Denise Noeby Denise Noe
First published in October/November, 2004, Volume 1, Issue 5, The Hatchet: Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies.
In much of the popular mind, Lizzie Borden stands unequivocally guilty of the brutal murders of her stepmother and father. Many people assume that the jurors, all male by law in that late nineteenth century era, were reluctant to convict a woman of such a physically brutal crime and that Borden owed her life in large part to their sexism [1]. Class prejudice is also assumed to account for her acquittal. “Miss Lizzie” was not just any woman but a “lady” of genteel, upper-class background. Critics and casual observers alike tend to believe Lizzie owed her life to biases about affluent females, and that she got away with and profited from a vicious parricide of which she seems obviously guilty.
This view that Lizzie’s acquittal was due to the jury’s prejudices ignores the troubling issue of the murder weapon. In the only interview Emma Borden ever gave to the press, she never cited her sister’s gender or refined upbringing as reasons for believing in her innocence. Instead, Emma spoke of something far more substantial: the failure of authorities to identify the murder weapon.
That singular interview is recorded in both Frank Spiering’s Lizzie and David Kent’s Forty Whacks. A reporter for the Boston Sunday Post, Edwin J. Maguire, spoke on the record with Emma in 1913. Emma assured him that she believed her sister was rightly acquitted saying, “Here is the strongest thing that has convinced me of Lizzie’s innocence. The authorities never found the axe or whatever implement it was that figured in the killing. Lizzie, if she had done that deed, could never have hidden the instrument of death so that the police could not find it. Why, there was no hiding place in the old house that would serve for effectual concealment. Neither did she have the time.”
Andrew Jennings, one of Lizzie’s attorneys, issued a blunt challenge on this issue in his opening statement. “[The government must] produce the weapon which did the deed, and, having produced it, connect it in some way directly with the prisoner, or else they have got to account in some reasonable way for its disappearance.”
Many people would retort that the weapon that Emma says “figured in the killing” was indeed found—they point to the infamous “handleless hatchet,” still kept by the Fall River Historical Society and introduced at trial as the possible murder weapon. Despite the jury’s verdict of acquittal, David Everitt includes Lizzie in his book Human Monsters. Further, Everitt agrees with the prosecution’s use of the handleless hatchet as the murder weapon, saying it had “some very suspicious characteristics. The wooden handle had recently been broken off and had apparently been discarded in some way (bloodstains on wood can be impossible to remove), and the blade was covered with ash while other hatchets in the same spot were covered with dust; the blade might have been recently washed, then dipped in ash to simulate disuse. And one other thing: the hatchet’s cutting edge matched the impressions in the victims’ skulls.” The truth is that there are several major problems with the “handleless hatchet” as murder weapon and even the prosecution’s identification of it as such was woefully shaky.
When the police came to the Borden house after the slayings, Officer Michael Mullaly asked Lizzie if there were any axes or hatchets in the home. Lizzie said there were and directed the family maid, Bridget Sullivan, to escort the policeman down to the cellar and show him where they were kept. Bridget did so and, according to David Kent’s Forty Whacks, Mullaly found “two axes as well as a claw-headed shingle hatchet. One of the axes was obviously bloodstained, and hairs still clung to the blade.” It might have been a “Eureka!” moment in the policeman’s mind but Bridget pointed out a little box holding some odds and ends as well as another hatchet – or at least the head of one. While officers agreed that most of the wooden handle had been broken off this hatchet by the time it was found, a startling discrepancy would show up at trial as to whether or not police found the hatchet’s handle with it.
The axes and hatchets were scientifically examined by Professor Wood of Harvard University. The hair on one hatchet was determined not to have been human. The other axe and both the claw-headed hatchet and the one missing its handle all tested negative for blood. However, authorities decided that the latter hatchet was probably the murder weapon. They theorized that Lizzie had broken off the handle because, as Everitt noted, it is very hard to wash bloodstains from wood. Commentators, convinced that Lizzie’s guilt is cut and dried (oops! pun accidental) have tended, as Everitt and others have, to accept this implement as the one true murder weapon.
Yet, when prosecutor William Moody put the weapon into evidence he said, “The Government does not insist that these homicides were committed by this handleless hatchet. It may have been the weapon. It may well have been the weapon.” But if it was the murder weapon, what had Lizzie – presuming she wielded it – done with the handle?
According to the testimony of one police officer at the trial, Lizzie could have done nothing with it for the broken handle was in the box with its head when it was discovered. To appreciate the explosive nature of this testimony, it is necessary to note that police testimony was at loggerheads as to the finding of the axes and hatchets in the Borden house.
Officer Mullaly testified that he was the one who first found the axes and hatchets, then summoned Deputy Marshal John Fleet down to show them to him. Mullaly revealed that Mr. Fleet not only saw the hatchet and its handle but took it out of the box and replaced it there. Under questioning from Lizzie’s defense, George Robinson, Mullaly said the handle “corresponded” with the hatchet head suspected of being the murder weapon. He replied to questions as to where it was now, or whether he ever saw it after that, with “I don’t know” and “I did not.” This exchange threw doubt on the prosecution’s theory of the crime, for it made little sense for Lizzie to just break the handle and leave it lying beside the head. If Mullaly’s sworn testimony was accurate, it could mean the police had taken this vitally important piece of evidence and either misplaced it or deliberately destroyed it.
Officer Fleet was brought back into court after Mullaly. He contradicted his fellow officer when he testified that when he looked in the now-infamous box, he “found a hatchet head, the handle broken off,” but no broken handle. One of these officers was either lying under oath or had a horrible memory.
However, if Lizzie got rid of the handle, what did she do with it? The prosecution contended that she burned it in her home’s kitchen stove. An officer had found a charred, rolled up piece of paper in that stove. Spiering relates that George Robinson ridiculed that idea by saying, “. . . did you ever see such a funny fire in the world? A hard wood stick inside the newspaper, and the hard wood stick would go out beyond recall – and the newspaper that lives forever would stay there!”
There is yet another factor that would appear to rule out any of the axes and hatchets found by police as the murder weapon. Shortly before the start of the trial, prosecutor Knowlton received a letter from Dr. Frank Draper, one of the medical examiners for Suffolk County, who had participated in the autopsies of both murdered Bordens. That letter, quoted in Kent, says, “On one of the cuts in Mrs. Borden’s skull near the right ear, there is a very small but unmistakable deposit of the gilt metal with which hatchets are ornamented when they leave the factory; this deposit (Dr. Cheever [a professor of surgery with whom Draper had conferred] confirmed the observation fully) means that the hatchet used in killing Mrs. Borden was a new hatchet, not long out of the store.” By contrast, the handleless hatchet head was, as Kent noted, “old, dull and rusty.”
Another problem with the handless hatchet as the murder weapon is the fact that the piece of the handle that still remained with the head had no trace of blood on it. If it had been used in the slayings, the part nearest the head have been closest to the gore. The portion of the handle lost to us would have been mostly protected by the assailant’s own hands.
Did the wounds in the heads of the dead Bordens match the handleless hatchet? Kent wrote that the suspected hatchet head was three-and-a-half inches long while the wounds varied between two inches and four-and-a-half in length. The three-and-a-half inches long instrument could have made those injuries if, as Dr. William A. Dolan testified, “the whole cutting edge hadn’t been brought into play” when it made the smaller wounds and by “sliding and by also crushing its way in” the larger ones. But there was no definitive proof it had made those wounds.
Had the hatchet head been covered with ashes to simulate disuse? Kent wrote that when Robinson cross-examined Fleet, the ex-Governor “forced him to admit there was an ash heap in the cellar big enough to fill 50 baskets, and that the dust on the other items in the box might have come from ashes as well.” In the prosecution’s summation, Knowlton attempted to explain away the absence of any blood-spattered garment in terms that might as easily have been used about the failure of the government to positively identify a weapon. “I cannot answer it,” he told the jury. “You cannot answer it. You are neither murderers nor women. You have neither the craft of the assassin nor the cunning and deftness of the sex.” This statement is especially interesting in light of the widespread perception that Lizzie was acquitted because of bias favoring females. Here Knowlton tried to use her gender against her to persuade the jury to overlook holes in the prosecution’s case.
Elizabeth Montgomery, who played Lizzie Borden in the brilliant made-for-TV movie The Legend of Lizzie Borden, could make things vanish in her incarnation as Samantha Stevens on the sitcom Bewitched. However, in real life, no feminine wiles can make a tangible object disappear. Although author Ann Jones quotes reporter Julian Ralph sarcastically in Women Who Kill, he may have had a point when, in the immediate aftermath of the verdict, he declared that the decision meant that “witches are out of fashion in Massachusetts.”
If the handleless hatchet was not the murder weapon and neither were the other axes and hatchets found in the Borden house, what was? And what became of it?
Here we should remind ourselves of the wording in the indictment charging Lizzie with the murders. That document accused her with having killed with “a sharp cutting instrument, the name and a more particular description of which is to the Jurors unknown.” Thus it is not necessary to limit our search for the weapon to axes and hatchets. Indeed, students of the case have frequently suggested other implements. Evan Hunter, in his novel Lizzie, has her killing with a candlestick holder. Writer Muriel Arnold (who thinks Bridget is the culprit) says a meat cleaver was the weapon. Regardless, we will always have the constraint of the gilt found in Abby’s wounds. While gilt could be found on items besides hatchets, such as a gilt-covered candlestick holder, its presence in a wound tends to point to a new hatchet.
Lizzie obviously knew the home she lived in much better than the police. Therefore it is tempting to speculate that she found a hiding place in which they did not think to look. But the home she lived in does not easily allow for this possibility since the Borden house was no medieval castle full of hidden passageways but a very simple dwelling. Spiering describes it as a “boxlike structure, extremely narrow, with a thin yard around its sides and a small barn in the rear.” When Andrew bought it in 1872, Spiering says it was “made up of two little industrial railroad lofts, one above the other. . . . On the second floor he [Andrew] fashioned a dressing room and four bedrooms. No space was wasted on hallways; the rooms simply opened into one another. One of the bedrooms had three doors leading to three adjacent rooms. . . . On the first floor he constructed a front parlor, a dining room, a sitting room and a kitchen. . . . at the rear, isolated from the rest of the house and accessible by a steep dark narrow-walled staircase, he took an attic with a pitched roof and turned it into maid’s quarters.”
Kent writes that the Borden residence “had been constructed as what was called a railroad house, built soundly but sparsely for two families. Separate entrances, one in front that opened onto the sidewalk, and another on the side, provided access to the upper and lower apartments. Space-wasting halls were not included in the design, making it necessary to go from room to room to get to the front or back.”
How thorough was the police search of this modest wood house of few rooms? Kent indicates that there were searches of “four hours” and “five hours” long that were “meticulous and detailed.” Spiering wrote about the police force “ransacking rooms, bureaus, beds, boxes, trunks and everything else where something might be hidden. An old well by the barn was emptied and several piles of lumber against the back fence were moved board by board.” He also recorded Medical Examiner Dr. William Dolan as saying, “We examined everything down to the slightest bump in the wallpaper.”
Whatever the weapon was, what happened to it? Why didn’t investigators find it? Emma Borden claimed Lizzie did not “have the time” to hide or get rid of the weapon so that it could not be found. Kent says that “Bridget testified at the inquest, and the preliminary hearing, before the grand jury, and at the trial that the city hall bell tolled 11:00 three minutes after she had reached her room to rest. She had verified the time by her bedside clock, which was later checked and found accurate.” At 11:15, the police received a call about trouble at the Borden house. That phone call was from newspaper dealer John Cunningham who had been told something was wrong at the home by Mrs. Churchill. She had been told, “. . . do come over. Someone has killed father,” by Lizzie.
Even if Bridget was off in thinking only three minutes passed between the time she went to her room to rest and 11:00, Lizzie still has, assuming her sole guilt, a maximum of about fifteen minutes to slaughter her father and get rid of the weapon.
There is a possibility that it was “hiding in plain sight.” In other words, police hunting for hatchets and axes simply did not think to examine a candlestick holder or other implements that could have been turned to deadly effect. Robert Flynn’s pamphlet called “Lizzie Borden and The Mysterious Axe” reprints a newspaper article that appeared on June 15, 1893 – five days before the Borden trial ended. That article, “Another Hatchet Found,” told of how a boy had discovered a “hatchet on the top of John Crowe’s barn, which is located just in the rear of the Borden property” and his father “reported his find to the police.” Perhaps most importantly, the article stated that, “Some of the particles of rust being removed a slight coloring of gilt was disclosed, which would either indicate that the hatchet was at one time used as an ornament or was quite new when lost or discarded.” Flynn notes that, “anyone could have easily climbed on the pile of lumber in the Borden’s back yard and flipped the hatchet onto the Crow barn where it would lay undetected for 10 months in the harsh elements.” Flynn concluded that the “hatchet found on the roof of the Crowe Barn was in all probability the murder weapon.”
If it was the weapon, who stood on the pile of lumber and flung it onto the barn’s roof? Ice cream vendor Hiram Lubinsky testified he saw a woman he could not positively identify coming toward the Borden house “from the back of the house” around five or ten minutes after 11 AM, seeming to confirm Lizzie’s story of taking a trip to her own barn before discovering her dead father. Perhaps Lubinsky actually saw Lizzie returning to the house after she had disposed of the murder weapon by tossing it atop her neighbor’s barn.
Of course, we do not know for sure that the hatchet Flynn nominates as candidate for weapon was actually used in the deed. The true weapon may never have been found. Is there a way to reasonably account for the weapon’s disappearance? One obvious way is to postulate that someone other than Lizzie took it away. Doing this would not necessarily exonerate Lizzie. She could have committed the murders and had a confederate who spirited away the weapon. In general, this writer does not cotton to conspiracy theories. But the nettlesome questions that forever dangle in the Borden case make the possibility of a conspiracy “reasonable.”
At the trial, the government put forward only the theory that Lizzie had committed both murders by herself. However, a letter from prosecutor Hosea Knowlton to Massachusetts Attorney General Arthur Pillsbury indicates that the two of them privately suspected someone else could have been involved. As reprinted in Forty Whacks, that letter said in part, “. . . even in my most sanguine moments, I have scarcely expected a verdict of guilty. The situation is this: nothing has developed which satisfies either of us that she is innocent, neither of us can escape the conclusion that she must have had some knowledge of the occurrence.” The astonishing implication of this is that Knowlton, and presumably Pillsbury, were not convinced that Lizzie murdered alone. Rather, they were certain only that she “had some knowledge of the occurrence,” a phrasing that leaves open the possibility that she conspired with a confederate and even the possibility that she was covering up for the true culprit.
It is possible that authorities could not find and positively identify the weapon that killed Abby and Andrew Borden because it was taken away by someone without Lizzie’s knowledge and that she was innocent of this crime. The Borden murders have baffled generations of true crime enthusiasts, historians, forensic scientists, and others. Like Emma Borden, many of those who believe in her innocence have found the absence of a clearly identifiable weapon “the strongest thing” in favor of her innocence.
Notes
1. The truth that the relationship between the genders is not one of strict, one-way male advantage and female oppression can be seen by this common belief, regardless of whether or not it is true. Women have often been disadvantaged and oppressed by preconceptions about females; they have also frequently benefited from them. Men have been both the beneficiaries and the victims of sexist bias. This supports Warren Farrell’s thesis in The Myth of Male Power that society is best understood not as a “patriarchy” but as “bi-sexist.”
Works Cited
Everitt, David. “Lizzie Borden.” Human Monsters: An Illustrated Guide of the World’s Most Vicious Murderers. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1993. 52-55.
Jones, Ann. Women Who Kill. NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980. 13, 196, 209-237.
Kent, David. Forty Whacks: New Evidence in the Life and Legend of Lizzie Borden. Emmaus, PA: Yankee Books, 1992.
Spiering, Frank. Lizzie: The Story of Lizzie Borden. NY: Random House, 1984.
