Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks
Or not

It was on this day in 1893 that the verdict was announced in the trial of Lizzie Borden. She was accused of murdering her father and her stepmother with an ax. It was one of the first murder trials in America that got covered by the national press because of the sensational nature of it.

Her father was the president of a bank. He was one of the richest and stingiest men in the town of Fall River, Massachusetts. He’d come home on a hot August morning, 1892, taken a nap on his couch, and about an hour later Lizzie started calling out to the neighbors that her father had been killed. The police found the stepmother upstairs was also dead. They determined the murder weapon had been some kind of hatchet.

The case against Lizzie Borden was entirely circumstantial. Nobody had seen the murders. No weapon was found. There was no physical evidence linking Lizzie to the crime. All the police could prove was that she had been in the house at the time of the murders. She had a lot of money to gain from it, and she’d recently tried to buy poison at the local pharmacy.

The trial lasted two weeks. Lizzie was found innocent. No one else was ever tried for the murder. After the trial, she bought herself a three-story mansion where she lived for the rest of her life.

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