A new Netflix series has reignited public fascination with one of America’s most infamous unsolved double homicides.
Lizzie Borden, 32, stood trial in 1893 for the brutal axe killings of her wealthy father Andrew Borden and stepmother Abby Borden inside their Fall River, Massachusetts home on August 4, 1892. The case, now revisited in Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, produced six pieces of evidence so grisly they still shock modern true crime audiences.
The prosecution’s prime candidate for the murder weapon emerged from a dark basement chimney recess where officers discovered four axes and hatchets. One small hatchet head bore a wooden handle snapped cleanly off near its socket, coated in coarse white ash and dust. Prosecutors argued the killer had burned the blood-soaked handle in the kitchen stove and rolled the metal head in ashes to conceal residue. Dr. Edward Wood of Harvard Medical School testified that he found no definitive traces of blood on the metal.
Medical examiners removed both victims’ stomachs during post-mortem examinations, tying off the organs and placing them in sealed glass jars for transport to Harvard Medical School. Dr. Wood analyzed the undigested bread and mutton to establish an exact timeline. The forensic analysis proved crucial: Abby’s digestion had stopped roughly an hour and a half to two hours before Andrew’s, proving she had been killed first, hours before her husband was attacked on the sitting room sofa downstairs.
Andrew Borden was murdered while taking a mid-morning nap. The blows to his face and head were delivered with such force that blood spattered across the adjacent wall and soaked deep into the furniture. Officers cut away swatches of the bloodstained horsehair sofa fabric, as well as the pillow beneath Andrew’s head, to present as physical exhibits. The bloodied fabric illustrated the trajectory of the blows and the sheer proximity the killer maintained during the attack.
When Abby was struck down from behind in the second-floor guest bedroom, the blade sheared directly through her hair before crushing her skull. Investigators gathered and catalogued several locks of her blood-matted hair from the bedroom carpet, cleanly severed by the hatchet blows. These hair fragments were submitted alongside skull casts to demonstrate the sharpness and angle of the weapon used in the initial ambush.
Police were initially baffled by the apparent lack of blood on Lizzie’s clothing when they arrived within minutes of the alarm being raised. Days after the murders, however, family friend Alice Russell observed Lizzie tearing apart a blue Bedford cord dress and feeding it into the kitchen stove. Lizzie claimed she was merely disposing of an old garment ruined by brown paint. The prosecution maintained it was the very dress she wore while slaughtering her parents, burned specifically to destroy blood spatter before state investigators could seize it.
Perhaps the most shocking evidentiary display in American legal history involved the actual skulls of Andrew and Abby Borden. Following initial autopsies performed on the dining room table, the victims were buried, only to be exhumed days later so medical examiners could decapitate them and boil away the soft tissue. The cleaned skulls, bearing 19 fractures on Abby and 10 on Andrew, were brought into open court to demonstrate that the bone gashes matched the dimensions of the basement hatchet. The sight was so gruesome that Lizzie Borden reportedly fainted on the spot when the tissue-less skulls were revealed to the all-male jury.
The Victorian gothic mystery has persisted in popular culture largely through a nursery rhyme claiming Lizzie gave her mother “forty whacks,” but the physical items recovered by investigators paint a far more forensic, macabre picture of 19th-century crime detection.
Ultimately, the lack of modern forensic tools, fingerprinting not yet being standard practice and blood typing still years away, meant prosecutors could not conclusively link the broken hatchet or the destroyed dress to the killings. After just an hour and a half of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty, leaving the grisly evidence to pass into true crime history.
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is now streaming on Netflix.