How Lizzie Borden, Acquitted of the 1892 Ax Murders of Her Father and Stepmother, Has Been Portrayed on Screen

When it comes to American crime stories, few have lingered in the public imagination like that of Lizzie Borden. On August 4, 1892, the Massachusetts town of Fall River became the setting for one of the most sensational murder cases of the 19th century. Andrew Borden and his wife, Abby, were found brutally slain in their home. The prime suspect was Andrew’s 32-year-old daughter, Lizzie, a respectable, unmarried woman from a well-to-do family.

Her arrest shocked the nation. Newspapers turned the prim New England town into a stage of scandal and speculation, and when she was acquitted the following year, Lizzie became both a free woman and a cultural enigma. Was she a cunning killer who escaped justice, or a victim of Victorian double standards and small-town gossip?

That question has haunted the curious for more than 130 years. From early plays and pulp stories to television, movies and more, the tale of Lizzie Borden has been told, retold and reinvented, each version revealing more about the era that produced it than the woman at its center.

On August 4, 1892, the Borden family home on Second Street became the scene of a brutal double murder. Andrew, a wealthy but notoriously frugal banker, was found slumped on a sitting-room couch, his face nearly destroyed by multiple blows from a hatchet. Upstairs, his wife, Abby, lay dead in a guest bedroom, her skull split open by the same weapon.

The family’s two daughters, Emma and Lizzie, had lived quietly in the house for years, sharing cramped quarters and chafing under their father’s tight control and their growing dislike of their stepmother. Emma was out of town that morning. Lizzie claimed she’d been in the barn before discovering her father’s lifeless body. Her calm demeanor and shifting story soon drew suspicion, and when investigators found no sign of forced entry, attention turned squarely toward her.

Newspapers seized on the contradictions: the upright church volunteer accused of an unspeakable crime. Within days, the case became a national obsession. Fall River’s quiet streets filled with reporters, sketch artists and curiosity seekers. Opinions varied wildly, some portraying Lizzie as a calculating killer, others as a persecuted woman caught in the glare of modern publicity.

Her 1893 trial was covered like today’s celebrity news. Readers followed every twist, and when an all-male jury acquitted her after barely 90 minutes of deliberation, public opinion remained divided.

That uncertainty helped birth the myth of Lizzie Borden, soon distilled into a macabre nursery rhyme:

“Lizzie Borden took an axe, and gave her mother forty whacks…”

The sing-song verse exaggerated the violence and stripped away nuance, transforming a real woman and two real deaths into grim folklore. By the early 20th century, the rhyme was known across America, proof that Lizzie had transcended fact to become legend.

More than eight decades after the murders, Lizzie Borden’s story found new life on television. In 1975, ABC aired The Legend of Lizzie Borden, a chilling dramatization starring Elizabeth Montgomery, whose wholesome image from Bewitched made her casting all the more startling. (The actress and the accused murderers were also distantly related.) The film drew on court transcripts and contemporary reports but leaned heavily into psychological speculation, presenting Lizzie as a repressed woman pushed to a breaking point by class, confinement and family tension.

Montgomery’s performance became a cult classic, with her version of Borden as self-contained, calculating and eerily calm giving way to fury. The film’s most infamous scene, in which Lizzie methodically prepares to commit the murders, hinted at motive and madness without sensationalism. Critics praised the production for its restraint and refusal to offer easy answers about guilt or innocence.

The Legend of Lizzie Borden became a ratings hit and cultural event, reintroducing the century-old case to a new generation. It established the template for every portrayal that followed, that of a story less about bloodshed than about the pressures simmering beneath a prim Victorian facade.

More than a century after the trial, Lizzie Borden returned to television in Lizzie Borden Took an Ax, a 2014 Lifetime movie starring Christina Ricci. The film fused historical detail with gothic flair, turning Fall River into a landscape of secrets and suspicion. Ricci’s performance captured both the prudishness and the volatility that made Lizzie so fascinating, with her cool gaze suggesting intellect, her sudden outbursts hinting at rage.

Director Nick Gomez leaned into that ambiguity, staging the murders with surreal precision and a pounding modern soundtrack. The film blurred period drama with psychological thriller, inviting viewers to decide for themselves whether Lizzie was a killer or a scapegoat.

“What we came up with was that [Lizzie] was somebody who has severe antisocial personality disorder and was very sociopathic and manipulative. [She] could only sort of express herself in… a very narcissistic way," Ricci said.

Ricci reprised the role in The Lizzie Borden Chronicles, an eight-episode limited series that imagined what might have happened after the trial. Set in a repressive 1890s America, the series portrayed Borden as a cunning survivor who uses her infamy as a weapon. The show’s stylized violence and dark humor polarized critics, but its feminist undercurrent resonated with contemporary audiences fascinated by morally complex protagonists. 

If Lifetime’s adaptations leaned toward melodrama, the 2018 independent film Lizzie, directed by Craig William Macneill and starring Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart, took a more intimate, psychological approach.

Here, Borden is not just a suspect but a woman suffocating under patriarchal control. Sevigny portrays her as a daughter demeaned by her father, constrained by propriety and consumed by loneliness. When Bridget Sullivan, the Borden family’s Irish maid (played by Stewart), enters the story, their forbidden romance becomes a bond that defies class and convention.

“So much has been said [about Borden],” Sevigny told W. “But I think that we just really wanted to focus on how she went about finding [her freedom] and how important that was to her and what that meant to her.”

The film builds toward the infamous killings not as a mystery, but as an act of psychological release. The violence, when it comes, is both horrifying and strangely inevitable. By reframing Borden’s motives through a queer and feminist lens, Lizzie transforms one of America’s most notorious crimes into a tragedy of power and identity.

Lizzie Borden’s story has been reimagined across nearly every medium. On stage, it was depicted in a ballet by Agnes de Mille, and Lizzie: The Musical, a rock opera that premiered in the late 2000s. The musical was inspired by theories proposed by more recent historians that Borden’s actions may have been a response to long-term emotional—and sexual—abuse by her father. With its driving score and all-female cast, the show reframes Borden as both victim and avenger, a young woman lashing out against years of repression.

Her infamy has also filtered through documentaries, music and cartoons, inspiring several songs and even a legendary episode of The Simpsons, proof of how deeply she has seeped into the American imagination.