Netflix’s Monster doesn’t show her final year, so here’s how Lizzie Borden actually died

Lizzie Borden spent her final years living quietly at her Fall River home, Maplecroft, after being acquitted of murdering her father and stepmother, so how did she die?

Lizzie Borden had been cleared in court in 1893, but the suspicion around the case never really went away. Then, in the final years of her life, her health began to decline. Lizzie died on June 1, 1927, aged 66.

But what actually happened during her final year?

Lizzie’s health had already been declining before her death. In 1926, she underwent an operation to remove her gallbladder at Truesdale Hospital in Fall River. According to The Herald News, she entered the hospital under the name “Mary Smith Borden” and was given a private room. It was later confirmed that the woman using that name was actually Lizzie.

Reports at the time also suggest that Lizzie had been operated on about three weeks earlier and was “well on the way of convalescence”. It was later reproduced in research on her final years. 

However, Lizzie never fully returned to good health. The New York Times reported after her death that she had remained in poor health following the operation.

The exact details of her final illness are a little less clear. The Fall River Daily Globe reported on June 2, 1927, that Lizzie had been ill with pneumonia for about a week, although she had been in failing health for some time. New Bedford Evening Standard reported that she had died from heart disease. Her death record lists myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle, as the cause of death.

Lizzie spent her final days at Maplecroft, the large Fall River house she had shared with her sister Emma before the two became estranged.

She died there on June 1, 1927.

Did she finally confess to killing her parents on her deathbed?

No. There was no recorded deathbed confession. Edmund Pearson, who later wrote about the case, discussed the lack of a confession and the fact that Lizzie died without publicly revealing who killed Andrew and Abby Borden.

Lizzie’s death was followed by her sister Emma’s death just nine days later. Emma died in Newmarket, New Hampshire, on June 10, 1927, aged 76. The two sisters had been estranged for more than 20 years after Emma left Maplecroft in 1905.

Lizzie was buried at Oak Grove Cemetery in Fall River, alongside her father, stepmother and other members of the Borden family.

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