LIZZIE

Lizzie Borden took an ax

And gave her mother forty whacks;

And when she saw what she had done,

She gave her father forty-one.

Or did she?

It was 133 years ago today that the bodies of Abby and Andrew Borden were discovered in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts.  (To be fair, Abby was Lizzie' stepmother, not her birth mother.  Also to be fair, Abby received only 18 or 19 whacks, while Andrew received a mere eleven blows.)  Lizzie was famously arrested and tried and acquitted for the murders.  Following the trial, Lizzie remained in the family home with her sister Emma; Emma moved out in 1905 following a disagreement and never saw her sister agina.  Lizzie died of pneumonia in 1927, yet her name, reputation, and legacy live on to this day in story fable, rumor, speculation, and popular culture.

No one was ever convicted of the murders and many thought that Lizzie was indeed guilty.  (On her deathbed, Bridget Sullivan, the Bordon's live-in maid who was 25 at the time, reportedly confessed that she had lied at Lizzie's trial to protect her.)  If Lizzie did do it, why?  Speculation abounds.  Some say both Lizzie and Emma were resentful over gifts of real estate that Andrew had made to members of Abby's family.  Some speculate that Andrew (he was not the most popular man in Fall River by a long sight) had been sexually abusing Lizzie, although there was never any proof of this, yet mild rumors of incest circulated at the time.  On June 1, 1893 -- five days before Lizzie's trail began -- another ax murder occurred in Fall River...could the murders be related?  Writer Victoria Lincoln has suggested that Lizzie killed her parents in a fugue state.  In Even Hunter's novel Lizzie he suggested that Lizzie had acted after being caught in a lesbian relationship with Sullivan.  (Specualtion about Lizzie's sexuality has always been rife, but there has never been a hint of homosexuality about Sullivan, who evidently went on to have a long marriage.)  One of the other suspects seriously considered by police was Abby's brother John Morse, who had an overly-detailed alibi for his sister's murder.  Another was a person called William Borden, who had been rumored to be Andrew's illegitimate son, but was eventually proven to be no relation.  Emma Borden, Lizzie's sister, was 15 miles away in Fairhaven when the murders occurred -- could she have travelled secretly to Fall River, committed the murders, and then returned to Fairhaven?  Some think so.

The Borden house became a museum and now is a bed and breakfast for the more morbidly inclined.  Pieces of evidence included in the trial, including the hatchet head, are now at the Fall River Historical Society,

The crime has been the subject of film, radio, television, theatre, music, and literature.  Some examples:

• A 1933 play, Nine Pine Street, with Lillian Gish playing a character based on Lizzie
• Goodbye, Miss Lizzie Borden, a 1947 one-act play by Lilliam de la Torre, which was also adapted as an episode on Alfred Hitchcock Presents 
• Fall River Legend, a ballet by Agnes deMille
• A 1965 opera by Jack Beeson, Lizzie Borden (I saw it when it aired once on PBS and it was awful, IMHO)
• Blood Relations, a play by Sharon Pollack whoch became a television movie
• Lizzie Borden, another musical adaptation, starrting Alison Fraser
• A dual presentation of the story for the March 24, 1957 airiing of the television program Omnibus, which included a play and a performance of the de Mille ballet
• The Legend of Lizzie, a 1959 play by Reginald Lawfrence
• The Legend of Lizzie Borden, a television movie starring Elizabeth Montgomery  (Montgomery later learned that she and Lizzie were actually sixth cousins, once removed)
• Lizzie:  The Musical (1969) had Lizzie and her neighbor Alice as lovers, while also covering alleged abuse in the Borden household
• Lizzie Bordon Took an Ax, a Lifetime television movie starring Christina Ricci, followed by a limited television series, The Lizzie Borden Chronicles 
• Another feature film, Lizzie, a feature film with Chloe Sevigny and Kristin Stewart, which portrayed Lizzie and Sullivan as lovers
• "The Lizzie Borden Case" was a fifteen-minute dramatization on the radio program Unsolved Mysteries; it theorized that the murders were done by a tramp during a botched robbery attempt
• Various television recreations on programs such as Biography, Second Verdict, History's Mysteries, Case Reopened, and Mysteries Decoded; as well as the BBC radio podcast series, Lucy Worsley's Lady Killers
• Agatha Christie has referenced the case in her novels Sleeping Murder, And Then There None, After the Funeral, and Ordeal by Innocence
• Angela Carter published two stories about Lizzie
• Avram Davidson referenced Lizzie in "The Deed of the Deft-Footed Drtagon"
• Walter Satterthwaite's novel Miss Lizzie imagines Lizzie thirty years after the crime
• Cherie Priest combined Lizzie with Lovecraftian horror in Maplecroft:  The Broden Dispatches
• Sarah Schmidt's 2017 novel about the affair, She What I Have Done, won the MUD Literary Prize for a debut novel
• Erika Mailman's novel, The Murderer's Maid, alternates points of view between Sullivann in 1892 and a present day character; it won a gold medal for historical fiction in the Independent Publisher Book awards
• Robert Bloch's now classic, oft-reprinted short story, "Lizzie Border Took an Axe," surprisingly was not about Lizzie.  The story has also been dramatized on radio and television; it is essential reading/viewing/hearing for anyone interested in the Borden saga.
• The heavy metal band Lizzy Borden got its name from guess who?
• The American filmmaker Lizzie Borden was born Linda Elizabeth Borden; she took on the name Lizzie Borden when she was eleven

And, of course, there's this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wlO-J0v9ZY