Lizzie Borden House

On August 4, 1892, a double murder turned an ordinary Fall River home into the center of one of the era’s most closely followed criminal cases. Andrew Borden and his wife Abby were found dead inside the house on Second Street. Andrew’s daughter Lizzie was accused, arrested, and tried the following year. The jury acquitted her in June 1893. No one else was convicted, and the murders remain officially unsolved.

The distance between a courtroom verdict and public certainty became part of the story. Newspapers carried the case far beyond Fall River, and a mocking rhyme later reduced a complicated investigation to a few lines. The rhyme is inaccurate, but it proved memorable. It also helped turn a legal case into a kind of national folklore, one in which repetition often sounds like proof even when it is not.