One of the most fascinating aspects of the Lizzie Borden story isn’t the crime – it’s why Lizzie chose to keep living in the city that ridiculed her for the rest of her life.
After Lizzie’s surprise acquittal in the 1892 hatchet murders of her father and stepmother, Andrew and Abby, she became a figure of gossip in popular media, eventually becoming an American folk tale. Even a century after her death, kids far from Fall River still know her story in nursery-rhyme version:
“Lizzie Borden took an axe, / gave her mother 40 whacks; / When she saw what she had done / she gave her father 41.”…