The Lizzie Borden House: Forty Whacks, an Acquittal, and the Bed and Breakfast Where You Can Sleep in the Murder Room
Every American child knows the rhyme, and almost none of them know they are reciting a libel. Lizzie Borden took an axe / and gave her mother forty whacks. / When she saw what she had done / she gave her father forty-one. It is not true in a single particular. It was not forty whacks; it was nineteen. It was not forty-one; it was ten or eleven. Abby Borden was not her mother but her stepmother. And Lizzie Borden was tried for those murders in 1893 and acquitted by a jury of twelve men in a little over an hour, and never charged again, and lived in Fall River for another thirty-four years as a free woman. The rhyme was made up by schoolchildren while the trial was still going on. It is one of the most successful pieces of character assassination in American history, and it worked so completely that the verdict of the court has never once, in a hundred and thirty years, been the verdict of the public. The house where it happened stands at 230 Second Street in Fall River, Massachuset...