It is one of modern history’s most enduring murder mysteries: a bloody double killing, a sensational trial and an acquittal that has fuelled debate for more than a century.
On a hot August day in 1892, a wealthy Massachusetts couple, Andrew and Abby Borden, were hacked to death in broad daylight in their home in the small industrial city of Fall River.
Andrew was found lying on the sofa downstairs, while Abby was upstairs in the guest bedroom, face down beside the bed. She was thought to have been killed 90 minutes earlier by 19 axe blows.
Andrew’s 32-year-old daughter, Lizzie, had apparently been unaware of the murders, despite the fact that she was on the property at the time.
Although she found the bodies of her father and stepmother, Lizzie claimed to have been in the barn behind the house eating pears when they were murdered.
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Even so, she soon became the prime suspect – and the only person ever charged with the killings.
‘It was this horrific double murder of two elderly people on an otherwise typical Thursday morning in a mill town that just wasn’t used to those sorts of crimes,’ explains historian Cara Robertson, author of The Trial of Lizzie Borden.
‘The nature of the murders was so grisly and so violent, they were very male-coded. It was hard to believe that a woman who ticked all the boxes of respectable upper-middle-class womanhood could commit a crime like that.’
Next month sees Lizzie’s story covered as the fourth instalment of Netflix’s gruesome Monster series, with Ella Beatty taking on the lead role and Charlie Hunnam – who previously starred in Monster: The Ed Gein Story -as her father.
When Lizzie was arrested a week after the murders, the public were mesmerised by the case.
Investigators soon discovered that the home she shared with her father, his second wife, Abby, and her older sister, Emma, who was away at the time of the murders, was an unhappy one.
Andrew had remarried two years after their mother’s death and the girls refused to talk to Abby, but when they did, they called her ‘Mrs Borden’.
The family lived by different routines, eating at separate times and leading separate lives. Lizzie had moved furniture to block the door connecting her room to her father’s and stepmother’s, while Andrew and Abby were said to keep their own bedroom door locked.
