7. Lizzie Borden: “Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother forty whacks…” Lizzie Borden, daughter of a wealthy but frugal New England merchant, was charged with killing both her father and stepmother with an ax. Found innocent at trial, speculation was Bordon was tired of her father’s stingy ways. Borden’s testimony both before and during the trial was confused and disjointed, possibly due to the use of morphine she took for “female ailments.” The case was never solved and Bordon lived out her life as a social pariah in the same town where her family died.
