Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions and/or images of violent, disturbing, or otherwise potentially distressing events.
Famous Murders: The Lizzie Borden Killings
Wikimedia CommonsLizzie Borden and the remains of her father, Andrew Borden.
The deaths of Andrew and Abby Borden are arguably two of the most famous murders in all of American history.
August 4, 1892, started off like any other day for the Borden family. Andrew started the morning by going into town to deal with some business, leaving his daughter Lizzie, a 32-year-old Sunday school teacher, at home with his wife, Abby, and the family’s maid, Bridget Sullivan.
When Andrew returned later that day, his wife was nowhere to be found. Lizzie told him that Abby had received a note and gone to visit a friend.
Abby, though, hadn’t gone anywhere. At that very moment, she was just upstairs, lying dead in a pool of her own blood.
Lizzie helped her father relax on the couch and take a nap. She tried to convince Bridget to leave the house, telling her about a department store sale down the road, but Bridget turned her down. She wasn’t feeling well, she told Lizzie. Instead, she went to her bedroom, laid down, and fell asleep.
Sullivan’s rest was cut short with a fit of screams and shouts. Lizzie was screaming that her father had been murdered. When Sullivan rushed out, she found Andrew dead on the couch, covered in blood. His face was so badly disfigured that he was nearly unrecognizable.
Wikimedia CommonsLizzie Borden landed on the cover of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly on June 29, 1893.
In the panic, Lizzie remembers that her stepmother, Abby, should have returned home by now. She asked Sullivan to check for her upstairs. The search, though, was short. Sullivan only made it halfway up the stairs before she found her, hacked to death with a hatchet.
Abby had received 19 blows from a hatchet and her husband had been hit 11 times. In the beginning, Lizzie was not a suspect, but after a friend caught her burning one of her dresses because it was stained, she was arrested and put on trial for the murders.
Ultimately, the court cleared Lizzie of the charges. There wasn’t enough concrete evidence against her, the defense provided witnesses that gave Borden an alibi, and they just couldn’t believe that the female Sunday school teacher could ever be capable of such crimes.
Countless theories have been proposed about what might have happened. Some put the blame on Lizzie Borden, others on Sullivan, and still others say that the girls committed the killings together. But more than 100 years later, the mystery remains unsolved.
JonBenét Ramsey
YouTubeJonBenét Ramsey, the six-year-old beauty pageant queen whose murder captivated a nation.
The tragic unsolved murder of six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey has kept the country’s attention for more than two decades.
At the time of her death, JonBenét was a well-known beauty queen who lived with her parents, Patricia and John Ramsey, and her nine-year-old brother, Burke, in Boulder, Colorado.
On the morning after Christmas, 1996, the Ramsey family’s lives were flipped upside down. Patsy Ramsey called the police in a panic, saying she had found a ransom note for their daughter. The three-page note demanded that the affluent Ramsey family pay $118,000 for the safe return of JonBenét.
Karl Gehring via Getty ImagesThe site where six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey was killed in Boulder, Colorado, 1996.
But JonBenét hadn’t really been kidnapped.
Just hours later, her dead body turned up inside the family’s own home. After examination of the body, it was discovered that JonBenét had been sexually assaulted and sustained a fracture to her skull. The six-year-old had also been strangled by an apparatus made from one of her mother’s paintbrushes.
JonBenét’s death was ruled a homicide, but mistakes made by police at the crime scene would make it nearly impossible for the killer to be found. The Ramsey family was suspected because of conflicting stories and the fact that the ransom note was written on paper from the house, but ultimately John and Patsy were never indicted for the crime (while Burke has also been suspected by some).
Many others suspects were questioned and investigated by police, including one man who confessed named John Mark Karr, but none led to any answers. To this day, the tragic death of JonBenét Ramsey remains unsolved.
