On the afternoon of June 20, 1893, the jury in New Bedford, Massachusetts filed back into the courtroom after deliberating for little more than an hour. When the foreman rose to deliver the verdict, the answer was not guilty. Lizzie Borden walked out of that courtroom free, and the question of who killed Andrew and Abby Borden has never been officially answered.
The story had begun ten months earlier, on August 4, 1892, at the Borden family home on Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts. Andrew Jackson Borden, a successful businessman, had returned from morning errands and fallen asleep on the living room settee. He was found there, murdered — struck multiple times in the face and head with an axe or hatchet. Upstairs in the bedroom, his wife Abby Gray Borden had already been killed in the same manner. The wounds on both victims were severe and consistent with the same weapon, leading investigators to conclude that a single killer had moved deliberately through the house.
Lizzie Andrew Borden, born in Fall River on July 19, 1860, was Andrew's younger daughter. Her biological mother, Sarah Anthony Morse, had died when Lizzie was barely three years old, and her father had remarried Abby Gray. By the time of the murders, Lizzie reportedly referred to her stepmother simply as "Mrs. Borden" — a detail investigators seized upon as evidence of a household at odds beneath its respectable surface.