How Lizzie Borden Got Away With Murder
by Denise
M. Clark
The New York Times
headline for Aug. 5th, 1892 read: "BUTCHERED IN THEIR HOME: Mr. Borden and
His Wife Killed in Broad Daylight." The first paragraph of the stunning
article read:
FALL RIVER, Mass, Aug. 4 -- Andrew J. Borden
and wife, two of the oldest, wealthiest, and most highly respected persons
in the city, were brutally murdered with an ax at 11 o'clock this morning in
their home on Second Street, within a few minutes' walk of the City Hall.
The Borden family consisted of the father, mother, two daughters, and a
servant. The older daughter has been in Fair Haven for some days. The rest
of the family has been ill for three or four days, and Dr. Bowen, the
attending physician, thought they had been poisoned.
The horrific axe murders of Andrew Borden and his
second wife, Abby, would have been shocking in any age, but in the early 1890s
they were unthinkable. Equally unthinkable was who wielded the axe that
butchered them an hour or so apart in their own home. The idea that the murderer
could possibly be Borden’s 32-year-old daughter Lizzie took days to register
with the police – despite overwhelming physical and circumstantial evidence
that pointed only at her. Nine months later a jury, unable to fathom that a
woman could commit such vicious crimes, would find a way to ignore the evidence
and set Lizzie free.
By no means had Lizzie Borden committed the
perfect crime. The police were quickly able to dispense with the possibility of
an outside intruder carrying out the murders. Lizzie – her alibi fraught with
inconsistencies – was the only suspect. She alone had both the motive and the
opportunity. What would end up saving her was the remarkable violence of the
murders: The murders were simply too grisly to have been committed by a woman of
her upbringing.
The Borden mystery is captured within a web of
falsified statements, suppositions, assumptions and public opinion, all of which
revolve around a missing weapon that actually never was missing, a blood-stained
dress that was never found, and a young woman’s previously impeccable
character.
Even today, crime historians remain divided about
Lizzie’s guilt. The viciousness of the murder scene did contrast sharply with
the image of Lizzie: a civilized, upper-middle-class woman who had never married
and who had lived at home her entire life.
The Borden Family
Lizzie’s father, Andrew Borden, was originally
an undertaker. Even then he was known to be stingy and tight-fisted, and rumors
floated about town that he forced corpses into coffins with bent knees to save
on the cost of wood. Later he would become a bank president and a mill director.
Financially well off for the time period, his net worth figured at over
$300,000. Instead of making his home on "the hill," where the
community’s financial elite resided, the Bordens lived on Second Street in
Fall River in a starkly furnished house that featured kerosene lamps and two
running cold-water faucets. The only toilet was in the cellar, but it was rarely
used. Instead each room had a chamber pot that was emptied in the morning into a
slop pail that was in turn emptied onto the back lawn. Andrew’s reputation in
town, whispered of course, was that of Scrooge.
The dreary Borden household consisted of Andrew,
his second wife, Abby, his two adult daughters, Emma and Lizzie, and a maid,
Bridget Sullivan. In a book entitled A Private Disgrace, author Victoria
Lincoln depicted the atmosphere in the Borden home as one of strained civility:
neither Emma nor Lizzie liked their stepmother, an overweight recluse who rarely
left the house. Abby, in turn, thought little of her stepdaughters. And Andrew?
He didn’t seen to care. He barely maintained a tenuous peace by bribing Lizzie
with a lavish spending account, for no one, not even Andrew, cared to upset the
moody Lizzie
Lizzie was a self-conscious woman with
reddish-brown hair and extremely light blue eyes. Wide shouldered with a thick
waist, she was cursed with a coarse, sallow complexion and rather heavy jowls.
Her manners, though, were impeccable: She was polite to hired help and to anyone
she met, and was known for her kindness to animals. While she was socially
handicapped and made few friends, it could not be said that these traits were
caused by an evil or especially disagreeable temperament. Though Lizzie was
known to be a conversationalist, she did tend to sulk, refusing to speak to
someone for days, if she felt angered or offended. She may have suffered from
migraines, as her mother did before her, and on several occasions her close
relatives and acquaintances spoke of her ‘spells’. That her spells nearly
always coincided with her monthly menstrual cycle was not something that was
understood in 1892. In any regard, no one spoke of such matters and the common
belief was that women suffering spells were almost always ‘crazy’.
The author Lincoln further suggests that Lizzie
suffered from what is now known as ‘temporal epilepsy’. It’s doubtful such
a claim could be scientifically proved, but that Lizzie suffered from occasional
"brownouts" is verified in both her police and court records. Still
the fact remains, that for two weeks prior to the murders, Lizzie had attempted
to purchase prussic acid – supposedly to use on Abby. Being a well brought up
young woman, Lizzie was unaware that arsenic was available over the counter,
without a prescription, as was required for prussic acid.
The Crime
The murders occurred at the Borden home on a
sweltering summer morning, Thursday, Aug. 4, 1892. By mid-morning, the family
members and maid were about their chores; Abby was busy feather dusting while
Andrew readied to go downtown. On his way out, Andrew passed Bridget, the maid,
as she began to wash the windows, starting with the outside. Lizzie, claiming an
upset stomach, wandered aimlessly about. Emma, the older sister, was away
visiting, and their overnight guest, Andrew’s brother-in-law from his deceased
first wife, had left to visit his niece.
Andrew normally remained downtown to take care of
business and collect his rents until around noon, when he would return home for
dinner. But on this day, he came home an hour and a half early. He first sat
down in the dining room, and then after making himself a bit more comfortable,
moved into the sitting room to avoid Bridget’s window cleaning. He reclined on
the sofa with his legs from the knees down dangling off the edge. Abby, who
almost always spent her mornings downstairs, did not appear when he came home.
Instead, Lizzie came down, dressed in a heavy bengaline silk dress, an outfit
consisting of a navy blue skirt with pale blue print and a separate blouse. Such
a heavy dress was an odd choice on a day when the temperature had already risen
to 89 degrees by 7:30 in the morning. According to proper etiquette at the time,
women wore a ‘street’ dress only for going out. Was Lizzie on her way
downtown to establish an alibi but was prevented from doing so by Andrew’s
unexpected early return?
Bridget, her chore completed but not feeling
well, came inside and went up to her room to lie down. Bridget was awakened a
short while later by Lizzie’s shout that her father was dead.
Andrew’s body was found on the sofa where he
had fallen asleep, right cheek resting on a cushion and an afghan he had propped
beneath his head. Though his face tilted upward, what remained of it was nearly
unrecognizable as human: One eye had been cut in half and protruded from its
socket, his nose had been severed and 11 gaping gashes concentrated upon the
left side of his face. Andrew’s blood still ran bright and fresh as police
arrived. There is little doubt that he more than likely never knew what hit him.
Confusion reigned. First doctors were summoned
and then the police. During the minutes immediately following the discovery of
Andrew’s lifeless body, doctors, police and neighbors came in and then left
again. A short time later, Lizzie remarked on Abby’s absence and suggested
that someone might want to look for her. Abby was found upstairs in the guest
room, lying face down in a pool of blood, her head nearly separated from her
shoulders by a blunt instrument. Because of the location of one of the wounds,
forensic experts surmised she might have seen her attacker as the first blow was
delivered. Upon further examination, Dr. Bowen discovered her head had been
nearly crushed by 19 axe or hatchet wounds in the back of the skull. One wound
at the back of the neck was misdirected, the blow cutting a flap of skin from
the back of her scalp. Because of a lack of blood splashes on nearby walls or
furniture, it became common conjecture that Abby died from the first blow; her
heart stopped pumping blood, thereby resulting in very little blood spatter for
such horrific wounds.
The Evidence
The police instructed the maid to show them any
axes or hatchets the Bordens used on the property. She brought several up from
the cellar, one coated with dried hair and blood (which later proved to belong
to a cow). From the fruit cellar she produced a claw headed hatchet stained with
rust. She then produced a box from the cellar that contained two hatchets, both
covered with a layer of fine dust.
Because Abby’s blood had already turned thick
and coagulated, the police, with the aid of the doctor’s expertise, were
certain that Abby had been murdered at least an hour before Andrew. But how could
the murderer have escaped the house undetected? The front door remained
bolted and locked from the inside. Lizzie claimed she had been in the yard but
then changed her location to the barn. Either way, the police did not think it
likely that the murderer could have escaped out the back door without her seeing
him.
Abby had been hacked by someone who probably had
stood straddled over the body after the initial blow had knocked her down. Her
blood splashed forward, but not very high or wide, and only one tiny spot of
blood stained the bedspread beside her. The wall in front of her sustained
little spatter, and that limited to the baseboard. Common consensus among the
police was that the murderer need not have been splattered by much blood in such
a scenario, that perhaps only the area below the knees would be prone to blood
splatter.
Very little blood spatter marked the walls in the
sitting room either. Andrew’s blood had dripped onto the carpet, but no blood
spattered the small table near his head. On the wall behind the sofa, there was
some evidence of splatter in the shape of little pearl drops. One policeman then
noticed that Andrew’s Prince Albert coat appeared wadded up beneath his
mangled head, crammed between the sofa and pillow. Yet anyone who knew Andrew
knew he would never treat his coat to such abuse. It is entirely possible that
the murderer slipped the coat off the rack and put it on so that it would catch
the blood splatters and then shoved it beneath his head to account for the blood
splatters on it.
A short time later, the police reexamined the box
of tools and axes that had been tucked on the ledge near the chimney in the
cellar. In it they found a hatchet head – not dusty like the other two – but
covered with what appeared to be white ashes in what police considered a
possible attempt to disguise it to look similar to the others or a failed
attempt to melt it down. Although it was a sweltering August day, a blazing fire
was in progress in the kitchen stove.
It was the house itself that spoke so strongly
against Lizzie’s claim that someone from outside the house murdered her
parents. Six people lived in the cramped two-and-a-half story home with
interconnecting doors and thin walls. It would have been difficult to stifle the
sound of a scream or the crash of overweight Abby as she fell to the floor
upstairs.
The Fall River police checked the house and found
the front door, the back screen door, the basement door and most of the bedroom
doors locked. To give the police their due, they made a determined attempt to
eliminate any possible outside suspects before considering the distant
possibility of the murders being an inside job.
Lizzie claimed that she had last seen her father
falling asleep in the sitting room. She then claimed she had spent some time in
the barn loft, but an officer who went to look at the loft found no evidence of
her having been there. Dust laid thick and undisturbed upstairs in the loft, not
to mention the heat made the place almost unbearable.
As the bodies lay under sheets in the dining
room, one of the doctors performed a partial autopsy while a five-man team
thoroughly searched the house from attic to cellar. They found nothing else to
indicate the identity of the assailant. The broken handle of the axe was never
found, nor was any blood found in any of the other remaining rooms.
Perhaps it was inevitable that Lizzie would
become the prime suspect, especially after the police learned she had made
several unsuccessful attempts to buy prussic acid during the two previous weeks.
And then there was the persistent problem of her shaky and ever-changing alibi.
The Inquest
During the following hours and days, Lizzie’s
rendition of the facts changed so many times that not only the police, but also
her lawyers and the public at large were left to wonder if any of her statements
were true. After the police determined there was no possibility a murderer could
have escaped the house undetected, a logistical impossibility according to the
many witnesses out and about on the street that morning, Lizzie was ultimately
considered the lone suspect and placed under arrest. The Fall River Police
Department Arrest Log Book for 1892 shows that Lizzie was booked and charged
with "murder of father."
At first, Lizzie’s account of the facts as she
remembered them were clear, but as she continued, she kept remembering this or
forgetting that. Surprisingly enough, none of those questioning her seemed
willing to press her about the contradictions. If one is curious enough to wade
through the hundreds of pages of inquest and trial testimony in the hopes of
finding something in common with all her statements, one does so in vain. It
seems as if Lizzie contradicted each and every statement she ever made, from the
moment she claimed she found her father, to that particular moment in court.
Again, oddly enough, both prosecuting and defense attorneys seemed hesitant to
press her, with the exception of one occasion, to try to clarify her many
different statements:
Q. Where
were you when your father came home?
A. I was down in the kitchen. Reading an old
magazine that had been left in the cupboard, an old Harper’s Magazine.
Mere seconds later, District Attorney Knowlton
asked if she was sure.
A. I am not sure whether I was there or in the
dining room
Still minutes later the question was asked again.
Q. Where were you when the bell rang?
A. I think in my room up stairs.
Q. Then you were up stairs when your father came
home?
A. I was on the stairs when she (Bridget) let
him (Andrew) in ... I had only been upstairs long enough to take the clothes
up and baste the little loop on the sleeve. I don’t think I had been up
there over five minutes.
Minutes later and obviously growing frustrated
with the witness, the D.A. asked;
Q. …you remember that you told me several
times that you were downstairs and not up stairs, when your father came
home? You have forgotten, perhaps?
A. I don’t know what I have said. I have
answered so many questions and I am so confused I don’t know one thing
from another. I am telling you just as nearly as I know.
The D.A. tried once again to get the facts.
Q. …Which
now is your recollection of the true statement, of the matter, that you were
down stairs when the bell rang and your father came in?
A. I think I was down stairs in the kitchen.
Q. And then you were not upstairs?
A. I think I was not because I went up almost
immediately, as soon as I went down, and then came down again and stayed
down.
(To read the entire transcript of the testimony,
see the Fall River Police Dept. files at http://www.frpd.org)
And so it went. While awaiting trial, Lizzie
spent nine months in the Taunton Jail, though it was hardly a stint of hardship
for her with such amenities as daily strolls and catered hotel food for her
meals.
The Trial
Lizzie Borden’s trial began on Monday, June 5,
1893 in New Bedford, the county seat of Bristol County, 15 miles from Fall
River. She was indicted on three counts: the murder of Andrew Jackson Borden,
the murder of Abby Durfee Borden, and the murder of Andrew and Abby Borden.
Two prosecutors presented the bulk of the state’s
case, D. A. Hosea Knowlton and his new assistant, William H. Moody, for whom
this was his first trial. Their presentation focused on three major points: a
burned dress, a hatchet with a missing handle, and Lizzie’s whereabouts at the
time of the crime.
The prosecution, according to Edward Radin’s
Lizzie Borden: The Untold Story, got off to a bad start when the
inexperienced Moody called Thomas Kieran, an engineer, as its first witness. The
state had retained Kieran to take precise measurements and drawn the floor plan
of both the downstairs and upstairs rooms on the Borden house. With Kieran on
the stand, Moody opened the second day of trial by stating: "The prisoner
(Lizzie Borden) from the hall above made some laugh or exclamation. At that
time, gentlemen, Mrs. Borden’s body lay within plain view of that hall"
and Lizzie must have been able to see it as she climbed the stairs. Kieran did
not concur. He testified that he had had his partner lay down on the floor in an
approximate location where Abby Borden’s body had been found and that he could
only see the body from one particular spot on the stairs, and only if he looked
carefully.
Another blow followed when another prosecution
witness, Dr. Seabury Bowen, the Borden family doctor, testified that he had
given Lizzie doses of morphine after the murders, during her initial hearing,
and throughout her stay at the jail. The defense immediately pounced upon that
bit of news and protested that the effects of such medication, though given to
calm her nerves, could have perceptibly altered Lizzie’s recollections and
view of things, thus accounting for her often contradictory statements.
The state’s first productive witness was Alice
Russell, a neighbor and good friend of Emma Borden. Frank Spiering in Lizzie recounts
that Russell testified that the night before the murders, Lizzie came to her and
told her she felt "afraid sometimes that Father has got an enemy" and
that somebody "will do something." Spiering also reported that Russell
testified at the Grand Jury hearing that on the Sunday following the murders
(the murders occurred on the previous Thursday) that she, Emma and Lizzie were
in the kitchen. Lizzie stood near the cupboard door and stove, either ripping
something or tearing apart a dress – a cheap cotton calico dress of light blue
background with dark figures. The dress that Lizzie had provided the police as
the dress she wore the morning of the murders was a heavy winter bengaline silk
dress of a navy blue background with light blue figures. (The police had asked
Lizzie to provide them the clothing she had on when the police arrived the
morning of the murder and she promptly did so, but neither the police nor the
prosecution later apparently gave any thought to the possibility that she might
have changed her clothes before the police arrived. Nor did she supply them with
the socks or shoes she wore that morning, but later supplied them with a pair of
black strap slippers and a pair of black stockings, which she admitted she had
washed.)
The prosecution’s rout of itself resumed in
full view of the jury when the prosecution introduced the axe head from the
alleged murder weapon. The prosecution attempted to show that the axe head found
in the box with the other two had been disguised with ashes to blend in with the
others and that its missing handle had left freshly sheared bits of wood
protruding from the axe head. The prosecution postulated that the fact that the
handle was missing seemed to point to someone within the house not only having
had access to it, but to destroy it as well. As intriguing as this speculation
may have sounded to the jury, it didn’t get to dangle long before a
prosecution witness would knock it down. When Dr. Edward Wood of Harvard Medical
School was called to testify regarding the forensic findings from the hatchet
head, he said all the stains on the hatchet had been tested by chemical and
microscopic methods with negative results. No blood. He also stated that he had
removed a portion of the wood from the broken handle in the eye of the hatchet
and tested it with iodine of potassium, which removes blood pigment. Again, no
traces of blood were found. He did state that while blood could have been
washed off with cold water, it would have had to been done thoroughly and
deeply.
Police officers testified. Fall River rookie
Medley inspected the barn loft where Lizzie claimed she had been at the time of
the murders, but testified he found no evidence of anyone having been in the
loft – dust lay thick over everything and the solitary window locked. Sgt.
Harrington testified that he saw the remains of what looked like rolled papers
in the stove.
The prosecutions strongest point hinged on Lizzie’s
own conflicting testimony, which D.A. Knowlton intended to show by calling to
the stand Annie White, the stenographer who had recorded the proceedings of
Lizzie’s initial statements to the police, statements riddled with
inconsistencies.
The defense immediately countered Knowlton’s
efforts by claiming Lizzie’s testimony was inadmissible for the following
reasons:
- Prior to the inquest, Lizzie had been
under constant surveillance and had already been informed that she was a
suspect.
- Lizzie’s request to be represented by
counsel had been refused by the district attorney and the judge.
- After giving her testimony, Lizzie wasn’t
allowed to leave and within two hours was placed under arrest.
- A warrant had been issued before the
inquest but was not served – Lizzie wasn’t told about the first warrant.
The court ruled in favor of the defense, saying
that Lizzie had been under virtual arrest at the time of her questioning and
that as such her inquest testimony was to be excluded from the proceedings. It
was the worst possible ruling for the prosecution, as they were now unable to
show the radical swings in Lizzie’s testimony.
The Defense
Andrew Jennings, who for years had been Andrew
Borden’s attorney, was convinced from the outset that Lizzie was incapable of
axing her father and stepmother to death, and he quickly took up her case,
agreeing to defend her. George Robinson joined him in presenting Lizzie’s
defense at trial. The defense presentation took only a day and a half. It set
out promptly to destroy any credibility of the prosecution’s case, knowing
that only two lingering points could still put Lizzie in danger: her hatred of
Abby and the burning of her blue dress. The plan was to prove that not only was
the prosecution’s case against Lizzie circumstantial, but totally unfounded.
The defense called a number of witnesses who had
reported seeing various men in the immediate area of the Borden home on the
morning of the murders. One witness said he saw a man delivering ice in the
neighborhood, another witness said he noticed a man standing outside the Borden
house on the sidewalk for a while, but as he never strayed from the sidewalk,
his presence did not make much of an impression. The testimony of these
witnesses was essentially conflicting but it did raise the possibility of an
intruder in the neighborhood that day.
The defense pointed out that the prosecution
could not produce the murder weapon. What had happened to it? If Lizzie had
never left the house, where could the handle have disappeared? Such supposition
cast further doubt in the minds of the jury. Unfortunately, Dr. Wood, upon
cross-examination, did nothing to help the prosecution when he replied to a
question about the lack of blood splatter. He said he was sure the culprit would
have been covered in blood.
Lizzie’s friend Marianna Holmes testified
regarding Lizzie’s religious activities, stating Lizzie was a Sunday school
teacher for Chinese children, deepening the jury’s impression that a staunch
Christian woman of Lizzie’s sensitivities could never have wielded a hatchet
to do more than chop a piece of kindling.
Phoebe Bowen, Dr. Bowen’s wife, testified that
she had been with Lizzie shortly after the murders were discovered and that
Lizzie had been pale and faint. She had seen no blood on Lizzie.
The defense also had Bridget Sullivan’s
testimony read, stating that Lizzie was agitated and in tears when the bodies
were discovered.
But the defense witness that everyone
waited with bated breath to hear was presented on the 11th day of the
trial. Emma Borden finally appeared, dressed in a black dress, black gloves and
black patent leather shoes.
Andrew Jennings spoke gently to the older sister,
a small bird-like woman with frightened dark brown eyes. To begin, the
questioning seemed simple and straightforward, almost boring until the topic of
Lizzie’s burned blue dress was brought up. Even then, the questions and
answers seemed rehearsed, as if it had been agreed upon ahead of time what the
two would discuss on the stand. When asked about the dress, Emma said she had
told Lizzie, "You have not destroyed that old dress yet. Why don’t
you?"
Emma testified that she was in the kitchen with
her friend Alice Russell on the Sunday morning following the murder when she
turned around and saw her sister standing by the stove, the dress hanging from
her arm. Emma quoted Lizzie as saying, "I think I shall burn this old
dress." Emma testified that her reply was: "Why don’t you", or
"You had better", or "I would if I were you". Emma
couldn’t seem to remember which it was. She also claimed that she did not hear
Russell say to Lizzie, "I wouldn’t let anybody see me do that,
Lizzie".
On the key matter of Lizzie’s relationship to
her stepmother, Emma testified that relations between Lizzie and Abby were
cordial. During his cross-examination, Knowlton pressed Emma on this point,
trying to show the jury the thinness of Emma’s claim. Knowlton asked Emma when
Lizzie ceased calling Abby "Mother." Emma said she could not remember.
Knowlton persisted with this question in various forms, asking her 12 separate
times. To each version of the question, Emma responded: "I don’t
remember."
Lizzie was not called to testify. When the judge
asked her if she had anything to say to the jury, she stood to say, "I am
innocent. I leave it to my counsel to speak for me."
In summation, the defense told the jury, "It
is not your business to unravel the mystery… you are not here to find out the
murderer…you are simply and solely here to say, is this woman defendant
guilty."
In his closing argument, D. A. Knowlton focused
once again on the gruesome facts of the crime, reiterating that no one else
could have had either the opportunity or the motive to kill the Bordens.
Common perception at the time was that while it
could be considered "acceptable" for a woman to commit murder by poison, the
possibility of such a delicate creature hacking two people to death with an axe
was unthinkable. On Tuesday, June 20, 1893, after only an hour of deliberation, the
all-male jury found Lizzie Borden not guilty in the murders of Andrew and Abby Borden.
Aftermath
During the 13 days of testimony that led to
Lizzie Borden’s acquittal, the key players had their names splashed in nearly
every national newspaper. After the trial, five of them remained in the public
eye. Though he failed in his endeavor to convict Lizzie, Knowlton became
attorney general of the State of Massachusetts. Andrew Jennings became the
district attorney of Bristol County. The Borden sisters also rewarded him for
his ardent defense of Lizzie by naming him to the board of directors of the
Globe Yarn Mill, one of Andrew Borden’s companies. William Moody gained fame
when in 1904 President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him attorney general
of the United States.
Lizzie was acquitted in the courtroom but not in
Fall River. In the very town where she sought acceptance, she was ostracized.
Twenty-nine days after the death of Andrew and Abby Borden, Emma received
possession of the Borden estate. Five weeks after Lizzie’s acquittal, the two
sisters moved up onto The Hill into a 13-room Victorian house that Lizzie
subsequently christened Maplecroft. Seven months after her acquittal, Emma gave
Lizzie her share of the inheritance, for all the good it did. Maplecroft became
Lizzie’s prison and refuge. Over the years the sisters were
relegated more and more to their own company, as no one really wanted to
befriend Lizzie.
In 1897, a warrant was issued for Lizzie,
regarding a theft of two paintings from a local gallery. She was told that if
she signed a confession, the warrant would not be served, but she stubbornly
held her ground and refused to sign until the last possible second. While Emma
grew more introverted, Lizzie traveled. It was in Boston that she met and
greatly admired Nance O’Neil, a Boston actress. Such a profession was still
considered unacceptable to most women’s sense of morality at that time, and so
when Lizzie gave a lavish party for Miss O’Neal at Maplecroft, Emma became so
offended that a rift developed between the two sisters. Emma moved out of the
house and relocated to New Hampshire, where she lived without speaking to Lizzie
for the next 22 years.
In 1926, Lizzie was admitted to the hospital for
a gall bladder operation. Three months later she returned to Maplecroft, but she
never regained her health. The following year, at the age of 67, she died. Ten
days later, her sister died as well. Both are buried together in the family
cemetery beside the bodies of Abby, Andrew and Andrew’s first wife, Sarah.
Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.
