Denise Noeby Denise Noe
First published in Winter, 2013, Volume 8, Issue 1, The Hatchet: Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies.
In Ann Jones’ fascinating but strongly biased book, Women Who Kill, she devotes a lengthy section to the story of the Borden murders. That section is in a chapter entitled “Laying Down the Law” and it is interesting to explore both Jones’ recounting of the Borden mystery and her analysis of it. However, to understand that analysis, we must understand the context in which Jones wrote Women Who Kill and the perspective from which she wrote it.
She started work on the book, originally published in 1980, because she saw a void. Most studies of murder had focused on men. Books that dealt with murderesses tended, as Jones notes, to be those “with snappy titles like Fatal Femmes and The Deadlier Species” that did not focus seriously on the subject. Women Who Kill should be regarded as an exploratory work. Jones states that she writes “mostly about prominent cases that obviously hit a social nerve” and about “groups of cases that cluster about a single prominent issue, such as infanticide in the colonial era or woman’s self-defense in our own.”
Ann Jones is a witty writer and her book a page-turner. She is also an excellent researcher and the cases she discusses are interesting and often socially important. However, her work can only be understood by taking into account her specific biases.
Jones is a radical feminist who subscribes to the tradition holding that “it’s a man’s world” or, in more sophisticated terminology, “patriarchy.” She specifically rejects what she regards as an unfortunate tendency among writers on gender issues to “disclaim any notion of male conspiracy in the oppression of women.” She writes, “If this book leaves the impression that men have conspired to keep women down, that is exactly the impression I mean to convey; for I believe that men could not have succeeded as well as they have without concerted effort.”
Since I have delineated Jones’ biases, I need to be open about my own. My basic belief about gender is that espoused by Warren Farrell in The Myth of Male Power. I believe that society has been “bi-sexist” with both “patriarchal and matriarchal elements.” I believe that traditional sex roles were not the result of efforts by men to oppress their sisters, mothers, mates, and daughters. Rather, it seems to me that traditional sex roles were formed largely due to constraints imposed on females by the biological burdens (as well as blessings) of pregnancy and childbirth as well as the general physical strength, speed, and size differences between the sexes.
Having said that, it should be noted that harm has in fact resulted from traditional gender roles—sometimes with great harm. Women have historically tended to be excluded from public life and female talent in many areas has been grossly under-utilized or insufficiently recognized. I applaud and support changes allowing women’s talents to flourish in every possible area and to enjoy equal recognition and reward with similarly productive men.
It should also be noted that men’s talents have also traditionally gone to waste if those talents were outside what has traditionally been considered “men’s work.” Men who would have been good house-husbands or child caregivers may have been excluded from fully utilizing their gifts in the past and face discrimination even today. For example, think of the word “nanny” and a female automatically springs to mind—although there are many “mannies” who make a living at the profession of child rearing.
Ironically, I see much in Women Who Kill that supports the hypothesis of a “bi-sexist” society rather than the common presumption of a man’s world. For example, Jones notes that the criminological tradition focusing on men is “legitimate” since men throughout recorded history have “committed far more than their share of crimes, particularly violent crimes.” She continues that male criminologists have shrunk from the implications of this truth. Jones proffers that the possibility “that women are less violent than men by nature leads to disquieting conclusions about the innate moral superiority of women.” Then she writes, “the alternative suggestion that women may be less violent because of their socialization raises even more unnerving possibilities to improve society by bringing up men to be more like women.”
That men are disproportionately violent may be evidence that, in at least some areas, men enjoy fewer options and social protections than women do. The greater propensity of men to rob may be the result of the fact that they are traditionally held responsible for the support of themselves and very frequently held responsible for the support of their spouses and children as well. That they are more violent may, to some extent, reflect the pressures of their traditional role as breadwinners. It could also be the dark side of their role as protectors. Boys are not culturally “allowed” to avoid physical fighting since they will be expected as adult men to risk their physical welfare in the defense of women and children. This enculturation into fighting may also lead to their higher representation in violent crimes.
Bridget Durgan: Parallel to Lizzie?
Jones deals with the Borden case toward the end of a long chapter entitled “Laying Down the Law.” Indeed, the Borden case winds up the chapter. Before delving deeply into the story of the Borden slayings, Jones writes about the relatively little-known case of Bridget Durgan, a 22-year-old woman who worked as a domestic servant in the home of Dr. William Coriell in New Market, New Jersey, in 1867.
Jones asserts that the Durgan case parallels the Borden case, writing, “The Coriell house and the Borden house … each became the scene of an extraordinarily brutal and vicious murder. In both cases the killing took place within the house. No one saw it. In both cases the suspected murderer told confused and contradictory stories of what happened and tried to pin the crime on someone else. In both cases the suspect willfully destroyed physical evidence. In both cases, on the basis of highly incriminating circumstantial evidence, the suspected woman was charged with murder and brought to trial. And there all resemblance stops. For one alleged killer was an Irish servant. And the other was Miss Lizzie Borden.”
Quiet and plain-faced Bridget Durgan had been born in Ireland and immigrated to the United States in her teens, at a time when many Irish journeyed to America because of the potato famine and political unrest in Ireland. When she got to America, she went from household to household as a domestic. Jones observes, “No one who knew her had anything particularly bad to say of her—nor anything particularly good either.”
In late 1866, Bridget found a job with the Coriells. William Coriell, 40, was a doctor and his wife Mary Ellen, 31, was a homemaker. Two-year-old Mamie Coriell had been born to Mary Ellen during their marriage.
Mary Ellen had been pregnant several times but, except for Mamie, all the babies had died. Mary Ellen weighed 100 pounds and was 5 foot 4 inches. The thin woman was not strong enough for some household tasks. Thus, the Coriells hired Bridget to take over the more physically strenuous domestic chores as well as help care for Mamie.
Jones reports, “[Bridget] told everyone how kind Dr. and Mrs. Coriell were to her.”
However, the Coriells did not find Bridget a satisfactory employee and Mary Ellen did not consider Bridget as neat in her work as she ought to be. Additionally, Bridget was often ill. One of the illnesses that plagued her appears to have been epilepsy. Not only did her illnesses mean that she could not perform the tasks she had been hired to do, but it also meant that Dr. Coriell sometimes had to hire someone to watch the servant.
Bridget had spent four months with the Coriells when Mary Ellen decided she had to go because she had “filthy habits.” Masturbation? Loud belching? Leaving soiled items around? Jones writes, “These habits were never more specifically described.”
Bridget was extremely upset at the prospect of leaving the Coriells. She told acquaintances that she did not want to leave and feared she could not easily get a job with another good family. Her firing was made especially distressing because heavy snowing made it a daunting time to travel.
The Coriells set Tuesday, February 25, as the deadline for Bridget Durgan to get out of their home. She spent the day prior to the appointed exit date laundering and ironing her clothes.
Things did not work out as the Coriells had planned.
On February 25, Bridget ran a few houses down to the home of William Coriell’s cousin Israel Coriell. When Israel opened the door, he saw an agitated Bridget holding little Mamie. Bridget’s hair streamed wildly about her head, she had no skirt over her underskirt, and she stood in the snow in her stocking feet. Shocked, the elderly Israel urged her to seek refuge at the home of Rev. Little.
Bridget took that advice. Once at the minister’s residence, she spilled out a terrifying story. She said two burglars had invaded the Coriell house and she feared they might even be murdering Mary Ellen Coriell at that very moment.
Rev. Little turned Mamie over to his wife. When he lit a lamp he saw a large red stain on Bridget’s exposed underskirt. Rev. Little grabbed a gun and rushed to notify other neighbors of the invasion of the Coriell home. When the group got to the residence, they saw that chairs had been tossed around and broken in the sitting room.
The dead body of Mary Ellen Coriell was on the floor near a still smoldering bed. Rev. Little and the other neighbors dragged her corpse out. Jones reports, “Her face was bruised and badly swollen, her neck gashed and bloody. But only when the body was more closely examined would they see how hard Mary Ellen Coriell had fought for her life. The list of her wounds took up half a column in the newspapers. The woman who laid out the body counted twenty-six gashes, not including those on her hand which had been slashed to the bone, apparently as she grasped the blade of the knife her assailant wielded.” Jones elaborates, “Her face, both arms, and her right leg were terribly bruised and swollen—a grim detail of great importance, for swelling does not occur after death. Mary Ellen Coriell’s struggle with her attacker had been fierce—and long.”
The neighbors asked Bridget Durgan for a fuller story about the tragedy. She said two men had come to the door and asked to see Dr. Coriell. Mary Ellen had told them he was away. The men left, later returned, and were allowed in the home. According to Bridget, Mary Ellen told her to fetch Dr. Coriell and Bridget grabbed Mamie and went to Israel Coriell’s house.
Bridget immediately found herself under suspicion. She resolutely denied harming Mary Ellen and named two men as the miscreants. They were investigated and cleared. Then she changed her story and accused another domestic named Anne Linen. Linen was also investigated and cleared.
The night of the murder, Bridget was observed washing a red stain out of her skirt. She was spotted the next morning walking to the garden shed. People followed her into the shed and discovered a bent Coriell kitchen knife. The snow outside the Coriell house showed no footprints as might have been left by intruders. Jones reports, “Bridget’s suggestion to the Littles that the house might be on fire counted against her, too, for if she had been on hand when Mrs. Coriell’s assailant threw the kerosene lamp on the mattress … then she must have been present during the whole death struggle.”
Why did Bridget slaughter Mary Ellen? In the aftermath of her execution, rival pamphlets circulated, each purporting to tell the story of the murder. One was supposedly based on her own handwritten confession, although Bridget was, in fact, unable to read or write.
That version asserted that Bridget had seen a newspaper photograph of one woman stabbing another and decided to murder so she could get her picture in the paper. The second pamphlet claimed that Bridget killed Mary Ellen because Bridget hoped that she would marry Dr. Coriell after his wife was out of the way.
However, Jones reports that at the trial it was generally considered that Bridget had “no motive whatsoever to murder Mary Ellen Coriell. And since there was no motive, the lawyers reasoned … the murder could only have been committed by a fiend.” Jones continues, “Everyone was eager to believe that Bridget Durgan was indeed a fiend. After all, she was Irish.” One of Durgan’s attorneys warned the jury that there was “prejudice in this community” and asked that they “be careful lest it reach them.”
The defense lawyers appointed by the court seemed at times confused as to exactly what their defense was. One minute they refuted the physical evidence that Bridget had killed Mary Ellen and the next they suggested that if she did it she was “not of sound mind” due to her epileptic fits.
Before the case went to the jury, Judge Vrendenburgh gave a charge to the jury that seemed like a direction for conviction. He said that he “knew of no evidence that Bridget was insane beyond the atrocious wickedness of the deed,” and addressed the issue of motive by asking, “Was not cruelty sufficient motive for the cruel?” He counseled the jury that they should have no chivalrous reluctance to send a woman to the gallows as this particular woman had “unsexed herself” by a “monstrous crime.”
On June 17, 1867, Judge Vrendenburgh sentenced Bridget Durgan to death. Courtroom spectators erupted into applause. Bridget Durgan burst out screaming and was dragged, still screaming, from the courthouse to the jail.
The execution of Bridget Durgan was a sordid spectacle. Although the judge at her trial had insisted that she had “unsexed herself” through her brutal crime, to the regular executioner of the area, she was still a woman and he said that he hanged “men, not women.” Thus, people with little experience crafted a rig.
The sheriff feared that Bridget might be too terrified to walk to the scaffold or that she might suffer an epileptic seizure before she could be taken to the gallows. Thus, on the execution day, he woke her up very early and gave her liquor. Two priests held her arms as she drunkenly stumbled to the scaffold.
The rig that had been created by amateurs failed to simply drop her and break her neck. Bridget Durgan hung off the ground, flailing around for about a half hour until she finally choked to death before approximately 2,000 spectators.
Ann Jones and the Borden Case
Jones begins the section on the Borden murders by describing Andrew Borden as the classic tightwad that he is generally depicted as being. Jones writes that Andrew Borden apparently believed that money was the root of all evil if one enjoyed it. She observes, “The trick then, for a good Christian capitalist, was to make money but to enjoy it not at all. And that skill Andrew Borden had perfected.” Jones continues, “His second daughter, Lizzie, had not. She complained a good deal, mostly about money.”
According to Jones, Lizzie’s life was boring and unfocused. Lizzie taught Sunday school and kept treasurer’s records for the church but “mostly she stayed at home” doing sporadic household chores, reading, and occasionally writing letters to friends. Jones observes, “Perhaps staying at home wouldn’t have been quite so tiresome if home had included any of those amenities one might reasonably expect in the household of a man who was well on his way to becoming a millionaire: a piano perhaps, a stereopticon, some new furniture to replace the ugly horsehair parlor fittings fashionable forty years before, electric lighting, or perhaps even a toilet. Other people with far less money had such conveniences.”
Then Jones recounts parts of the Borden story that are well known to readers of The Hatchet, beginning with the morning of August 4, 1892, and Adelaide Churchill seeing Bridget Sullivan hurrying to the home of Dr. Seabury Bowen. After Churchill had arrived home, she looked at the Borden house from a window and heard Lizzie say, “Oh, Mrs. Churchill, do come over. Someone has killed father.” Jones relates Lizzie’s stories of the trip to the barn that kept her out of the house when her father was murdered and how she had not seen her stepmother since Abby had supposedly received a note from a sick friend. Jones tells of police searching for a bloodstained dress on the Saturday after the Thursday morning of the murders and how, on that Sunday, Lizzie burned a dress she claimed was covered with paint.
When discussing the trial, Jones states that Lizzie’s demeanor initially troubled some journalists. Jones writes, “Her calm self-possession, appropriate to a lady, seemed too tightly controlled.” Jones continues that after “a crucial point of law was decided in Lizzie’s favor” the defendant wept. Then she quotes reporter Julian Ralph: “Miss Borden’s womanhood was fully established when she burst into tears.” Jones elaborates that Lizzie frequently displayed emotion after this first crying jag: weeping, calling for water, sniffing smelling salts, and fainting. Then Jones remarks that as a stereotypically emotional “womanly woman,” the accused Miss Lizzie, “was conspicuously out of place in the courtroom that resembled nothing so much as an old boys’ club.”
Jones reports that the defense contended Lizzie had no motive to murder her father. Jones sardonically comments, “as though coming into a half-share of a quarter of a million dollars is not motive enough for murder.” Jones criticizes, “everyone pretended that women do not care about money.”
According to Jones, “Even as the attorneys debated and the judges and jurors decided, all of them seemed caught up in a drama far more encompassing and profound than the facts of the case would suggest … It is no wonder that Lizzie became a legend to subsequent generations, for her trial itself was the ritual reenactment of a very old legend: the embarrassingly trite tale of the damsel in distress.”
Later Jones comments on what she regards as the peculiar role of Lizzie’s attorneys: “They were both patriarchs and champions, both fathers and lovers. This double role of the father/protector to the young woman, with all its incestuous implications, runs as a sinister undercurrent throughout the trial and surfaces only rarely, as in [Governor George] Robinson’s maudlin references to Lizzie’s ring that Andrew wore at his death and that was buried with him, as though he were not father but spectral groom.”
Jones believes that because “an attack upon the patriarch is an attack upon the patriarchy itself,” men desperately wanted to believe that it had not occurred. Thus, Jones thinks, “Paradoxically, then, the defense of Miss Borden becomes the defense of the patriarchy itself.”
After describing the trial and Lizzie’s acquittal, Jones gives one lengthy paragraph to its aftermath. Jones comments, “After the grand charade of the trial, most of her townspeople—who knew she had got away with murder—turned against her; though perhaps they would have been kinder if she had not flaunted her victory so.”
Examining Jones’ Facts and Interpretations
There are several errors of fact in Jones’ recounting of the Borden case. She states that the Borden house, unlike many others less economically well off, lacked even a toilet. However, “Research Discovers An Unknown Side of Andrew J. Borden,” an article published in the July, 1997, issue of the late and lamented Lizzie Borden Quarterly, put a lie to that myth. The article recounted how the Fall River Historical Society had catalogued nineteenth century ledgers and showed that Andrew Borden had furnished both his home and his business, Borden, Almy & Co., with indoor plumbing. What’s more, Andrew applied for this convenience and had it installed within six months of its becoming available to Fall River residents!
Stuck on the legend of Andrew as the tight-fisted miser, Jones, like many authors on the case, is oblivious to the generosity that her own evidence suggests Andrew demonstrated. She observes that Andrew paid for Lizzie to enjoy a lengthy grand tour of Europe but cannot see that this expenditure would hardly be likely from a man determined to pinch every penny.
Finally, the presence of Bridget Sullivan in the Borden home is hardly consistent with the standard depiction of Andrew Borden as hysterically stingy. In a house with three adult women, none of whom were engaged in paid employment, it is hard to imagine a genuine tightwad paying for a full-time, live-in domestic servant.
Jones makes another all-too-common mistake when she writes of August 4, 1892: “the heat wave continued and already the temperature was in the nineties.” Rebello quotes the U. S. Signal Service as recording a temperature of 67 degrees at 7:00 a.m., 83 degrees at 2:00 p.m., and 75 degrees at 9:00 p.m. He also quotes the Fall River Daily Herald as describing that day’s weather as “fair.” The Lizzie Borden Quarterly ran two articles on this subject in two different issues. One article was by William L. Masterton and the other by William Schley-Ulrich. Rebello comments: “Given the documentation, it can be recorded that the murders were not committed on a sweltering hot day.”
Perhaps Jones makes her most significant factual error when she writes that, “all the medical experts agreed that the assailant need not have been spattered with blood.”
Dr. William A. Dolan testified at the trial that the assailant “would have spatters.” When asked specifically about the attack on Andrew Borden, Dolan said that the spatters would be on “the upper part” of the assailant’s body and that it was “probable” that the attacker’s hands would be spattered. The doctor also testified that the attack on Abby Borden would leave an assailant with spatters “on the lower part” of the body.
Jones is sarcastic when discussing Lizzie’s alibi for her whereabouts during Andrew’s murder, and writes that Lizzie claimed, “she had been in the barn behind the house, she said, for ten minutes or fifteen or twenty—in any case, just long enough to miss her father’s murder. She had been looking for lead to make some sinkers for her fishline, although she hadn’t gone fishing for five years; or she was looking for a piece of screen to repair a window. And she had eaten some windfall pears, perhaps two or three, while standing up in the hayloft looking out the window, or perhaps not looking out the window. In any case, after some time she walked the few yards back to the house and heard a grating noise, or her father groaning, or nothing at all.”
The above synopsis clearly makes it sound likely that Lizzie was making up a story. However, Jones omits important information supporting Lizzie’s account.
It seems fishy (?!) for Lizzie to claim she was looking for fishing equipment when she “hadn’t gone fishing for five years.” However, Lizzie was in fact planning such a trip. As Rebello reports, “Lizzie was to vacation with friends in Marion, Massachusetts, at the summer cottage of Dr. Handy.” Rebello also writes that Lizzie told her friend Alice Russell that Lizzie “would go to Marion on Monday, August 8.” It does not seem unreasonable to suppose that Lizzie might have planned to fish on this projected vacation.
Lizzie’s story of the trip to the barn received independent corroboration from ice cream peddler Hyman Lubinsky who said he had passed by the Borden house at about the time Lizzie claimed she had been in the barn. At the trial, Lubinsky testified, “I saw a lady come out from the barn right to the stairs from the back of the house.” He could not identify the woman he saw but said it was not Bridget, with whom he was acquainted.
How close is the Durgan parallel?
There is one analysis that Jones makes of both similarity and contrast between the Durgan and Borden cases that I found quite astute. She quotes novelist Elizabeth Oakes Smith, who visited Durgan in jail, describing Bridget’s appearance. According to Smith, the inmate possessed jaws that were “large and heavy” with her “forehead naturally corrugated and low, nose concave and square at the nostrils, leaving a very long upper lip.”
Later Jones quotes reporter Julian Ralph describing Lizzie: “her nose is a tilting one, and her cheeks bones are so prominent that the lower part of her countenance is greatly overweighted. Her head is broadest at the ears. Her cheeks are very plump, and her jaws are strong and conspicuous. Her thick, protruding lips are pallid from sickness, and her mouth is drawn down into two very deep creases that denote either a melancholy or an irritable disposition.”
Jones accurately points out that Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s description of Bridget Durgan reads very much like Ralph’s description of Lizzie. However, while Smith found that Durgan’s face suggested she was “hardly human” and someone “born without moral responsibility, just as much as the tiger or the wolf is so born,” Ralph thought Borden’s very similar face “that of a lady.” Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and so, apparently, is ladylike-ness. Jones is correct to surmise that class prejudices distorted the lenses through which both Smith and Ralph peered.
Why did Bridget Durgan kill Mary Ellen Coriell? Jones believes Durgan was not responsible for her actions but was in an epileptic seizure. However, the relationship between epileptic seizures and violence is unclear. The website of the Epilepsy Foundation states, “The overwhelming majority of seizures are either convulsions or brief alterations of consciousness during which movements are vague, non-threatening, and primitive. During these episodes, directed violence or any complex actions requiring organized thought are unlikely to occur.”
It seems, to this writer, that the killing of Mary Ellen Coriell was neither the result of an epileptic seizure nor, as the judge at Bridget Durgan’s trial suggested, a matter of simple cruelty.
Bridget had been treated well in the Coriell family—until she was fired. Her dismissal may have been experienced as an especially bitter betrayal because of the family’s previous kindness. This may have triggered a rage in Bridget that led her to viciously attack Mary Ellen.
Ann Jones sees the different outcomes for Bridget Durgan and Lizzie Borden as solely the result of class prejudices. While it is likely that being poor affected the quality of the defense that Durgan received and, thus, may have been a factor in her ultimately being hanged, the truth is that the facts of the cases are divergent in vital respects. In order to obscure this truth, Jones misstates that all experts concurred that the Borden attacker need not have been spattered with blood and omits the important truth that Lizzie’s seemingly unlikely story of a trip to the barn during her father’s killing received independent corroboration from Hyman Lubinsky.
Jones insists that Lizzie Borden’s guilt was just as clear as Bridget Durgan’s. This is simply wrong.
Miss Lizzie and Female Lives Half-Lived
Jones ignores facts that do not fit her belief that Miss Lizzie was acquitted purely because of an all-male jury’s reluctance to believe in a “certified female father-killer.” It is entirely possible that Lizzie was, in fact, guilty but that there was room for reasonable doubt.
However, Jones makes good points in her analysis when she points out the odd and frustrating situation faced by many unmarried women during the time period. They often continued, as Lizzie and Emma did, to live at home until their parents died. Few occupations were open to them. Jones writes that Lizzie “was nothing but Andrew Borden’s daughter, a woman whose life was apparently without the possibility of an event.”
Jones reports that political activist Mary Livermore visited Lizzie in jail. Livermore may have been interested in Lizzie because Livermore’s What Shall We Do with Our Daughters? argued that young women should be trained to hold down paid employment.
Finally, Jones praised Agnes DeMille because she “came closest to the bone of Lizzie Borden’s existence when she created her ballet Fall River Legend.” Jones quotes DeMille: “Lizzie’s life consisted mainly in things … that didn’t happen. And how does one put inaction, lack of dynamics, the maintenance of status quo into dance? … How does one express boredom on stage?”
These are excellent points, especially relevant to Lizzie’s era but not irrelevant to our own. Traditionally, there has been a tendency to value men in terms of active virtues such as industriousness and courage while women, especially young women, have been judged by the virtue of chastity. This is not arbitrary as the consequences of un-chastity—the births of children who will be raised in unstable and deprived environments—can be disastrous not only for the woman but also for the child and for society as a whole.
The problem with seeing females entirely in terms of this virtue is that chastity is composed of NOT doing things that are bad rather than doing things that are good.
There is a danger in viewing women this way, as life is ultimately about activity, about DOING. The modern slogan “Just Say No” has value but has been rightly criticized by those asking if there is enough to say “Yes” to. A rich, full life can never be made up of things that do not happen.
Works cited
“Frequently Asked Questions.” Epilepsy Foundation. Page 4. 1 August 2010.
<http://www.epilepsyfoundation.org/about/professionals/emergency/takeanotherlook/tal_ FAQs.cfm>.
Jones, Ann. Women Who Kill. Beacon Press. 1996.
Rebello, Leonard. Lizzie Borden: Past and Present. Al-Zach Press. 1999.
Tanous, Jamelle. “Research Discovers an Unknown Side of Andrew J. Borden.” Lizzie Borden Quarterly. July 1997: 18-19.
Trial of Lizzie Andrew Borden, Volumes 1 and 2. Widdows, Harry. LizzieAndrewBorden.com. 2001.
