Lizzie Borden and her Axe
The 1800s was a time of industry, financial gains, and invention. Andrew Borden was one of the many who was able to capitalize on this prosperous time by working his way up to becoming a director of two different financial institutions. He married and bore two children, and one of those children was the ever infamous Lizzie Borden. Little did he know at the time of his first wife’s death that it wouldn’t be very long until he met her again in the afterlife on account of being murdered in cold blood by their very own daughter.
Church Girl Turned Murderer
Lizzie Borden’s real mother passed away from an illness unexpectedly when she was only three years old. Lizzie’s father, Andrew, eventually remarried to someone else, but the two were never very close. Lizzie and her sister even referred to their step mother as Mrs. Borden rather than her own name.
However, Lizzie stayed extremely active within the community church, and because of her family’s wealth, had also achieved a pretty high social status. She led Sunday school each week and went on many different mission trips and participated in weekly women’s group bible studies.
We would later learn, however, that the wealth and seemingly good nature of the Borden family covered large amounts of tension and fights that brewed for years on end. Though Andrew Borden was incredibly successful financially, he was very tight with his money and had strict stipulations on his assets and estate. His two daughters rarely spoke to their stepmother, and there are little details as to precisely why, but the two even went as far as demanding living space off of the property and away from her.
A few days before the murders, Lizzie’s estranged uncle, who was the brother of her real mother who had passed had come for a visit. He discussed finances with Lizzie’s father and even property transference arrangements. The next day, everyone in the house had fallen mysteriously and severely ill. Experts on the case have now come to believe that Lizzie had at first tried to poison everyone but failed miserably at it because of some type of fear that her uncle and stepmother were getting more money than she was in her father’s will.
A few days after each person in the household had a chance to recover from this mysterious illness, both Andrew Borden and his wife, Abby, were found in an enormous bloodbath. Lizzie began screaming for their maid at the time when she acted as if she had just discovered her father’s body on the sofa, hacked to death with an axe. Upstairs, they discovered the body of Lizzie’s stepmother also killed in the same grisly fashion, donning over forty stab wounds.
Authorities immediately arrived to the Borden household and began questioning the maid and Lizzie upon their arrival. However, no one was taken in as a suspect at the time. One of the most table-turning and only pieces of evidence in regards to the case was that a few days after the murders, Lizzie was seen burning a dress. She would tell prosecutors during her trial that she had simply burned it because she had spilled paint on it, but they firmly believed she had burned it because it had blood on it. Because of their wealth and social status, the case against Lizzie Borden was highly publicized. She would go on to state that she was in her family’s barn indulging herself in pears and reading a book among the horses, and therefore could not be responsible for the murders. The maid who was in the house at the time of the murders, however, was the one who had informed authorities that Lizzie burned her dress, and went on to testify that she had seen Lizzie through the crack of a bedroom door, wielding an axe above her stepmother’s body while cackling.
Unfortunately, it was the maid’s word against one of the wealthiest women in the town, and because there was no other evidence that could be produced, it was one person’s word against someone else’s. No other suspect was ever tried for the double homicide, and Lizzie Borden would go on to be acquitted of all charges and she ended up inheriting an enormous sum of money from her father’s death.
Lizzie and her sister used some of the money to buy their own house and lived there for over ten years. Because the case was so publicized, her reputation had taken quite a beating. Though most people were civil to her, it was common knowledge that she was deemed untrustworthy, and even went on to be accused of shoplifting a few years after her father’s case was closed. Lizzie Borden would die alone at the age of sixty-six from pneumonia.