Did Lizzie Borden Really Give Her Parents 40 and 41 Whacks? The Rhyme vs. the Evidence

“Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks; when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one.” It’s the single most famous thing most people know about the Borden case — and nearly every part of it is wrong.

The real wound counts

According to the actual 1892 autopsy record, Abby Borden was struck approximately 18 times, and Andrew Borden approximately 10 times. That’s a fraction of the rhyme’s “forty” and “forty-one.” Netflix’s own material for Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story cites these same corrected figures, describing the real totals as 19 for Abby and 11 for Andrew — figures close enough to the primary autopsy record that the discrepancy likely comes down to how different accounts count overlapping or glancing wounds. Either way, the rhyme roughly doubles or triples the true numbers.

“Mother” is also wrong

Abby Borden was Lizzie’s stepmother — Andrew’s second wife. Lizzie’s birth mother had died decades before the murders. The rhyme’s use of “mother” isn’t just imprecise shorthand; it erases a genuinely relevant detail, since the tension between Lizzie and her stepmother is a real, documented part of the household dynamic historians point to when discussing the case.

Where the rhyme actually came from

No one knows who wrote it — historians generally attribute it to an unidentified newspaperman capitalizing on the sensational case. But the rhyme didn’t start at “40” and “41.” The earliest known printed versions, which appeared as newspaper filler in early 1894 — roughly eight months after Lizzie’s June 1893 acquittal — actually read “twenty whacks, and twenty-one.” The now-famous “forty/forty-one” version was popularized decades later, in 1924, by true-crime writer Edmund Pearson in his book Studies in Murder. That’s the version that stuck in pop culture. It’s traditionally sung to the tune of “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay.”

Why the rhyme endures anyway

Factually inaccurate or not, the rhyme became the dominant cultural shorthand for the entire case — appearing in countless books, films and references since, including as the backdrop for how most people first encounter the Borden case at all. Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is only the latest retelling to grapple with separating the folklore from the documented record. For the full chronology of what actually happened that day, see our murders explainer, or go back to our complete true-story-vs-Netflix comparison.