ABSTRACT

At 1 1 : 15 on the morning of August 4, 1892, Marshall Rufus B. Hilliard, the chief of police in Fall River, Massachusetts, received a telephone call reporting some sort of violence at the residence of Andrew J. Borden, one of the town's leading financiers. Hilliard dispatched an officer to the scene, saying, with immortal understatement, "There's a row at the Borden house." Such was the official beginning of nineteenth-century America's most famous murder case. The "row," of course, turned out to be the bloody deaths of 69-year-old Mr. Borden and his 65-year-old second wife, Abby, both of whom had been killed by repeated blows from an ax or hatchet. Within a few days, Lizzie Borden, Andrew's respectable, church-going daughter, was charged with the crime. A little less than a year later, after a trial that reached new heights of national attention and media sensationalism, Lizzie Borden was acquitted of that crime despite what seemed strong evidence against her.