Inside the House That Suggests History Got Sad Spinster Lizzie Borden All Wrong

After she was acquitted for the murders of both of her parents, Lizzie Borden did not adopt a pseudonym and disappear into obscurity. Instead, she spent her ample inheritance (equivalent to about $10 million dollars today) exactly as she’d always wanted to before her parents’ untimely demise: On an imposing 4,000-square-foot, seven-bedroom Queen Anne Victorian mansion in the swankiest neighborhood of her hometown of Fall River, Mass. She named her new abode “Maplecroft.”Borden—the subject of the latest installment of Ryan Murphy’s Netflix Monster anthology, which has previously dramatized the stories of Jeffrey Dahmer, the Menendez brothers, and Ed Gein—lived out the rest of her life at Maplecroft and died there almost exactly 100 years ago. The home’s a mere mile from the so-called murder house where Andrew and Abby Borden were famously axed to death in August 1892, when Lizzie was 32 years old. Some 50,000 true-crime fanatics flock annually to the macabre site (now a museum and bed and breakfast), but few know to trek up “The Hill,” as Fall River locals call it, for a glimpse of Borden’s other home. Now, as then, it’s a private residence whose owners would prefer looky-loos walk ...