Lizzie Andrew Borden
Lizzie Andrew Borden (1860-1927) was the youngest daughter of Andrew Jackson Borden and Sarah Anthony Morse Borden of Fall River, Massachusetts. In 1892, her father and step-mother (Abby Durfee Gray Borden, Andrew's second wife) were murdered in their home, the victims of hatchet blows to the head. Lizzie and their domestic servant Bridget Sullivan were the only two people home at the time, and, after a police investigation, Lizzie was suspected of committing the murders herself. She was arrested, indicted, and stood trial in June of 1893. Although she was acquitted and lived another thirty-three years sustained by her father's inheritance money, Lizzie Borden never fully escaped the dark legacy of the murders.
Today, most people only know her through a bit of doggerel that boldly states: "Lizzie Borden took an axe/Gave her mother forty whacks/When she saw what she had done/Gave her father forty-one." While the verse has many inaccuracies, including the presumption of her guilt, the number of blows, the nature of the murder weapon, and the fact that Abby Borden was her stepmother, it remains to this day, for most people, their sole source of information about Lizzie Borden.
Fall River at the time of Lizzie's birth was a major textile city and the Borden family was a large player in the growth of that industry, principally because, at the time the first mills were built, they had owned much of the water privileges on the Quequechan River. Accordingly, the Bordens soon established a textile dynasty. However, Andrew Jackson Borden's branch was confined to a much humbler station. Andrew had no significant inheritance to draw upon, and had to elevate himself to a respectable social ranking through being a carpenter, a furniture builder, and an undertaker; and then by investing in real estate and mill stock. By the time Lizzie was a young girl, her father was solid upper-middle class, but hardly the wealthiest man in town, as some authors have fashioned him. Lizzie grew up in an atmosphere of idle, not gentile, living; the family did not have the material trappings of wealth or the pretense towards cultural self-improvement. Lizzie was never to hold a job during her life, although she did volunteer her services to church missions, temperance unions and various charities, most prominently animal rescue. Despite a welter of controversy, social stigma, and being ostracized by her own community, she started and ended life enjoying the privileges of her father's money.
Lizzie had an older sister, Emma Lenora, and a middle sister who died at age two. Shortly after Lizzie's own birth, her mother Sarah passed away from what the death certificate described as uterine congestion, leaving Andrew Borden a widower and the two girls motherless. By 1865, Andrew had married Abby Durfee Gray, who took on the task of running his household and raising his two daughters. Emma was old enough to remember her mother quite well, and became very protective of Lizzie. After the murders, the sisters' exact relationship to their stepmother Abby would be a matter of much debate being that it potentially could reveal a motive that would send Lizzie to the gallows.
Much has been said about Andrew's stinginess, his Scrooge-like attitude towards customers, tenants and those who borrowed money from him. His attitude towards money was a point of contention during the murder trial; the prosecution attempted to characterize Lizzie as someone who would not only kill for an inheritance, but would do so out of revenge for the decades of deprivation, (both material and psychological) from which she had purportedly suffered in her father's household. Lizzie herself seemed concerned about her father's reputation. When asked if she knew of anyone who would hold a grudge against her father, her first answer was a stranger she had overheard having an argument with her father over a rental property. Andrew may have had many enemies, although it is unclear if any of them would have resorted to murder.
Throughout the 1880s, the Andrew Borden household prospered, but whatever stability it seemed to have on the surface began to change in the Spring of 1890. Lizzie had just returned from a grand tour of Europe, presumably a trip bestowed on her for her thirtieth birthday. Tensions between the girls and their stepmother manifested in a real estate deal transacted by their father which gave half of a house on Fourth Street to Abby Borden, a transaction that the girls seemed to have resented. They wanted their father to take care of them as favorably as he was taking care of Abby's relatives. As an appeasement, Andrew sold the sisters the family house on Ferry Street for one dollar. This seemed to calm things a bit, but by this time Lizzie had stopped calling Abby "mother" and simply addressed her as "Mrs. Borden." At the murder inquest, Lizzie was to state that this name change came about as a result of a difference of opinion between Abby and the girls.
Other incidents that had significance in light of the murders included a daytime burglary in which the Bordens' house was broken into, and some money and street car tickets were stolen from Mrs. Borden's dressing room. Andrew forbade the girls from talking about it, but some believe that Andrew's habit of locking his own bedroom dated from this period. It is also believed that Andrew thought that Lizzie herself had committed the burglary and that his subsequent habit of leaving his bedroom key in plain sight on the sitting room mantle was actually a taunting message to Lizzie, perhaps a way of letting her know that he knew what she had done. Andrew also kept a club under his bed as an added source of protection, a not-too-insignificant fact considering he was later to be murdered in his own home while he slept.
Around the same time as the burglary, Andrew killed some pigeons in the backyard barn, thereby causing Lizzie much distress. His motivation for the killings was probably that boys were breaking into the barn to taunt the birds. He brought the lifeless bodies into the house with their heads removed, so Lizzie did not know if he had used a hatchet to decapitate them or if he had simply twisted the heads off with his bare hands. Regardless, she was clearly disturbed by the incident, and if the pigeon murders pre-dated the daytime burglary, they may have been a precipitating factor for its occurrence. Lizzie was also known to have a proclivity for shoplifting, a practice that her father continually bailed her out of by paying shopkeepers for the items she had snatched, so suspecting her of the burglary is not too fantastical. It is reasonably believable that Lizzie's relationship with her family as well as her own personal self-control was, in the year leading up to the murders, beginning to break down. This may be true whether or not she was guilty of the crimes.
Two weeks before the tragedy, Emma Borden left for Fair Haven to stay with friends and Lizzie embarked on a trip to Marion. Once there, hanging out with her friends, Lizzie felt a foreboding sense of depression, or so she confessed to her friend Alice Russell. She returned early to Fall River, presumably to attend a special church business meeting on Sunday, August 7th. The murders would cause her to miss this date.
On Wednesday, August 3rd, Abby Borden paid a visit at the home of the family physician, Dr. Bowen, across the street. Abby's complaint was that she was suffering nausea and stomach cramps, and believed her baker's bread to be poisoned. Indeed, at this time, most of the family members were feeling sickly, and were prone to fits of vomiting. This by itself was not so suspicious, but sometime that afternoon a woman walked into a drugstore on South Main Street, and attempted to buy ten cents' worth of prussic acid from the pharmacy clerk. The clerk, Eli Bence, said the woman claimed that she needed the poison to clean a sealskin cape; and he later visually identified Lizzie Borden as the woman who came to him that day. Bence refused to give out the acid without a prescription, after which the woman left in a huff. Bence's evidence, which was excluded from the trial record, was very incriminating and cast some suspicious light on the mysterious ailment that struck the Bordens the day before the murders.
The same afternoon that a woman visited Eli Bence, John Vinnicum Morse, the brother of Lizzie's mother Sarah, who was still on friendly terms with Andrew, came to visit the Bordens from where he was staying in New Bedford. He arrived in the afternoon and spent the night, but did not have any encounter with Lizzie until the next day, after the discovery of the dead bodies. He had a warmed-over meal with Andrew and Abby, presumably eating some of the same leftover mutton which may have made the Bordens ill. He then traveled to Swansea across the Taunton River to do some business, have supper with a relative, and check the farm for Andrew, returning in the evening.
Sometime around 7:00 pm, Lizzie slipped out of the house and walked around the corner to visit with her friend Alice Russell, a woman roughly ten years older than she who used to live in the house next door to them on Second Street. There Lizzie shocked her friend by sharing her fears that someone was trying to harm her family. She talked about the illness, speculating on whether it was poisoned baker's bread or milk, and told her that Andrew had a lot of enemies. She feared that someone would do something and she slept with one eye open. Alice calmed her friend down as best she could, and sent her home with some reassurances. When Lizzie arrived home, Andrew and John were talking in the sitting-room and heard her come in. They did not see her since their line of sight to the front hall was obscured, but they heard her ascend the stairs into her bedroom. There she spent the night.
On the morning of Thursday, August 4th, Lizzie was the last to come down, doing so after John Morse had left the house to visit some relatives. Telling Bridget that she did not have an appetite for breakfast, she went about her business while her father left the house to run some errands. Abby Borden went to tidy up the second floor guestroom, and Bridget went to the yard to do some window cleaning. While Bridget worked on the outside, Mrs. Borden and Lizzie were alone in the house together. If Lizzie killed her step-mother with a hatchet, it may have been while Bridget was occupied with her window washing.
By her own account, Lizzie was going about some random tasks: heating up some flats so she could iron handkerchiefs, reading some magazines, and going to her room to mend a dress. Either way, when Bridget came inside to do the interior windows in the sitting-room, she did not see Lizzie. However, she soon heard someone trying to open the front door with a key. She went to help, but struggled with the locks herself, muttering a small exclamation, something like, "Oh, phsaw!" Then she heard Lizzie Borden at the top of the front hall steps giggle at her indiscreet language. This was a significant observation in that Lizzie may have been standing just yards away from her stepmother's dead body at the time that her father had arrived back at the house. During her inquest testimony, she was to remain unclear about where she was at the time, contradicting herself several times when pressured under questioning by the District Attorney.
Bridget let Mr. Borden into the house, observing that he had a small package in his hand. The exact nature of this package was never to be determined, although theories range from its being the broken lock that he had picked up at a construction site on South Main Street, to a mysterious package that he had gotten at the post office which, as this speculation goes, may explain the motive for the killing. Lizzie soon came into the sitting room, asking her father if there had been any letters for her. When Andrew asked her where Mrs. Borden was, she told him that a note had come for Abby saying that someone was ill; she believed that her step-mother was out of the house. Lizzie also told Bridget about a sale on dress cloth on North Main Street, presumably to get the servant girl out of the house. She encouraged her father to lay down on his sofa and take a nap, even sticking around to make sure he was comfortable. At this point, Bridget, who had finished the interior window cleaning, slipped up to her room to take a nap since, like Lizzie, Andrew, and Abby, she did not feel well.
Lizzie's first instinct was to send Bridget across the street to fetch Dr. Bowen, who, as it happened, was away on a house call. Then she thought of Alice Russell, telling Bridget to run around the corner to get her friend, perhaps the only person with whom Lizzie had shared her ominous fears about someone wanting to hurt her family. While Bridget was away fetching Alice, Lizzie stood in the doorway on the side of the house. Mrs. Adelaide Churchill, a next door neighbor, was putting away groceries in her kitchen when she spotted Lizzie and noted that she looked very disturbed. She asked her what the matter was. Lizzie replied something similar to, "Do please come over, someone has killed father."
Soon Mrs. Churchill, Alice Russell, Doctor Bowen, and Bridget had all converged on the house, along with Officer Allen, the first policeman to arrive on the scene. Within a quarter of an hour, several dozen people, including newspaper reporters, passersby, and even more police officers, had descended upon the scene. A large crowd accumulated in the street as word began to spread. Lizzie sat in the kitchen getting her hands rubbed and her face fanned; she fielded many questions from the police, telling each one a slightly different variant on her alibi, and repeating the belief that Mrs. Borden was not at home due to the note that she had received. Finally, Bridget and Mrs. Churchill ventured up the front staircase and discovered the dead body of Abby Borden in the guestroom, lying face down on the carpet with evidence of nineteen hatchet blows to the back of her head.
Lizzie was, to a few policemen, a suspect from the very beginning. John Morse's alibi checked out, and Emma wasn't even considered for a moment since she was in Fair Haven with friends. Bridget had also been in the house during the murders, but she had been seen outside cleaning the windows and seemed sufficiently rattled enough by the events to be an unlikely suspect. Lizzie, who struck one police officer as disturbingly calm and collected, showing no agitation, raised in his mind a most revolting thought: that Lizzie Borden had murdered her own father and stepmother.
Before the evening was over, the drug stores in the city had been canvassed by the police, and Eli Bence had come forward with his story about the prussic acid. The police had also discovered a handle-less hatchet in the basement whose split wood seemed to have been freshly broken. The blade also seemed to be covered in dust that seemed of a differing texture than the dust on the other tools in the cellar. Although the police were to dismiss this weapon on August 4th, it was re-discovered during a subsequent search of the house, and presented at the trial as the possible murder weapon.
That first night in the house must have been a dark one indeed. The bodies of Andrew and Abby lay in their post-autopsy state on flat boards in the dining room, and policemen patrolled outside on night duty. Sometime in the evening, Alice Russell, who was sleeping in the master bedroom, accompanied Lizzie to the cellar with an oil lamp, visiting the privy and emptying a slop pail in the wash room. After the two women had returned to their bedrooms, the officer in the backyard was surprised to see Lizzie Borden again go down, this time by herself, to the basement; she there spent some time stooped down in the wash room near the bloody clothes removed from Andrew and Abby's body, as well as a pail of bloody menstrual rags (Lizzie was menstruating at the time). What she was doing there on that visit remains a mystery to this day.
For several days, the Borden girls lived in the house with a twenty-four hour police guard, leaving only for the funeral on Saturday morning where, strangely enough, the bodies were not interned pending further forensic examination. That evening, the Mayor of Fall River and the City Marshall paid a visit to the Borden home to warn the family that they needed to be more discreet in venturing from the house. The evening before, John Morse's attempt to visit the post office had drawn a large crowd, and he had had to be escorted back home by the police for his own safety. During the course of the interview, Lizzie asked the Mayor directly if anyone in their household was suspected of the crime, and he nervously but boldly told her that yes, she was a suspect.
This revelation may have prompted Lizzie to take action, one she may have later regretted. On Sunday morning, she took an old dress which, she claimed, was dirty with paint and, in the presence of Alice Russell and Emma, proceeded to tear it up and feed it into the stove fire. Alice was particularly rattled by this, and the next day, while being interrogated by a private detective hired by the Borden sisters, Alice was asked about the dresses and felt compelled to withhold the information she knew. She later confronted Lizzie, telling her that burning the dress was perhaps the worst thing she could have done, to which Lizzie replied, "Oh, why did you let me do it!" Either Lizzie was genuinely concerned that her innocent act would be misinterpreted, or she was upset that her plan to get rid of damning evidence under the noses of her own family, as well as the police officers, had failed. The burning of the dress was much debated at the trial, and Alice Russell's testimony about the incident was looked upon as a betrayal, since it could very well have sent Lizzie to the gallows.
What few people knew at the time was that ever since the afternoon of the murders, Lizzie had been taking drugs to calm her nerves. On August 4th, Dr. Bowen prescribed her bromo caffeine, and by the weekend he had placed her on a heavy dose of morphine. This may have affected her judgment in burning the dress, and it must have seriously impacted her performance at the Inquest hearing which started on Tuesday, August 9th. Still medicated with morphine, Lizzie appeared during this inquest to be in a foggy haze, contradicting herself, misunderstanding questions put to her by District Attorney Hosea Knowlton, and giving answers so blunt that they actually helped incriminate her. For example, in response to the question of whether she was on cordial terms with her stepmother, she replied, "It depends on one's idea of cordiality, I suppose." Her shockingly snide and often confrontational answers pushed Knowlton into actually calling her inquest testimony a "confession" in a letter to the state D.A. in April of 1893. On August 11th, after the close of the inquest, Lizzie was arrested for the murder of her father and stepmother.
On August 12th, Lizzie Borden was arraigned before Judge Blaisdell of the District Court. A preliminary hearing was started on August 25th and continued for six days. A large public outcry had erupted, and everyone, from members of Lizzie's Central Congregational Church to the Women's Temperance Union to newspapers from all over the country, publically came to her defense, denouncing her arrest as an outrage not to be tolerated in a civilized community. The preliminary hearing was practically a trial, and had the distinction of including the testimony of Eli Bence and others who were present in the drug store during the prussic acid incident. The end verdict was that Lizzie Borden was "probably guilty" and she was removed to a Taunton jail cell to await a hearing before a Grand Jury.
It was at the Grand Jury hearing in December that Alice Russell first revealed her story about the burning of the dress. This revelation must have contributed greatly to the return of three indictments against Lizzie Borden: one for the murder of Mr. Borden; one for the murder of Mrs. Borden; and one for the murder of both. Lizzie was arraigned before the Superior Court on May 8th, 1893, after which she sat and waited in her Taunton jail cell for yet another month before her trial began.
Lizzie Borden's trial, which was considered by many to be the trial of the century, certainly, at the very least, a media circus drawing journalists and spectators from all over the country, began on June 5th, 1893 in New Bedford. It was held in a courtroom that had windows opening onto a cow pasture (the sounds of mooing often interrupted the proceedings). The case was presided over by, according to Massachusetts state law, three Superior Court justices. The jury of twelve, mostly Republican men, had an average age of 53.
Lizzie had hired the services of George Robinson, an ex-Governor of the state, providing some political leverage to her defense. To assist Knowlton in the prosecution was William Moody, a District Attorney for Essex County, who took the weight of the case in light of Knowlton's increasing lack of confidence about his chances of success. Shockingly enough, Knowlton had written to State District Attorney Pilsbury: "Even in my most sanguine moments, I have scarcely expected a verdict of guilty."
Including the jury selection, the trial lasted from June 5th to June 20th , 1892. It had some significant defining moments that have made Lizzie Borden legend, most particularly when the prosecution brought out her father and step-mother's skulls to show the court the hatchet wounds and to demonstrate how the handless hatchet fit them. Two highly consequential rulings were made. One concerned the exclusion of Eli Bence's testimony about the attempt to buy prussic acid. The defense claimed that there were indeed innocent uses of the acid, including as a clothing cleanser; but more importantly that the attempt to purchase the acid did not happen on the exact day of the murders and therefore cannot be linked to them. As incredible as this strained logic may sound to a modern sensibility, the Borden jury was denied that damning piece of evidence. They were also denied access to Lizzie's inquest testimony because, as the judges ruled, the woman was essentially under arrest at the time she testified and was denied counsel, so that any statements she made under such conditions were required to be excluded. What was included in the trial, however, was Alice Russell's account of the Sunday morning dress burning.
One of Lizzie's strongest allies in her defense was her sister Emma, who testified that she had suggested to Lizzie to burn the dress because it had been soiled with paint stains. Lizzie also had on her side the fact that no one could find any blood on her person or her clothing, except for a small amount on her undergarment which was caused by her menstrual cycle. Attempts to prove that she had changed her dress that morning to cover up blood stains collapsed into a jumbled confusion of several witnesses' foggy memories. Despite the inclusion of the dress burning and Lizzie's unproven statement that someone had suggested she change her dress to the pink wrapper she wore on the afternoon of August 4th, no one was able to prove that there had been any significant blood on her clothing. Finally, on June 20th, 1893, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty, and sent Lizzie Borden home, a free woman.
The public reaction to the verdict was explosive and varied. The City Marshall and the Mayor received death threats while Lizzie, who was receiving as much as two hundred letters a day, was even deluged with proposals for marriage. The press had a field day, and many of Lizzie's supporters, including various women's groups, applauded what they asserted was the proper carrying out of justice. A Lizzie Borden Fan Club even formed in New Bedford, and for a time, Lizzie was treated like a hero returning from a triumphant war. However, Lizzie, who was half-expected to retire from Fall River and seek a new life somewhere else, returned to 92 Second Street with her sister Emma. They hired a new domestic, and resumed what they hoped would be their normal lives in the community, including attendance at church services.
However, the cooling of public sentiment, along with an uncomfortable lack of closure regarding the murders, caused Lizzie's and Emma's position in Fall River society to sour. With the purchase of a house on French Street, which they, in a manner considered pretentious by their contemporaries, renamed Maplecroft, the Borden sisters withdrew into seclusion and spinsterhood. Lizzie and Emma were now wealthy women, having profited from the fact that Abby died before Andrew, depriving the stepmother's family of the estate and, as a legal matter, repositing it squarely into the sisters' possession.
Lizzie's social status decayed, possibly due to her own paranoia and post-traumatic stress over the murders. When she had a falling-out with the Women's Christian Temperance Union and initiated proceedings to evict them from the Andrew J. Borden office building on South Main Street, a spokesperson for the W.C.T.U. told a newspaper reporter, "Miss Lizzie Borden is a physical wreck, and is morbidly sensitive, imagining a thousand and one slights where none were ever dreamed of."
The next incident that further tarnished Lizzie's reputation occurred in 1897, when she was accused of shoplifting two paintings from Tilden-Thurber and Co. in Providence, Rhode Island. According to the grandson of Andrew Jennings, Lizzie's attorney, he saw the incident as a final straw and was reported to say, "I will have nothing to do with that woman." While a warrant for her arrest was never served and the matter was settled privately, Lizzie became increasingly isolated, and her reputation was further diminished.
A more serious event occurred in 1905. Emma Borden, who had continuously lived with her sister since her birth in 1860, suddenly and without any public explanation, left Maplecroft and abandoned her sister, presumably for the rest of their lives. While there is much speculation over Emma's reasons for leaving, the most persuasive theory notes that Lizzie was inviting theatricals into her home, more significantly Nance O'Neil, a stage and screen actress who befriended Lizzie when she was performing at the Fall River Academy of Music. Many have tried to establish that a romantic or even physical affair existed between Lizzie and O'Neil, although this has never been proven. There is also the possibility that Emma left so abruptly because she discovered something about the murders of 1892. Regardless, neither sister publicly explained the break, and by all accounts they did not see or talk to each other again before their deaths in 1927.
Lizzie spent the last twenty-two years of her life an aging spinster in Maplecroft, surrounded by loyal servants who never broke their silence, even after their employers' death. By all accounts, she was quite generous with their salaries, and she even purchased a house on French Street as a residence for some of them. Despite Lizzie's isolation, she did, however, have close friends in the community, most significantly Grace Hartley Howe, the wife of Louis Howe, Franklin Roosevelt's political advisor, and Helen Leighton, who was a generous recipient of Lizzie's estate upon her death.
Lizzie Borden died on June 1, 1927, after suffering complications from a gall bladder operation. Her sister Emma died nine days later in Newmarket, New Hampshire. Neither had begotten children in their lifetime, and so the Andrew Borden branch of the Borden family came to an end. Lizzie's legacy to the world was an enigma that has endured and become iconic in American culture. Whether she committed the murders in 1892 or not, the countless unanswered questions about her life, both outer and inner, continue to fascinate our collective imagination.
