What the Lizzie Borden Rhyme Gets Wrong About the Real Case

Almost everything the average person knows about the Borden family murders arrives as a jump-rope chant: Lizzie Borden took an axe / And gave her mother 40 whacks / When she saw what she had done / She gave her father 41. That’s the text Edmund Pearson printed in his 1924 true crime collection Studies in Murder, and it’s the text you know. But it’s wrong about the weapon, the arithmetic, and the identity of the woman upstairs was—and it’s silent about how the trial actually came out.Fact Vs. MythAndrew and Abby Borden were killed in their house at 92 Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts, on the morning of August 4, 1892, and a week later medical examiner W.A. Dolan, assisted by Dr. F.W. Draper, opened both bodies and counted. The autopsy recorded 10 wounds to Andrew’s head and face and 18 distinct wounds on Abby, most of them on the right side of her head. Douglas O. Linder, the law professor who maintains the Famous Trials archive, puts the pair at 29 whacks against the 81 the rhyme advertises, and the tool wasn’t an axe at all but a hatchet, small enough to swing one-handed.The second line gets a relationship wrong rather than a figure. Abby Durfee Gray was Lizzie’s stepmother—Lizzie’s mother, Sarah, died on March 26, 1863, and Andrew remarried on June 6, 1865, when Lizzie was four— and the person most insistent on the distinction was Lizzie. Asked at the inquest whether her relations with Abby were cordial, she said she didn’t know how to answer the question; pressed on how they weren’t, she said, “I did not call her mother.” Her usual address, she testified, was “Mrs. Borden,” and had been for five or six years.Then there’s the ending, which the rhyme handles by not mentioning it. A New Bedford jury took the case on June 5, 1893, and acquitted her on June 20 after roughly an hour and a half—contemporaneous reports and later histories put the deliberation anywhere from 40 minutes to 90, and the jurors reportedly stretched it so the verdict wouldn’t look hasty. Nobody else was ever charged for the murders. The rhyme states as settled fact the one thing twelve men who heard all the evidence refused to say.Lizzie Borden | Bettmann/GettyImagesHow the Rhyme Changed Over TimeThe strangest wrong number is 40, because the rhyme didn’t start there. Its earliest known printings are newspaper filler from February 1894, eight months after the acquittal, and they ran as a gag: a Boston woman who raises her children carefully and never lets them see a newspaper walks into the nursery and finds them singing it. The Morning News of Savannah, Georgia ran the squib on February 3, 1894, The Indianapolis Journal ran it the next day, the Hillsboro, Ohio News-Herald—the printing Borden scholarship has long treated as the earliest—ran it on February 15, and The Charlotte Democrat picked it up on February 16. Every one of them says 20 whacks, and 21.20 is nearly right. Abby took 18 or 19 blows, depending on whose testimony you follow, so the verse circulating while Lizzie was still a nationally famous acquitted woman was almost accurate about the stepmother and double the truth about the father, and it doubled again sometime in the three decades before Pearson’s book. Who did the doubling is unrecorded; Pearson himself wrote that “Who invented it, nobody knows, but everyone heard it,” and passed along a story from the poet Carolyn Wells, who said Theodore Roosevelt had recited the thing to her at Sagamore Hill, telling her that of all the doggerel verse he had ever heard, “it had remained most persistently in his mind.”The rhyme does land one thing. It kills the stepmother first and the father second, and that is the order investigators settled on the same afternoon, when they found Abby’s body cold upstairs and Andrew’s still warm on the sitting-room sofa—a gap of around 90 minutes. One out of four, and the one it got right is the only part nobody quotes.