The Skulls on the Evidence Table. June, eighteen ninety-three. A New Bedford courtroom, sweltering. The prosecutor reaches into a cloth and lifts out two human skulls—the actual skulls of Andrew and Abby Borden—and turns them so the jury can see where the blade went in. Wait, they brought the victims' skulls into the courtroom? With the accused sitting right there? Lizzie Borden was in the room. And the moment those bones came out, she reportedly fainted. Okay, I'm hooked. Where are we? I'm Ada. This is Historai, and this is Theo—and today we're in Fall River, Massachusetts, for the murder case that everyone thinks they know from a nursery rhyme, and almost no one gets right. The forty whacks. Lizzie Borden took an axe— Which is wrong on nearly every count. Abby took nineteen blows, not forty. Andrew took ten or eleven, not forty-one. And ninety minutes after that jury retired, they came back and said not guilty. So to understand why twelve men acquitted her, we have to go back to the house—and the family already divided inside it. A Fortune Measured in Pennies. So picture the head of this household. Andrew Borden was one of the richest men in Fall River—a banker, a landlord, a director of mills—and he lived like a man terrified of spending a nickel. How rich are we talking? Comfortably into the hundreds of thousands, which in eighteen ninety-two was a small fortune. And yet the house at ninety-two Second Street had no indoor plumbing. No bath. Chamber pots emptied by hand. That's not frugal, that's almost a statement. His daughters must have hated it. They did. Lizzie and Emma were grown women—thirty-two and forty-one—living in a cramped, gaslit house while their father sat on money he wouldn't touch. And there was Abby. The stepmother. Andrew's second wife, sixty-four. When Andrew started transferring property to Abby's side of the family, the sisters saw their inheritance leaking away. They stopped taking meals with the couple. The house had two staircases, and the family split along them. A house divided by a back stairway. And then Thursday morning, that quiet resentment found something sharper to work with. The Morning the House Went Quiet. Thursday, August fourth. Hot morning. Andrew left early to make his rounds downtown. In the house were Abby, Lizzie, and Bridget Sullivan, the Irish maid, whom the family for some reason called Maggie. And what was everyone doing? Bridget was outside washing windows—that matters later. Abby went upstairs to the guest room to make the bed. And sometime that morning, in that room, someone struck her nineteen times with a hatchet. Nineteen. Not forty. The rhyme says forty. The rhyme is wrong about everything. Abby took nineteen blows and fell face-down between the bed and the wall. And here's the chilling part—she'd been dead for well over an hour before Andrew even came home. So the killer was in the house that whole time. With Lizzie and Bridget. Andrew returned late morning, lay down on the sitting-room sofa to rest, and there he took ten or eleven blows to the head. Shortly after eleven, Lizzie called out to Bridget that her father was dead. Before anyone could ask who came in, the police had to answer a stranger question—had anyone come in at all. The Clean-Bladed Hatchet. Dr. Seabury Bowen was summoned, saw Andrew's ruined face, and only then did they think to look for Abby. She was found upstairs, already stiffening. Now the police arrive—and immediately hit a wall. What kind of wall? No forced entry. No windows jimmied, no doors broken. The house was famously locked up tight—Andrew's habit. No fingerprints, though frankly the department barely used them yet. And crucially, no bloodstained clothing on anyone. For two hatchet murders, that's astonishing. Whoever did this should have been drenched. Exactly the problem. In the basement they found a hatchet head with no handle, the wood snapped off, coated in what looked like ash. They offered it as the probable weapon. Offered it—so they weren't sure. They never were. The blade looked too clean, and no one could match it conclusively to the wounds. The murder weapon was, and remains, unidentified. The physical case against anyone was thin to the point of vanishing. So if the evidence pointed nowhere, what turned suspicion toward Lizzie? Her own words—and what she did next. An Inquest Under Oath. So five days after the killings, Lizzie is brought before a judge for the inquest. August ninth through the eleventh. And here's the thing that would haunt the whole case — she testified without a lawyer beside her. Wait, no attorney? For the prime suspect in a double murder? None in the room. And the district attorney, Hosea Knowlton, pressed her hard. She'd reportedly been given morphine to calm her nerves, which may have muddied her answers. That would rattle anyone. So what did she actually say? She contradicted herself repeatedly. Where she was when Andrew came home, whether she was in the barn or the kitchen, how long she'd been upstairs. The story kept shifting. Which sounds damning. But the drugs, no lawyer — was that even fair? That was exactly the fight. The defense argued the whole thing was coerced and inadmissible. Meanwhile police found the burned blue dress, and the prussic acid inquiry surfaced too. So by winter the question was no longer whether Lizzie looked suspicious, but whether any of that suspicion could survive a courtroom. Ninety Minutes to Not Guilty. June nineteenth, eighteen ninety-three. New Bedford. The trial that had the whole country reading the morning papers. And this is where the prosecutors bring out the skulls we opened with. They did. A theatrical moment — and Lizzie reportedly fainted. But the three-judge panel dealt the prosecution a body blow: they ruled the inquest testimony inadmissible. So all those contradictions just… vanished from the case? Gone. The jury never heard them. The prussic acid evidence was excluded too. And Lizzie herself never took the stand — no cross-examination, nothing. That leaves the prosecution with what, exactly? A handleless hatchet with a suspiciously clean blade, no bloody clothing, no fingerprints, no forced entry. Motive, but no proof connecting her hand to the weapon. And a respectable churchgoing woman in the dock in front of twelve men. Exactly. On June twentieth, the jury retired. They were back in about ninety minutes. Not guilty on every count. Ninety minutes. The law closed the case. Fall River, though, did not. Buried Beside the Accused. After the acquittal, Lizzie and Emma inherited Andrew's fortune. They left Second Street and bought a fine house up on the hill, which Lizzie named Maplecroft. A free woman, cleared by law, with money. But not welcomed back? Never. Fall River shut its doors. The rhyme — forty whacks, though the real count was nineteen and eleven — had already done its work. In popular memory she was guilty forever. Even the sisters drifted apart, didn't they? Emma eventually moved out and they stopped speaking. Yet both died within days of each other in June nineteen twenty-seven — and were buried at Oak Grove Cemetery, right beside Andrew and Abby. The accused, laid to rest next to the victims. That's a strange kind of ending. It's the whole case in one image. Think back to those skulls on the evidence table, the inquest thrown out, ninety minutes to acquit. A weak investigation — no weapon proven, no clothing, no confession — left a hole that a nursery rhyme filled. So the verdict said not guilty, but the culture never changed its mind. What does that tell you? That we crave certainty a courtroom can't always give. When proof runs thin, people write their own ending — and a catchy verse outlasts the evidence every time. We still don't truly know who took that hatchet to Andrew and Abby Borden. If you want, that unsolved thread is one tap away — just ask us anytime, on any episode. This was Historai — where history answers back.