In the hot, late morning hours of
August 4th, 1892, the sleepy community of Fall River,
Massachusetts, fifty-five miles southwest of Boston, was rocked by
the murders of one of its leading citizens and his wife. In a large
house that still stands at what was 92 Second Street in Fall River
(since renumbered to 240 Second St.), seventy-two year-old Andrew
Borden and his sixty-five year-old wife Abby were found brutally
murdered, literally hacked to death by someone using a heavy,
sharp-bladed instrument. Abby died first, in an upstairs bedroom.
Andrew was killed some sixty to ninety minutes later, while napping
on a sofa in the sitting room. The discovery of Andrew’s body
occurred first, and the brutality of his murder was sufficient to
guarantee headlines in the local papers; the discovery of Abby
Borden’s body lying butchered in the guest room upstairs took those
headlines national. However, it was the news, a week later, that
Andrew’s thirty-two year-old daughter Lizzie had been arrested for
the killings made it the crime of the century.
 |
| Lizzie Andrew Borden |
One hundred and twenty-two years later,
those killings, and their aftermath, still resonate through popular
culture. Movies, books, plays, even songs have memorialized the
case; the home where Andrew and Abby died is now a quaint
bed-and-breakfast; and experts still try to solve the case that
children have long ago marked closed:
Lizzie
Borden took an ax,
Gave her
mother forty whacks.
When she
saw what she had done,
She gave
her father forty-one.
Though the details are slightly off,
most people familiar with the case do feel that Lizzie did in fact
murder her father and stepmother, despite being acquitted of the
crime. To think otherwise would be to admit the incredible—that a
stranger, after brutally killing an elderly woman, waited in an
occupied home for more than an hour, went downstairs, murdered her
dozing husband with equal ferocity, and escaped unseen, taking
nothing with him save any evidence of his presence. Robbery clearly
wasn't the motive; nothing was missing from the home, and Andrew
was found with his silver watch and chain in place, gold ring on his
finger, and $85.65, nearly three months wages for most men in 1892,
in his pocketsi.
The extreme violence of the attack initially led police to speculate
that it was the work of, in the parlance of the time, a “fiend,”
or in today’s terms, a psychopath. The Fall River Police, acting
upon that supposition, did what most 19th Century law
enforcement officers would've considered the wisest move: they
looked for foreigners to arrest.
Eventually however, certain facts in
the case led them to a more reasoned conclusion—that the killer was
a member of the household. The longer the investigators looked at
the outwardly happy little family, consisting of the Bordens;
Andrew’s eldest daughter Emma and youngest daughter Lizzie; John
Morse, the brother of Andrew’s first wife Sarah; and Bridget
Sullivan (whom the entire household insisted upon calling Maggie),
the lone servant in the house, the less happy things appeared to be.
Though Andrew was wealthy, serving on
the board of directors of at least four banks, he was also
parsimonious to a fault; his household lived in near poverty, forced
to scrimp and save every penny possible. Repeatedly Emma and Lizzie
had begged their father to sell the cramped, two-story house in the
decidedly middle-class part of town and move “up the hill,” to
the swankier side of Fall River, where they could live among those of
their economic and social strata. The appeals were ignored, perhaps
fatally so. As author David Kent explains, “That Andrew would not
spend a portion of his considerable wealth for a sumptuous home on
the Hill may well have been the linchpin of the murders; certainly
the prosecution made it one of the core motives in its case against
Lizzie.ii”
The morning of the murders, breakfast
consisted of three-day-old mutton, mutton broth (both kept in the
summer heat without the benefit of refrigeration), johnnycakes
(pancakes made with corn meal), cookies, and overripe bananas, all
washed down with coffeeiii.
The family dined heartily on the unappetizing fare, then began their
busy day.
Andrew left shortly after 9:00 to
transact some business and stop by the post office. Lizzie returned
to her bedroom, still suffering from a bout of nausea that had
affected the entire household the previous day. Emma was away
visiting friends in Fairhaven, and had been for two weeks. John
Morse left earlier, with the understanding that he would return for
lunch at noon. Bridget was tasked with washing the windows … all
of them, inside and out, while Abby began cleaning upstairs.
Sometime after 9:30, Lizzie came back downstairs, dressed for a
shopping trip. As she was in the kitchen drinking coffee, her father
returned from the post office. Lizzie informed him that Abby had
received a note from a friend who was ill; she had left to visit
them. Andrew retired to the sitting room to rest before lunch. The
time was perhaps 10:55 in the morning. At that time, Abby was
certainly lying dead in the guest room, body wedged between dresser
and bed. Andrew, just drifting off on the sitting room sofa, had
mere minutes left to live. And the whereabouts of his favorite
daughter Lizzie during that period of time would become the crux of
the most sensational trial of its day, a trial that carried all the
notoriety of the O.J. Simpson trial a century later.
The trial lasted fifteen days, from
June 5th to June 20th 1893. The verdict, “not
guilty,” was the only one possible given the dearth of physical
evidence available to the prosecution, a sympathetic press, and the
golden oratory of the counsel for the defense, the Honorable George
Dexter Robinson, former three-term governor of the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts. But was it the right one? Did the scale of justice
function as intended, or did a guilty woman go free? And what led
authorities to fix their suspicions on Lizzie in the first place?
Lizzie made the initial discovery of
Andrew Borden’s body; Bridget was in her room resting. Bridget
wasn’t present when the note requesting Abby come to the aid of a
sick friend, nor when she supposedly left. Only Lizzie bore witness
to that. Lizzie claimed that, following her father’s return, she
spent fifteen minutes, or maybe twenty … or perhaps thirty,
rummaging in the barn looking for bits of metal to use as fishing
sinkers, and snacking on pears from the tree in the Borden’s yard.
She claimed that, shortly after the city hall clock chimed 11:00,
perhaps five or ten minutes past, she returned to the kitchen, then
entered the sitting room to discover her father’s bloody corpse in
repose on the sofa.
Within minutes, the alarm had been
raised, and at precisely 11:15, the first call is received at the
City Marshal’s office. That is one fixed point in the day’s
timeline; the only other ones are when John Morse left the house at
8:30, and when Andrew began his walk home, at 10:45. For the other
points on the timeline, there is only the word of Lizzie and Bridget.
One fact is certain, and is the source of much of the suspicion
which must rest on Lizzie—Abby Borden died at least an hour, and
perhaps as much as an hour-and-a-half, before her husband. To
believe that Lizzie, Bridget, or both were ignorant of the crime is
to believe that a stranger entered the home, traveled upstairs,
through the oddly laid out building (the home had no hallways; it was
necessary to move through each room to reach the adjoining rooms), in
order to hack a woman to death. He then spent the next ninety
minutes concealed in the home until her husband returned, while
avoiding the other two women moving in and out of the house … well,
the premise strains credulity.
But why would Lizzie Borden want to
kill her father and stepmother? Was it as simple as being tired of
living so far below their means? A childish resentment of a
stepmother taking her late mother’s place? Or, as has been
suggested by those who’ve studied the case, a more sordid reason
for the crime, one rooted in a forbidden relationship? As noted
crime author Ed McBain posited in a 1984 novel entitled Lizzie,
a possible motive could have been to cover up a lesbian relationship
between Lizzie and Bridget, at a time when mere rumors of such an
affair would have ruined the reputation and social standing of the
Borden daughter. Others have suggested that the obvious rage visited
upon the Bordens was revenge for some manner of abuse Lizzie suffered
at their hands as a child, possibly even physical or sexual abuse.
 |
| Post-Mortem photograph of Andrew Borden |
Some may wonder, in this day of CSIs,
when fingerprints and DNA solve crimes every day, how there could be
no evidence from such brutal murders. The murders occurred in a far
different era, when forensic science was just a dream in the minds of
a few criminologists. Some departments in larger cities had begun
using the Bertillon system, a complex series of precise measurements
of criminals, especially such characteristics as the shape of the
ears, the width of the nose, and the distance from one pupil to the
other. In 1892, the same year the Borden murders occurred, a
detective in Argentina closed the first case using fingerprint
evidence, a homicide in the town of Necochea, though the practice
wouldn't be introduced in the United States until 1906.
 |
| Post-Mortem photograph of Abby Borden |
As far as physical evidence in the
Borden case, it’s conspicuous in its absence. No trace of the note
which supposedly called Abby away to the bedside of a sick friend was
ever found, nor were attempts to identify said friend successful.
The prosecution made much of a supposed bloodstained skirt, the spot
upon which, in the words of expert witness Prof. Wood, “… was the
size of a very small pin head …iv”
that wasn't blood after all. There was testimony about a blue dress
that Lizzie burned in the days following the murders. She stated
that it had been spattered with paint. An old, rusty hatchet without
a handle was found in a bin in the basement; experts testified that
it couldn't have been the murder weapon. In short, there was
nothing to prove that Lizzie committed the crime, and nothing to show
that anyone else had either. The only proof of the murders was the
dead, bloody bodies of Andrew and Abby Borden, and their severed
heads, removed by authorities just prior to the funerals and
preserved as evidence.
Did Lizzie kill her Father and
Stepmother? I believe so. Logically, it’s hard to believe
otherwise. It can’t be proven, nor is it possible at this point to
assess a motive for the crime. One thing is certain, however …
this case will continue to fascinate people for generations, just as
it has for more than one-hundred and twenty years.
References:
Kent, David. Forty
Whacks: New Evidence in the Life and Legend of Lizzie Borden.
Yankee Books, Emmaus, PA. 1992.
Kent,
David, with Roberta A. Flynn. The
Lizzie Borden Sourcebook. Branden
Publishing, Boston. 1992.
i
Kent 20
ii
Kent 9
iii
Kent 13
