Denise Noeby Denise Noe
First published in June/July, 2005, Volume 2, Issue 3, The Hatchet: Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies.
The title of Arnold R. Brown’s book, Lizzie Borden: The Legend, the Truth, the Final Chapter, is overly optimistic, as the author probably knew. Brown had to be aware that a multitude of previous writers had purported to solve the mystery of the Borden murders and none had ever persuaded all students of the case. However much evidence he amassed, the writer had to realize that many readers would not be convinced and that he was not going to lay this mystery to rest with his “final chapter.”
In his introduction, Brown informs us that he was born and raised in Fall River. Lizzie Borden died only eight days before he turned two. Growing up in Fall River, he believed the standard version of the Lizzie Borden story: she was guilty and got away with it.
Ironically, second thoughts about the conventional wisdom were triggered after he left Fall River to spend his retirement in Florida. There he happened to meet up with another Fall River native and the conversation turned to the Borden case. The other man, whom Brown identifies as one Lewis Peterson, claimed his father-in-law knew the murderer. “You mean Lizzie?” Brown automatically asked. “Hell, no,” Peterson replied. “I mean the guy who killed them!”
As Brown relates, Peterson told him his father-in-law Henry Hawthorne wrote down the “true” story of the Borden killings in 1978. Knowing death was imminent, the sickly 89-year-old Hawthorne wanted to get the facts off his chest.
Peterson forwarded that account to Brown. What Brown tells his readers next does not inspire confidence. The story written by Hawthorne was, Brown claims, “a collection of disconnected ramblings with events choreographed backwards, with simple timing wrong, and with major characters totally ignored or, at best, moved from their traditional locations.”
Nevertheless, Brown found something “compelling” in this disjointed narrative. The Hawthorne account attributed “motives that offered some semblance of sense to what has always been a senseless crime, and finally a motive that surviving members of the family would generate all necessary pressures to keep hidden.”
Thus, Brown felt he had to investigate these claims. He writes that he spent two years researching the case and checking the facts against the Hawthorne “ramblings.” He concluded that Hawthorne’s story “fits the facts of the case better than any other theory.” He also tells us that the true murderer was outside the standard line up of suspects. It was not Lizzie, nor sister Emma, Uncle John, Bridget Sullivan or a shadowy suitor of Lizzie’s who hovers in the background of so many tales.
Just as Brown could not easily dismiss Hawthorne’s story, neither can a committed Borden buff easily dismiss Brown’s book.
Brown appears to have a firm grasp of the basic outlines of Fall River history as well as of the accepted facts and major personages of the Borden tragedy. As in most accounts, Andrew Borden appears in Brown’s book as a vile skinflint. Brown writes, “Thrift may be a virtue, but Andrew Borden made it a vice.”
This author introduces us to Ellan Eagan, who was a young woman at the time of the tragedy and who would become mother-in-law to Henry Hawthorne.
According to Brown, Ellan was on an errand on the morning of August 4, 1892 and passed the Borden residence. Spotting the “greenhorn maid” she thought in exasperation, “Imagine being so dumb as to be outside washing windows in this heat. Landagoshen!” Ellan bought the goods she needed from the store, and then headed back for home. Again she passed the Borden home and saw something that, according to Brown, would haunt her ever after. The following is a direct quote from Brown.
Ellan saw a man in the Borden yard, just standing there. She started to do the ladylike thing and avert her eyes when, for the first time in her life, she found herself staring at a stranger. There was something about this man that was wrong! He was about halfway between the gate and the back stoop, and he was facing her. He turned as if to go back. His left side and his back were all that she could see now. His clothes were dirty and coarse, but what had caught her eye was that he was wearing an overcoat—and on one of the hottest days of the year! At first Ellan thought his coat was burlap, then she realized he had a burlap bag over his shoulder and partially tucked under his arm. The overcoat, she could see, was a long duster-type like nothing she had ever seen. She felt funny, sort of scared. He stopped and turned his face toward her. His eyes looked into hers.
She sucked in her breath, gasping. Feeling faint, she shivered and almost cried out in terror. Speak of the Devil and he will appear roared in her ears. I am seeing the Devil!
When he took a step toward her, she ran. She had to get away, and somehow she did, feeling the fire from his eyes burning right through her. Even though she was confused and filled with terror, she knew something else was wrong, too. As she sped away, her senses finally told her what it was. It was his odor – one that she had never smelled before. It was not sour, not sweet, not a manure smell, not sweat . . . not anything she could even imagine! Intent on getting help, she ducked into the first yard she came to, gasping and sobbing. Then she was sick.
After fainting or at least lying on the “comforting grass” of a yard that turned out to be that of Dr. Kelly, Ellan recovered and made it home.
Soon the news of the Borden murders swept through Fall River. Ellan was reluctant to involve herself in a scandal. However, Brown writes that she heard tongues wagging that the maid had to have done it because “you know how them Irish is.” Ellan had seen the woman outside washing windows and thought that was something the police should know. She also believed they should know about that odd-looking, foul-smelling man in the coat.
About a week after the murders Ellan overcame her reticence and went to the police station where she spoke with Officer Michael Mullaly. “She was too outside, and that’s no lie!” Ellan blurted. Soon the nervous Ellan explained that she meant the Borden’s maid.
“We know she was,” Mullaly said, then added that he would tell his superior, Marshal Rufus Hilliard, that Ellan had confirmed this for them.
Then she tried to stammer out her recollection of “this man.”
In Brown’s story, the officer teased Ellan, saying sarcastically, “All covered with blood, carrying a bloody hatchet, and all wild and crazylike?” His ridicule shamed Ellan. She took a vow of silence to “never, never, never again” mention the man she had seen on that fateful morning.
Soon after her unproductive trip to the police station, police made a trip to her house. Officers Philip Harrington and Patrick Doherty questioned her about seeing Bridget outdoors and the sickness that had necessitated that Ellan collapse in Dr. Kelly’s yard. Nervously, she kept her vow of silence about the mysterious man.
Brown believes the police used Ellan to shore up their case against Lizzie. He quotes from the August 11, Fall River Daily Herald: “Another woman dropped into the case Wednesday afternoon, but she did not stay long. A lad who drives for Wilkinson, ice cream man [Russian immigrant Hyman Lubinsky], said he saw a woman come out of the Borden yard about 10:30 o’clock Thursday. Officers Harrington and Doherty went to work to find this woman, and they succeeded in discovering that Ellan Eagan was passing that way Thursday morning when she was seized with a sudden illness. She went into the first yard she came to, but it was Dr. Kelly’s yard, which is next to the Borden house, and the boy was mistaken.”
The better-known facts of the case, as well as original material, are cited and interpreted by Brown to buttress the theory he carefully lays out. A critical supporting point is the famous statement Lizzie made to her close friend Alice Russell the day before the murders. Lizzie told Alice that her father had an enemy and that, “I am afraid somebody will do something; I don’t know but what someone will do something.”
Many people have assumed the “somebody” she spoke of was herself and that she was anticipating her own acts of the next day. Brown believes that “somebody” was indeed somebody else and Lizzie was expressing a (soon to be proven well founded) fear of him.
The culprit, according to Brown who is telling the story laid out by Hawthorne, was a son Andrew Borden had fathered out of wedlock. Brown says this son, William “Bill” Borden, was a young man at the time of the killings.
Brown postulates that not only did this shadowy Bill Borden commit the murders but also that his guilt was deliberately covered up by Fall River authorities—at the behest of Lizzie herself! According to him, the trial was a farce with a largely pre-arranged script in which Lizzie, her defense team and the prosecution co-operated both in having her tried and having her acquitted.
The cover-up was supposedly orchestrated by a group Brown calls the “Mellen House gang.” They were the bigwigs of Fall River, whom Brown designates as the “Silent Government” of the city and they did not want the true identity of Abby and Andrew Borden’s murderer ever publicly disclosed.
However, the truth came out decades after the fact because, as a child, Henry Hawthorne had worked on the large apple farm owned by Bill Borden. It seems rather odd that Bill was able to farm successfully as he was characterized in Brown’s book as both mentally retarded and mentally ill. Like a child clutching a security blanket, the adult Bill, who is said to have possessed the mental faculties of an 8-year-old, always held onto his one favorite item: a hatchet. In front of young Henry, Bill frequently talked to his hatchet in the manner of a child confiding in a teddy bear.
Young Hawthorne was there as Bill chatted with his hatchet, saying, “You knew my father and that fat sow he married when he should have married my mother. Of course you knew them; you were there when they died!”
Years later, Brown writes, Hawthorne discussed Bill Borden with his mother-in-law, Ellan Eagan. She wanted to know if the man she had seen outside the Borden residence was in fact Bill Borden—and if he was the killer—and so began keeping three lists that she believed would help her pinpoint the truth. The first was a list of the facts she remembered from that day. The second was of “all the things Henry had said over the years about Bill Borden.” The third was of “things that had been said at Lizzie Borden’s trials about the murderer when somebody assumed it was someone other than Lizzie.” She found a great deal of agreement on the lists. While not every item was on all three, there was nothing on any of the lists that directly contradicted anything on the other two.
Recalling the horrible stench of the man she had seen, Ellan asked Hawthorne if Bill Borden had ever had a “stink” that could not be explained as a normal smell that could be expected on a farmer. No, Hawthorne replied, but there was a time when Bill Borden had pulled a malicious prank on young Henry Hawthorne that caused him to have a terrible odor.
Hawthorne often performed the chore of cleaning the equipment used to store apple cider. According to Brown, after the boy had finished with the casks, “Bill handed him a jar of something that looked like axle grease and a cake of lye soap and told him to be sure and rub this secret grease on all the spots of his body where the cider residue and the cleaner had come in contact. Henry did exactly as he was told and, when he got into the waterhole that was a summertime bath tub, every part of his skin he had rubbed with Bill’s grease began to burn. When the burning stopped, he noticed the foulest odor he had ever smelled.”
The smell that clung to the boy was so offensive that he “had to sleep in the barn that night and for the next three nights.” He had a terrible smell for two weeks.
Ellan was certain that must have been the odor that had made her sick. She asked Hawthorne if Bill had possessed a very long coat and he told how Bill “had his wife make him an extra long custom-fitted duster.”
Shortly after this revelation, Ellan shared her recollection of that day with her son-in-law and the two agreed that the man she had seen was Bill Borden and that he had slaughtered Abby and Andrew Borden.
With this information from Hawthorne, Brown pieces together what he claims constitutes the truth of the Borden case. As Brown tells it, when Andrew Borden was still married to his first wife Sarah (mother of both Emma and Lizzie) he had an affair with Phebe Borden who was married to Charles Borden (Brown never says what relationship Charles had to Andrew). Out of this doubly adulterous union, William Borden was born in 1856. Brown does not say how it was possible in those pre-DNA days to be sure the child was Andrew’s, but claims the existence of the “illegitimate” son was well gossiped about in Fall River. He also relates that, “Henry Hawthorne says he spoke with a woman who professed to be the midwife who delivered Phebe Hathaway of Andrew’s son and to have full knowledge of the affair.”
Brown writes that William Borden had a half-brother named William Lewis Bassett. How they were half-brothers is obscure. According to Brown, it is known that Bill Borden’s father, Charles, was married first to Bill’s mother Phebe and then to a woman named Peace. He does not know whether Phebe and Charles’ marriage was ended by divorce or her death. He thinks it likely that Bill Borden and William Lewis Bassett were actually stepbrothers as the latter was, he speculates, Peace’s son by a previous marriage.
As anyone familiar with the Borden case knows, several witnesses reported seeing an unfamiliar man in the vicinity of the Borden house close to the time of the slayings. Brown quotes the August 10, 1892 Daily Globe as saying that Dr. Benjamin Handy was “driving by the Borden house at about 10:30 or 10:40 . . . [when] he noticed a man walking slowly by the house.” Dr. Handy “described him as being a man about five feet four inches in height, of medium weight, and wearing a dark moustache. His face was deadly white but was round and full. The young man was apparently 24 years of age.” The article notes that, “This description tallies with that of a man whom Officer Hyde saw in the vicinity on the morning of the murder.”
For reasons he does not explain, Brown does not believe this man was William Borden but William Lewis Bassett.
Bill Borden had been “making demands of his father,” says Brown. Both Uncle John and Lizzie knew of these demands and sometimes acted as “mediator” between father and officially unacknowledged son.
The note that Lizzie claimed Abby received calling her away was real in this account. William Lewis Bassett delivered it and its purpose was to lure her outside the house while Bill Borden dealt with Andrew. However, it did not accomplish that purpose. Perhaps Abby got distracted by household chores or simply decided to delay the visit.
In Brown’s theory, Bill Borden was distressed because Andrew had recently drawn up a will. Brown does not claim to know exactly how Andrew was dividing his estate but thinks it likely he left out Bill.
Brown states that Bill actually spent the night prior to the killings somewhere on the property of his natural father. He could have entered through the front door, allowed in by Lizzie and Uncle John and slept either in the same guest room as Uncle John or in Emma’s empty room. If he did not do that, Brown postulates that he “spent the night in the hayloft of the Borden barn and was admitted to the cellar that morning by Lizzie after Uncle John and her father had left the house.”
Both Lizzie and Uncle John cooperated with Bill to avoid a fuss that could become public. However, Lizzie deeply feared Bill. It was that fear, Brown believes, that led her to try to buy prussic acid.
Brown thinks Abby may have surprised Bill in the guest room and Bill let her have it with his trusty hatchet. He speculates that she may have taunted him with his being left out of his father’s will or that Bill hated her because he saw her as that “fat sow he [Andrew] married when he should have married my mother.”
The laugh that Bridget heard on the stairs and attributed to Lizzie was actually Bill’s, in Brown’s account.
Andrew Borden came home, Bridget went upstairs for a nap and Andrew asked Lizzie to leave the house so he could have talk with Bill privately. Lizzie acceded to her father’s request. Brown believes Bill may have murdered Andrew because he knew his father planned to leave him out of his will.
Writes Brown: “After killing his father, Bill left by the open cellar door and looked to the front of the house to see if his half brother and his team might still be there. They were not, but Bill was seen by Ellan Eagan and, sensing from her reaction that he might be in danger, he retreated into the Borden back yard where, before leaving, he may even have talked with Lizzie, although he would not have mentioned what he had just done. He then headed for Uncle Hiram Harrington’s shop on Fourth Street where, by arrangement, his half brother should be waiting with his out-of-town horse and buggy.”
Both Lizzie and Uncle John knew who the culprit was as soon as they found out about the murders—and both wanted his identity kept secret. It was at Lizzie’s behest that the Mellen House gang swung into action to cover up for Bill.
Why did Lizzie want the murderer of her stepmother and father to go free? Brown asserts that she feared having to share her inheritance with her half-brother should his existence be discovered. To avoid that, she set in motion a plan that would have her tried for the killings. Brown notes that she was ultimately safe because she “had the actual murderer as her ace in the hole.”
Lizzie was indeed tried and acquitted. The reasons for that “not guilty” verdict have been endlessly debated but one thing that might have contributed to it was a similar crime committed while Lizzie was in custody.
On a farm just outside Fall River, 22-year-old Bertha Manchester was brutally axed to death between 9 and 10 AM on 30 May 1893. One of Lizzie’s defense attorneys, Andrew Jennings asked reporters, “Well, are they going to say that Lizzie Borden did this also?” Police soon arrested Manuel José Carreiro, a young Portuguese farmhand, for the slaying. Thus, the jury and public knew that a crime remarkably similar to the Borden murders had been committed close to Fall River and Lizzie Borden had the most airtight possible alibi: she was in jail at the time. Additionally, the suspect was someone—a male laborer—who fit the profile of a violent felon far better than did Lizzie, an upper-class female known for her good works.
According to Brown, Bill Borden died nine years after the Borden murders, a supposed suicide. Brown quotes from newspaper reports of a body of a man who had apparently killed himself being found “in the New Boston road woods” on 17 April 1901. An April 18th article in the Daily Globe misidentified him as “George F. Borden.” It also said he was “a son of the late Deacon Charles Borden” and had “a half brother living in the person of William Lewis Bassett.” The article continues that the suicide had been “a lodger at the house of William Michen” who “lives in a farmhouse in the territory about half way between New Boston road and the Manchester estate, where Bertha Manchester was murdered some years ago by José de Correiro.” A piece in the Fall River Daily Herald published the same day identified him as “William S. Borden” and describes him as “a farmer” with an “apple orchard which yielded him many barrels of cider yearly which he peddled through the country.”
The dead man was found suspended from the limb of a tree. He had apparently drank carbolic acid and then hanged himself with a chain. Brown quotes the 17 April 1901 Fall River Daily Globe as writing that the victim’s “clothing was almost new, and had probably not been worn but a few times. A black overcoat covered a brown suit with a small check and he wore a pair of congress shoes.” In the April 18th Fall River Daily Herald article, the age of the deceased is said to be “about 50.”
Brown points out unusual elements in the story of this suicide, noting that the man seemed “overdressed for suicide.” He also finds it unlikely that he would easily be able to hang himself with a chain wearing a coat and congress shoes, especially since he was middle-aged. He believes that the Mellen House gang had Bill Borden killed in such a way as to make it look like suicide.
What’s more, Brown says that Bill Borden was probably the true murderer of Bertha Manchester. He backs this up by the similarities between the slayings and because the supposed “suicide” took place close to the Manchester farm. He also thinks it is possible that Bill Borden was persuaded to commit the murder by the Mellen House gang to ensure that Lizzie would escape conviction.
Why did the Mellen House gang go to such lengths to help Lizzie—and help the murderer of two respectable people escape justice? Brown believes she paid them off. He supports this assertion by incorrectly noting that, at the time of her death, her estate was worth less that half her sister’s so “somewhere her expenses must have been much greater.”
There is no question that Brown’s book is interesting. His theory is intriguing and supported in places but ultimately unconvincing.
The motive attributed to Lizzie for wanting to draw suspicion on herself and away from her guilty half-brother is weak. It seems unlikely an imprisoned or, given the temper of justice during the era, a hanged Bill Borden would be in any position to claim his inheritance. Moreover, Brown undercuts this greed hypothesis when he writes that Lizzie’s estate was worth only approximately half of what Emma’s was on her demise and suggests that the difference was because Lizzie had made such large payments to the Mellen House gang. It would seem that the people who were plotting with her took at least as much money as Bill Borden could have gotten, especially if he had been convicted of the murders.
According to Leonard Rebello in Lizzie Borden: Past and Present, the two sisters’ estates were much closer in value at their deaths than is reported by Brown. Rebello reports that Emma left behind about $447,000 and Lizzie roughly $348,000, a difference of less than $100,000. Could that difference have been due to payments to the mysterious Mellen House gang? Or could that money have gone toward more mundane living expenses? Since the sisters separated, Lizzie had lived more largely, had the sole upkeep, tax burden and insurance of the house, and paid Emma for her use of her share. Lizzie did treat herself to trips out of town, and to dinner and the theatre, with the concomitant need of a social wardrobe. Author Brown seems to disregard these expenses. It still seems unlikely that Lizzie paid off anyone as the weakness of motive is aggravated by the natural feelings a grieving, outraged—and innocent—Lizzie would have been assumed to have had if the father she loved had been murdered by another.
A central difficulty with Brown’s theory lies with the character Bill Borden is alleged to have possessed. It is hard to accept the idea of someone who was both mentally ill and mentally retarded committing these murders and escaping detection—even with the help of that powerful, shadowy, Mellen House gang. After all, Bill Borden was so sloppy as a murderer that he did not have the sense to get rid of the murder weapon but kept it constantly with him, even years after the crime. Furthermore, he was such a blabbermouth that he habitually chatted with that same weapon and even confessed the double murder in the presence of a child.
There is also a major improbability in Ellen Eagan’s story. When she matched her recollections with those of Henry Hawthorne, the story of the boy’s stinking from a Bill Borden prank seemed to clinch his identity as the man she saw and smelled. There seems no reason why Bill Borden would have deliberately caused himself to stink. Of course, it is possible that someone else played this same prank on him but highly improbable that he would have selected a day when he was so odious to murder or even confront his father. Bridget made no report of an unseemly smell on the day of the killing and she surely would have sniffed it if it had been as extraordinary as the smell Henry Hawthorne claims to have suffered from.
Lizzie Borden: The Legend, the Truth, the Final Chapter is a worthwhile read for connoisseurs of Borden theories but the careful, informed reader is apt to give it the Scottish verdict of “not proven.”
Works Cited:
Brown, Arnold R. Lizzie Borden: The Legend, the Truth, the Final Chapter. Nashville, TN: Rutledge Hill Press, 1991.
Rebello, Leonard. Lizzie Borden: Past and Present. Fall River, MA: Al-Zach Press, 1999.
“Startling Parallelisms.” Boston Daily Globe, 1 June 1893.
