The REAL David Anthony: Did Ruby Tell a Fib?

by Glen “Joe” Carlson

First published in October/November, 2004, Volume 1, Issue 5, The Hatchet: Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies.

David Mason Anthony, Jr., the son of one of Fall River’s finest, was alleged by Ruby Cameron of Cherryfield, Maine, to be Lizzie’s lover and the murderer of Andrew and Abby Borden. Ruby released her story to the press in January 1985 when she was 85 years old. New England reporters picked up on the story and did some investigating. The conclusion of those journalists was that Miss Cameron probably was full of prunes. Was she? Perhaps this article will shed some light on her allegation.

David Mason Anthony, Jr.

David was the son of David M. Anthony [1], one of the founders of Swift and Co., the meat packing people in Fall River. While in Fall River, Gustavus Franklin Swift [2], a cattle buyer, met the enterprising elder D.M. Anthony in 1875. Anthony owned a large wholesale meat and slaughtering company. It was Anthony who invited Swift to join him. Started in 1885, the new company became Anthony, Swift and Company, headquartered in Fall River. Swift later moved its operation to Chicago [3]. 

David was born in Fall River on June 6, 1869 to David and Ruth Ann (Horton) Anthony. They had one child at the time, Ella Martin (b. June 19, 1867) [4]. Harold Horton was born on November 28, 1876. David and Ruth had married March 6, 1863. Ruth Ann, David’s mother, died on April 18, 1879, of heart failure. A baby, (Unknown) Anthony, died just two days before [5]. He was 2 days old.  On the grave marker, a second wife, Abbie Caril (or Carll) Anthony is listed, a marriage which must have been contracted after 1880. She died in 1908.

Not a great deal is known about young David. He was born at 368 N. Main St. in Fall River [6].  In 1880, he was living with his widowed father and two siblings at 116 N. Main in Fall River. The publisher, Thomas Almy, lived next door at 114. David Anthony was 11 at that time, Ella was 13, and Harold was 3. There was an Aunt, Mary A. Davis, aged 60, who was listed as “Housekeeper” for the motherless family. Her husband, Edmond, a mason, 61, lived there as well [7].  In the 1900 census, the family consisted of the father, David Anthony, as head of the household, aged 64, his second wife, Abbie, aged 51, and David Anthony, his son, aged 30 and single, who worked as a clerk in the packing house. David’s brother Harold was still at home and single, aged 23, and might have been a Foreman at the packing house. By the time of his death, at age 59, Harold had risen to an executive position with Swift & Co. in Boston [8].  David, in contrast, seemed content in his later years to pursue and enjoy his hobbies. In 1920, David was living with his sister and brother-in-law, Frank L. Horton, at 25 Durfee Street in Fall River’s 7th Ward [9]. 

What we know of David is that he lived in Fall River, not New Bedford as Ruby claimed. He owned a motorcycle. He may have been in love with Lizzie. He may have killed her stepmother and father. In 1892 he was 23 years old to Lizzie’s 32 years. He did come from a prominent family. We know for a fact that he died at Truesdale Hospital on December 4, 1924 of a fractured skull following a motorcycle accident in South Somerset, Massachusetts on November 25. His home at the time was at 28 Charlotte St, in Fall River. He is buried in Fall River’s Oak Grove Cemetery in plot 1825 Tritoma Path along with his father, mother and stepmother and not, as Ruby Cameron claimed, in an unmarked grave in New Bedford. She said that David died in 1917 during the flu epidemic.

David’s obituary reads, in part, “Mr. Anthony was an enthusiastic wheelman and for 40 years had traveled awheel in all kinds of weather, summer and winter, having been a familiar figure. He was a lover of outdoor life and the afternoon of the day he received the injuries that resulted in his death, he had been out sailing. He was also very fond of music and frequently gave great pleasure to his friends with his viola” [10].

“We called him Uncle Dade,” said Ruth Waring. “Uncle Dade loved the outdoors. He would come from Fall River to Swansea on his motorcycle many days. He had a cottage on the water and he would go sailing many afternoons. . . . He was a master of the harmonica. I remember him as a very religious man. He belonged to the Methodist Episcopal Church in Fall River and later became a Christian Scientist” [11].

If there was any love match between David and Lizzie, there is no hard evidence of the affair. The only reference we have to their tryst is from Ruby Cameron.

Ruby Frances Cameron

Ruby Cameron was 84 in late 1984 when she contacted the Ellsworth (Maine) American and announced that she had the solution to the Borden murders. Reporter John Wiggins was assigned the task of investigating Ruby’s claim. On Thursday, January 3, 1985 the American’s front-page banner headline read “Ruby Cameron Says David Anthony Murdered Lizzie Borden’s Parents.” Who was Ruby Cameron?

According to the story she told Wiggins, Ruby was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts on April 19, 1900, the daughter of John and Margaret (Johnson) [sic] Cameron [12].  She is listed in the 1930 census for New Bedford as living with her mother (possibly at 42 Beech St.). Ruby is listed as a registered nurse attached to a hospital. In 1920, Ruby is living at 26 Beech with her father and mother. John is listed as a painter at a mill; Ruby as “doubling” at a silk mill; her mother a “winder” at a silk mill. In 1910, at the same address in New Bedford, Ruby is listed as living with her parents. Her father is a “wholesale provisions dealer” and her mother a “laundress” “working out.” In 1900, at (number illegible) Beech St., John is listed as a “sausage maker,” and the mother is not listed as having a job [13].  

In the Ellsworth American article, Ruby said that before the time of the murders her parents “bought the old Kempton farm on the outskirts of New Bedford.” She states that this location is where the Camerons took David “after it happened.” There is no reference that John Cameron purchased the Kempton Farm on the outskirts of New Bedford as Ruby alleged. There is an “Anthony” listed as a one-time owner of a small parcel of land on the farm, but no Cameron [14]. 

According to her story, culled from the various interviews she gave in 1985, Ruby worked at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and was awarded her bachelor’s degree in nursing from Columbia. In her first account in the Ellsworth American Ruby is quoted as saying she accomplished this task in just three short months. Ruby says she received her master’s degree in English literature from Florida and her doctorate in biochemistry from Chapel Hill in 1945. She told Wiggins that she “put 45 consecutive years into nursing work, plus doing many other things” [15].  She also told Wiggins that she had written two novels and had almost completed her memoirs. The first novel “is a story about an academy in New Hampshire. The second novel is about a candystriper, a nurse who takes one suffering dropout, and then seven other girls, and makes decent women out of them. It is a Christian story” [16].

I made a phone call to the Cherryfield Public Library and spoke to a member of the Board of Trustees, Kathy Upton. She couldn’t remember much about Ruby, but Kathy’s mother, the president of the local historical society, knew her quite well. Ruby, according to Kathy, was “rather eccentric,” “almost a hermit,” but “a wonderful, caring soul who went out of her way to help people.” The library had no record of Ruby’s novels or any memoirs that she had been writing.

Hoping to find a reference about her novels or anything scholarly she had written in her field of biochemistry, I checked the Internet. She is not listed in the Library of Congress where her novels would appear if they had been published. She is not shown in any of the Maine writer’s websites. 

The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, was contacted to verify if indeed Ruby received her Ph.D. in biochemistry. The Registrar/Records office reported that a time-consuming alphabetical search of microfiche had been completed, years 1908-1971, and no record was found for a degree in the name of Ruby Frances Cameron.

Ruby died quietly in her cabin in Cherryfield of cardiac arrest in late 1985. Her obituary was short and to the point; there was no mention of her various degrees or her wondrous past.

Is the Story Believable?

When I first began to research the Ruby-David-Lizzie connection, I was open-minded to the possibility that Ruby’s story, while controversial, was nonetheless credible. Even though she made some errors of fact, these mistakes could easily be attributed to her advanced age. It was still entirely possible that her story was correct. 

The Anthony home was at 368 N. Main St., not too far from the Borden residence on Second Street. If David killed the Bordens and Bridget ran to the Anthony residence to fetch Ruby’s father and mother, Bridget would have had to run at least 1/2 a mile to reach the Anthony home. However, she had been sick, had just finished washing the windows, and was briefly resting. There was no reported sighting of Bridget leaving the neighborhood immediately after the murders. If David was removed from the Borden premises by two women, and brought to N. Main St., there was, unfortunately, no outside witness to this feat.

Employees of both the Borden family and the Anthony family have been implicated in the cover-up of the murders so their servant’s names were checked in the census records. In the census of 1880, David Anthony, Sr.’s Aunt Mary, probably his mother’s sister, served as housekeeper, and there was a maid, 26 years old, named Margaret Malone. In 1900, the servants for the Anthony’s were listed as Delia Graham, cook, age 22, Helna Kenny, 27, job illegible, and Thomas Kenny, coachman, aged 37. In the census of 1910 David Anthony and his father lived next door to David’s younger brother Harold, and his wife Caroline and their young daughter Ruth, who was 7. Their servant was Julie Goggin. Interestingly, Harold’s occupation at that time was listed as “Automobiles.” Listed at the elder Anthony’s household were Florence E. Woodruff as housekeeper, widowed and 49, and Alice N. Barrett, a single, 26 year old servant. None of these people were named by Ruby as complicit in the cover-up. Unluckily for our purposes, the census of 1890 is not available, as it was destroyed. What census records that were available did not prove or disprove the veracity of Ruby’s story—any domestic employed by the Anthony’s in the year 1892 fell between the cracks of the federal government’s 10-year record keeping.

I then looked at what was known. Ruby’s mother died an alcoholic and a kleptomaniac; her facts about Anthony were skewed; each successive newspaper interview of 1985 gave differing stories; there is no record of her having written a single novel or scientific article; and there is no support for her claim of a Ph.D. in biochemistry. She also made some bold, and improbable, claims about her life in her first interview with Wiggins. She said “the biggest mistake I ever made was after I finished putting the Hebrew Home in Boston on its feet. While I was doing that I met some of the finest Jewish people in the world. That was when Dr. Cook wanted me to meet Golda Meir. They wanted me to go to Jerusalem and open a clinic. I was 68, and I said I would not do it. . . .  I did go to South Carolina with Golda, and the people I met with her there said they would give me all the money I needed to establish a clinic.” This seemingly outrageous autobiography has the effect of coloring her other story—that of Lizzie actually telling her in 1927 that David Anthony had done the deeds.

Bernie Sullivan, former feature writer for the Providence Journal-Bulletin, researched Ruby’s facts and interviewed David Anthony’s niece Ruth Waring, Florence Brigham, and Borden scholars. He rejected Ruby’s story. I spoke to Bernie and he told me he did not want anything more to do with Lizzie Borden or Ruby Cameron.

Because of my investigation I have grown increasingly suspicious about Ruby Cameron’s tale. In my opinion, the combination of her vivid imagination, old age, and memory lapses contributed to creating the story she told to the Ellsworth American.

I suppose it is also entirely possible, as Florence Brigham, curator of the Fall River Historical Society commented, Ruby was “just one more person” who wanted “to make a buck” [17].  In Ruby’s case, no buck was made, and she left many more questions behind than answers.

Notes

1. Born September 24, 1835 to John Anthony (b. October 23, 1807) and Maria Bloomfield Davis (b. August 24, 1805). From the Genealogy of the Anthony Family From 1495 to 1904, 28 Sept. 2004 <http://www.Ancestry.com>. 

2. Born 1839 in West Sandwich (now Sagamore) Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Died 1903. Terence Duniho, “All Things Swift,” Lizzie Borden Virtual Museum and Library 2 Aug. 2004, 30 Sept. 2004 <http://lizzieandrewborden.com/NewResearch/Swift.htm/>.

3. Louis F. Swift, The Yankee of the Yards: The Biography of Gustavus Franklin Swift (Chicago: A.W. Shaw Company, 1927).

4. Genealogy of the Anthony Family. The genealogy showed Ella’s birth date as 1861. This is questionable, since David and Ruth were married in 1863. I did further research and discovered that the 1870 census for Fall River shows Ella as 3 and David Jr. as 11 months old. The 1920 census shows Ella as 52 years old. I have to assume that the Genealogy of the Anthony Family From 1495 to 1904 has an error. By my calculation, Ella would have been born in 1867 or 1868, not in 1861.

5. Telephone call to Fall River City Clerk, September 10, 2004, by Joe Carlson.

6. “Obituary,” New Bedford Sunday Standard-Times 5 Dec 1924. 

7. Fall River census, June 1880.

8. Kate Boylan, “Tracking Down the Existence of the Mysterious Lover, Killer,” New Bedford Standard Times, 13 Jan. 1985: 10-11.

9. Fall River Census, 1920. 

10. Kate Boylan, “Obscure David Anthony Led a Carefree Life,” New Bedford Sunday Standard-Times, 13 Jan. 1985: 10.

11. Bernard F. Sullivan, “Tracking the Truth about Lizzie Borden: Maine Woman Tells Why She Thinks She Knows the Real Killer,” Providence Journal-Bulletin, 13 Jan. 1985: C2.

12. The Ellsworth American 3 Jan. 1985, Ruby’s first interview, quotes Ms. Cameron about her family history. The spelling of her mother’s name is “Johnson” in this piece, but later corrected to “Jonsson” in Bernard Sullivan’s article in the Providence Journal-Bulletin 13 Jan. 1985.

13. New Bedford census, 1930; New Bedford census, 1920; New Bedford census, 1910; New Bedford census, 1900.

14. Mabel L. Potter, History of Sconticut Neck (Fairhaven, MA: The Millicent Library, 1945).

15. Ellsworth American, 3 January 1985. (Courtesy of Ellsworth Public Library).

16. Ibid.

17. Marshall Rothman, “Historian Rejects Theory of Slayings,” Fall River Herald News, 6 Jan. 1985: 1.