Commonwealth of Massachusetts

Lizzie Borden

Lizzie Borden (1860–1927), a resident of Fall River, Massachusetts, was tried and acquitted in 1892 for the murder of her father and stepmother. She was indicted for the murder—that is, a grand jury believed there was probable cause for an arrest and trial, as shown in this historic document. However, when she was tried in a New Bedford court, she was found not guilty by a jury that took an hour and a half to deliberate. While there are many theories on what happened more than one hundred years ago at the Borden house, the crime remains an unsolved mystery, one that lives on in folklore and rhyme, as evidenced in this once-popular jump rope ditty:

Lizzie Borden took an axe

And gave her mother forty whacks.

When she saw what she had done

She gave her father forty-one.