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Every other Friday, True Crime of the Historical Kind returns to the scene of the crime...
We uncover the deeper story. The world that shaped the violence, and the humans that played a hand in history's tragedies.
Because the past may be distant, but human nature rarely is.
Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother 40 whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41.
Speaker 1:You're listening to true crime of the historical kind. This is the strange case of Lizzie Borden part one, a quiet house.
Speaker 1:Fall River, Massachusetts in the mid nineteenth century was a place caught between two eras.
Speaker 1:It still carried the imprint of old New England with Puritan values that prized discipline, thrift, and respectability, and a very firm sense of what a proper household should look like. But at the same time, Fall River was modernizing at a remarkable pace. The textile boom transformed it from a quiet mill town into one of the fastest growing industrial centers in the country. Smoke stacks rose above textile mills, immigrant labor poured in from Europe as wages in America were rising quickly, and fortunes were being made. There were thousands of Irish, French Canadian, and Portuguese that didn't just bring in a difference in culture.
Speaker 1:Some were bringing the religious opposition to the Puritan ideals that had brought Puritans to America in the first place. This created a social tension you can feel between Protestant and Catholicism, old money and new money set across the rigid views of a classist society. Old families held tight to the idea that wealth should be accompanied by restraint, piety, and a sense of moral uprightness even if it was performative. Meanwhile, newer mill owners in town were building grand houses up on the hill, which in Fall River signaled the social status of the elite. The streets were wider, the air was cleaner, and the houses were far more modern, many with indoor plumbing, elaborate gas lighting, and the kind of architectural flourish that showed you'd arrived.
Speaker 1:It stood in sharp contrast to the older neighborhoods closer to where production was happening. The homes were smaller, plainer, and often lacked those modern conveniences. Women's roles were shaped by both of these worlds at once. Middle class women were expected to embody domestic virtue, quiet, helpful, obedient, and always aware that the household's moral reputation rested on their shoulders. A woman's fear resided in church or in the parlor, though it was becoming more and more acceptable for women to take on jobs in factories.
Speaker 1:It still represented a lower social standing if her family needed the income, though these women had a little more social freedom. In respectable families, a woman was expected to remain under her father's roof until marriage. It was a show of propriety and assumed all her behaviors were to be in line with the discipline of her father. A daughter who behaved improperly didn't just shame herself. She marked the entire household.
Speaker 1:The women of this world lived by a narrow script as obedient daughters, pious wives, or charitable spinsters. Independence would be a crude, unfavorable state of being unless a woman came by that independence by circumstance, not choice. As in if a woman was widowed or orphaned. Clearly, like all of New England during this time, Fall River watched its women closely. While work outside the home was rare for upper to middle class women, labor inside was endless and emotion kept behind closed doors.
Speaker 1:Churchgoing was nearly universal among its Yankee families, and gossip traveled fast. A woman born into this world would have to manage the social rules and limitations, both written and unwritten, as they navigate their own desires. This was exactly the case for Lizzie Andrew Borden, who was born in 1860. Her parents were Andrew Borden, her namesake, and Sarah Morse Borden. Sarah Borden was said to be quiet, practical, and devout.
Speaker 1:She was from a long rooted Fall River family. Andrew Borden was a self made man, though you wouldn't quite know that right off the bat. He was from the old Puritan mentality that restraint was godly and frugality was honorable. He was known for being shrewd and not charitable. Andrew and Sarah were married on Christmas day in 1845.
Speaker 1:They moved into a modest house at 92 2nd Street. They had two children before Lizzie was born. The oldest was a girl named Emma, who was nine years older than Lizzie. And like her mother, she was quiet, obedient, and dutiful. For Emma, another child was born, Alice, but tragedy struck early.
Speaker 1:She died before her second birthday of hydrocephalus. The family's grief must have been immense, but life pressed on. Lizzie would end up being their youngest child. By all accounts, the Bordens were a normal family living a normal life. In this society obsessed with appearances, a well kept home and a spotless reputation meant more than luxury ever could.
Speaker 1:Families like the Bordens measured virtue by conservative standards. Thrift was moral and waste was sinful. Their home stood as a quiet contradiction to their financial success. It sat just a few blocks away from the bustling commercial center, a statement of restraint in a city where new money was beginning to be flaunted. The house at 92 2nd Street had no indoor plumbing on the upper floor and was little in the way of ornament.
Speaker 1:The furnishings were sturdy, practical, and plain. For Sarah Borden, life revolved around the rhythms of the home, caring for her daughters, keeping the house, and maintaining the sober respectability expected of a wife and mother in a Puritan influenced New England town. She teach her young daughters discipline, order, and faith. Yet in March 1863, grief came again to the Borden home. Sarah Borden died at the age of 39 from uterine congestion, which is a Victorian phrase for gynecological issues that really masked a slow and painful decline.
Speaker 1:Emma was just 12, and Lizzie was not even three. They'd enter morning with the heavy stillness typical of the era. Curtains drawn, mirrors draped in black cloth, clocks sometimes stopped to mark the moment of passing. These were the customs of Victorian New England, where grief moved according to ritual and propriety. For Andrew, being as practical and disciplined as ever, carried on in business stoic and steady.
Speaker 1:For Emma, it began a lifelong duty to care for her younger sister, Lizzie. And for Lizzie, losing her mother at such a young age would, of course, reshape her life forever. Neighbors would have seen a family remain composed and eventually return to his household routines. But inside the Borden home, without a mother's warmth, it grew colder. In June 1865, two years after Sarah's death, Andrew Borden remarried.
Speaker 1:His new wife was named Abby Gray. She was a 37 year old woman of solid Fall River stock. She was respectable, churchgoing, and plain spoken. She was older than many second wives of the time and brought with her a calm domestic steadiness that Andrew no doubt valued. To the neighbors, the batch seemed practical.
Speaker 1:Andrew was a prosperous man with two young daughters who needed a woman's guidance. For Abby, it would be a sort of opportunity. At her age, she wouldn't expect to be a first wife, and being the second wife to a prosperous man in town would essentially give her a role as the mother in charge of a home and eventual estate. Abby was seen as kind and capable, and the union promised stability, something the old society prized just as much as wealth. But inside the house, the dynamic was more complicated as it often is.
Speaker 1:Emma was now 14 and had, for the last two years, taken on the mother role over her little sister and may have felt like she had a part in the management of the house. Lizzie was only five and would have to adjust to a new woman stepping in the shoes of her late mother. In those early years, Abby likely tried to maintain order and civility as stepmothers were expected to. It's never not a complicated dynamic, though. And even in a time where obedience and practicality were expected, small rebellions would be just beneath the surface.
Speaker 1:Lizzie called her stepmother mother for a time, which would be the norm. But as the girls grew older, the bond thinned, and Lizzie began to refer to her as missus Borden. In a time and culture where family hierarchy was sacred, that single choice of words spoke volumes. It was so formal, it marked the lack of warmth and affection you'd expect for someone who essentially raised her. While still being polite, at least on the surface, it was like a passive aggressive act.
Speaker 1:The Borden home became a quiet home, which is typically not a happy home. Though there was little evidence that the tension felt outright hostile, silent resentments and fractures would soon appear. In Lizzie's teen years, her father's success continued to flourish. Yet when she saw many other successful families establishing their affluence by fashionable clothes or moving on the hill, Andrew Borden did not. They remained on 2nd Street.
Speaker 1:To Andrew's daughters, especially Lizzie, this decision or outright refusal to move where the upper classes lived would come with frustration as it limited her own social standing and potential prospects. In a time where women were dependent on the men in their life to provide their social opportunities, it was more than likely causing great dissatisfaction. It may have even felt like a purposeful withholding. But Lizzie found other outlets to make her mark. The family attended the Central Congregational Church, one of Fall River's most prominent congregations.
Speaker 1:Within its pews, the Bordens found respectability and belonging. And for Lizzie, it offered purpose, perhaps a sense of identity beyond the confines of her father's rigid home. Lizzie grew up an active member of the church community. In an era of sharp class divisions and nativist sentiment, this work was seen as charitable and moral. Young women of means extending grace to those less fortunate.
Speaker 1:Though it would be one of the few, if not the only social opportunities someone like her had. She taught Sunday school to children of immigrant workers and also served as secretary treasurer of the Christian Endeavor Society. She took part in the Women's Christian Temperance Union and joined the ladies fruit and flower mission, which brought small comforts to the sick and elderly. These roles reflected the era's ideal of feminine virtue, Heidi, service, and self discipline. But it also hinted at Lizzie's longing for a purpose and the community outside of her father's authority.
Speaker 1:Within those church walls, Lizzie Borden's reputation was one of respect and decorum. She was seen as a well bred, upright woman, serious, proper, and deeply involved in Christian service. By the mid eighteen eighties, Lizzie was a well known figure in Fall River society, church going, unmarried, and living respectably with her father, stepmother, and sister. She appeared the model of moral New England womanhood. While being a wife and mother would be an important calling for women like Lizzie and her sister Emma, they remained unmarried, which is more than likely a reflection of the strict social codes that quickly became limitations.
Speaker 1:Many women of their social standing would choose not to marry. That may be because there were very few acceptable prospects, and being unmarried and doing charity work was far more acceptable than the alternative of marrying beneath you, so to speak. Not to mention, in the born daughter situation, they would likely have more independence staying single and waiting to inherit their father's estate than marrying someone with probably less money who they would then be dependent on and probably be expected to do more work for. In Victorian times, spinsters were a part of a sort of counterculture that reflected how marriage wasn't all that great for women. Many saw marriage as domestic confinement.
Speaker 1:To stay single meant that they had more control over their time, their interests, and their identity. For example, when a Victorian newspaper asked Finsters why they were single, you can imagine there were many hilarious responses, but one example sums it up like this. In response, this woman says, because I do not care to enlarge my menagerie of pets, and I find the animal man less docile than a dog, less affectionate than a cat, and less amusing than a monkey. Ouch. So while being spinsters made sense for the Borden sisters, they were still limited as daughters.
Speaker 1:Because even though they were now adults, they still had a stepmother. An example of this complication would play out as Andrew Borden purchased a home for Abby's half sister, Sarah Whitehead. To Andrew, it was a practical gesture, a means of securing family property within respectable bounds. But to Emma and Lizzie, it was something else entirely. The decision ignited a bitterness that had likely been simmering for years.
Speaker 1:The sisters viewed the gift as a sign of favoritism, proof that their stepmother, missus Borden, held sway over their father's affections and his finances. In an effort to restore balance, Andrew deeded his late father's former home to his daughters as a form of compensation. But the gesture did little to soothe their resentment. That house was older, less valuable, and symbolically loaded as it was nowhere near the houses on the hill. It felt less like a gift than a reminder of what they were being denied, at least in their minds.
Speaker 1:To them, their stepmother was siphoning their inheritance, and in reality, their independence and social standing along with it. Because by now, it was clear neither sister would ever marry, and they were gonna be permanent fixtures in the home. Though in 1889, a new presence entered the Borden household, Bridget Sullivan, a young Irish immigrant who was hired as the family's live in maid. She was in her mid twenties and part of the steady wave of Irish women who crossed the Atlantic seeking wages and stability in the industrial towns of New England. Bridget's arrival brought a quiet shift to the daily life at 92 2nd Street.
Speaker 1:Her responsibilities were demanding. She tended the fires, cooked the meals, hauled the coal and water. She did the scrubbing, laundering, and maintained the home's strict order. It was work that began before dawn and ended late into the evening. The boredom women, by contrast, handled the lighter, more respectable domestic tasks, like sewing and managing the household's routines.
Speaker 1:Still, it was Lizzie and Emma who spent most of the time at home. Their days marked a mix of charity work, church duties, and the idle hours common to unmarried women of this class and age. To Bridget, the house must have felt both proper and peculiar. It was elegant in its restraint, yet heavy with unspoken tension. The rooms were clean and quiet, but the silence between its inhabitants carried more weight than conversation.
Speaker 1:As an outsider, she would see firsthand what others would not. The small courtesies forced through clenched teeth, the way voices lowered when certain subjects arose, or the distinct chill between Lizzie and missus Borden. Bridget would remain in the household for years, part servant, part unassuming observer in a home where and resentment coexisted uneasily under one roof. Lizzie's image in particular was beginning to gather cracks. There were rumors that began to ripple quietly throughout the town.
Speaker 1:Whispers that Lizzie had been caught taking small items from local shops. The stories varied. An item here, a bit of fabric there, nothing major, but enough to draw the attention of merchants who knew her name and knew her father. In a town where gossip was its own form of currency, such talk traveled fast. No formal arrests were ever made.
Speaker 1:When these incidents occurred, Andrew Borden, ever conscious of propriety, seemingly paid for the items and ensured the matter was kept discreet. He had the influence and the means to make the problem disappear, so he did. To those in the know, it was quietly understood that such things were best not spoken of. Yet it's impossible to know what these small transgressions meant, if they were acts of carelessness, compulsion, or a quiet rebellion. In the controlled world of Lizzie Borden, where emotion was contained and desire suppressed, the line between propriety and impulse had begun ever so slightly to blur.
Speaker 1:Back at home, Abby herself had incidents of missing jewelry, cash, and small household items. The response from Andrew was to keep internal locks on all the doors inside the home. It was a strange method in a house without hallways. So if you can imagine, you'd have to open a room to get into another room. That meant Bridget would have to lock and unlock adjoining rooms as she went about her daily tasks, which shows the level of mistrust within the home.
Speaker 1:This may have been a coincidence, but around the same time, Andrew began giving the women in the household an allowance, which would average around 4 to $6 a week, a very small sum for a family of such means, especially when measured against Fall River's growing class divide. This was about the same amount that a woman would make working from a factory. For Lizzie, who longed for finer clothes, travel, and social standing equal to her wealthier peers, this small allowance was upsetting to say the least. Perhaps in an effort to appease Lizzie, her father sent her on a trip. At 30 years old, Lizzie finally saw the world beyond Fall River.
Speaker 1:She embarked on a grand tour of Europe, a nineteen week long journey financed by her father. It was an extraordinary indulgence for a woman who had lived her entire life under Andrew Borden's watchful thrift. For Lizzie, the trip marked a rare taste of freedom. Crossing the Atlantic Ocean aboard a passenger steamer, she joined a party of well read women from New England. She shared a cabin with a distant boarding cousin from the more well-to-do side of the family.
Speaker 1:And she got to visit the great cities of Europe, London, Paris, and Rome, though the exact route is uncertain. Wherever she went, she would have been surrounded by art, architecture, and refinement on a scale far beyond the plain rooms of 92 2nd Street. Europe for women of her class offered more than sightseeing. It offered perspective. Lizzie saw how others of wealth and status lived and how freely they seemed to move in their own circles.
Speaker 1:For a woman who had grown up in a house without indoor plumbing upstairs, the contrast must have been profound. In Europe, she was dining in hotel parlors, touring museums, and seeing cathedrals older than anything she'd set eyes on in America. Yet when the voyage ended and she returned to Massachusetts, she came home not satisfied as perhaps her father had hoped, but restless. In comparison, Fall River must have felt smaller than ever. Her father's frugality, her stepmother's existence, the rigid domestic routines, perhaps all seemed to close in again.
Speaker 1:The grand tour had shown Lizzie the world, and in doing so, made her own corner of it feel impossibly confined. By the 1891, strange things were happening at 92 2nd Street. For one, the home was broken into by a daytime robbery. Cash and small personal items were reported missing from Andrew and Abby Borden's bedroom. Yet, there was no sign of forced entry.
Speaker 1:The theft was unsettling. Not for its material loss, Andrew could easily afford what was taken, but for what it suggested that someone from inside the house may have done it. After all, they had that maze like setup with locks on internal doors. So it was a strange incident that didn't make much sense. Andrew even moved a large wardrobe to block the connecting doorway between his bedroom and that of Lizzie's, an unmistakable symbol of distrust.
Speaker 1:According to accounts, Lizzie was falling under private suspicion of the family, but it wasn't spoken of. By the 1892, the distance between Lizzie and her stepmother had seemingly hardened into disdain. What had once been polite indifference was now laced with open irritation, no longer hidden behind the veneer of New England civility. That April, while visiting a cloakmaker's shop, Lizzie made a rare and telling remark. In the midst of a casual conversation, she referred to Abby Borden as a mean old thing.
Speaker 1:It was a small phrase, but it revealed how far the relationship had deteriorated. Such a comment seemed scandalous. Women of standing did not speak unkindly of family, especially not in public. And tensions continued. One small but telling incident involved the pigeons Lizzie kept in the family barn.
Speaker 1:It was a modest roost that she tended herself. She fed them and took quite pleasure in their company. Then one day that May, Andrew, perhaps irritated by the mess they left or concerned about the neighborhood boys breaking into the barn, he killed the pigeons with the hatchet. To him, it was a simple matter of practicality, property management, probably without malice. But to Lizzie, it was a wound.
Speaker 1:She was reportedly deeply upset, withdrawing even further from her father and stepmother. Another incident is when the Bordens hired a painter to work on the house's exterior, a rare act of home improvement. Lizzie supposedly attempted to supervise the project, ensuring the man's work was done properly, but may have been more of a sign of how much control she sought and how little she truly had. By midsummer eighteen ninety two, the tension inside 92 2nd Street had curdled into open resentment. That July, the Borden sisters sold back their grandfather's old house, the one that Andrew had given them as compensation.
Speaker 1:It was about $5,000 for them to split. On paper, it was a straightforward transaction, but in spirit, it may have shown their dissatisfaction with the deal. Then around the time of Lizzie's birthday, which is July 19, she said that she saw a stranger lingering near the back door of the house on 2nd Street. Details were scarce. Whether it was a fleeting glimpse or a longer encounter, no one could say for certain.
Speaker 1:In any other household, the incident might have passed without notice. But in the Borden home, already sealed by locked doors and heavy suspicion, it seemed to mean something, at least to Lizzie. And, of course, the robbery the year before hadn't been forgotten. To Lizzie, the moment may have felt like confirmation that something was not right, or this was her way of noting strange occurrences in case anything else went wrong. Either way, paranoia and resentment had become constant companions.
Speaker 1:Lizzie and Emma ended up leaving the tension of the home for a trip to New Bedford. Emma ended up staying in Fairhaven while Lizzie returned home without her sister. She was reentering the same quiet house that she had left behind, tensions unresolved. The August brought another restless night to 92 2nd Street. In the household, Bridget, Andrew, and Abby all fell violently ill complaining of cramps, nausea, and dizziness.
Speaker 1:It was later said to be spoiled mutton left out in the summer heat. By morning, the household was in disarray. Bridget, the maid, though sick, tended to them as best she could, fetching water and watching as Abby moved heavily between rooms, pale and shaken. Meanwhile, Andrew, ever the stoke businessman, forced himself to his usual errands downtown, but he too seemed uneasy. By nightfall, the air in the Borden home was thick with both sickness and perhaps suspicion as Lizzie, notably, wasn't ill.
Speaker 1:That following morning, Lizzie walked into the drugstore on South Main Street and asked to purchase a small vial of prussic acid, which just so happens to be an incredibly deadly poison. She told the clerk that she needed to clean a seal skin cape, and the clerk refused the sale. The substance is so deadly that it can't be sold without a solid justification. That same day, John Morse, who's brother to Lizzie's late mother, Sarah Morse Borden, arrived at the Borden home for an overnight visit. So this is Lizzie's uncle.
Speaker 1:Morse was a quiet, practical man who often stayed with the family when in town. His arrival was not unusual, but his presence added another layer to an already strained household. That evening, Lizzie visited her friend, Alice Russell, a trusted confidant who lived only a few blocks away. Lizzie told her she was worried, worried that someone meant harm to her father or that something was gonna happen. She feared the house might be broken into again, that danger was close even if she couldn't name it.
Speaker 1:Alice would later recall Lizzie's tone as unusually nervous, almost agitated, as though she sensed trouble gathering around her. When Lizzie returned home that night, the house was dim, the air heavy with the August heat, and upstairs, John Morse retired to the guest room. Andrew and Abby had already settled in for the night. The next day, 08/04/1892, began like any other quiet and ordinary day. Breakfast was served early that morning.
Speaker 1:Andrew, Abby, Lizzie, and John Morse gathered at the table as Bridget prepared the meal. It was an unremarkable breakfast, and conversation was minimal. Afterward, John left around 08:45AM to visit relatives on the other side of town. Andrew followed shortly after at 9AM. Inside the house, Abby set about her usual chores, dusting and making up the guest room where John had slept.
Speaker 1:It was mundane and uneventful until sometime between nine and 10AM without warning, she was attacked from behind. Abby was struck in the back of the head 19 times with a hatchet. The first strike likely failed her instantly. The rest were delivered in succession. She was left face down between the bed and the wall, her blood soaking into the carpet.
Speaker 1:Though she was about two hundred pounds, no one heard her fall or any footsteps of an intruder. Around 10:45AM, Andrew Borden returned home. Lizzie, who had been moving about the house, offered him a cup of coffee and spoke briefly, telling him Abby had left a note that she was out of the house. So he settled into the sitting room on the sofa to rest. Not long after 11AM, Andrew too was attacked from behind.
Speaker 1:He was struck 10 or 11 times with a hatchet as he sat on the couch. The first blow destroyed the left side of his face. The rest followed in a violent rage. His body slumped onto the couch. Just moments later, Lizzie Borden called out for Bridget who had been upstairs.
Speaker 1:Her voice was clear and urgent. Calm down quick. Father's dead. Someone came in and killed him. This was true crime of the historical kind.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for listening. Make sure that you're following so that you don't miss part two. Until next time. Bye.