Today, we’re revisiting the details of the Lizzie Borden trial. In 1892, Andrew and Abby Borden were hacked to death in their locked Fall River home while their 32-year-old daughter Lizzie was the only other person inside. Over 130 years later, the case is still officially unsolved and now serves as the inspiration for Ryan Murphy’s latest installment of the "Monster" series. Let’s dive into mounting family resentment, the evidence the jury never heard, and Lizzie’s lavish lifestyle after the murders.
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TRANSCRIPT
Adelaide Churchill was washing dishes one morning in Fall River, Massachusetts in 1892. It was almost time for lunch and the New England air was quickly heating in the early August sun. From her kitchen window, she could see the three-story house of her neighbors, the Bordens. They were a quiet and polite family, but this morning, Adelaide could see the shadow of someone through their front door screen pacing back and forth, as if in a panic. At once she realized it was Lizzie, the youngest daughter of the family.
Something didn't seem right, so Adelaide opened her window and called out across the yard. Is everything ok, Lizzie?
Lizzie stopped pacing and stood at the screen door. Oh Adelaide, she yelled. Come quick, father's been killed.
The night before Lizzie Borden found her parents brutally murdered, everyone in the Borden household was throwing up.
Something they had eaten at dinner didn’t sit right. So After dinner, everyone retired to their respective bedrooms without speaking, clutching their stomachs. Getting sick after dinner was a rare occurrence in the household, but going to bed without speaking was not.
Now, there were several people inside the house that night. There was Andrew Borden, Lizzie's father and Abby Borden, Lizzie's stepmother. The two had married more than two decades earlier, two years after the death of Lizzie's mother, Sarah Morse Borden. Lizzie was just two when her mother died. She died of something called uterine congestion. Which sounds like a horribly victorian illness, but today some say it was likely an ectopic pregnancy.
Bridget Sullivan, the housekeeper, was also there that night. Then, There was a visitor. 59 year old John V. Morse, Lizzie's biological mother’s brother. He had arrived that day unannounced
And of course there was Lizzie who wasn’t, as you might think, a little girl. No, Lizzie was thirty two., and the youngest of two sisters.
Her older sister, the 41 year old, Emma wasn’t at home because she’d been out of town for two weeks visiting friends.
Now, There were two distinct groups in the Borden household. Groups that didn’t necessarily like each other. There was Andrew and Abby.
And then there was Lizzie and Emma. The two groups never ate together and hardly spoke at all. They’d even take different staircases up to their bedrooms to avoid seeing each other.
Whenever Uncle John Morse visited, which was becoming frequent, he would mostly hang out with Andrew and Abby, rarely seeing Lizzie and Emma unless it was to exchange the most basic of pleasantries.
Bridget, the twenty-six-year-old Irish immigrant housekeeper, tended to float between the groups, helping out whenever she was asked. But I can’t imagine she liked it there all that much. even though Bridget had been with the Bordens for a few years, Lizzie, Emma, and Andrew all referred to her by their last housekeeper's name: Maggie. Abby, the stepmom, was the only member of the house to call her Bridget.
In this episode, I will be referring to Bridget by her real name. Because to do otherwise would be rude, Lizzie. That's a rude thing to do.
It sounds odd, but it was somewhat easy to ignore each other. The Borden residence was a three-story home in Fall River. And while not extravagant, it was very comfortable for its residents and one guest. Everyone had their own room, Lizzie and Emmas could be accessed by the front staircase which you would see if you walked in through the front door, and Abby and Andrew’s room could be accessed by the backstaircase, off of the kitchen. Bridget lived in the quarters upstairs.
Now, let me be very clear — the Bordens could have lived in a MUCH bigger house if they wanted to. They were not in want of more money. Andrew Borden's family had built serious wealth over generations, and Andrew had grown it further through his own career. He worked his way up from cabinet maker to furniture maker, eventually becoming the director of the Merchants Manufacturing Company. He saved his money, never spending more than he needed to, and boasted that he had never once borrowed money from anyone.
But despite his fortune, Andrew kept the family on Second Street, below what was known as The Hill where Fall River's elite families lived. And that gap between what the Bordens could afford and how they actually lived would become a constant source of tension.
About a year before the murders, something happened ithat nobody talked about much at the time. In June of 1891, the Borden home was burglarized in broad daylight. Andrew's desk was rifled through, about a hundred dollars was taken along with his watch and streetcar tickets. No sign of forced entry. Captain Dennis Desmond investigated, and Andrew told him something that stuck. he said it three separate times over two weeks: "I'm afraid the police will not be able to find the real thief."
He thought it was someone inside the house.
Even still, After the burglary, Andrew became obsessive about locking the doors. Every door, locked from the inside and outside, bolted, latched, chained. Bridget received her own side-door key.
But the night of August 3rd, the last night of his life, none of that mattered, as he was doubled over with stomach cramps. Abby was pretty concerned by how violently ill everyone had gotten, like I said, food poisoning was not common in the borden household. She ended up crossing the street to see the family doctor, Dr. Seabury Bowen, and told him she thought they had been poisoned. Bowen chalked it up to spoiled mutton, prescribed castor oil, and sent her home.
And that night, everyone retired early to their beds without talking.
The next morning, August 4th, was just like any other at the Borden house.
Abby and Andrew awoke early and were feeling a bit better, so they ate breakfast at 7:00 a.m. with Uncle John. All of them were still suffering from the food poisoning, but they still ate cold mutton, pancakes, coffee, and tea. At 8:45, Uncle John left to go visit a relative that lived nearby.
A few minutes later, Lizzie came downstairs to eat breakfast by herself.
At 9:15 a.m., Andrew left the house to attend to some business downtown.
Around the time that Andrew left, Abby asked Bridget to wash the downstairs windows from the outside while Abby went upstairs to make the guest bedroom. Lizzie remained downstairs.
At 10:45, Andrew returned home from downtown, but was unable to unlock the front door because it had been bolted from the inside — just like every door since the burglary a year earlier. The spring lock, the bolt, and the key lock were all secured. Bridget ran over to help him and yelled out an expletive. Lizzie had been coming down the stairs from the second floor when she heard Bridget swear and she burst into laughter.
When he entered the house, Andrew went upstairs to his bedroom, then came back down and asked Lizzie where Abby was. She replied that Abby had gotten a note from a friend asking her to visit someone who was sick, and that she was out of the house. That note, by the way, was never found. No writer ever came forward, no messenger was ever identified. It was as if the note never existed.
Andrew then went into the sitting room to take a nap on the couch. Lizzie, on the other hand, went out back to a shed. She wanted to get a lead sinker for a fishing line.
But Bridget stayed in the house. She was upstairs on the third floor in her room when all of a sudden, she heard Lizzie scream out.
“Maggie, come quick! Father's dead. Somebody came in and killed him”
Bridget ran downstairs to see Andrew laying on the couch, his head violently smashed in. Lizzie said when she was walking back into the house she heard a strange groan from the living room, and there her father was.
But how could this be? How could the house that was normally locked down like a fortress be the site of a murder this violent? And in the middle of the day.
The first police officer on the scene was Officer George Allen. When he got dispatched, he sprinted the roughly quarter-mile to Second Street. When he got inside, huffing and puffing, he didn't recognize that it was Andrew laying on the couch. And that’s because He was lying on his right side, his legs still dangling off the front. And The left side of his head had ten deep and brutal wounds from some sort of sharp, small object. Whatever was used in this attack was sharp enough to completely bisect his left eye socket.
But one thing he noticed, was that the room looked clean. Disturbingly clean, given how gruesome Andrew's injuries were. No specks of blood anywhere aside from where his head bled into the pillow.
Allen deputized a passer-by named Charles Sawyer to guard the front door and ran back to the station for help.
Lizzie summoned Dr. Bowen, the family doctor, and told him to write to her sister Emma, who was staying thirty miles away. She told him not to include the gruesome details.
Others needed to be made aware, namely Abby. officer Allen was told that Abby had received a note asking her to visit a friend. He asked Lizzie to bring him the note, but Lizzie said she didn't know where it was.
Now, Bridget was getting antsy, and she also was confused. She didn't hear Mrs. Borden leave that day. But she also couldn’t hear much of anything up on the third floor, because she didn’t hear Andrew’s attack. she insisted they needed to find Abby NOW.
That's when Lizzie offered up some information. She told everyone that actually, she thought she heard Abby return and go upstairs., up the front staircase towards the guest bedroom.
So Bridget ascended the stairs with Adelaide Churchill, the neighbor. The two women slowly tiptoed up. If Abby was home and on the second floor, she would have heard all the commotion and come downstairs. Now, they feared the worst.
Mrs. Churchill only cleared the stairs enough to see into the guest bedroom, but from where she stood, she could see Abby’s feet sprawled out on the floor by the bed
The women ran down and told Dr. Bowen to go look. At first glance, Bowen thought Abby had died of fright. She was lying on the floor, face down on her left cheek, with her arms above her head. But as he got closer, he could see the blood, dark maroon around her head. Abby had suffered even more than Andrew — eighteen wounds to the head with what appeared to be the same weapon.
But there was one detail about Abby's scene that changed everything.
The blood around Abby's head had congealed. Like, really congealed. Andrew's wounds were so fresh that blood was still dripping down his face when Dr. Bowen arrived. This led him to a shocking realization. Abby had been murdered before Andrew. Well before Andrew. By his estimates, like 90 minutes prior.
So The murderer must have killed Abby without Bridget or Lizzie hearing or seeing anything, waited an hour and a half, and then come back to do the same thing to Andrew. And if Abby was killed around 9:15 a.m., that meant someone hit her in the back of the head with a hatchet or other heavy sharp object, watched her collapse, and then kept hitting eighteen more times, while Bridget and Lizzie were downstairs. It was shocking to investigators that her dead weight fell face first and no one on the floor below heard a thud.
And not only that, but the door to the guest bedroom was left open. According to the timeline, both Lizzie AND Andrew went upstairs, passed that open doorway, and never saw a thing.
Lizzie and Bridget were both questioned that day. Bridget was frantic and panicked, while Lizzie remained composed as she normally was, not crying once. Bridget's version of events never changed; she was outside washing windows when police believed Abby was killed, and upstairs in her servants' quarters lying down when Andrew was killed. Her separate staircase meant she never passed the guest bedroom. She would, however, have been able to see an intruder enter at the time of Abby's murder, being that she was outside of the house. and she never saw a thing. Bridget's story was confirmed by Lizzie's account.
But Lizzie's own story? That started changing right away.
When asked where she was when Andrew came home, she said she was already downstairs waiting for an iron to heat up. But Bridget had watched as Lizzie came down the stairs and laughed at the door being locked for Andrew. But Lizzie said no, she had been downstairs the entire time.
Then there was the question of Lizzie's alibi during Andrew's murder. She claimed she'd gone out to the barn to get a lead sinker for a fishing line. Police asked if she fished. No, she replied. They asked why it took so long. Lizzie explained she couldn't remember where the sinkers were because she'd last seen them five years ago. She said she also picked a pear from a tree and sat down and ate it inside the barn.
To police, this story seemed unrealistic. Why was she dawdling in the barn for so long?
And here's where you get two completely contradicting pieces of testimony about that barn visit. Officer William Medley climbed up to the barn loft about fifteen minutes after arriving on scene and testified that the dust on the floor was completely undisturbed. You would think someone walking around the barn would leave footprints. He pressed his own hand into the dust to show it would have left a mark.
But there was a witness that day. Hyman Lubinsky, a Russian-immigrant ice cream peddler who passed the house just after 11:00 a.m. he said he saw a woman in a dark dress, not Bridget, whom he knew, walking from the barn toward the side door.
The next order of business for investigators was to search the house. Based on the wounds, they assumed a small axe or hatchet was the murder weapon. Could it still be in the house?
Well, they found something in the basement. In a box of tools, there was a handleless hatchet. The handle looked like it had been recently separated, perhaps from use? The only thing was the hatchet had no blood on it. It was coated in a white, ash-like film, and the suspicious-looking spots on it tested negative for blood. A separate hatchet in the basement did have strands of hair on it that were later determined to be cow hair. So the most suspicious item they had didn't have blood, and the hatchet with hair on it was clearly for something else entirely.
And those weren’t the only things in the basement that caught investigators' eye. Also downstairs was a barrel of water with a few bloody rags. When asked about them, Lizzie had a reason. She said she was menstruating and they were rags she was using. Dr. Bowen intervened, confirmed they were menstrual towels, and told investigators the matter "need not be further investigated."
That’s right, in the Victorian era, if you said something was menstrual blood, no one asked any questions. Even if it was at an active crime scene.
But blood was going to matter in this investigation. The crime scenes were shockingly clean considering how gruesome the attacks were, but also not entirely without trace.
Dr. Dolan mapped the blood spatter by Andrew and Abby carefully, and he found that there were about eighty-six spots behind the sitting-room lounge, some reaching over six feet high on the wall. About fifty spots on the dressing table upstairs, fifteen on the guest-room mirror. But there was no trail of blood on the floors, no bloody footprints leading anywhere.
Whoever committed this crime should have been covered in blood, there’s no question about that. But Lizzie was spotlessly clean, and Bridget confirmed that Lizzie hadn't changed clothes that day. They searched her closet and made meticulous notes about every dress, but couldn't find anything consistent with the crime scenes.
All they found was a single pinhead-sized spot on a white skirt that the Harvard chemist, Dr. Edward Wood, conceded could have been menstrual blood. So I’m sure they also said ew gross!!! And threw it away
One more thing worth mentioning. Dr. Benjamin Handy, a local physician who lived nearby, testified that he'd walked past the Borden house twice that morning and seen a pale young man near the property — agitated, staggering, eyes fixed on the sidewalk. The press called him "The Wild-Eyed Man." Police never identified him. It was a lead that went nowhere but refused to disappear.
So could someone really have come in and done this attack?
The perimeter of the house was searched for any sign of a break-in or tracks from someone escaping. But there was Nothing.
Andrew kept the house locked down, but Lizzie had opened the door to go outside to the barn. So sure, someone could have slipped in, but Abby was killed BEFORE Andrew. The person would have already had to be in the house. So maybe they took that opportunity when Lizzie went to the barn to escape? ]
Police took stock of the situation. There was not much that told them anything. It didn’t look like someone had broken in, but it ALSO didn’t look like the two people inside of the house had anything to do with it.
However, there was something that happened the day before that gave police some insight.
Two years before his murder, Andrew had sent Lizzie on an all-expenses-paid Grand Tour of Europe. her passport application, dated June 4, 1890, is still held by the National Archives. And upon her return he had gifted her a beautiful seal skin cape. Not the present I would wante, but this was luxurious back in the day. It wasn't like Andrew to spend extravagantly, especially on his own daughters. For having so much money, the allowance he gave Lizzie each week was less than what a woman would make as a spinner in town.
Now I tell you this because On August 3rd, the day before the murders, Lizzie walked into a drugstore and told the clerk, that she needed prussic acid to clean her seal skin cape. The clerk had never heard of prussic acid, also known as Hydrogen Cyanide, being used on clothing. You could take small amounts as a sedative or cough medicine but It’s really poisonous. Just one teaspoon was potentially lethal, so the 10 cents worth that Lizzie wanted was too much. He refused to sell it without a prescription. Two other people in the store, a clerk and a customer, both witnessed the odd exchange. Eventually, Lizzie left empty-handed.
When they learned this, alarms went off in investigators' heads. Lizzie tried to buy poison the DAY before her father and stepmother were murdered. And Abby had run to Dr. Bowen saying she thought they'd been poisoned. So now they had evidence of intent. And even though they didn’t know WHY the murders had occurred, Five days later, on August 9th, 1892, Lizzie was called to a closed inquest presided over by Judge Josiah Blaisdell.
And 2 things happened that would severely affect this case. 1. Lizzie asked that her attorney be present, but she was refused.
And two, Dr. Bowen had prescribed Lizzie morphine after her father’s death. So there she was, high on morphine, without a lawyer, being questioned by The District Attorney
this was the only time she would ever testify under oath about the murders and Her testimony was a mess. Contradictory, confused, shifting from question to question. She couldn't keep straight whether she was in the barn or downstairs. She gave different answers about whether she knew her father had come home. She also contradicted her earlier statements to police.
The DA pressed her on the note Abby supposedly received asking her to visit a sick friend; Lizzie couldn't say who wrote it, who delivered it, or where it went. Her stories didn't line up from one answer to the next, which was a really bad look for her.
But Dr. Bowen would later concede that the morphine he'd prescribed could account for her confusion.
Regardless, She was arrested immediately afterward on August 11th.
Lizzie spent nine months in jail awaiting trial. In that time, there was a preliminary hearing where Judge Blaisdell found her "probably guilty," and a grand jury convened. At first, the grand jury did NOT indict. But then one of Lizzie’s friends, Alice Russell, came forward with something she'd been holding back.
See, Alice had been in the Borden house the night before the murders and stayed for several nights afterward to help. The night before, she said Lizzie mentioned feeling like she was slipping into a depressive episode; that something was hanging over her, following her around. Lizzie also spoke of her father's enemies, mentioning a man who'd come by about renting a property, been turned away, and left sneering.
But what Alice told the grand jury about was what she saw AFTER the murders. On Sunday morning, three days after the killings, Alice came downstairs to find Lizzie and Emma, stuffing something into the kitchen stove. Alice asked what they were doing. Lizzie said she had a dress covered in paint and she was going to burn it. Alice told her she shouldn't let anyone see her doing that. Lizzie ignored her.
When investigators checked their meticulous notes on Lizzie's dresses, there was nothing about a dress covered in paint. They would have noted that.
It was this revelation that led the grand jury to reconveneand they issued the indictment on December 2nd, 1892. And to make things worse for Lizzie, Emma took the stand at trial to testify that it was HER idea to burn the dress, not Lizzie's. as if that somehow made it better.
The trial started June 5th, 1893, and it was a spectacle unlike anything America had seen. More than a hundred newspapers sent reporters and sketch artists. Telegraph wires carried updates to the nation daily. It was one of America's first media-sensation trials. It was the O.J. Simpson case of its day.
Now, the people in that courtroom matter. On the defense side was Andrew Jennings, the Borden family attorney, and George D. Robinson, the former Governor of Massachusetts. On the prosecution was District Attorney Hosea Knowlton and a young attorney named William Moody, who would later go on to become a United States Supreme Court Justice.
And presiding as one of three judges? Justice Justin Dewey — who had been appointed to the bench by George Robinson, Lizzie’s lawyer, when Robinson was governor. So one of the three judges was appointed by the defense.
However, the jury. All men. Being told that a menstruating spinster might have killed her parents. So it was going to be an uphill battle.
As the trial unfolded, more information emerged about why Lizzie might have done this. Lizzie's birth mother, Sarah, had passed when Lizzie was a child. Andrew and Abby married just two years later. In some ways, Abby was the only mother Lizzie knew, but that didn't stop Lizzie from resenting her. Multiple witnesses testified about nasty remarks Lizzie had made; that Abby was mean, that she was after Andrew's money. A few months before Abby's death, Lizzie snapped at a dressmaker who referred to Abby as Lizzie's mother. "She is NOT my mother," Lizzie corrected her. "She is my stepmother."
The root of it seemed to go back six years, to a dispute over property. Abby's half-sister wanted to buy their father's house after their father died, but she lacked the funds. So Andrew stepped in and purchased the house outright, putting it under Abby's name. This infuriated Emma and Lizzie. Their father had always been incredibly stingy with them … he refused to live the high-society life he could afford, keeping them on Second Street below The Hill instead of in the elite neighborhood.. And now he was buying up property for the half-sister of someone who wasn't even their mother.
It was after this dispute that the two groups started eating separately, stopped speaking unless necessary, and divided the house between them.
But was a property dispute from six years earlier enough to drive someone to pick up a hatchet? Why now?
Then there was the medical examiner, who upon doing autopsies on Andrew and Abby, ruled there was no poison in their stomachs. They all did happen to get food poisoning that night, Lizzie included. There was no evidence that Lizzie had successfully poisoned anyone.
And here's why the case really fell apart.
The prosecution tried to introduce the pharmacist, Eli Bence's testimony about the prussic acid attempt. But The defense objected. No sale had occurred and no poison was found in the bodies. The three judges agreed that there was no reason to include the testimony, so The jury never heard that Lizzie tried to buy poison the day before the murders.
Then came the inquest testimony. The prosecution moved to admit Lizzie's own contradictory, morphine-fueled statements. The defense argued that Lizzie had been, for all practical purposes, a prisoner, questioned without counsel, under the influence of drugs. The judges ruled the inquest testimony inadmissible.
So The jury also never heard Lizzie's own contradiction about her alibi.
There were also interesting points made about the handle less hatchet. The defense pointed out that the blade was three and a half inches long… but some of Abby's wounds were only two inches wide. They couldn't have been made by that blade.
Probably one of the most shocking moments of the trial was on day two, and this is the most victorian thing I’ve ever heard, but the prosecution brought in the actual skulls of Andrew and Abby, cleaned and defleshed , for the jury to see.
Lizzie saw the smashed skulls and fainted
That was the most emotional she got during the trial. For the most part, she was as calm and collected as she was every other day of her life… still on the morphine Dr. Bowen had prescribed. Could a woman this calm do something this brutal?
Just a few months before Lizzie's trial, another axe murder had happened up the road, reinforcing that notion. On May 30th, 1893, Bertha Manchester was killed and left with over twenty axe wounds in her family's farmhouse. Jose Correa deMello, a Portuguese farm hand with grievances about his wages, had attacked the farmer's daughter to get revenge on her father.
He confessed immediately. But also, he wasn’t in the country yet for the Borden murders. But the timing of this case really mattered. Because everyone in town was reading about what a typical axe murder looked like: passionate, hateful, messy, impulsive. All the things that quiet, composed Lizzie Borden was not.
The trial went on for three weeks in sweltering summer heat. Reporters couldn't believe anyone had survived the humidity in that packed courtroom. And Lizzie never testified, not once. She didn't need to.
The facts of the case spoke for themselves. The jury was left with no murder weapon definitively found, no evidence she tried to buy poison, no blood found on Lizzie, and none of her weird testimony. Just circumstantial evidence and a composed, well-dressed woman from a rich family.
When it came time to render a verdict, after roughly ninety minutes of deliberation, the same amount of time between Abby and Andrew’s murders, the all-male jury gave a resounding NOT GUILTY.
The courtroom erupted in cheers. Lizzie fell to her knees and rested her head on the rail. She was free.
Though the crowd celebrated her acquittal, their support dwindled over the years.
Five weeks after the verdict, Lizzie and Emma bought a thirteen-room stone Victorian on French Street... Located on The Hill, the neighborhood their father had always refused to move to. Lizzie carved the name "Maplecroft" into the top step and restyled herself "Lizbeth of Maplecroft." After a lifetime of her father's penny-pinching, she finally lived the way she wanted to. And as a result, Lizzie was shunned in Fall River, treated as guilty despite the verdict. In 1897, a warrant was issued in Providence for shoplifting two porcelain paintings from Tilden-Thurber, a department store. Then around 1904, Lizzie developed an intense friendship with the actress Nance O'Neil. She hosted lavish theatrical parties at Maplecroft. In 1905, Lizzie’s sister Emma moved out. She later said only that "the conditions became absolutely unbearable." The sisters never reconciled.
Lizzie Borden died on June 1st, 1927, of pneumonia following gallbladder surgery, at age sixty-six. Few attended her private funeral. She was buried at her father's feet in the Borden family plot at Oak Grove Cemetery.
Emma died nine days later, on June 10th, in Newmarket, New Hampshire. They hadn't spoken in over twenty years.
Lizzie's will was telling. Her estate, roughly $265,000, (that’s over $5 million today) left nothing to Emma just a note saying "she has enough to make her comfortable." She left $30,000 and her stock in the Stevens Manufacturing Company to the Fall River Animal Rescue League. "I have been fond of animals," she wrote, "and their need is great and there are so few who care for them." She left five hundred dollars for perpetual care of her father's grave. Nothing for Abby's.
In 2012, the Fall River Historical Society received a trove of documents that had been stored for decades in an attic. These werethe private journals and case notes of Lizzie’s defense attorney Andrew Jennings, alongside original evidence including the handleless hatchet. The "Hip Bath Collection" it’s called, is the most significant new Borden archive in a century. And in 2021, the Borden house at 230 Second Street,long operating as a bed and breakfast, sold for its full two-million-dollar asking price. It still operates as a museum and offers overnight stays.
No DNA testing has ever been conducted on the evidence. In 1992, forensic scientist James Starrs sought to exhume the bodies, but the Borden family denied permission. The case remains officially unsolved. No one else was ever charged.
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Many, many people think Lizzie Borden was actually guilty. When I first covered this topic years ago, i spoke with two professors of criminology who broke down why they believe Lizzie was guilty. It was a great discussion, I’ll add it to the free shelf on my patreon for everyone to listen to.
But those who truly don’t think she did it have a few other theories as to who might have:
There was the “wide-eyed man”--the pale young man Dr. Handy had said he’d seen hanging around the Bordens acting strange the morning of the murders. He wasn't walking so much as drifting, eyes fixed on the ground, and Handy's word for him was "agitated."Nobody ever identified him. The Fall River Herald tried, months later, and floated a local drunk called "Mike the Soldier" — Handy said no, that wasn't him. And remember, Lizzie herself had told Alice Russell the night before the murders about a man who'd come to the house wanting to rent a property, been turned away by Andrew, and left sneering.
The second suspect is Bridget Sullivan, the housekeeper
The case for her is basically that she was there. She was the only other person in the house for both murders. And she had reason to be angry that morning. She was sick from the same food that had everyone else throwing up, and Abby had sent her outside anyway, on a hot August day, to wash windows. In 1961, a crime writer named Edward Radin built a whole book on that grievance; a servant pushed too far. Plus, how was she in the home and didn’t know a thing? Decades after the murders, Bridget was living in Montana, and a friend named Minnie Green later claimed that Bridget, believing she was dying, confessed she had changed her testimony to protect Lizzie.
The case against her is stronger. She obviously had the opportunity, and maybe something of a motive. She was seen outside with a bucket by neighbors, backing up her window washing story. But remember, there was an hour and a half after Abby’s murder where she could have gone outside and carried on with her duties until Andrew got home. And also keep in mind the main person to clear here was Lizzie. The two women who were at home the whole morning and somehow didn’t see or hear any intruders or the many many strikes of the hatchet.
The third suspect is Uncle John.
This one is kind of interesting. John Vinnicum Morse was fifty-nine years old, Sarah Borden's brother. He'd trained as a butcher as a young man, then gone west and made a comfortable living farming and trading horses in Iowa before coming back to Massachusetts a couple of years earlier. He showed up at the Borden house the afternoon before the murders unannounced, with no luggage and no change of clothes, ate dinner with Andrew and Abby, and slept in the guest room. The room Abby would be killed in the next morning.
People have been making the case against him for 130 years. A butcher. In the house the night before. Talking business with Andrew, specifically about the Swansea farm, which is a property some believe Andrew intended to leave to Abby. And then there's his alibi, which was almost too good. When police asked where he'd been, John didn't just say he'd gone to visit his niece and nephew across town. He gave them the number of the streetcar he rode back and He gave them the conductor's badge number. Investigators found that oddly specific for a man who had no idea, when he boarded that car, that anyone would ever ask.
But the alibi held. The relatives confirmed the visit and the conductor confirmed the ride. He left the house at 8:45 and didn't return until nearly noon, which puts him out of the house for both murders. He didn't inherit a dime.. Lizzie, for what it's worth, which is maybe not a lot, told police that same day her uncle couldn't have had anything to do with it.
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We may never know what really happened in that house. But that has never once stopped Ryan murphy from making a season of television, and it sure as hell is not going to stop him now. I’m not sure what his version will look like, but I bet every dollar I’ve ever made that it will probably be more psychosexual than what really happened.
Let me know what you think! Do you think Lizzie is really innocent? And after you watch the show, come back here and let me know if they made anything up. Or just, tell me all the stuff they made up.
I’ll be back here next week and I’ll see you then. Love you guys!!