Lizzie Borden – 1860-1927

The daughter of a successful Fall River (Massachusetts) businessman, Borden lived with her father and stepmother. On August 4, 1892, the couple was found brutally murdered—bludgeoned and hacked, possibly by an axe. Lizzie (who had tried to purchase poison the day before the slayings) was indicted for both murders but acquitted (because of inadequate circumstantial evidence) after a trial that created an international sensation. Despite the verdict, most Americans believed her guilty, and she lived out her life as a pariah. Histories, novels, plays, and an opera have been written about Lizzie Borden, but the most famous “literary” product was a children’s rhyme: “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.”