I slept in the room where Lizzie Borden’s stepmom was killed. Here’s what I found.

You can’t get much closer to a murder case than actually sleeping at the crime scene in the very bedroom where the crime occurred. That’s exactly what “48 Hours” did in the summer of 2019. 

A brave team of “48 Hours” producers and I decided to take a trip to Fall River, Massachusetts, to spend the night in the house where, on August 4, 1892, 70-year-old Andrew Borden and his wife, 64-year-old Abby Borden, were found hacked to death. 

The prime suspect in the murders: Andrew’s 32-year-old daughter, Lizzie Borden. 

It’s easy to understand why Lizzie became the main suspect. She was at home at the time of the murders, which took place in the middle of the day. Lizzie also had a strained relationship with Abby, her dad’s second wife and her stepmother.   

The deaths were so violent that investigators believed the killer was someone who knew and hated the couple. What’s more, the murder weapon was believed to be a small hatchet found in the basement. And yet, despite overwhelming evidence that pointed to Lizzie as the killer, a year later, following a high-profile two-week trial, an all-male jury, deliberating for a little more than an hour, decided to acquit her.

We went back to the scene to try to determine what happened.

We certainly aren’t the first people to try to solve the case that remains such a tantalizing mystery to this day. Lizzie Borden has inspired countless books, films and even a nursery rhyme: “Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother 40 whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41.” This week, “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story,” a part of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s true-crime anthology series, premieres on Netflix.

We now know that the murder weapon wasn’t an ax and Abby was actually stabbed fewer than a dozen times, but that doesn’t diminish the brutality of these murders that still resonate more than a century later.

The green-frame house on Second Street, more than 180 years old, has been restored and is now known as the Lizzie Borden House and Museum. It operates as a Bed and Breakfast and is advertised to a very select clientele since the house is filled with macabre black and white photos, including actual crime scene photos of Abby’s Borden’s body on the floor of an upstairs bedroom.  

It’s in that bedroom where I decided to spend the night. After all, if the house is haunted as its current owners suggest, maybe Abby would appear and give me the interview of an “after-lifetime.”

Why revisit a crime scene nearly 135 years later? One question I had, after reading what Lizzie told investigators, was why Lizzie, who said she had been on the first floor,  didn’t hear anything when her stepmother Abby was attacked upstairs. And walking through the house today made that statement seem even less likely. The walls and floors of the house are thin and the dining room, where Lizzie says she was, is located directly below Abby’s bedroom. It seems difficult to believe that Abby didn’t cry out when she was attacked.

And when you see how small the house actually is, you wonder how anyone could have killed Andrew and Abby without leaving a blood trail or blood spatter. If Lizzie used a hatchet to kill her parents, how did she manage to do it without a drip of blood left on her dress? There was testimony that she may have destroyed a dress, but the murders were reported quickly. How could she have changed clothes and cleaned up?

I was wrestling with those questions when it was time to go to bed. After my colleagues had gone to sleep in various rooms in the house, I settled into the second floor front bedroom, Abby’s room. Right beside the bed was the area where her bloodied body had been found. I went to bed in running gear, in the event I wanted to make a quick exit, but I am sorry to report that I slept undisturbed the entire night.

Forensic science was very rudimentary back then. Today, investigators would have sealed the scene immediately and would have been able to recover even the tiniest traces of blood, if any existed, on Lizzie Borden’s clothing. And it’s likely that today, modern jurors would have looked at the case and the defendant very differently. In 1893, 12 men found it difficult to believe an affluent, educated single woman was capable of such heinous acts. They let her walk free.