Denise Noeby Denise Noe
First published in January/February, 2008, Volume 5, Issue 1, The Hatchet: Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies.
The Borden murders took place in 1892, in the final days of the Victorian era, which ended with the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. It was a period that had seen a great deal of ferment in the scientific realm. The Second Industrial Revolution was in full swing, leading to changes that reverberate to the present day. Charles Darwin had published his famous—some would say infamous—On the Origin of Species in 1859, launching a controversy over the reality of evolution that still sizzles as hot as ever a century-and-a-half after it began.
Of course, the areas of science that most concern the Borden case are medicine and forensics. As far as is known, there was no eyewitness to either the murder of Andrew or Abby Borden, other than the murderer or murderers, and there has never been a verified and reliable confession.
Thus, these murders remain a case of circumstantial evidence, with medical and forensic science persisting as vital to the prosecution and the defense, as well as to modern students of the case. It is fascinating to closely examine the role played by these fields in this most baffling of mysteries.
Poisons
A defendant’s attempt to purchase a deadly poison just one day before a double homicide for which she is accused would appear to show a murderous frame of mind. However, as is well known to Borden enthusiasts, the judges ruled that Lizzie’s alleged attempt to buy prussic acid was inadmissible, so her jury was not to consider the information when they deliberated.
However, readers of The Hatchet undoubtedly know that Eli Bence, a clerk at D.R. Smith’s drugstore, testified at both the inquest and the preliminary hearing that Lizzie had been to the store and asked for the poison, saying she wanted it to put on the edge of a seal skin cape. Bence further claimed that he refused to sell her the deadly poison as it could only be purchased with a physician’s prescription. In her inquest testimony, Lizzie stoutly denied that she had attempted to buy prussic acid or even knew where D. R. Smith’s store was.
Many of us probably scratch our heads at the term “prussic acid.” Indeed, this writer asked about this poison at a nearby Eckerd’s drugstore and found the pharmacist unfamiliar with it.
This toxic chemical is also known as hydrocyanic acid. Both prussic acid and hydrocyanic acid are names for a solution of hydrogen cyanide in water.
One might be familiar with the word cyanide, but does the layman know exactly what it is? Encyclopedia Britannica explains that cyanide is “a highly volatile, colourless, and extremely poisonous liquid.” It is so poisonous, in fact, that hydrogen cyanide is used in gas chambers as a form of execution in the United States. Lizzie would not have faced a dose in the event of her conviction, as this method of punishment was not introduced into the U.S. until the 1920s.
Sedatives
Some people have taken reports of Lizzie’s supposed cold demeanor in the aftermath of the slayings as damning evidence of her guilt. However, Dr. Seabury Bowen testified at the trial that he found her upset enough in the hours and days following the murders to give her medicines to calm her.
The hardy Lizzie-Did-It brigade may conclude that Dr. Bowen was not a good judge of his patient’s emotional status and even that he and Lizzie were in cahoots. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Dr. Bowen said that he found Lizzie with “nervous excitement and headache,” and gave her pharmaceuticals to allay that distress.
The first such medicine, given on Thursday, August 4, was bromo caffeine, a drug that did not require a prescription. Bowen administered one dose and left a second with instructions that it should be taken in an hour.
How can it be that caffeine was given to someone in the aftermath of a horrible trauma to quiet her nerves? We all know that caffeine is a stimulant. Coffee, the beverage most strongly associated with caffeine, is often consumed to help get us going in the morning, and caffeine is the best-known active ingredient in NoDoz. We also know that caffeine often has the effect of making people nervous and jittery.
So why in the world did Dr. Bowen give it to a supposedly shocked and distraught Lizzie after her stepmother and father were butchered?
According to Bottlebooks.com, Bromo caffeine “was a headache remedy. Originally it was called ‘Broma’ . . . [and] manufactured by the Keasbey & Mattison company in the 1890s.” The website Ambler . . . Then and Now describes bromo caffeine as a patent medicine created “to soothe the anxieties of the ‘neurasthenic woman or the congestive or anaemic headaches of the fin de siecle man.’”
Lizzie Borden Past & Present describes bromo caffeine as “the equivalent of aspirin” and states that it was a “mild sedative given for headache, pain and nervousness.”
Both of the above descriptions still beg the question of how caffeine, a stimulant, could soothe nervousness. The answer is that caffeine could not, but bromo caffeine could, because of the ingredients with which the caffeine is mixed—a bromide that the Science and Technology Encyclopedia defines as “salt of hydrobromic acid or certain organic compounds containing bromine. The bromides of ammonium, sodium, potassium, and certain other metals were once extensively used medically as sedatives.”
In the days after the murders, Dr. Bowen prescribed another medicine to calm Lizzie’s nerves: sulfate of morphine. She was probably under the influence of this drug when she testified at the inquest. During this admissibility ruling at the trial, Lizzie’s attorneys, however, argued that her testimony should be excluded because they could show that she had been virtually under arrest once the August 8th warrant was drawn, and the court agreed. It is interesting that they did not argue that Lizzie was possibly under the effects of morphine, a narcotic, which could have impaired her responses since it is known to affect memory and even to trigger hallucinations.
Prescribing morphine for its psychological effects was a common practice in the Victorian era but would be utterly verboten in our own because of concern about the possibility of addiction.
Time of Death
Medical science also came into play in determining the times of deaths of Abby and Andrew Borden. In Forty Whacks, David Kent notes that while “the science of forensic medicine was not an advanced one in 1892,” Dr. William A. Dolan, “could tell by the blackened, thickened blood of Abby’s wounds and the fresh, red flow from Andrew’s that Abby had already been dead an hour or so when Andrew’s time had come.” The time the alarm was sounded meant that Andrew was murdered at roughly 11:00 AM, which would place Abby’s death at about 9:30 AM. Kent continues, “It made a difference, that span of time when nothing had been seen and nothing heard.” Indeed, the hour plus between deaths placed a strong spotlight of suspicion on Lizzie and has become a perennial sore spot for those who believe her innocent.
Medical practitioners of the era were well acquainted with autopsies and authorities recognized the need for them in the Borden case. Dr. William A. Dolan, surgeon and doctor, was the Medical Examiner for the Third District of Bristol County, Massachusetts, an area that included Fall River. According to Lizzie Borden Past & Present, it was “Dr. Dolan [who] removed the Bordens’ stomachs and sent them to Professor [Edward S.] Wood. Dr. Dolan’s report for this examination was dated August 8, 1892, and witnessed by William S. Learned, M.D. and J.Q.A. Tourtelott of Fall River.”
Autopsies had certainly been conducted on the dead prior to the 19th century. According to Dictionary.com, the word “autopsy” comes from a Greek word meaning “a seeing for oneself” or “seeing with one’s own eyes.” MedicineNet.com reports that, “Galen (131-200 A.D.), a disciple of Hypocrites practicing in ancient Greece, performed surgical dismantling (dissection) of animals and humans.”
However, MedicineNet.com also writes that “before 1700 there was a negative attitude regarding dissection of the human body.” There were concerns that it might violate religious precepts. Despite this attitude, autopsies were sometimes performed, and, in the late 13th century, the University of Bologna’s law faculty would sometimes require autopsies in order to resolve legal questions. In the latter part of the 15th Century, Pope Sixtus IV issued an edict specifically permitting autopsies by medical students—probably greatly advancing the cause of medical science. Perhaps significantly, “Some historians say that the power of the autopsy in medical education peaked during the 1800s.” Thus, the doctors in the Borden case would have been intimately familiar with this procedure.
What did the examinations of the fluids and organs removed at the time of the autopsies show?
It was Dr. Edward S. Wood, a professor of chemistry at Harvard Medical School, who was given the task. Kent reports that Dr. Wood’s “specialty was poisons and bloodstains” and that he was an old hand at courtroom testifying, having been on the witness stand at hundreds of trials.
According to the trial transcript, Dr. Wood testified about Abby Borden’s stomach: “I removed the contents into a separate vessel and thoroughly examined the inner surface of the stomach which I found to be, so far as I could determine, perfectly healthy in appearance. There was no evidence of the action of any irritant whatever.”
This was especially significant as the Bordens had been ill on Tuesday evening and the Wednesday morning prior to the murders, raising the possibility of poisoning.
Wood attested that he found evidence of “partially digested” food including starch, meat, cake, and vegetable. He noted that Abby’s stomach contained “an undigested skin of a vegetable or of a fruit, one piece of which I have removed and have there.” Dr. Wood indicated something held in his hand and explained, “It looks like the red skin of an apple or pear.” The particular fruits mentioned are intriguing, as the former has echoes of the Garden of Eden and The Fall, while the latter reminds us of the peculiarly large role played by pears in this case.
Dr. Wood testified that “the stomach of Mr. Borden I removed and examined in precisely the same way” and “with the same result, —that is, there was no evidence whatever of any diseased condition or of the action of any irritant so far as could be determined by inspection and ocular examination.”
According to Dr. Wood, Andrew’s stomach had “tissue cells such as might have come from the skin of an apple or pear.”
However, Wood found that the “character of the food found in the stomach of Mr. Borden differed from that in the stomach of Mrs. Borden in that there was very much less of it, and that it consisted mostly of water and contained only a very small quantity of solid food.”
What was learned from these findings? “This would indicate that the digestion, had it gone on normally, at the normal rate, in the stomach of Mr. Borden, was much further advanced than in the case of Mrs. Borden, since nearly all of the solid food had been expelled from the stomach into the intestine, and that the stomach digestion was almost completed, and it would make it therefore somewhere in the neighborhood of four hours, say from three, anywhere from three and a half to four hours, the digestion, providing it took place with the ordinary rapidity,” Dr. Wood stated.
Hosea Knowlton asked the witness to assume that Abby and Andrew “ate breakfast at the same table and time and partook of the same breakfast substantially” and to estimate “what difference in the time of deaths” would be reasonable to ascertain. Dr. Wood answered that it “would be somewhere in the neighborhood of an hour and a half more or less.”
He commented more completely on the topic of poisoning. “Both of those contents of the stomachs were immediately tested for prussic acid . . . with a negative result,” he said. “Afterwards they were analyzed in the regular way for the irritant poisons, with also a negative result.”
Dr. Wood continued that he had examined the milk delivered to the Borden home on the day of the killings and the previous day. He found no poison in either specimen.
What was done to detect poison? What could have been done at the time?
Dr. Manuel J. Torres, who is currently National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow of the Plant Genome Mapping Lab of the University of Georgia observes, “By 1892, chemistry was an advanced science very capable of diagnostic tests to determine the chemical composition and identity of a poisonous substance.”
Professor Wood did not specify in his testimony as to which tests for poison he or others on the Harvard University team of forensic examiners performed on the milk and stomachs, but it is probable that one of them was the Marsh test for arsenic. As Columbia Encyclopedia relates, the Marsh test is “so sensitive that it can be used to detect minute amounts of arsenic in foods . . . or in stomach contents.” How is this test done? “The sample is placed in a flask with arsenic-free zinc and sulfuric acid. Arsine gas (also hydrogen) forms and is led through a drying tube to a hard glass tube in which it is heated. The arsenic is deposited as a ‘mirror’ just beyond the heated area and on any cold surface held in the burning gas emanating from the jet.” The test was named for its inventor, the British chemist James Marsh.
Marsh developed his test in 1836 and it soon became a standard procedure in court cases involving arsenic poisoning. In the decades that followed, the process was improved upon because his original test was a destructive one that used the sample completely. In the 20th century, the test was replaced by more accurate and less destructive x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, which could also test hair samples—something the Marsh test was not sensitive enough to do.
What experiment was performed to test for prussic acid, better known to us as cyanide? Most probably it was the sodium fusion test, which the Encyclopedia of Chemistry, Analytics, and Pharmaceutics reports was developed by Jean Louis Lassaigne, who died in 1859. “When an organic compound is heated strongly with sodium, any halogens, nitrogen, and sulfur will be converted into inorganic sodium salts such as sodium halide (for halides), sodium cyanide (for nitrogen), sodium sulfide (for sulfur), and sodium thiocyenate (for sulfur and nitrogen). These inorganic salts can subsequently be tested using the appropriate qualitative tests.”
The test was performed by placing “a piece of clean sodium metal, about the size of a pea into an ignition tube. Add a little of the compound (50 mg or 2-3 drops). Heat the tube on a Bunsen flame – gently at first, allowing any distillate formed to drop back onto the molten sodium. When charring begins, heat the bottom of the tube to dull redness for about three minutes and finally plunge the tube, while still hot, into a small beaker containing cold distilled water (6mL) and cover immediately with a clean wire gauze.
The tube shatters, releasing the contents into the water. Any residual sodium metal will react to give sodium hydroxide. Stir the mixture, boil for 1-2 minutes, and filter hot through a fluted paper to remove char and broken glass.
The broken glass and char are filtered off and the aqueous solution is separated into three portions and tested for halides, cyanides, sulfides, and thiocyanates using the respective tests.” According to the Principles of Organic Chemistry, “The Lassaigne test converts any nitrogen present in the compound to sodium cyanide.”
Blood Testing
In 1892, technology existed for scientists to be able to conduct important tests on both hair and blood. Officer Michael Mullaly was probably aware of this when he asked the very recently bereaved Lizzie if axes or hatchets were in the home. Lizzie replied in the affirmative and directed Bridget Sullivan to lead Mullaly to the basement where they were kept. Sullivan led him to the cellar and pulled down a box within which were hatchets. Mullaly also collected two axes from the south wall of the cellar. All of the tools were sent to Dr. Wood for blood and hair analysis.
The science of the day enabled Dr. Edward S. Wood to test the hair found on one hatchet and he testified at the trial that he had examined it under a microscope. “It was seen to consist of almost entirely of the central medullary cavity, which is unlike human hair, and it had a red brown pigment, and is more similar to a cow’s hair than any other animal whose hair I have ever examined,” Dr. Wood stated. He later reiterated, “It is animal hair, there is no question of that, and probably cow hair.”
Tests for blood were negative on the axes and hatchets, indicating that whatever stains were present were from other sources that had taken on a red or reddish look. Dr. Wood could have performed a test for blood that had been developed by Christian Freidrich Schonbein in 1863. According to an article at geocities.com, Schonbein invented this test for blood “based on the observation that the peroxidase-like activity in hemoglobin causes oxidation of hydrogen peroxide. The result of the reaction between hydrogen peroxide and hemoglobin is the appearance of ‘foaming’ as the oxygen bubbles rise.” We can assume that the red spots on the Borden hatchets did not foam.
Fingerprints
No one investigating the Borden murders appears to have tested the crime scene for fingerprints. This powerful identifying tool had not yet come into common usage, although it was in the process of doing so.
The History of Fingerprints notes that Sir William Herschel, Chief Magistrate of the Hooghly district in Jungipoor, India, began using fingerprints on contracts with locals in 1858 but acted “on a whim, and with no thought toward personal identification.” His collections of fingerprints grew and with it his “private conviction that all fingerprints were unique to the individual, as well as permanent throughout that individual’s life.” However, he did not transform this “private conviction” into public and common knowledge.
By 1880, Dr. Henry Faulds had become convinced that fingerprints could help identify individuals and formed a fingerprint identification system. He wrote to Sir Charles Darwin about this system, but Darwin was elderly and sick and could not help Faulds. Instead, he forwarded the information to his cousin, anthropologist Francis Galton, who worked on the use of fingerprints as a means of identification.
Only one year before the Borden murders, in 1891, a police official, Juan Vucetich of Argentina, began collecting fingerprint patterns. The next year, the year of the Borden slayings, the pioneering Vucetich nailed the first murderer ever identified through a fingerprint. According to The History of Fingerprints, Vucetich “was able to identify Francis Rojas, a woman who murdered her two sons and cut her own throat in an attempt to place blame on another. Her bloody print was left on a door post, proving her identity as the murderer.”
Perhaps the Borden case might have been solved if Juan Vucetich had immigrated to America and settled in Fall River, Massachusetts prior to 1892. But then that would have meant that murderer Francis Rojas would not have been caught!
Scotland Yard set up a Fingerprint Branch in 1901. The timeline reports that the next year, a full decade after Abby and Andrew Borden were brutally butchered, the New York Civil Service Commission began testing the “first systematic use of fingerprints in the U.S.” In 1905, the U.S. Department of Justice formed the Bureau of Criminal Identification to collect fingerprint identification cards.
As fingerprinting became an accepted method of identifying criminals in the U.S., it is possible that the murderer of the Bordens heaved a sigh of relief that this method was not in everyday use when he or she did the foul deeds.
Of course, some people’s fingerprints would have inevitably been at the residence even if they were as innocent as newborn babes. Among them would be the deceased, Lizzie, Emma, Bridget Sullivan, and Uncle John Morse. The fingerprints of the friends of Borden family members or of Andrew’s business associates or employees could also have been found without necessarily indicating guilt.
However, fingerprinting would have been extremely useful, as it could have found evidence of someone whose presence did not have an easily guiltless explanation. Perhaps the murderer was a person outside those known to have been in the house, and a fingerprint would have alerted authorities to that malefactor’s identity. Even if the person who left the impression could not be identified, the existence of a fingerprint from someone outside those known to have been on the premises for legitimate purposes would have lent credence to the contention that the killer was from outside that group.
On the other hand, if the Borden home had been thoroughly examined for fingerprints and no unexpected print found, it would have supported the belief that the murderer was one of those commonly suspected.
While fingerprint identification was being developed even as the Borden case unfolded, and would become an accepted forensic tool about a decade after the murders, DNA profiling was many, many years in the future, with American authorities first using it in a court case as evidence in 1987 in Orlando, Florida. We can only wonder what might have become of the Borden mystery if this technique, undreamed of in the time period, had been available then!
Science and Crime Detection
The Borden case was illuminated by the medical and forensic science of its time period, but its solution may have been left in the dark by the scientific limitations of the age. There is no doubt that the state of medical and forensic science in 1892 is a vital topic for those pursuing this most extraordinary of mysteries.
The medicine of Lizzie’s era allowed her to receive narcotics to treat psychological distress after the murders—such treatment with narcotics may have left her genuinely confused, led her to give contradictory testimony, and contributed to an unfair suspicion hovering over her both then and now.
It is possible that if the Borden case had occurred today, our contemporary forensics might have decisively solved it, leading to convictions supported broadly by public opinion and reasonable observers. Then again, perhaps we are not yet at a level of scientific knowledge adequate to the facts of the Borden murders. Perhaps we never will be.
The tantalizing possibility exists that future forensic techniques still to be developed may yet lead to a genuinely satisfactory solution to the murders of Abby and Andrew Borden. We might hope that a solution to the case does not put The Hatchet out of business, as this Whittler loves writing for it.
The author thanks Dr. Manuel J. Torres for his statements in personal correspondence.
Works Cited:
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Frank H. Burt. The Trial of Lizzie A. Borden. Upon an indictment charging her with the murders of Abby Durfee Borden and Andrew Jackson Borden. Before the Superior Court for the County of Bristol. New Bedford, MA, 1893, 2 volumes; Orlando: PearTree Press, 2001.
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Kent, David. Forty Whacks. PA: Yankee Books, 1992.
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Science and Technology Encyclopedia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000: 72.
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