Night at the Lizzie Borden murder house: questions that still linger 135 years on

A CBS News team spent the night in the Fall River bedroom where Abby Borden was killed in 1892. The house's thin walls raise fresh doubts about Lizzie Borden's alibi.

Sleeping where Abby Borden was killed — and finding no answers

A CBS News "48 Hours" team spent the night inside the Lizzie Borden House in Fall River, Massachusetts, in the summer of 2019 — specifically in the upstairs bedroom where 64-year-old Abby Borden was found hacked to death on 4 August 1892. The exercise, cbsnews.com reports, was designed to revisit one of American true-crime's most enduring unsolved questions: did Lizzie Borden kill her parents?

The murders themselves are not in dispute. On that August morning, Andrew Borden, 70, and his wife Abby were found bludgeoned inside the family home on Second Street. The prime suspect from the outset was Andrew's daughter, Lizzie, then 32, who was home at the time. Investigators concluded the killer must have known and hated the couple; a small hatchet recovered from the basement was believed to be the weapon.

A jury acquitted her in just over an hour

Despite what prosecutors described as overwhelming circumstantial evidence pointing to Lizzie, an all-male jury deliberated for little more than an hour at the conclusion of a high-profile two-week trial in 1893 and returned a not-guilty verdict. Twelve men, the report notes, found it difficult to believe that an affluent, educated single woman was capable of such acts.

The case never closed in the public imagination. It has since inspired numerous books, films and a well-known nursery rhyme attributing 40 blows to her mother and 41 to her father. This week, the crime returns to mainstream attention with the Netflix premiere of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, part of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan's true-crime anthology series.

One factual note that the nursery rhyme gets wrong: the murder weapon was not an axe, and Abby was struck fewer than a dozen times. That revision does nothing to reduce the violence of the killings, which continue to resonate more than a century later.

The house still stands — and takes guests

The green-frame property, now more than 180 years old, has been restored and operates today as the Lizzie Borden House and Museum, functioning also as a bed and breakfast. The interior is decorated with macabre black-and-white photographs, including actual crime-scene images of Abby Borden's body on the bedroom floor.

It was in that bedroom that the CBS News journalist chose to sleep. The reported motivation: if the house is haunted, as its current owners suggest, perhaps Abby might make an appearance.

She did not. The journalist slept undisturbed throughout the night, dressed in running gear as a precaution.

Thin walls, a small house — and a difficult alibi

The overnight stay did, however, sharpen existing doubts about Lizzie's account to investigators. Lizzie stated she had been on the ground floor when Abby was attacked upstairs. Walking through the house today makes that statement harder to accept: the walls and floors are thin, and the dining room where Lizzie said she was standing sits directly below Abby's bedroom. It is difficult to account for why Lizzie would have heard nothing.

The physical scale of the property raises a second question. The house is small enough that killing two people with a hatchet would have produced significant blood spatter. Lizzie's dress showed no blood. There was testimony that she may have destroyed a garment after the murders, but the bodies were reported quickly — leaving little time, by the report's reasoning, to change clothes and clean up.

What modern forensics would have changed

Forensic science in 1892 was rudimentary by contemporary standards. Investigators today, cbsnews.com notes, would have sealed the scene immediately and recovered even trace amounts of blood from clothing. Modern jurors, too, would likely have evaluated the evidence — and the defendant — differently from their 1893 counterparts.

Instead, Lizzie Borden walked free. She lived in Fall River until her death in 1927, and the case remained officially unsolved. The question of what happened inside that small house on Second Street — who struck first, how, and why no physical evidence conclusively tied anyone to the crime — has never been answered to the satisfaction of historians, criminologists or, it seems, the journalists who still book a room there to find out.

Source: Google News MT