Lizzie Borden's Forty Whacks: Fact or Fiction Edition

By Jennifer Uhlarik

 

I’m sure most of us have heard of Lizzie Borden, the woman best known for having been accused of and tried for the Massachusetts axe murders of her parents in the 1890s. Perhaps you know of her for no other reason than the oft-repeated playground rhyme that kids skipped rope to. Or maybe you’ve read of her yourself…there have been several great blog posts done on her here at Heroes, Heroines, and History across the years, as well as many other places. Or…<shiver> maybe you’re one of the brave souls who so loves this macabre historical murder that you’ve stayed in the supposedly haunted Borden house turned into a Bed & Breakfast.

Lizzie Borden

For those who don’t know of Lizzie Borden, here are the basic facts: On August 4, 1892, Andrew and Abby Borden were discovered in their home, deceased, each apparently killed with a hatchet or an axe. Living in the house with them at the time of their deaths were 32-year-old daughter Lizzie, her older sister Emma (age 41), and Bridget Sullivan, the 25-year-old live-in maid who’d immigrated to America from Ireland. Also having stayed in the Borden’s home the night prior was one of Lizzie’s maternal relatives, John Morse.

The Borden House,
Fall River, Massachusetts

Present at breakfast on the morning of the murder were Abby and Andrew, Mr. Morse, and Miss Sullivan. According to my research, neither Lizzie nor Emma ate with the family that fateful morning. Following breakfast, Mr. Morse and Andrew talked about some family business until about 8:30 a.m., then Morse departed to attend to some other errands. Somewhere between 9 a.m. and 10:30 a.m., Abby went about her usual house chores, and somewhere after 9 a.m., Andrew took his usual morning walk. It is thought that during his walk, Abby was murdered as she made up the guest room bed. Upon returning from his walk around 10:30 a.m., Andrew struggled to open the door, so he knocked. Miss Sullivan testified during the trial that she found the door jammed, and that as she opened it, she heard Lizzie laughing from the top of the stairs, though Lizzy denied that fact. According to the forensic investigation, Abby had already been murdered in the guest room by this time, though she’d not been discovered. Andrew went to the sitting room to nap on the couch, and as he slept, was also killed. As the history goes, moments after 11 a.m., Lizzie called out to Miss Sullivan in her third-floor bedroom to come quickly, someone had killed her father, and when Miss Sullivan arrived in the room, Andrew’s blood was still flowing, indicating the blows had been delivered very recently.

Abby Borden's body, 
lying dead in the guest room

Andrew Borden's body on the 
sitting room couch

 

Those are the basic facts of the case, but let’s look more deeply—at both the childhood rhyme and other details of the case—and see what’s fact and what is fiction. 

 

Fact or Fiction: The Childhood Rhyme

 

As the rhyme goes…

“Lizzie Borden took an axe,

and gave her mother forty whacks;

when she saw what she had done,

she gave her father forty-one.”

 

Let’s take it line by line.

 

“Lizzie Borden took an axe…”

 

Uncertain. During her trial, Lizzie was acquitted of Andrew and Abby Borden’s murders, so no one knows who the real culprit was. Perhaps it was Lizzie and the jury got it wrong—or maybe the real culprit got away with murder. Twice.

 

“And gave her mother forty whacks…”

 

Fiction: This is actually false on two fronts. Abby Borden was Lizzie’s step-mother. Her mother had passed away some time before this. Also, Abby was struck about seventeen or eighteen times, not forty.

 

“When she saw what she had done,

she gave her father forty-one.”

 

Fiction: While he was Lizzie’s father, and not a step-parent as above, he received about ten or eleven blows with the murder weapon, not the forty-one chanted in the rhyme.

 

~~~~~

Fact or Fiction: The police investigated the Borden murders for possible poisonings.

 

Fact. Several days before their deaths, everyone in the household had fallen ill, and Abby said she thought someone had poisoned them because her husband was disliked among the neighbors and townsfolk. During the autopsies, both Abby and Andrew’s stomachs were removed and thoroughly checked for poison. None was found. The more likely cause of the bout of illness days before their murder was mutton that had been left out too long and allowed to spoil.

~~~~~

Fact or Fiction: Lizzie destroyed a dress in the first days after her parents’ murders.

 

Fact. More than one witness saw Lizzie tearing or cutting up one of her dresses and tossing the pieces in the stove to be burned up, though she was not stopped from doing so. When asked why she was destroying the dress, she said it was old and had paint stains on it.

~~~~~

 

Fact or Fiction: Lizzie was denied her right to an attorney.

 

Part Fact/Part Fiction. If you’ve watched any police drama on TV or the big screen, you have heard the “Miranda Rights” quoted—the right to remain silent, to have an attorney, and if you can’t afford one, to have one appointed for you. However, those rights were not officially created until 1966, decades after Lizzie Borden’s case. So she was never promised an attorney or her choosing or the court’s.

 

Despite that fact, Lizzie found herself facing an inquest, and she did ask that a family attorney be present. It was wise of her to request this, since she’d been consistently given morphine for her nerves after the murders. And yes…fact…she was denied the requested attorney for the inquest due to a Massachusetts rule that said inquests were to remain private. Poor Lizzie was erratic, likely from the morphine, and changed her story multiple times. She sometimes refused to answer questions, even if those questions might have helped her case. Thankfully for her, her testimony from the inquest was not allowed in the actual trial (where she was allowed to have an attorney—and in fact, had three).

~~~~~

 

Fact or Fiction: An eerily similar axe murder happened in the same town as the Borden Murders days before Lizzie’s trial began.

 

Fact. Lizzie’s trial was days away from beginning when Bertha Manchester was found in her home, also hacked with an axe or hatchet, in very similar style to Andrew and Abby Borden. A Portuguese immigrant was later found guilty of the Manchester murder, though apparently, they couldn’t not place the man in Fall River, Massachusetts, during the time of the Borden murders. Despite that fact, it certainly helped sway the jury that another, uncannily similar murder was just committed—and not by Lizzie.

 

This is by no means an exhaustive list of all the facts of the case. There are many more details that must be considered to come to any sort of informed conclusion on who really killed Mr. and Mrs. Borden. What I have presented here are some of the oft-misquoted, interesting, or otherwise bizarre details that accompany this case.

 

It’s Your Turn: Had you heard of Lizzie Borden? Do you suspect she is the real culprit or do you think someone else committed these heinous crimes? If so, who—and why do you believe that?

 

Jennifer Uhlarik discovered western novels at twelve when she swiped the only “horse” book from her brother’s bookshelf. Across the next decade, she devoured westerns and fell in love with the genre. While attaining a B.A. in writing from the University of Tampa, she began penning her own story of the Old West. She has finaled in and won numerous writing competitions and appeared on various best-seller lists. Besides writing, she’s been a business owner, a schoolteacher, a marketing director, a historical researcher, a publisher, and a full-time homemaker. She lives near Tampa, Florida, with her husband and fur children.

 

 

Love and Order: A Three-Part Old West Romantic Mystery

 

Wanted: 

Family, Love, and Justice

One Old West Mystery Solved Throughout Three Short Romantic Stories

Separated as children when they were adopted out to different families from an orphan train, the Braddock siblings have each grown up and taken on various jobs within law enforcement and criminal justice.

 

Youngest child, Callie, has pushed past her insecurities to pursue a career as a Pinkerton agent. Middle child, Andi, has spent years studying law under her adoptive father’s tutelage. And the eldest and only son, Rion, is a rough-and-tumble bounty hunter. 

 

When the hunt for a serial killer with a long history of murders reunites the brother and sisters in Cambria Springs, Colorado, they find themselves not only in a fight for justice, but also a fight to keep their newly reunited family intact. How will they navigate these challenges when further complicated by unexpected romances?