Born on July 19, 1860, in Fall River, Massachusetts, Lizzie Borden was the daughter of a well-to-do businessman who married for a second time in 1865, three years after Lizzie╒s mother died. Tension grew between the new Mrs. Borden on the one side and Lizzie and her elder sister on the other, much of it seemingly arising from anxiety on the part of the girls as to the eventual disposition of Mr. Borden╒s wealth. The marked frugality and sternness of Mr. Borden added to the strain.
While the problem remained unresolved, Lizzie became active in the affairs of her church and the Woman╒s Christian Temperance Union. By 1892 the family dissension was approaching a breaking point; on one occasion the elder Bordens suspected they were being poisoned, and at the same time Lizzie expressed fears for her father╒s safety. On the morning of August 4, Mr. Borden left the house for a time. Upon his return Lizzie told him that her step-mother had gone to visit a friend. He fell asleep, and a short time later Lizzie, claiming she had just come in from the barn, awoke the maid and cried that someone had killed her father. His body was terribly mutilated about the head, apparently with an axe, and a subsequent search of the house revealed her step-mother╒s body upstairs, similarly mutilated. Examination showed her to have been killed more than a hour before her husband. Soon afterward Lizzie was found burning a dress in the kitchen stove. She was arrested and charged with both murders, but despite the burden of circumstantial evidence she was acquitted in a sensational trial in June 1893.
She was nonetheless ostracized thereafter by the people of Fall River, where she continued to live until her death on June 1, 1927. The grisly murders inspired a great many books, both serious studies and fiction, and one immortal, if slightly inaccurate, quatrain: ╥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.╙
