Inside the Borden Murder House: A Journalist's Night in History's Most Infamous Room

The bedroom on the second floor of the Borden house in Fall River, Massachusetts, is small and spare. Afternoon light filters through the windows. On August 4, 1892, Abby Durfee Gray Borden, Lizzie's stepmother, was struck repeatedly with an axe as she lay on the bed in this room. Her husband Andrew Borden, Lizzie's father, was killed the same morning downstairs on the sofa. Lizzie Borden was tried for both murders, acquitted, and spent the rest of her life in the same town where the crime occurred, her name forever attached to the case. Now, more than a century later, a journalist spent a night in that bedroom—the room where one of America's most famous unsolved murders took place—to understand what the house itself might reveal about the woman history has cast as a spinster driven to violence by thwarted ambition and family resentment.

The timing of this firsthand investigation coincides with Netflix's release of "Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story," a new documentary series that has reignited public fascination with the case. The streaming platform's entry into the Borden narrative arrives alongside a broader reassessment of how history has understood Lizzie herself. For generations, the dominant portrait has been one of a bitter, unmarried woman trapped in a suffocating household, her rage finally boiling over into bloodshed. But recent scholarship and fresh examination of historical records suggest a more complicated figure—one whose relationships, ambitions, and inner life have been flattened by decades of sensationalism and cultural assumptions about what an unmarried woman in the 1890s must have felt.

The house itself is now a museum, preserved as a window into the Gilded Age and the crime that shattered the Borden family's reputation. Walking through its rooms, a visitor encounters the material reality of the household: the furniture, the layout, the distances between spaces. The bedroom where Abby Borden died is modest. The sofa where Andrew Borden was found is positioned in a parlor that opens onto the street. These physical facts matter because they ground the case in something other than speculation. The house does not answer the question of who wielded the axe, but it does provide context—the cramped quarters, the tensions that proximity breeds, the way sound travels or does not travel between rooms.

Lizzie Borden was twenty-two years old when her mother died. She was thirty-four when her father and stepmother were murdered. In the intervening years, she lived in the house with her older sister Emma, their father, and the woman he married after Lizzie's mother's death. The household was not poor, but it was marked by conflict. Andrew Borden was a wealthy man—a banker, a landlord, a moneylender—but he was also known as stingy, reluctant to spend on his daughters' comfort or social standing. Lizzie and Emma chafed under his control. They wanted independence, travel, a larger house in a better neighborhood. Their stepmother, Abby, was not beloved. The two daughters resented her presence and her claim on their father's estate.

On the morning of the murders, Lizzie told police that she had been in the backyard when her father was killed. She said she heard nothing, saw nothing. She discovered his body when she came back inside. Her account of her movements in the hours before her stepmother's death was less clear. The evidence against her was circumstantial but suggestive: she had recently tried to buy prussic acid, a poison, from a local druggist; she had spoken of her father and stepmother in harsh terms; she stood to inherit a substantial sum if both died. But there was no physical evidence linking her to the murders. No blood was found on her clothing. No witness placed an axe in her hands. The jury acquitted her, and she remained free.

What the Netflix series and the journalist's night in the house both attempt to do is move beyond the binary of guilty or innocent and ask instead: who was Lizzie Borden, really? The documentary reportedly explores her relationships, including a long-term connection with an actress that some historians have interpreted as romantic. It examines the constraints placed on women of her era and class, the ways in which unmarried women were pitied and controlled, the limited paths available to them. It suggests that the conventional narrative—the sad spinster, the resentful daughter, the killer—may have been a story imposed on Lizzie rather than a truth discovered about her.

The house, for its part, offers no easy answers. It is a place where a crime occurred, where two people died violently, where a family fractured under the weight of suspicion and loss. It is also a place where a woman lived, worked, moved through rooms, made choices within the constraints of her time. Sleeping in the bedroom where Abby Borden was murdered is an act of historical imagination, an attempt to inhabit a moment and a space and to feel, however distantly, what it might have meant to be present in that house on that day. It does not solve the case. It does not prove innocence or guilt. But it does anchor the story in something concrete—the physical reality of the place where history happened, and the lives that unfolded within its walls.