Andrew Jackson Borden had built himself into one of Fall River's wealthiest men. Starting in furniture and casket manufacturing, he expanded into property development, textile mills, and banking, amassing an estate worth $300,000 -- roughly ten million dollars today. Yet he was legendarily frugal. The Borden house on Second Street lacked indoor plumbing, a remarkable absence for a man of his means. The family lived in a respectable but unfashionable neighborhood, well below the Hill district where Fall River's true elite resided. Tensions ran deep. Lizzie and her sister Emma despised their stepmother Abby, whom their father had married in 1865. Lizzie referred to her as "Mrs. Borden" and suspected she had married Andrew for his money. Property disputes festered: when Andrew gave real estate to Abby's relatives, the sisters demanded compensation. A family argument in July 1892 drove both daughters out of the house on extended vacations. They returned just a week before the murders.

The timeline of August 4, 1892, has been reconstructed minute by minute. After breakfast, Andrew left for his morning walk. Sometime between 9:00 and 10:30 a.m., Abby went upstairs to make the guest room bed. Her killer struck her from the front first, a hatchet blow above the ear that dropped her face-down. Seventeen more blows followed. Andrew returned at 10:30 and found the front door jammed. Maid Bridget Sullivan went to unlock it and heard Lizzie laughing from the top of the stairs -- the same floor where Abby's body lay in plain view. Sullivan later helped Andrew into his slippers and left him napping on the sofa. Just before 11:10, Lizzie called out that her father was dead. Dr. Bowen, the family physician from across the street, arrived and pronounced both victims dead. The murder weapon was never definitively identified, though a hatchet-head with a freshly broken handle was found in the basement, its blade suspiciously coated in what appeared to be deliberately applied dust.

Lizzie's behavior baffled investigators. Her statements were contradictory -- first she heard a groan, then she heard nothing. She claimed Abby had gone to visit a sick friend, producing a note that was never found. Officers who interviewed her noted she was unnervingly calm. Yet police failed to check her for bloodstains, and their initial search of her room was cursory because she said she was not feeling well. Days later, neighbor Alice Russell witnessed Lizzie burning a dress in the kitchen stove, explaining it was covered in paint. The trial began on June 5, 1893, in New Bedford. The prosecution team included future Supreme Court Justice William H. Moody. The defense was led by former Massachusetts Governor George D. Robinson -- whose political appointee, Associate Justice Justin Dewey, happened to be the presiding judge. Dewey delivered a lengthy summary favorable to the defense before sending the case to the jury. After ninety minutes of deliberation, Lizzie was acquitted. She told reporters she was "the happiest woman in the world."

Acquittal brought no peace. Lizzie and Emma moved to a large modern house in the Hill neighborhood, the fashionable district their father had always avoided. Lizzie adopted the name Lizbeth A. Borden and attempted to live a society life. Fall River wanted nothing to do with her. She was ostracized completely. Emma eventually moved out and never spoke to her sister again. When Lizzie died on June 1, 1927, at age 66, she left an estate worth over $250,000. Emma died nine days later in a New Hampshire nursing home, having suffered from chronic nephritis. Neither sister ever married. The hatchet-head and other trial evidence are preserved at the Fall River Historical Society, where they remain objects of grim fascination more than a century later.

"Lizzie Borden took an axe / Gave her mother forty whacks / When she saw what she had done / Gave her father forty-one." The rhyme, attributed either to an anonymous newspaper writer or to the ever-convenient Mother Goose, got the facts spectacularly wrong -- Abby suffered 18 or 19 blows, Andrew just 11. But accuracy was never the point. The case has generated an endless stream of theories: Lizzie acted in a fugue state, she was abused by her father, her sister Emma secretly committed the murders, an illegitimate son named William was the true killer. None have been proved. The Borden murders have been adapted into plays, ballets, operas, television films, a Christina Ricci movie, a Kristen Stewart movie, Agatha Christie references, and a forthcoming Netflix series. The trial has been compared to those of Bruno Hauptmann, the Rosenbergs, and O.J. Simpson as a landmark of American legal spectacle. Fall River cannot escape its most famous resident -- and perhaps it has stopped trying.