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The Lizzie Borden Rhyme Gets Every Single Fact Wrong

134 years ago today, Andrew and Abby Borden were murdered in Fall River. The nursery rhyme America wrote about it goes zero-for-four — including the verdict.

Allen Erwin·Hellbound Hearts·August 4, 2026·5 min read

Sometime today, somebody in your life will recite it. "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's one of the most successful pieces of American folklore ever composed — a nursery rhyme about a double homicide that children have been skipping rope to for a hundred and thirty years.

August 4 is the anniversary of the Borden murders. Fall River, Massachusetts, 1892. And in honor of the occasion, I'd like to point out something about that rhyme that I find genuinely delightful.

Every single fact in it is wrong.

Not exaggerated. Not simplified. Wrong. All of them. Line by line, the most famous true-crime verse in American history goes zero-for-four, and the story of how wrong it is turns out to be better than the story it replaced.

The Audit

Let's grade it like a term paper.

"Took an axe." The weapon was a hatchet. The prosecution's best candidate was a handleless hatchet head found in the Borden basement, which they could never conclusively tie to the crime. Axe, hatchet — if you're not from the 1890s, you may not care about the distinction, but the 1890s cared, and the rhyme flunks it.

"Gave her mother." Abby Borden was Lizzie's stepmother. Lizzie's biological mother died when Lizzie was a toddler; Andrew remarried. This detail actually matters, because the strained relationship between Lizzie and Abby was a pillar of the prosecution's motive theory. The rhyme flattens it for the meter.

"Forty whacks." Abby took eighteen or nineteen blows — the historical sources genuinely disagree by exactly one whack, which I am confident is the pettiest scholarly dispute in true crime. Either way: not forty. Off by more than half.

"Gave her father forty-one." Andrew Borden took ten or eleven. Again, the sources bicker over one blow. Again: nowhere near forty-one. The rhyme inflates the body count of blows by roughly three hundred percent because "eighteen or nineteen whacks" doesn't scan.

And then there's the big one. The conviction the rhyme carries in its bones — Lizzie did it, everyone knows Lizzie did it, sing it on the playground — is the one thing the actual legal system of the United States explicitly declined to agree with.

Ninety Minutes

Here's what happened after the murders, told fast. Abby was killed first, in an upstairs guest room, sometime around 9:30 in the morning. Andrew came home from his rounds, lay down on the sitting room sofa, and was killed roughly ninety minutes after his wife. Lizzie, thirty-two years old, a Sunday school teacher, reported finding her father's body. Her alibi was that she'd been in the barn. Her story shifted under questioning. She had tried to buy prussic acid — a poison — the day before the murders. Three days after them, she burned a dress in the kitchen stove.

She was arrested, indicted, and tried in June 1893 in front of a national press corps that covered it like a celebrity trial, because that's what it was — arguably the first one.

The all-male jury deliberated for about ninety minutes. Roughly the same amount of time that elapsed between the two murders. They came back with not guilty on all counts.

Some of that verdict was the evidence, which was genuinely circumstantial — no blood on Lizzie, no confirmed weapon, her inquest testimony thrown out on procedural grounds. And some of it was 1893 doing what 1893 did: the judge all but instructed the jury that a well-bred Christian woman was constitutionally incapable of this kind of violence, her attorneys leaned on her fainting spell during the autopsy testimony as proof of her delicacy, and twelve men agreed that ladies don't.

No one else was ever charged. The case is unsolved to this day. Officially, nobody killed Andrew and Abby Borden.

The courts acquitted her in ninety minutes. The playground convicted her for a hundred and thirty years. Only one of those verdicts stuck.

The Rhyme Won

And this is the part I actually want you to sit with, because it's the same phenomenon I wrote about with the Stull Cemetery legend, and I'm starting to think true subject is my theme of the week.

The legal system produced a verdict: not guilty. The folklore produced a counter-verdict: forty whacks. And the folklore won. Nobody chants the acquittal. There is no skipping rhyme about reasonable doubt. The verse convicted Lizzie Borden more thoroughly than any jury could have — no appeal, no retrial, no statute of limitations, taught to each new generation of children before they're old enough to ask what a hatchet is.

Lizzie lived the rest of her life inside that verdict. She stayed in Fall River, of all places — bought a big house on the Hill with her sister, named it Maplecroft, started going by Lizbeth. Fall River society froze her out anyway. She died there in 1927, acquitted and convicted at the same time, which is a trick only folklore can pull off.

Was she guilty? Most historians who've dug through the record think the prosecution had the right defendant and the wrong century's forensics. But "probably, though it was never proven" doesn't rhyme, and so America went with the version that does.

You Can Sleep In The Room

One last thing, because this is a horror site and you people are my people. The Borden house on Second Street in Fall River still stands, and it operates today as the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast Museum. This is real. You can book a night there. You can specifically book the guest room where Abby Borden was found face-down between the bed and the dresser, and you can sleep in it, assuming you sleep.

A hundred and thirty-four years, and the house where the rhyme happened — where the rhyme didn't happen, where the real thing happened, eighteen or nineteen and ten or eleven, hatchet not axe, stepmother not mother, acquitted not condemned — is now a place where horror fans pay for the privilege of not sleeping.

Honestly? If it ever goes on the itinerary, I'm booking the room. Some windows you jump through. Some rooms you book. The mission continues.

HELLBOUND HEARTS — hellboundhearts.com

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