Did Lizzie Do It? A Primary Source Murder Mystery for Honors English

Every kid in America knows the rhyme.

Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks.

Here’s the fun part: almost none of it is true. It was a hatchet, not an axe. Abby Borden was her stepmother. And the number of blows was nowhere near forty.

That rhyme is the perfect way to open a unit on evidence, because it’s a story everyone believes and nobody checked.

I built a short unit around the Lizzie Borden case for my honors students, using real primary sources from 1892 and 1893. They read the documents, built their own case, decided whether she did it, and then argued it out in a Socratic seminar. My students loved it. They argued from bell to bell. They loved forming an opinion and fighting for it, and they loved arguing about who else could have done it. The one thing they hated? That it’s unsolved.

Why this works

Honors kids love a mystery, and they love being trusted with real material. This lesson does both. It’s argument writing in disguise: they have to make a claim, back it with evidence, weigh sources against each other, and deal with a counterclaim, but it feels like playing detective.

It also teaches the hardest skill in English class: the difference between what a source says and whether you should believe it.

The case in sixty seconds

On the morning of August 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts, Andrew Borden and his wife Abby were killed with a hatchet inside their home. The only people known to be on the property were Andrew’s 32-year-old daughter Lizzie and the family’s maid, Bridget Sullivan.

Abby was killed first, upstairs. Andrew was killed in the sitting room roughly an hour and a half later. Lizzie said she was out in the barn when her father died.

The details that make students sit up:

The day before the murders, a druggist said Lizzie tried to buy poison. He refused to sell it to her.
Three days after, her sister Emma watched her burn a dress in the kitchen stove. Lizzie said it had paint on it.
At the inquest, Lizzie testified without a lawyer and contradicted herself.
A hatchet head turned up in the basement, with its handle broken off.

She was arrested, tried in June 1893, and found not guilty.

The sources

Everything I used came from Famous Trials, a free collection run by a law professor. These are the documents I’d start with:

Lizzie’s inquest testimony, the star of the show. Students catch her changing her story almost immediately.
Excerpts from the trial: witnesses, police, and doctors in their own words.
The autopsies, especially for the timeline.
Maps and diagrams of the house. The floor plan matters more than you’d think.
The indictment, for a look at the formal charge.
The chronology, as a teacher reference.

Then add the two things my students liked reading most:

Newspaper accounts from the time. The papers had very strong opinions, and that’s a lesson all by itself.
Poetry about the case, starting with the rhyme. Putting a poem next to a court transcript is a great way to talk about how the same event changes depending on who’s telling it and why.

The lesson, step by step

Day 1: The hook. Open with the rhyme. Ask students what they think they know. Then fact-check the rhyme together, line by line. Give them the sixty-second case summary and assign each student to a “jury.”

Day 2: The evidence. Set up stations, one per source type: testimony, autopsies, maps, newspapers, poetry. Students keep an evidence log with four columns:

What does the source say?
Who said it, and when?
Should we believe it? Why or why not?
Does it point toward guilty, not guilty, or neither?

That third column is where the real thinking happens.

Day 3: The verdict. Each student writes a verdict with their three strongest pieces of evidence and one piece of evidence that works against them. Making them address the counterevidence keeps them honest. They bring this to the seminar.

If a student thinks Lizzie is innocent, push them one step further: then who did it? Bridget, Uncle John, and a mystery stranger all have their defenders. Building a case for another suspect is the same skill, and students love it.

Day 4: The Socratic seminar. Inner circle, outer circle. One rule above all: every claim has to point to a document. “I just think she did it” doesn’t count. “On page three of her inquest testimony, she says…” counts.

At the very end, reveal the verdict. Then watch them react.

Socratic seminar questions

These are written for honors-level thinkers. You won’t get through all of them, and you shouldn’t try. Pick a few from each round and let the conversation run.

Opening: warm them up

Before you read a single document, what did you believe about Lizzie Borden? Where did that belief come from?
Which single piece of evidence affected your verdict the most? Why that one?
What’s the difference between “she probably did it” and “she’s guilty beyond a reasonable doubt”? Which one did you decide?

Core: the evidence

Lizzie contradicted herself at the inquest. Is that proof she was lying? What else could explain an innocent person changing her story?
Lizzie testified at the inquest without a lawyer, and her trial jury never heard that testimony. Was keeping it out fair? Would your verdict change if you couldn’t use it?
Is burning a dress three days after a murder suspicious, or just suspicious-looking? How do we tell the difference?
The case against Lizzie is almost entirely circumstantial. No witness saw the murders. How much circumstantial evidence adds up to proof?
Which source in your packet do you trust the least, and why? Which do you trust the most?
If not Lizzie, then who? Make the case for another suspect using only the documents. Is your case stronger or weaker than the case against her?

Deeper: the context

An all-male jury in 1893 had to decide whether a respectable, churchgoing woman could commit this crime. How might their ideas about women have shaped the verdict?
How did the newspapers cover Lizzie? Did their coverage report the case or shape it?
Most historians today believe she did it. She was still found not guilty. Is “not guilty” the same as “innocent”?

Closing: the big picture

The rhyme is wrong about almost everything, and it’s still the version most people remember. Why do the wrong versions of stories stick? Compare it to another poem about the case: which one tells a truer story, and does a poem even owe us accuracy?
The case was never solved, and it never will be. Does that bother you? Why do we need stories to have endings?
We’re still fascinated by this case more than 130 years later. What does our obsession with true crime say about us? Is there anything uncomfortable about turning real deaths into entertainment?
Did this seminar change your mind about anything? What did someone else say that you can’t stop thinking about?

Wrap it up

After the seminar, have students write a short reflection: Did your verdict change? What evidence or argument moved you, or what kept you where you were?

That reflection is the real assessment. You’re not grading whether they solved a 130-year-old murder. You’re grading whether they can weigh evidence, change their minds for good reasons, and defend their thinking when they don’t.

The goal isn’t to solve the case. It’s to learn how to think like someone who could.

And if a student walks out still insisting it was the maid? Excellent. Make them prove it.