Most folklore grows over a thing nobody witnessed. The Lizzie Borden rhyme is the inverse pattern: it grew over a verdict. The rhyme says forty whacks and forty-one. The court said not guilty. The rhyme won anyway — and that inversion is why this one goes on the reel list.
| Rhyme line | The record | |
|---|---|---|
| "took an axe" | The weapon was a hatchet, not an axe. [S] | |
| "gave her mother forty whacks" | Abby Borden was struck up to 19 times. She was Lizzie's stepmother, not mother. [S] | |
| "gave her father forty-one" | Andrew Borden was struck 11 times. [S] | |
| (nothing) | The jury returned not guilty. The rhyme has no verse for that. [D] |
August 4, 1892: Andrew and Abby Borden are killed in their Fall River, Massachusetts home, between about 9:30 and 11:15 in the morning. August 11: Lizzie is arrested. [D]
June 5, 1893: the trial opens in the New Bedford courthouse before a panel of three judges, Justice Justin Dewey charging the jury. The defense is high-powered for its day — Andrew Jennings and George D. Robinson, a former governor of Massachusetts. The prosecution: Hosea Knowlton and William H. Moody. [D]
Dewey hands the state two blows before the case reaches the jury: he excludes Lizzie's conflicting statements to police, taken without an attorney present, and blocks the drugstore clerk's testimony about an attempted poison purchase. [D]
June 20, 1893: the all-male jury deliberates and returns not guilty. One Ohio paper put her tears on the front page. The New York Times called the verdict's promptness "very significant." [D]
The deliberation time varies by telling: "little more than an hour" in one legal encyclopedia, "about 90 minutes" in two popular histories, "an hour and a half" in the trial archive. Safe ground: under two hours. The rhyme's first print appearance wobbles too — a local Fall River historian dates it to 1893–94 with no known author; one traceable early printing is the February 3, 1894 Savannah Morning News, on a single secondary tell. [S, thin]
What never wobbles: nobody else was ever charged, and the case was never solved. The rhyme was fixed in public memory before the jury sat down, and it never revised itself when the verdict came in. A darker print variant of the day went further — "On the gallows she will swing" — for a woman the court declined to hang.
The Fall River Historical Society holds the primary letters and transcripts; I have not read them yet. That pull is open, and the reel script waits on it. Embellishment stays marked when the script lands — and the script goes to my Master's door before any post, as always.