YES! Thank you. They both had motives. IMO, it was almost definitely Lizzie yet it's hard to believe the maid Bridget Sullivan wasn't complicit. Due to Victorian class distinctions, nobody ever seemed to consider that she was no independent witness, not 'only' an Irish immigrant, working class maid to the very WASPish, wealthy Bordens.
Lizzie and Bridget were youngish women close in age, and had lived together for nearly three years.

During the trial, Lizzie fainted at the sight of her parents skulls, but showed almost no emotion otherwise - except when Bridget the maid testified in detail that the wealthy Mr and Mrs Borden wolfed down very old mutton the morning of their murders. At this testimony, Lizzie began smiling and found she couldn't stop. They must have exchanged glances, because Bridget herself began giggling in the witness box.

The morning of the murders, when Bridget swore in frustration over all the locks on the door, Lizzie laughed back from upstairs. They evidently felt the same way about the way the house was run and had some camaraderie going on.
(How the hell this was all they can have heard is the million dollar question.)

I don't think Bridget ever worked for Lizzie again, but there was no lasting animosity between them. After the trial, Lizzie felt warmly enough to pay Bridget's fare, there and back, to see her family in Ireland.

I think women could only own land if a male relative signed the deed over to them (or if they inherited it). That's what Lizzie (and her older sister Emma) fell out with the stepmother over.

Their father gave their stepmother another property, for the stepmother's half-sister to live in, five years before the murders. The sisters were both angered by this, feeling they deserved the same. After this, they ceased calling Abby Borden 'mother' and referred to her as 'Mrs Borden'. Immediately after the murders, Lizzie corrected a police officer on the scene, telling him, 'She wasn't my mother. She was my stepmother. My mother died when I was a little girl.'

Really? You guys can't think of a better motive than money?

I bet $5 Lizzie and Bridget were lovers. I bet it really pissed off Lizzie's parents and they first tried to kill them with food poisoning. When that didn't work - they resorted to a more violent murder.

I think they were also influenced by money, but I think they were just young girls in love facing an oppressive family.

omg are you serious??? it's plausible but I've never heard of such a theory, did you just made it up?

Yeah, I did make it up... but it makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

And for someone who has to write a fictional story about a historical figure, I think you've got a pretty good plot here

yes, it makes perfect sense. Wouldn't it be cool if it were a movie?? Like you have all this drama, really dark and disturbing. Very manipulative parents, etc and at the end you reveal they were lovers. It would be like Body of Evidence meets Monster or something like that. My mind just never stops.

That's a really interesting motive! I likey.


I love and hate mysteries like these. Aren't you just dying to go back in time and find out what really happened?
OMFG, that sounded sad -_-

Tscha! I was gonna call you up on that...

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No way do I believe money was the motive! It was a crime of ... err, passion (how's that for original?). Somebody in a rage.

I don't think there's much to suggest that Bridget the maid was same-sex swinging. I'm not 100 percent sure on this, but I think she had a boyfriend and later got married and had kids.

Lizzie on the other hand probably was gay. It wasn't that she was 32 and unmarried when the murders took place. Years and years after the murders, she re-shocked America by holding some massive party in her home for a bunch of friends described as "theatre people" and "bohemians". At least one of her "close friends" was an actress who was an "overt" lesbian. Whatever Lizzie's big sister Emma saw go on at this party, it was bad enough for her to blab to the press about the "goings on" being too much for her, and the sisters never saw or spoke ever again.

It'd be nice and Heavenly Creaturish if Lizzie and the maid were in love. But they could truly have just been good friends. Both knew that the other would be hanged if accused and found guilty, after all.

but what caused the rage?? were her parents abusive?? I just keep picturing Lizzie as this overprotected brat, with very dominant and suffocating parents, I don't know if that's the case.

No to me that doesn't sound sad at all! Up until the last week or two, I've never been THAT interested in going back in time over this but I can think of a lot of other mysteries I'd love to be able to swap places with a fly on the wall and solve.
Oops. Edit.

Summary from American Heritage July/August 92 Vol 43
Carlisle M. and Lee Savage.
Attempts to explain the extreme violence in the Boredon killings by suggesting
incest and recovered memory as motives.

I tried to summarize this article here but the messageboard logged me out..
Lots of good sociology in this article, and some psychology (the recovered memory stuff, which is NOT crucial) which was widely excepted 15 years ago
but in some disrepute today.
Sorry, but I'm too lazy to help more.

OK, when I looked this article up on the EBSCO data base I thought it listed
Carlisle and Lee-but now I have the issue in front of me and it only lists Carlisle.

It Also recommends

The Fall River Tragedy: A Hisory of The Borden Murders by
Edwin Porter 1893

The Trial of Lizzie Borden by Edmund Pearson 1937; caution this was edited to demonstraight Lizzie's guilt.

Lizzie Borden :The untold Story by Edward D. Radin reveal's Pearson's bias and builds a case against Bridget Sullivan.

Legal critiques: "The Bordon Case" American Law Review 27 NOv-Dec 1893 (John Wigmore).
and Robert Sullivan's Goodbye Lizzie Borden 1974

Also A Private Disgrace :Lizzie Borden by Daylight suggests Lizzie killed her parents in an epileptic seizure.

Lostinplace - thank you. Yeah "repressed memory" is definitely "not crucial" these days! But thanks for the effort.

I was trying to come up with an answer to HighClassHo's question about what could have caused the rage that morning, and one possible answer could have been the unexpected arrival of Lizzie's uncle, John Morse, on August 3rd, the day before the murders. The uncle wasn't a close relative, and the visit was unexpected.
He stayed overnight, but left around 8:30am in the morning. He had a firm alibi and couldn't have committed the murders.

But in Lizzie's testimony during the inquest, she states over and over again that she never felt any need or desire to even so much as pop her head through the door and say a polite hello to her 'Uncle John'. Lizzie refused to even enter the same room as John Morse. They never saw or spoke to one another until after the murders. This appeared to puzzle the DA a little, but he didn't pursue the matter.

Maybe the uncle's visit triggered not a repressed memory but just a very bad memory?
Lizzie had attempted to purchase deadly poison without a prescription from a chemist that day (not sure if this was before or after John's arrival), and early that evening, she left the home and paid a visit to Alice Russell, a neighbor.

Alice Russell became a star prosecution witness, thanks to the strange conversation that followed.
It's too long to quote in its entirety, but here's a little, from the prosecutor to Alice Russell (I got this off the 'Famous trials' website) -

Alice Russell, quoting Lizzie Borden, night before the murders:

"I feel depressed. I feel as if something was hanging over me that I cannot throw off, and it comes over me at times, no matter where I am. When I was at the table the other day, when I was at Marion, the girls were laughing and talking and having a good time, and this feeling came over me, and one of them spoke and said, 'Lizzie, why don't you talk?' "

Q. [By Mr. Moody] Well, then, go on and state how the conversation went on, taking your own method.

A. She says, "I don't know; Father has so much trouble." ...

"I feel as if I wanted to sleep with my eyes half open—with one eye open half the time—-for fear they will burn the house down over us."

"I feel afraid sometimes that Father has got an enemy far," she said, "he has so much trouble with his men that come to see him." She told me of a man that came to see him, and she heard him say-she didn't see him, but heard her father say, "I don't care to let my property for such business." And she said the man answered sneeringly, "I shouldn't think you would care what you let your property for."

Alice Russell describes at length how Lizzie rambled on and on about the bread being poisoned, the milk maybe being poisoned ... Everyone in the house except Bridget had been ill.

"I am afraid somebody will do something; I don't know but what somebody will do something."

Lizzie left Russell's house in this ominous mood, and went back home around 9PM, and went straight to bed without a word to anybody.
Maybe the uncle raped or molested her as a child, and her stepmother and father knew - or Lizzie thought they knew - and this, coupled with the extreme weather conditions, a heavy period and God knows what else, was Lizzie's 'trigger'?
Just an idea. There are plenty of others that are just as good (including ideas like Andrew Borden having used a hatchet to behead Lizzie's beloved pet pigeons, up in the family loft, about a month before being killed with a hatchet himself.)

I was thinking the same thing. I just can't believe, assuming she did it, how can anyone kill their parents. Some parents are just very dominant. In my country there was this girl, who killed her mother, who was bi polar with an ice pick. She was acquited on the grounds of being depressed or whatever. I think that in part it was because she was a woman, I think somehow that generated some sort of sympathy. The thing is that she is working at a call center now, and I just can't imagine. I mean killing your own mother and then having like a normal life.

I think the key to finding the motive for the Borden murders, again, assuming that she did it, is to find out what kind of family they were. Some families are so dark, and cases like these are the outcome of such toxic relationships. For some reason the whole Borden thing scares the hell out of me in a very sickly, existentialist(sp?) way, I don't know if that make sense.

i was in the play of lizzie borden called blood relations i played her sister emma, in the play mrs borden is desperately trying to get mr borden to sign his land over to herself and her brother. mr borden is a good deal older than his new wife and signing over the land means his daughters stand to inherit much less, while emma just goes along with it lizzie does not and continually fights with her father and stepmother over the matter.they also want to marry her off to a neighbour when she is in fact a lesbin. the speech used to defend lizzie in the play is the same speech used to defend her in court i believe. it basically says that it was too horrific a crime for a woman to commit. but yeah thats just the play, don't know how much is true oh and in the play it's pretty much spelt out that lizzie did it and bridget helps cover it up

yup theres a scene in the play where he hacks up her pet pigeons with a hatchet

Nothing to contribute, but I'd like to watch this thread.

Murder mysteries excite me.

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If you are Canadian, there is a 30% chance you are already in Broken Social Scene

i have read afew short things about the murders in books and i have seen the murder scene photos. its all bit a disturbing, i don't buy the stranger attacking them either.
i think more than likely it was lizzie, id say nowadays with all the forensic evidence she would be convicted

You might like "The Fall River Axe Murders" about this case, by Angela Carters - it's one of the creepiest, darkest short stories I've ever read!
And yes, there's no doubt women can commit murders this gruesome. In France, there was a famous case in 1933 involving two French maids who were sisters, Christine and Leah Papin. I don't think I've ever read of murders as vicious and sadistic. The sisters killed the mother and daughter they worked for by gouging their eyes out while both were still fully conscious. They proceeded to pull out their teeth, disembowel them, cut them up until both victims were completely unrecognizable. One of the sisters got off on the grounds of insanity and was committed to a mental asylum, where she died a few years later. The other only served something like ten years in jail. The motive? And argument over a broken iron. (There's a great movie about this case called "Sister, My Sister".)

But back to Lizzie. At first I thought the best thing going in favour of her innocence was that nobody noticed any blood on her, at any time. During the whole investigation, the police and prosecutors, who were all men, kept trying to figure out what dress she had on that morning. Most witnesses said it was blue, but they couldn't all agree.
In "The Fall River Axe Murders", Angela Carter points out that Lizzie Borden had on a lot more than a dress that morni