A Popular History of Unpopular Things
A podcast that makes history more fun and accessible - we love all things gory, gross, mysterious, and weird!
A Popular History of Unpopular Things
The Lizzie Borden Hatchet Murders
Join Kelli as she takes a look at a historic killer - Lizzie Borden - who was accused of killing her father and stepmother with a hatchet in 1892. But despite everything pointing toward her, she was acquitted by the jury. Kelli offers up an explanation as to why she was not found guilty of a crime she most likely committed, and it (of course) has to do with the historical context! What was life like in New England in 1892? And how did that contribute to her acquittal?
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Sources referenced:
The Trial of Lizzie Borden: A True Story by Cara Robertson
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The Lizzie Borden Hatchet Murders
Intro
Welcome to A Popular History of Unpopular Things, a mostly scripted podcast that makes history more fun and accessible. My kind of history is the unpopular stuff - disease, death, and destruction. I like learning about all things bloody, gross, mysterious, and weird.
Just a quick reminder that you can support me and the show on Patreon, just look up either A Popular History of Unpopular Things or APHOUT: A-P-H-O-U-T. And you can also now watch episodes on YouTube - so go subscribe to my channel there! I appreciate all the love and support :)
So for those of you who might have listened to a bunch of my episodes, or know me personally, you know that I’m super into serial killers. Always have been. I’m a true crime girly for sure - and there’s a whole lot of us out there, so don’t judge me. And growing up, I studied and read about alllll kinds of serial killers - not just the ones that are household names like Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, and Ted Bundy, but also guys like Richard Ramirez - the Nightstalker. Or Dennis Rader, the BTK killer. How about the Sons of Sam? Green River Killer? Zodiac? There’s (unfortunately) an endless list of these guys. And those are just the American ones - who can forget Harold Shipman, the British doctor who might have killed up to 250 people? Or Fred and Rose West, a couple who killed together in the UK? Or Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka - same thing, but in Canada? Or just female serial killers who worked alone, like Aileen Wuornos? There are just so many stories. I used to stay up late reading about them on the Crime Library website, which is now gone but can be accessed with the Wayback Machine. I think I’ve mentioned that before.
Man, I was a really, really messed up kid. This podcast is teaching me a lot about myself.
Aaaaanyways, there’s a whole subset of killers that most would consider more historic, and those fascinate me too. I already did back-to-back episodes on HH Holmes, who I posited was not a serial killer, just a regular killer, fraudster, and mass murderer, and Jack the Ripper, who was definitely a serial killer, though we still don’t know with certainty who he actually was.
And then that got me thinking about historic killers in general, and I thought about good ole Lizzie Borden. Maybe you’ve heard the rhyme.
Lizzie Borden took an axe,
And gave her mother forty whacks,
And when she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.
Lizzie Borden was not a serial killer, but certainly fits nicely in that “killers from history” category. She was accused, arrested, and put on trial for murdering her father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1892. But she was acquitted. So today, I want to explore that story. I’ll start with the briefest of historical contexts - what was happening in Massachusetts in and around 1892? What was the world like? Who was Lizzie Borden? Then, we’ll take a look at the bloody, bloody murder and try to understand why Lizzie was acquitted. And I’m going to make the argument that the Lizzie Borden story is a perfect metaphor for America in the late 19th century.
So let’s get started!
Historical Context
1892 in America fits squarely into what we call the Gilded Age. Fun fact - the term “Gilded Age” actually comes from Mark Twain, who wrote a book of the same name. It’s a play on “Golden Age.” To gild something, G-I-L-D, is to coat it with a thin layer of gold to make it look fancy and rich, but in reality, it’s not. Like cheap gold earrings that are called “gold-plated.” It’s not gold, it’s just covered in a thin layer of gold to make it look fancier. In reality, the metal below is probably copper, or brass, or maybe sterling silver.
So the Gilded Age is just that - a thin layer of gold to make it look fancier than it is. It’s a great metaphor and image for this period in America, roughly the 1870s to the late 1890s. It’s after the reconstruction era, which was rebuilding the country after the Civil War, and before the progressive era, where activism led to social and political reforms. The Gilded Age was all about industrialization and economic growth, but this was only a gilded facade. Everything looked great, golden, rich, and generally better than what came before. Look at these new railroads! Neat! Look at all this industry! Cool! America is recovering! Jobs are everywhere! Cities are growing! But under that thinly gilded surface, there was still immense poverty, workers were exploited, there was a general fear and dislike of immigrants and, more generically, anyone not white or Protestant, and the gap between the rich and the poor was more noticeable and growing.
The Gilded Age is before the time when we started to see people fighting back against corruption and horrible working conditions. Think Upton Sinclair and his book, The Jungle. Not about trees, for those of you who haven’t heard of it - it was a takedown of the Chicago meat-packing plants, which were corrupt, unsanitary, blood-splattered industries. Quite literally. Blood and rotten meat all over the factory floor. Then we’ve got the rise of women’s suffrage movements and organizations built to help immigrants settle and adapt to life in the US. But most of all that was in the Progressive Era… the Gilded Age had all of this corruption too, but it went by mostly unchallenged.
And out of that gilded progress, the illusion that life was great and awesome and things were improving for everyone, we actually get a handful of historic killers. Perhaps the most well-known was HH Holmes, who operated throughout the 1890s, killing men and women who got in his way of running scams on the residents of Chicago. I did an episode on him where I argued that he wasn’t actually a serial killer based on the definition… just a mass murderer, scam artist, and compulsive liar.
And then we have Lizzie Borden, the daughter of a relatively well-off businessman, who was accused of hatcheting her father and stepmother to death in 1892. And this case, this family, is the perfect representation of the Gilded Age. From the outside, all seems golden. But just underneath that thin gilding of wealth was a broken, dysfunctional family.
So let’s crack on with it - who were the Bordens?
The Borden Family
Living at the Borden family home, on Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts, were five people. Andrew Borden, the father, was a successful businessman. At the time of his murder, he was 69. He was notoriously tight with his money and would scrutinize his expenses - so much so, that he gave his two adult daughters - unmarried and living at home - a weekly allowance that was less than they could get working.
Also at the home was his second wife, Abby Borden. She was the stepmother, brought in after Andrew’s first wife died. At the time of her murder, she was 62. By most accounts, she was a nice woman. But her two stepdaughters, who also lived in the home, hated her.
The older daughter was Emma, 41. The younger daughter, Lizzie, 32. Andrew didn’t have any other living children. And like I mentioned - both daughters were unmarried. They would have been called spinsters - unmarried women who were older than the “typical” marriage age, which in the Gilded Age was around 18-20. Spinsters also typically didn’t have any plans to get married. But I think the girls were ok with that. Because their father was wealthy, they considered themselves as high-society girls, women on leisure… but because of their father’s frugalness, they didn’t live a high-society life. More on that in a sec.
The last permanent member of the Borden household was their Irish servant, 26-year-old Bridget Sullivan. It was common for Irish women in the mid- to late-19th century to take up domestic servant jobs. For a more in-depth explanation of how Irish immigrants came to the US, go listen to my episode on the Irish Potato Famine. But as an immigrant woman, Bridget was seen as “lesser” than her employers - Andrew, Emma, and Lizzie called her Maggie, which was the name of their previous Irish servant. They couldn’t even be bothered to learn her name. Abby knew her name, though. Abby wasn’t part of the “old money” social elite that ran Fall River.
The Bordens were one of the wealthy families who populated Fall River in its early days. They were white and Protestant, and going back several generations, owned big chunks of industry there. They considered themselves Yankees - native-born inhabitants of New England. As Cara Robertson writes in her book, The Trial of Lizzie Borden, quote,
“The elite derived their status from their Yankee heritage, their Congregationalism or other Protestantism, and their ownership of the mills. Through marriages and business arrangements, the leading families of Fall River preserved their control and cemented their status. That status, in turn, contributed to a self-regarding provincialism that proved difficult to dislodge.” End quote.
And though Andrew Borden and his family were part of the elites, they lived in a modest single-family home on Second Street in Fall River, in the middle of town. It wasn’t where most wealthy Fall River families lived. That was in a place called “the Hill,” and both Emma and Lizzie resented the fact that they didn’t live there, but their cousins did. From what I read, they sounded kind of bratty, to be honest. They grew up in an elite, wealthy, privileged family, but were mad that their dad didn’t spoil them with the same privileges afforded to their cousins, like living in the posh side of town. But they didn’t have to work, and did whatever they wanted, more or less.
It probably didn’t help that of all the Bordens in Fall River, their line of Bordens were considered “lesser.” Their line had inherited less wealth a few generations back. But although Andrew didn’t inherit the bulk of his wealth like his cousins did - he became rich because he was a self-made businessman. It’s probably why he scrutinized money so much more, and why he was comfortable in the small middle-class home compared to the Hill where the rich and fancy lived.
So here’s an example of that brattiness, just to put the family’s dynamics into perspective for you. Andrew once purchased a house, put it in his wife’s name, and allowed his wife’s sister and husband to live there rent-free. The daughters, Emma and Lizzie, were angry that THEY didn’t get a house in their name. They felt entitled to it. And when Andrew gave them some properties in their name of a similar size and price, they weren’t satisfied with that either. The girls already didn’t like their stepmother, pretty much just because she wasn’t their birth mother, but this housing situation made things worse. The girls resented being in her presence so much that they started refusing to eat dinner with their father and stepmother, making their poor servant Bridget serve them separately at each meal. I will remind you that they were adults at this time, not teenagers as this behavior suggests.
Lizzie, over time, grew even more resentful. At one point, a store clerk in March 1892 (the same year of the murders) referred to Abby as Lizzie’s mother. In response, Lizzie is quoted as saying “Don’t say that to me, for she is a mean good-for-nothing thing.”
So, in short, Lizzie hated her stepmother and was growing more resentful of her father for being, as she perceived it, cheap. And for being married to Abby.
So in June 1891, a year two months before the murder, there was a robbery at the house. Abby’s jewelry drawer was raided, and some money, gold, and other valuables were taken from Andrew’s desk. Both Emma and Lizzie were apparently at home while this robbery took place and told police they didn’t hear anything… which is suspicious. But Andrew didn’t want to pursue it further. Instead, he started locking everything up. Interior doors, like the ones to his office and the bedrooms, were kept locked at all times and were only unlocked when someone needed to use the room. The front door had three locks on it.
So let’s fast forward a bit. Two days before the murders, August 2, 1892, the whole family (except Lizzie) got sick from eating leftover fish. Emma the older daughter wasn’t there, she was staying with a friend 30 miles or so away. Now getting a bit sick off fish was common enough - it’s leftover fish, it’s the summer, it probably went off. No big deal. Abby went to talk to their doctor who lived down the road, because she actually suspected she was poisoned. Intentionally. How interesting. Andrew, not wanting to spend money on a doctor, shooed him away.
The next night, the whole family (except Lizzie) got sick again, this time off mutton stew. Mutton is meat from an older sheep. Lamb comes from a younger sheep. But how suspicious that the whole family gets sick again with a different meal. Except Lizzie.
That same night, the night before the murders, Lizzie called a friend and confided that she thought some unnamed men had it out for her businessman father and tried to poison them. Lizzie said to her friend, quote,
“I feel as if something was hanging over me that I cannot throw off, and it comes over me at times, no matter where I am.” End quote.
The next morning, August 4th, a neighbor saw Lizzie standing just inside the screen door. Concerned, she called out to Lizzie and asked what was wrong, and Lizzie replied “Do come over. Someone has killed father.”
The Murders
When police arrived at the scene, they found Andrew’s body on the couch in the living room. His legs were hanging off the couch, his shoes touching the ground. His upper body was laying on the couch, one arm folded over his chest, the other by his side. The cause of death was obvious - several hatchet wounds to the head. Relatively recently, too, because there was fresh blood running down his face. It hadn’t coagulated yet, which usually happens soon after death. One witness described his face as, quote, “a mass of raw meat.” But other than the bloody victim on the couch? Nothing in the house was disturbed. It didn’t look like a robbery gone wrong - the doors weren’t broken in, things weren’t in disarray and valuables weren’t missing. The place wasn’t ransacked. And apparently, during both of these murders, both Lizzie and Bridget were home.
Police didn’t know about Abby’s death yet when they arrived on scene. Lizzie had told them that Abby received a note from a friend and went out to see her. It was the Borden family servant, Bridget, who ended up finding her upstairs on the floor of the guest bedroom, face down, almost as if she was in the child’s pose yoga position. Imagine kneeling on the floor, then bringing your upper body down so it’s resting on the ground. She looked like that. Her blood was darker and coagulated, meaning she was killed first. She was hit 19 times with the hatchet, and according to police, the force of the attack was powerful enough to shatter her skull and separate a flap of skin from her back. Yikes. They estimated she was killed some time around 9:30 am, when Andrew was out of the house on business. The only other people home were Bridget and Lizzie.
At 10:45, Andrew returned home and spoke to Lizzie, then settled on the sofa for a quick nap. Sometime between 10:45 and 11:45, he was hit ten times with the hatchet and died where he slept.
The news spread pretty rapidly, and people were terrified. One newspaper even speculated that Jack the Ripper came over from Britain! It was the same basic period of time, Jack the Ripper did his killings in 1888, only four years prior to the Borden murders, so it was still fresh on everyone’s minds. But… no. This one seemed more… personal. It wasn’t a random attack, and it wasn’t a burglary. Someone targeted Andrew and Abby intentionally.
There were a lot of questions and concerns about who could be responsible. How did the killer get inside, when the Borden house was triple locked from the outside? How did the killer, assuming it was someone from outside the home, not get Lizzie or Bridget’s attention? I can imagine that hatcheting Abby in the upstairs guest bedroom would have been a loud affair, right? I can imagine she was screaming bloody murder. So how did Lizzie or Bridget not hear this? And how did they not see the killer in the hours between Abby’s and Andrew’s murder? How did the girls not hear when Andrew was killed? Lizzie spoke with him before he died, so it’s not like she didn’t know he had come home!
Things were looking more and more likely that someone inside the home killed Andrew and Abby. And since older daughter Emma was away at a friend's, with an alibi airtight and confirmed, it was becoming more and more likely that it was either Bridget the servant or Lizzie.
And it didn’t take police long to hone in on Lizzie, because her story and version of events were full of holes. That note she claimed her stepmother received? They never found one. And the whole story couldn’t be corroborated. Where was she around the time her father was hatcheted to death on the couch? Apparently, in the loft in the barn out back. But please tell me - what does a wannabe high society spinster find interesting in a barn loft? She’s not likely to be the kind of girl who does farm labor, now is she?
Here’s what one policeman recounts from the crime scene. Quote:
“Lizzie stood by the foot of the bed, and talked in the most calm and collected manner; her whole bearing was most remarkable under the circumstances. There was not the least indication of agitation, no sign of sorrow or grief, no lamentation of heart, no comment on the horror of the crime, and no expression of a wish that the criminal be caught. All this, and something that, to me, is indescribable, gave birth to a thought that was most revolting. I thought, at least, she knew more than she wished to tell.” End quote.
When police and the District Attorney interviewed Bridget, she was straightforward and cooperative. Her story was that she cleaned up after breakfast, washed the windows, talked to the neighbor’s housemaid, and then had a quick nap inside. She was woken up by Lizzie, who told her that Andrew was dead. Bridget then went to get the family doctor. Crucially, she couldn’t give the police any information about where Lizzie Borden was that morning or what she had been doing.
Lizzie Borden’s questioning was next. She was a crucial witness because she was the only other person, well, living person who was home at the time of the murders, but she was also now the main suspect. Unlike Bridget, Lizzie dodged some questions and answered others vaguely. She claimed she never really saw her stepmother that morning. Her account of her whereabouts on the day of the murder didn’t make sense. And her undoing was the system of locks that Andrew had set up - to get the key to the upstairs guest bedroom, where Abby was later found dead, Abby would have had to come downstairs in view of where Lizzie said she was on the morning of the murders. When pressed, Lizzie also contradicted herself a few times on where she was in the house.
Like the Gilded Age itself, that thin layer of gold was starting to show its cracks. Lizzie’s story was breaking apart. She was arrested. But in 1892 New England, it was practically unfathomable that a socialite woman, and a Yankee at that, could be capable of committing what many assumed to be a “man’s” crime because of how gruesome it was. She was a Christian. She taught kids in Sunday school. She was upper class, and rich, and white. And she had a lot of supporters who raised quite a fuss in her defense.
And that, if we take a step back, is indicative of the times, the Gilded Age itself. Those on top were the white, Protestant, rich upper class. Everyone else, the immigrants, including Irish Catholics, didn’t experience the same lifestyle. They were discriminated against. Had fewer opportunities. Nativism, which is protecting the interests of the “native born” over immigrants, was rampant. And don’t even get me started on that, because everyone in this country who isn’t indigenous can trace their roots to an immigrant at one time or another.
Here’s a good example of nativism in Fall River, and more specifically the Borden household - there was a doctor who lived next to the Bordens. Dr. Kelly. But because he was an Irish Catholic, the Bordens didn’t use him - they chose to go farther down the street to use a quote-unquote “Yankee” doctor - a white, protestant man who ran in their social circles. Even the fact that most of the Borden family didn’t give their Irish servant the time of day, or could even be bothered to learn her name, gives us a good understanding of the common issues of nativism and discrimination in this community.
And this came into play during the trial. Because although the evidence seemed to suggest that Lizzie did the murders, part of the reason she was acquitted was because she was a woman and came from a well-to-do family. It also didn’t help that Lizzie was not found with a ton of blood on her clothes - even though she admitted to changing clothes that day - and they couldn’t conclusively prove that the hatchet and axe in the basement were the murder weapons. In an age before fingerprint analysis, let alone DNA, these were key aspects of a murder investigation. But there were other things that pointed towards Lizzie as the perpetrator.
For example, she attempted to buy prussic acid at a drugstore the day before the murders. Prussic acid, also known as hydrogen cyanide, is a colorless and poisonous acid. She’s a woman of leisure - what in the world does she need acid for?! The pharmacist at the drugstore refused to sell it to her. Maybe that’s why she went with the hatchet instead.
It didn’t help that while she was in jail, there was another axe murder that was similar to the Borden murders. On May 30, 1893, so 9 months after the Borden murders, 22-year-old Bertha Manchester was attacked 23 times in the back and the back of her head with an axe. The press labeled it “Jack the Chopper,” of course a reference to Jack the Ripper, a man who infamously went around attacking women in London’s East End for a brief stint. A Portuguese farmhand named Jose Correa deMello was arrested and charged. He wasn’t even in the US at the time of the Borden murders, so he couldn’t be connected to those, but people were more satisfied with this one - he was an immigrant. A man. He fit everyone’s perception of what an axe- or hatchet-wielding murderer should look like. It’s Nativism at its worst. And around the time he was arrested, Lizzie’s murder trial began.
Long story short and simplified, because I honestly don’t want to recount all the court drama here, Lizzie was acquitted. Her position in society, the fact that she was a woman, the jurors being mostly white, Protestant men who couldn’t see her as someone capable of wielding a hatchet, nativism… there were lots of factors at play here. It came down to the fact that society didn’t believe a woman could be capable of this crime. That a daughter couldn’t be capable of killing her father and stepmother. But she was capable. And after the trial, she was free. She was shunned by her Church community, stared at on the street, and was often subjected to children’s pranks… but she lived a free life until she died from pneumonia in 1927.
It’s a story that perfectly encapsulates the Gilded Age. That period of time in US history where we see rapid economic growth as a result of industrialization, but before the age of progressivism that tackled things like corruption and inequality. In the Gilded Age, those who took advantage of the economic growth, like the Borden family, grew powerful and rich. But despite that, under the thin golden surface of a booming economy and strong industrial sector, there was still rampant discrimination, nativism and a general fear of immigrants - xenophobia. It’s part of the reason why Lizzie Borden was acquitted for her crimes - she was part of the social elite, though not elite enough for her tastes, and was let off because of her gender, her status, and the overall public idea that a woman could not be capable of committing such horrific acts.
Today, I think that trial would go down differently.
Outro
Thanks for joining me for this episode of A Popular History of Unpopular Things. My name is Kelli Beard, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the story of The Lizzie Borden Hatchet Murders. Thank you for supporting my podcast, and if you haven’t already checked out my other episodes, go have a listen!
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