![]() But Andrew had never made a show of his good fortune. He had invested in mills, banks, and real estate. Like other Fall River Bordens, he possessed wealth and standing. Moreover, Andrew Borden was no ordinary citizen. No one saw a suspect enter or leave the Borden property. There was no evident motive-no robbery or sexual assault, for example. In the early hours after the discovery of the bodies, people only knew that the assassin struck the victims at home, in broad daylight, on a busy street, one block from the city’s business district. Cultural, religious, class, ethnic, and gender divisions in the town would shape debates over Lizzie’s guilt or innocence-and draw the whole country into the case. Fall River was rocked not only by the sheer brutality of the crime, but also by who its victims were. Part of the puzzle of why we still remember Lizzie’s crime lies in Fall River, Massachusetts, a textile mill town 50 miles south of Boston. ![]() Still, the rhyme does accurately record the sequence of the murders, which took place approximately an hour and a half apart on the morning of August 4, 1892. And fewer than half the blows of the rhyme actually battered the victims-19 rained down on Abby and ten more rendered 69-year-old Andrew’s face unrecognizable. While there is no doubt that Lizzie Borden committed the murders, the rhyme is not quite correct: sixty-four-year-old Abby was Lizzie’s stepmother and a hatchet, rather than an axe, served as the weapon. ![]() And the horrible identity of the murderer was immortalized by the children’s rhyme passed down across generations. New England’s crime of the Gilded Age, its seeming senselessness captivated the national press. The Lizzie Borden murder case abides as one of the most famous in American criminal history.
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