The Case Against Lizzie Borden
Prosecutors argued Lizzie had both motive and opportunity. Her relationship with Abby, her stepmother (not mother, contrary to the popular rhyme), was deeply strained, and earlier disputes over Andrew’s property had divided the family. With Andrew and Abby dead, Lizzie and her older sister, Emma, stood to inherit their father’s substantial fortune. Even the order of the murders potentially mattered financially: Abby died first, meaning her property passed to Andrew and, after his death, would ultimately go to his daughters.
Lizzie was also unable to provide a witness who could account for her movements during either killing. At one point, she said she had been eating pears in the barn loft shortly before discovering her father’s body, an account investigators questioned partly because the weather was notably hot that day. She also told Sullivan that Abby left the house after receiving a note about a sick friend, but no such note or friend was ever identified.
Then there was the dress. Three days after the murders, Lizzie’s friend Alice Russell saw her burning a dress in the kitchen stove. Lizzie said it had been stained with paint, but prosecutors suggested she might have been destroying evidence.
The Limits of 1890s Forensics
For all the suspicious circumstances, prosecutors had little physical evidence tying Lizzie to the murders. No one had seen her attack either victim, police found no bloody clothing that could be definitively linked to the crimes and no weapon could be conclusively identified as the one used to kill Andrew and Abby.
The limitations of 1890s forensic science made those gaps harder to overcome. Investigators had no blood typing or DNA testing, while fingerprint identification was not yet part of routine American police work. Although suspected bloodstains could be examined, available tests could provide only limited information about their origin.
In a case involving two extraordinarily bloody attacks, prosecutors therefore could not scientifically connect Lizzie, her clothing or any suspected weapon to the victims.
What Evidence Was There Against Lizzie Borden?
The prosecution’s case became weaker still when the judges excluded some of its most potentially damaging evidence. A Fall River drugstore clerk, Eli Bence, said Lizzie had attempted to purchase prussic acid, a deadly poison, on August 3—the day before the murders—claiming she wanted it to clean a sealskin cape; Bence refused to sell the acid to her because she did not have a doctor’s prescription. Prosecutors hoped the encounter would suggest that Lizzie had contemplated killing members of the household by poison before resorting to a hatchet.
The judges refused to admit the testimony. Among other problems, the prosecution had not established a sufficient connection between an attempted poison purchase and murders committed with a bladed weapon.
More consequential was the exclusion of Lizzie’s testimony from the August 1892 inquest. During questioning shortly after the murders, she gave confusing and sometimes contradictory answers about where she had been and what she had done that morning.
However, Lizzie had already become a focus of suspicion when she was compelled to testify and was not represented by counsel during the questioning. The judges ruled that allowing those statements against her would violate her constitutional protections.
The jury therefore never heard some of the material that has since contributed most strongly to public suspicions about Lizzie.
A Powerful Defense
Lizzie could also afford an exceptional legal team. Her attorneys included Andrew Jennings, a prominent Fall River lawyer and longtime Borden family attorney, and George D. Robinson, a former governor of Massachusetts.
The defense did not have to prove who killed Andrew and Abby. It only had to demonstrate that prosecutors could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Lizzie did. Her lawyers attacked the investigation and emphasized the absence of physical evidence. Where were Lizzie’s blood-covered clothes after two extraordinarily violent attacks? Where was the murder weapon? How could she have killed Abby, gone about her morning for roughly 90 minutes and then murdered Andrew without Sullivan or anyone else seeing anything incriminating?
The defense also possibly benefited from another development: Just days before Lizzie’s trial began, a young woman named Bertha Manchester was murdered with an ax in Fall River while Lizzie remained jailed awaiting trial. A Portuguese laborer was later convicted of that killing. The crime had no demonstrated connection to the Bordens, but another brutal daytime ax murder could have complicated the idea that only Lizzie could have committed such an attack. However, not much evidence suggests it significantly influenced the jury.
Could Lizzie Borden Kill?
The trial also unfolded within the social expectations of the 1890s. Lizzie was not the kind of defendant many jurors expected to see accused of a savage double murder. She was a white, middle-class Protestant woman from a prominent family, a churchgoer who taught Sunday school and participated in charitable activities. The prosecution was asking 12 men to believe that such a woman had repeatedly struck her stepmother and father in the head and then calmly concealed virtually every physical trace of the crime.
Her defense leaned into that image. Robinson portrayed Lizzie as a respectable daughter and emphasized how difficult it was to reconcile the brutality of the murders with the woman sitting before the jury.
The composition of the jury may also have mattered. Fall River residents were excluded from the pool, leaving jurors drawn largely from smaller communities in Bristol County. Most were Protestants, and several had daughters around Lizzie’s age.
Support for Lizzie extended beyond the courtroom. Women’s organizations and reformers rallied to her defense, arguing that she was being condemned by rumor and sensational journalism before her guilt had been proved. The case became intertwined with contemporary ideas about womanhood, respectability and whether a woman should be judged by evidence rather than assumptions about how an accused murderer ought to behave.
Why Did the Jury Acquit Lizzie Borden?
By the time the case reached the jury, the prosecution had presented numerous suspicious circumstances but had been unable to overcome the central weaknesses in its case. Important evidence had been excluded, the physical evidence was inconclusive and the defense had repeatedly emphasized the reasonable doubt surrounding the murders.
The prosecution faced one final obstacle in Justice Justin Dewey’s instructions to the jury. His lengthy charge strongly emphasized the presumption of innocence and weaknesses in the state’s case, prompting criticism that he sounded more like another defense attorney than an impartial judge.
On June 20, 1893, the jurors deliberated for about 90 minutes before finding Lizzie not guilty.
The verdict did not require them to believe Lizzie was innocent or to identify another killer. They needed only to conclude that prosecutors had failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she murdered Andrew and Abby. More than 130 years later, that distinction helps explain why Lizzie could be acquitted in a courtroom while remaining a suspect in the public imagination.
