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| Did Lizzie Borden Get Away With Murder? Her Acquittal Explained. |
Lizzie Borden walked into one of the most closely watched trials of her time with the public already leaning towards one conclusion: she had killed her father, Andrew Borden, and stepmother, Abby Borden. Yet the prosecution had a problem that became increasingly difficult to ignore. Much of the case against Lizzie was circumstantial, disputed or ultimately kept away from the jury, while her defence had several ways to challenge the prosecution’s story. Add Victorian attitudes towards gender and social class, and the case became considerably less straightforward than the headlines suggested.
Netflix’s Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story dramatises this notorious chapter in Lizzie’s life, including the deaths that made her name infamous. The series presents Lizzie as remarkably composed while investigators question her, particularly in contrast with her sister Emma, whose emotional reaction appears more conventional. That difference becomes suspicious in the eyes of the authorities, eventually helping push Lizzie towards arrest and trial.
But looking suspicious was not enough to secure a conviction. The prosecution needed evidence that could survive the courtroom, and that turned out to be the central weakness in the case against Lizzie.
One of the biggest problems was Lizzie’s changing account of where she had been around the time of the deaths. She initially said she was downstairs when her father returned home, before later giving an account that placed her upstairs. That mattered because Abby had been found dead in an upstairs guest room. If Lizzie had been nearby, investigators could reasonably question why she had apparently heard or discovered nothing sooner.
Her explanation concerning Andrew’s death was hardly less puzzling. Lizzie said she had gone to the barn because she intended to go fishing and was looking for sinkers. At another point, she said she had been eating pears. Investigators also found her presence in the barn strange given the heat that day. None of this helped her story, but suspicion and courtroom proof are two very different things.
Lizzie had also given evidence at an inquest shortly after the deaths, but that testimony could not be used at the trial. She had not had a lawyer present, and her doctor had been administering morphine, which was cited as a reason for her confusion over events. Without that testimony, prosecutors lost one of the more obvious ways of challenging Lizzie’s version of what happened.
And because Lizzie did not take the witness stand during the trial, prosecutors could not simply put her conflicting statements in front of the jury and let the questions pile up. The courtroom therefore became a much narrower contest over evidence than the public drama surrounding the case might have suggested.
The allegation that Lizzie had obtained poison also failed to provide the prosecution with the decisive breakthrough it needed. Chemist Eli Bence said Lizzie had bought prussic acid, or cyanide, from him shortly before the deaths. That certainly sounded suspicious, but there was no firm evidence establishing that the chemical had been obtained for use in the deaths. The defence also challenged whether Bence had correctly identified Lizzie.
Then came the dress.
Alice Russell testified that she had seen Lizzie burning a dress in the kitchen several days after the deaths. Russell believed the garment carried stains resembling blood, giving prosecutors another potentially damaging piece of evidence. Investigators had also discovered bloody rags in the cellar bathroom, although Lizzie said they were menstrual rags.
The defence, however, had its own explanation for the dress. Lizzie had already handed over the clothing she had worn on the day of the deaths, while Emma later testified that she had asked Lizzie to burn the other dress. The garment also contained only a single blood spot on its hem, and there was no way to establish whose blood it was.
That left the prosecution with a particularly awkward problem: a dress that looked suspicious was not necessarily proof of murder.
The supposed murder weapons were no more helpful. Investigators had recovered two hatchets from the cellar and considered them possible weapons, but a Harvard chemist testified that no blood had been detected on either one. For a case built around a weapon, that was hardly the courtroom gift the prosecution would have wanted.
With the strongest evidence either disputed or excluded, Lizzie’s lawyers had considerable room to attack the prosecution’s argument. And there was another factor that cannot easily be separated from the trial: Lizzie’s position as a respectable, relatively wealthy woman in Victorian society.
Lizzie was associated with the Central Congregational Church, taught Sunday school, participated in the temperance movement and served on the board of Fall River Hospital. Her arrest also prompted support from women's organisations, including the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. In other words, she did not arrive in court carrying the social image of someone the community readily imagined committing such a crime.
Gender expectations mattered too. The prosecution’s theory required the jury to believe that Lizzie had repeatedly struck two people with a hatchet. The defence could therefore lean on the period’s assumptions about women, physical strength and femininity. Lizzie’s carefully presented courtroom appearance worked against the image of a physically powerful attacker.
She appeared in tightly corseted black dresses, carried flowers and used a fan, presenting herself in a manner that fitted the era’s expectations of a refined woman. Whether that should have had any bearing on the evidence is another question entirely. But trials are conducted by people, and people bring their assumptions with them.
The timing of another case may also have influenced the atmosphere surrounding the trial. Shortly before Lizzie’s trial was due to begin, Bertha Manchester was killed with an axe in her kitchen at roughly the same time of day as the Borden deaths. A Portuguese labourer was arrested, later tried and convicted.
The prosecution did not need to prove that another person had committed the Borden deaths, and it did not point directly towards another suspect. But news of the Manchester case had likely circulated in newspapers. For jurors already considering whether Lizzie could physically have carried out the attacks, the existence of another recent axe case involving a male labourer may have provided an alternative mental picture of who could have committed such an act.
In the end, the jury did not need to determine exactly who killed Andrew and Abby. It only needed to decide whether the prosecution had proved Lizzie’s guilt. After deliberating for less than an hour, the jurors returned a not-guilty verdict.
So, did Lizzie Borden actually “get away with it”? Legally, she was acquitted, and the deaths remained officially unsolved. The verdict did not establish that Lizzie was innocent; it established that the prosecution had not proved her guilty beyond the required standard. Those are very different things, even if newspapers and popular culture have spent more than a century happily blurring the distinction.
The most interesting part of the Lizzie Borden case is not whether the jury somehow missed an obvious answer, but how little certainty the courtroom actually had to work with. The prosecution had suspicious behaviour, inconsistent stories, a disputed poison purchase, a burned dress and possible weapons, yet none became the decisive piece of evidence it needed. That makes the acquittal less mysterious than it first appears. At the same time, the gender and class assumptions surrounding Lizzie are hard to ignore. Her respectable image clearly mattered to how people imagined her, whether it should have or not.
The trial also shows how easily suspicion can become accepted as fact when a case captures public attention. More than a century later, we still have the same unanswered question: was Lizzie an innocent woman who survived a terrible accusation, or did a weak case simply fail to prove what really happened? What do you think the jury got right — or wrong?