Tourists wait to be guided through the house on Second Street in Fall River where Lizzie Borden lived with her father and stepmother, and where the murders occurred.

The Providence Journal / Glenn Osmundson

FALL RIVER — There’s something about Lizzie that makes it tough, once you know her story, to get her out of your head.

The story has all the right melodramatic elements: an upper-crust family, unspeakable violence, and a young woman’s life jeopardized by a sensational trial.

But we crave closure. The fact that she was acquitted and no one else was tried for the murders leaves people wondering. Did she do it? Did she know who did? Should we pity her, or despise her? Will the truth ever be revealed?

The city of Fall River has wrestled with the same uncertainty. In her lifetime, she sparked perplexity from residents who weren’t sure whether to embrace her or scorn her. Since then she has become, by far, Fall River’s most famous resident. And this city, once an industrial powerhouse, has never really decided how to deal with the legend — or how to promote it.

The public’s fascination with the case waxes and wanes, said Michael Martins, curator of the Fall River Historical Society, which is so tied to the Borden case its Web site is lizzieborden.org. Nonetheless, “there are a tremendous number of people who are interested in the case. The fact that it’s a woman, at a time when women did not murder in such a fashion. The fact that it was a prominent family, which makes the story so fascinating to many people. The fact that it’s unsolved,” he said.

“I think what often is overlooked, unfortunately, is you’re talking about a brutal horrible crime,” said Martins. “Two people were bludgeoned to death in an unbelievably horrific manner. It’s been so sensationalized that it’s almost to the point of being vulgar.”

FOR THE UNINITIATED, Lizzie A. Borden lived with her father, prominent businessman Andrew Jackson Borden, and his second wife, Abby, and her older sister in a house at 92 Second St. On Aug. 4, 1892, with the 32-year-old Lizzie and the family maid at home, the husband and wife were found murdered.

Abby was apparently killed first; she was found dead at the side of the bed in the second-floor guest room, her head smashed by at least 18 blows. Andrew had come home from business about 10:45 a.m. and gone to take a nap on the sitting room sofa, where he was struck in the head 11 times. His body was discovered first, by Lizzie.

A hatchet, showing no traces of blood and without most of its handle, was recovered from the basement. It was branded as the murder weapon. No fingerprints had been taken because the Fall River Police Department had not embraced that practice.

Lizzie — who burned a dress the day after the mayor informed her that she was a suspect, claiming she had gotten paint smeared on it — was arrested and held in jail before being brought to trial in New Bedford.

But she was acquitted of both murders on June 20 by a jury that deliberated for an hour and a half.

By then, she was already a sensation. Children were skipping rope to the rhyme, “Lizzie Borden took and ax and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done she gave her father forty-one.”

“This was the first major American murder trial to ever go out on the wires. It went nationwide and worldwide in a matter of days, so certainly at the time there was a tremendous amount of interest in that, and interest in Lizzie’s life,” said Martins, the historical society curator.

BERNIE SULLIVAN, the former newspaper editor who now works for the Bristol County Sheriff’s Department, said the attitudes of people in Fall River changed after the verdict.

“The city really came to help her and back her up during the trial. She was still looked on as part of the elite of society, and they did not want her found guilty” because it would be a reflection on them, he said.

“But once the trial was over, she spent a very very very lonely life. People who had been very close to her testified as character references [during the trail]. After that, she couldn’t buy a friend,” Sullivan said. “She became very lonely, and would go on trips to Washington and became involved in the theater because, I guess, they found out she had a lot of money and they enjoyed her companionship. But as far as the upper crust Fall River society, they wanted nothing to do with her.”

Sullivan thinks she was shunned “because most of them believed she was guilty. But they sucked it up during the trial.”

Lizzie and her older sister subsequently moved out of the Second Street house. The two later split, and Lizzie began calling herself Lizbeth, the name now on her gravestone. She died in 1927.

During the remainder of her lifetime, the case “sort of died down and was kept quiet,” said Martins. “In Fall River, it was said it was something that was not discussed. Lizzie was tried and acquitted, and that was the end of the story. And that was the case until about the time of her death.”

Then there was a resurgence of interest.

“IN THE 40s and 50s, books began to be published,” he said.

There was a 1948 opera, Fall River Legend, about Lizzie, followed by the infamous — and tasteless — Lizzie Borden song from the Broadway musical New Faces of 1952. The title: “You Can’t Chop Your Papa Up In Massachusetts.”

The Chad Mitchell Trio later recorded the raucous song and sparked another wave of popularity. (Best line: “Shut the door and lock and latch it. / Here comes Lizzie with a brand new hatchet!” Second-best line: “She’s always done the slightest thing that Mom and Papa bid / They said, ‘Lizzie cut it out,’ so that’s exactly what she did.”)

When evidence from the trial was donated to the Fall River Historical Society and the society made the material public, there was another wave of interest.

Unfortunately, even new evaluations of the material have not offered a definitive answer about who killed the Bordens. Some efforts to explain the murder have been cheesier than others, most notably the 1975 made-for-TV movie The Legend of Lizzie Borden in which Lizzie, played by Elizabeth Montgomery, strips naked to carry out the murders so as to not get blood on her clothing. Martins characterizes that movie’s historical accuracy as “really bad.”

Since then, there have been television documentaries, plays and more books.

“Every time a book is published, or there’s a documentary, there’s another resurgence” in interest, Martins said.

IT PEAKED AGAIN in 1992, the 100th anniversary of the murders. Reporters and photographers camped outside the Second Street home but they were unable to get inside because it was still in private hands and the owner had wanted nothing to do with the Borden legend.

Sullivan was the only exception. He spent the morning there. Nothing supernatural happened. No specter of Andrew Borden appeared to reveal who had killed him. Sullivan remembers the wife of the owner being in the kitchen, as if it were any other day. She was watching Family Feud on TV.

As part of the anniversary, Bristol Community College held a four-day Lizzie Borden event. It was packed.

“I talked with a guy who drove a taxi in Australia. He had taken off a week to be in Fall River to celebrate the anniversary of the murders,” said Sullivan. “There’s amazing interest. But it’s more from people who come in from out of town.”

In August, , the Borden story made headlines when an outfit in Salem, Mass., a city with no connection to the Borden case that’s already infamous for its witch trials, tried to open a Lizzie museum and gift shop.

But the Borden house had been turned into a bed and breakfast, complete with tours, in 1996. The owners of the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast and Museum sued. The case was settled out of court after the Salem museum agreed to stop referring to itself as the Lizzie Borden Museum. (The museum, which can be found on the Web as the 40whacksmuseum.com, apparently refers to itself as “The True Story of Lizzie Borden.”)

FALL RIVER, with its mill outlets and the Battleship Cove complex, which includes a carousel, marine and railroad museums, and the largest collection of decommissioned ships on the East Coast, hasn’t really decided how much it wants to embrace Lizzie and her legend.

“The city has had as much trouble making up its mind on whether to capitalize on it, or how to capitalize on it, as it has believing whether or not Lizzie killed her father and stepmother,” said Sullivan. “I wouldn’t even want to bet how many people in the city, if you asked them where Lizzie Borden’s house was, would know.”

It didn’t help that in its pre-bed-and-breakfast days the house was owned by John McGinn, who would chase off anybody interested in the property.

“I’ve always questioned how much of a draw Lizzie Borden actually is,” said Martins. “We have a number of people who come to Fall River because they’re interested in the Borden case, there’s no doubt about that. But we also have people who are interested in other things, either textile history or genealogy or whatever.”

The city, with no department to promote tourism, refers calls about the Borden legend to the Historical Society at 451 Rock St., where the artifacts are on display. However the exhibit is closed for the winter.

The owners of the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast and Museum on Second Street, just south of Route 195 near City Hall, give tours of the restored house and let people stay overnight in the rooms of the Victorian home. (Its Web site is www.lizzie-borden.com.)

“The house itself is the museum. The Historical Society has the blood artifacts from the case. We’ve recreated the crime scene,” said co-owner Lee-Ann Wilber.

About half the bed and breakfast visitors are interested in Lizzie; the rest are looking for something paranormal, said Dee Moniz, who works there.

And you can visit Oak Grove Cemetery at 765 Prospect St., where the Bordens are laid to rest and Lizzie’s grave is marked as “Lizbeth.”

So Lizzie Borden may not be a tourism powerhouse in Fall River, but interest in her case is not likely to go away soon.

Sullivan, when he was a newspaperman, remembers asking crusty John McGinn, one of the former owners of the Borden house, why he thought Lizzie Borden got so much publicity.

“He said, ‘Because the sons of bitches like you write about it,’ ” Sullivan recalled with a laugh.

“And that’s probably true.”

gemery@projo.com