Andrew Borden was one of the richest men in Fall River, Massachusetts, and lived like one of the cheapest: no electricity, no bathroom, a narrow house on unfashionable Second Street kept locked like a bank vault — front door triple-fastened, inner doors bolted, every member of the household carrying keys. On the morning of 4 August 1892 that frugality became the case’s central riddle: whoever killed Andrew and his wife Abby did it inside a locked house, in daylight, with the maid washing windows and his daughter Lizzie somewhere on the property.
Ninety minutes
Abby Borden was struck down first, in the upstairs guest room, by nineteen blows from behind with a hatchet-type blade. Andrew came home from his rounds at about 10:40; the maid, Bridget Sullivan, had to unlock the jammed front door to let him in. He lay down for a nap on the sitting-room sofa and was killed there, ten or eleven blows, sometime around 11:00. He never woke; the first blow took him in his sleep.
The medical evidence — the temperature of the bodies, the state of the blood, the contents of two stomachs — put Abby’s death roughly ninety minutes before Andrew’s. That interval is the entire case. An intruder would have had to kill Abby, then hide in a small, locked, occupied house for an hour and a half, kill Andrew, and leave unseen in the busiest hour of the morning. No one ever explained how. The alternative was simpler and unthinkable: the killer never had to leave, because the killer lived there.
The daughter
Lizzie Borden, thirty-two, church treasurer and Sunday-school teacher, told the police she had been in the barn loft for twenty minutes — or thirty — looking for lead to make fishing sinkers, and came in to find her father dead. An officer who climbed to the loft found the dust on the floor, by his account, undisturbed. The note Lizzie said had called Abby to a sick friend’s bedside was never found, and no sender ever came forward. The day before the murders, a druggist testified, Lizzie had tried to buy prussic acid — for cleaning a sealskin cape, she said. Three days after the murders, a friend watched her burn a dress in the kitchen stove — paint-stained, she said. In the cellar, police found a hatchet head with a freshly broken handle, its blade coated in furnace ash the way an honest tool gathers dust.
Every one of those facts had an innocent explanation. Every one. That was the maddening genius of the case.
Sixty-six minutes
The inquest testimony that might have sunk her — contradictory, sedated with morphine prescribed by her own doctor — was ruled inadmissible. The prussic-acid evidence was excluded too. In June 1893, after a trial that transfixed the country, an all-male jury deliberated sixty-six minutes and acquitted her. Juries, one newspaperman wrote, could not hang a churchgoing New England spinster on evidence that failed, by inches, to be seen doing it.
No one else was ever arrested. Lizzie — who now called herself Lizbeth — bought a fine house on the Hill with her inheritance and lived in Fall River, largely shunned, until 1927. Abby and Andrew are buried in Oak Grove Cemetery. So, a few steps away, is she. The house on Second Street operates today as a bed and breakfast, where guests pay for the privilege of sleeping in the room where Abby Borden’s ninety minutes started — history’s most patient unsolved morning.