When was lizzie bordens trial

Lizzie Borden took an axe, And gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, She gave her father forty-one.

Still, the rhyme does accurately record the sequence of the murders, which took place approximately an hour and a half apart on the morning of August 4, Fall River was rocked not only by the sheer brutality of the crime, but also by who its victims were. There was no evident motive—no robbery or sexual assault, for example. Neighbors and passersby heard nothing. No one saw a suspect enter or leave the Borden property.

Moreover, Andrew Borden was no ordinary citizen. Like other Fall River Bordens, he possessed wealth and standing. He had invested in mills, banks, and real estate. But Andrew had never made a show of his good fortune. Thirty-two-year-old Lizzie, who lived at home, longed to reside on The Hill. She knew her father could afford to move away from a neighborhood increasingly dominated by Catholic immigrants.

He was not at home. Lizzie then told Maggie to get a friend down the street. Yet Lizzie never sent the servant to the Irish immigrant doctor who lived right next door.

Nor did Lizzie seek the help of a French Canadian doctor who lived diagonally behind the Bordens. Only a Yankee doctor would do. These same divisions played into keeping Lizzie off the suspect list at first. She was, after all, a Sunday school teacher at her wealthy Central Congregational Church.

People of her class could not accept that a person like Lizzie would slaughter her parents. And her inability to summon a single tear aroused police suspicion. Then an officer discovered that Lizzie had tried to purchase deadly prussic acid a day before the murders in a nearby drugstore. On the day of the murders, Irish police were among the dozen or so who took control of the Borden house and property. Some interviewed Lizzie. One even interrogated her in her bedroom! Lizzie was not used to being held to account by people she considered beneath her.

The Lizzie Borden case quickly became a flash point in an Irish insurgency in the city. John Coughlin were all pieces of a challenge to native-born control.

Among other things, it promoted rumors that Bordens on the Hill were pooling millions to ensure that Lizzie would never be convicted. Five days after the murders, authorities convened an inquest, and Lizzie took the stand each day: The inquest was the only time she testified in court under oath.

Lizzie did not have a defense lawyer during what was a closed inquiry. But she was not without defenders. Her year-old spinster sister Emma, who also lived at home, claimed that the sisters harbored no anger toward their stepmother.

Yet the police investigation, and the family and neighbors who gave interviews to newspapers, suggested otherwise. They found her not guilty on all counts, as Lizzie sank to her chair in relief. Lizzie and her older sister, Emma, briefly returned to the house, but soon purchased a room, Queen-Anne style home on The Hill, which they named Maplecroft. The now-wealthy sisters lived the life Lizzie had always dreamed of, with a large staff of servants and all the modern conveniences of the day. Lizzie began using the name Lizbeth and while she may have hoped for a fresh start, Fall River refused to allow her to forget her past.

Maplecroft became a target for school children, who threw objects at the house and regularly pranked and taunted her. Former friends abandoned her, and even fellow church members avoided her. Newspapers wrote thinly-veiled attacks, all but accusing her of getting away with murder.

In , Lizzie faced another scandal, when she was accused but not charged of shoplifting while visiting Rhode Island, leading her to become even more isolated within the walls of Maplecroft.

Fall River society may have treated Lizzie like a pariah, but others were more than willing to take advantage of her largesse. She also began throwing lavish parties at Maplecroft for her new friends. Lizzie doted on her, and gossip soon began to spread that the two were having a sexual relationship, though neither woman commented on the accusations. I did not go until conditions became absolutely unbearable.

Lizzie died in June , at age Emma died a little more than a week later. Today, the Borden family home on Second Street is a popular bed and breakfast, where those brave enough can spend the night at the scene of the one most famous — and officially unsolved — murders in American history. Lizzie Borden took an axe, And gave her mother forty whacks, When she saw what she had done, She gave her father forty-one.

Actually,the Bordens received only 29 whacks, not the 81 suggested by the famous ditty, but the popularity of the above poem is a testament to the public's fascination with the murder trial of Lizzie Borden.

The source of that fascination might lie in the almost unimaginably brutal nature of the crime--given the sex, background, and age of the defendant--or in the jury's acquittal of Lizzie in the face of prosecution evidence that most historians today find compelling. On a hot August 4, at 92 Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts, Bridget "Maggie" Sullivan, the maid in the Borden family residence rested in her bed after having washed the outside windows.