Austin American-Statesman (Austin, Texas)
Tuesday, Aug. 4, 1992
And why, a century later, does anyone care?
Hundreds of scholars, from historians and amateur sleuths to psychiatrists and playwrights, convened Monday to debate the murders that made this old mill city famous.
"It's an opportunity to talk about a case that is really a window on a period and a place in time," said Jules Ryckebusch, a Bristol Community College English professor and chairman of the school's three-day conference on the killings, which took place 100 years ago today. Lizzie Borden's stepmother, Abby Borden, and father, Andrew, were found hacked to death in the family's Fall River home Aug. 4, 1892.
According to the verse popularized since then:
Lizzie Borden took an ax,
And gave her mother 40 whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father 41.
Despite damning circumstantial evidence, Borden was acquitted a year later. Ryckebusch said having a female villain kept the story alive: "If it was a Lester Borden, we wouldn't be having this conference."
"It was the contrast between her image and the visciousness of the crime," keynote speaker Joyce Williams, a professor of history at Indiana University, said. Many believe Borden was guilty. Williams and Ryckerbusch cite possible motives ranging from dissatisfaction with her father's frugal ways to the possibility that she was a victim of incest. Some have suggested, half-jokingly, that the cold mutton soup her stepmother served for lunch all that week drove Borden over the edge.
Others think she was framed.
Conference organizers said that for many years residents were uncomfortable talking about the blot on the community's reputation. No signs direct visitors to the house where the murders occurred or the mansion Borden bought with her inheritance.
"It's hard to acknowledge that the most famous citizen of your city is an ax murderer," Ryckebusch said. But the City Council welcomed the conference with a proclamation and the Bristol County Convention and Visitors Center sponsored trolley tours to key sites in the story.
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