Fall River Bristol Massachusetts United States

The father and stepmother of Lizzie Borden are found murdered in their Fall River, Massachusetts home, on August 4, 1892.

Although acquitted at trial, Borden will remain the prime suspect in her father's and stepmother's murders.

Writer Victoria Lincoln will propose in 1967 that Borden might have committed the murders while in a fugue state.

Another prominent suggestion will be that she was physically and sexually abused by her father, which drove her to commit patricide.

There is little evidence to support this, but incest is not a topic that would have been discussed at the time, and the methods for collecting physical evidence would have been quite different in 1892.

This belief is intimated in local papers at the time of the murders, and will be revisited by scholar Marcia Carlisle in a 1992 essay.

Lizzie Borden is suspected of the axe-murder of her stepmother and father on August 4, 1892.

Arrested and tried for both murders in June 1893, her trial becomes a national sensation in the United States.

The popular, red-haired daughter of a well-to-do businessman who married for a second time in 1865, three years after the death of Lizzie's mother died, is acquitted, given the circumstantial evidence, but is nonetheless ostracized thereafter by the people of her native Fall River, Massachusetts, where she will continue to live until her death in 1927.

The grisly murders will inspire a great many books, both serious studies and fiction, and one immortal, if slightly inaccurate, quatrain: "Lizzie Borden took an axe And gave her mother forty whacks; And when she saw what she had done She gave her father forty-one."

An American folk group, the Kingston Trio, will revive this verse in their popular song about her, written in the late 1950s.