The murders of Andrew and Abby Borden
Fall River, Massachusetts, August 1892
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
On the morning of August 4, 1892, the merchant and banker Andrew Borden and his second wife, Abby, were killed with a cutting instrument, probably a hatchet, inside their home in Fall River. Abby died at about 9:30 a.m. in the upstairs guest room; Andrew at about 11, on the sofa in the sitting room. The maid, Bridget Sullivan, was washing windows and later resting in her attic room. The younger daughter, Lizzie Borden, 32, said her stepmother had gone out after receiving a note from a sick woman (the note never turned up) and that she herself had been in the barn at the time of her father's death.
Suspicion fell on Lizzie. The day before, she reportedly tried to buy prussic acid at a pharmacy, saying it was to clean a fur cape, and the pharmacist refused; the whole household had fallen ill days earlier. A family friend said she saw Lizzie burn a dress in the kitchen stove days after the crime, saying it was stained with paint. In the cellar, police found a hatchet head with a broken handle, but never proved it was the weapon.
Sources
In the game
Buttons in the Ashes
Fall River, Massachusetts, Monday, August 8, 1892, 10 a.m. Last Thursday, the banker Josiah Crandall, 69, and his wife, Lucinda, 64, were killed in their own home.
Lizzie was arrested a week later and tried in New Bedford beginning in June 1893; the judge excluded the pharmacy evidence, and the jury acquitted her on June 20, after little more than an hour. No one else was charged, and the case officially remains unsolved. The game borrows the locked house, the note that never existed, the barn alibi and the burned dress; the characters, the evidence and the outcome are fiction.
