“I think we’re still fascinated by the case to this day largely because it has all the elements of a Greek tragedy or a Victorian melodrama, and the fact the case is unsolved gives it cultural longevity,” Richard Behrens, host of The Lizzie Borden Podcast says. What separated this from other crimes was the combination of an unlikely suspect, the rise of sensationalized journalism, and the fact that it offered a morbid and wry critique of high society – and we have never lost interest. Moreover, Lizzie’s inquest testimonies were inconsistent, perhaps owing to the fact that she was prescribed morphine after the murders to help calm her nerves.īut it’s not just the act of murder that keeps us coming back well over a century later. But the finer details of the Borden murders were hazy from the beginning, starting when thousands of curious townspeople visited the crime scene, unintentionally tampering with evidence. His other daughter, Emma, was out of town, and their live-in maid Bridget Sullivan was in her third-floor room, resting from a morning of window washing and vomiting following the consumption of spoiled mutton stew. The only serious suspect was Andrew’s 32-year-old unmarried daughter, Lizzie, who was at the house during the killings. The facts of the case are fairly straightforward: During an oppressive heat wave in August 1892, prominent Fall River residents Andrew and Abby Borden were brutally murdered in their home each had received multiple blows to the head with a hatchet. While both were panned by critics, they did bring the case back to the public eye, opening the door for an upcoming psychological thriller starring Chloe Sevigny as Lizzie and Kristen Stewart as Bridget Sullivan, the family maid.
BLACK AXE MURDERS US SERIES
Almost 40 years later, Lifetime aired the Christina Ricci vehicle Lizzie Borden Took an Ax, and followed it with a series called The Lizzie Borden Chronicles.
BLACK AXE MURDERS US MOVIE
The 1975 made-for-TV movie The Legend of Lizzie Borden, starring Bewitched’s Elizabeth Montgomery – who in real life was sixth cousins with Lizzie – brought the story to a new generation. There was Agnes de Mille’s 1954 ballet Fall River Legend and the 1965 opera Lizzie Borden, the concept recently updated as a rock opera called Lizzie: The Musical.
Outside of the press – and the ubiquitous “Lizzie Borden took an axe” schoolyard chant – Lizzie has been a lasting figure in pop culture. 'Silence of the Lambs': 'It Broke All the Rules' How True Is 'Respect'? Fact-Checking the Aretha Franklin Biopic “As the unofficial Lizzie Borden reporter, you’d be surprised how newsworthy a 124-year-old cold case murder can be,” she says. Recent discoveries of new materials have made the paper, like letters and journals that belonged to Andrew Jackson Jennings, Lizzie’s attorney, and Lizzie’s meatloaf recipe. Deborah Allard, a staff reporter at the local Herald News and a lifelong resident of Fall River, has covered everything from a couple who got married after meeting during the annual dramatization on August 4th, 2012 (the bride played Lizzie and the groom played a detective), to the renovations of Maplecroft – the home where Lizzie lived out her life after the murders – which is set to open to the public soon. Lizzie’s acquittal in June 1893 only stoked the interest – and that interest never died down. Newspaper coverage began immediately after that hot August day in 1892, and centered on the fact that a prim, proper, churchgoing woman in Fall River, Massachusetts, may have brutally killed two members of her family with a hatchet. It didn’t take long after Lizzie Borden was accused of murdering her father and stepmother for the public to start obsessing over the case.
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