What Happened To Lizzie Borden After Her Not Guilty Verdict?
Lizzie Borden, as we all know, took an axe, and gave her mother 40 whacks, and when she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41. The alleged whacks occurred on August 4, 1892, when Andrew Borden and his wife, Abby — Lizzie's stepmother — were found dead in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts. The most likely suspect in the grisly murder was Lizzie, the younger of Andrew's two daughters. In her 30s, unmarried, and still living with her father and his new wife, she claimed to have been at home when the murders occurred, but had neither seen nor heard anything of the crime. According to Gizmodo, she had exhibited strange behavior before and after the murders, and she was soon arrested.
After a sensational two-week trial, however, the jury deliberated for just 90 minutes before coming back with their verdict: not guilty. Borden was now free to do whatever she pleased and go wherever she wanted, but she never left Fall River.
Lizzie Borden lived in Fall River for the rest of her life
Instead, Borden and her sister, Emma, inherited their father's estate, which was worth around $7 million. With the money, she purchased a three-story Queen Anne mansion at 306 French St., in the wealthy party of the city, according to the Providence Journal. She nicknamed the house "Maplecroft."
Despite her acquittal and her fancy new address, however, the townspeople never really saw Borden as innocent. Her mansion was frequently vandalized by children, who would dare each other to throw rocks and eggs at it, or ring her doorbell in the middle of the night, according to Smithsonian Magazine. And she was socially ostracized by the adults. People shunned her, refusing to sit next to her at church. Sometime in the early 1900s, the famous Lizzie Borden jump-rope rhyme was written and popularized, which can't have helped matters.
Borden did change her name from "Lizzie" to "Lizbeth," but the name change wasn't fooling anyone from her hometown. For whatever reason, she never tried to embark on a new life somewhere else, where there wasn't a schoolyard rhyme immortalizing her as the girl who had murdered her parents with an axe. Borden lived in her Maplecroft mansion in Fall River until her death after a short illness in 1927. She was 66 years old.