Criminal Justice Takes Field Trip to Lizzie Borden House

On Thursday, October 25th, thirteen students from the Criminal Justice program traveled to the Lizzie Borden House in Fall River, Massachusetts where two brutal and gruesome murders took place in August 1892.

These students explored the story and trial of Lizzie Borden detailed below:

These two infamous murders rattled the city of Fall River in 1892, as there did not seem to be a reasonable explanation for who killed Abby and Andrew Borden except their daughter Lizzie. Although this accusation was a stretch at the time, many did not believe a woman would be capable of something as terrible as murdering her parents, both of whom were found with ax wounds that caused their deaths. Abby Borden was struck in the back of the head eighteen times and an hour and a half later, her husband Andrew was struck in the face eleven times.

In all actuality, there was a lot of evidence for the prosecution against Lizzie for the murder of her two parents. Her mother – actually her step-mother – did not get along with Lizzie, as not only did Abby want her children from her first marriage to get most of Andrew’s money, but Lizzie never viewed Abby as her mother because of the fact that her own mother had died when Lizzie was only two and her father remarried soon after. Furthermore, there were many rumors that Andrew abused both Lizzie and her older sister Emma, in addition to preventing Lizzie from marrying a man in her early twenties.

Also, in her testimony, Lizzie kept contradicting herself. In one instance, she testified that she was in the barn’s attic looking for fishing equipment for an upcoming trip while a murderer went into the house and killed her parents, while in all actuality this was proven incorrect. Upon investigation of the attic, there was dust everywhere, showing that no one had been up there in quite some time. On another occasion, Lizzie claimed that she was eating pears when a random murderer had come in. It also did not make sense that a person would go upstairs without alarming Mrs. Borden, kill Mrs. Borden, wait an hour and a half and then find Mr. Borden and kill him as he was taking a nap upon a couch in the living room. The prosecution also put forward that Lizzie was found burning a dress because it had red paint on it; paint that could have been blood.

So why was Lizzie not convicted? To start, the jury was a Victorian jury, meaning it was made of traditional men who still did not believe that a woman could do something so violent. In addition, the multiple inconsistent alibis were omissible in court for the jury, so they only were supposed to go on what else was presented in court, which did not amount to much.

Nevertheless, the community believed in the guiltiness of Lizzie Borden, and she was shunned from many activities. She would later move into a home with her sister Emma, but it would be short-lived. They had an argument that no one knows the topic of, but it eventually led to Emma moving out of the house. The two sisters died nine days apart in 1927.

This is the story that the Criminal Justice students explored on the 25th of October. Luckily, the tour guide was extremely knowledgeable and left little to question. She showed the table on which Mrs. Borden’s corpse was examined, the creaky attic room of the Irish maid, and the rooms that they allow people to spend the night in. So the real question remains: Did Lizzie Borden kill her parents and the prosecution let her go? Or was there a murderer that was never caught in Fall River?

Lizzie Borden took an ax

And gave her mother forty whacks

When she saw what she had done,

She gave her father forty-one