s 32-year-old daughter, who raised the alarm, calling out to the maid: “Maggie, come down! Come down quick; Father’s dead; somebody came in and killed him.” Abby’s body was found shortly afterwards upstairs. And suspicion almost immediately fell on Lizzie herself — because the house had been secured, there was no clear sign of an intruder, and she and the maid had been in or around the house during the critical period.

The Modern Relic

A week later, Lizzie Borden was arrested and charged with both murders. Her trial in 1893 became a national sensation, followed obsessively across the United States. And the evidence against her, while circumstantial, was troubling.

In the days before the murders, the household had fallen violently ill, and Abby had reportedly told a neighbour she feared poisoning. It emerged that Lizzie had allegedly tried to buy prussic acid — a deadly poison — from a local shop shortly before the killings, though this testimony was excluded from the jury. A few days after the murders, Lizzie was seen burning a dress in the kitchen stove, which she said had been stained with paint. No blood-soaked clothing was ever found. Her accounts of where she had been during the murders were inconsistent and strange.

And yet — she was acquitted. On 20 June 1893, after deliberating for about ninety minutes, the all-male jury found Lizzie Borden not guilty. There were powerful reasons. The case was entirely circumstantial: nobody had seen her commit the murders, and no murder weapon was conclusively tied to her. The idea that a respectable, churchgoing Victorian woman of good family could commit such a savage crime was difficult for many people to accept.

Lizzie had also inherited a substantial fortune from her father and could afford a formidable legal defence, including former Massachusetts governor George D. Robinson. The judges excluded damaging evidence and made rulings that significantly weakened the prosecution. And so she walked free.

But acquittal is not the same as innocence, and the verdict only deepened the mystery rather than resolving it. Because if Lizzie Borden did not do it — then who did? No one else was ever charged. The murders were never officially solved, and they remain unsolved today.

Many modern writers and historians consider Lizzie the most likely perpetrator because of the circumstantial evidence and the lack of a plausible alternative. But it was never proven, and never can be. Other theories have named Bridget Sullivan, Lizzie’s uncle John Morse, or an unknown intruder — none supported by conclusive evidence.

Lizzie lived out the rest of her life in Fall River, wealthy but socially isolated in a town that never stopped suspecting her. She died in 1927, taking whatever she knew with her.

The relic of the case still stands, and you can walk right into it. The house at 92 Second Street where Andrew and Abby Borden were murdered is now a museum and bed-and-breakfast — one of the most famous allegedly haunted houses in America. Visitors can sleep in rooms connected with the crime, including the room where Abby’s body was discovered.

The rhyme got the details wrong: not forty whacks, not an axe, not her mother. But it got one thing right — the terrible suspicion, never proven and never completely dispelled, of what may have happened in that quiet house on an ordinary summer morning.

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