Denise Noeby Denise Noe
First published in August/September, 2005, Volume 2, Issue 4, The Hatchet: Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies.
The Lizzie Borden case is often seen as a kind of sepia-tinged touchstone of the Victorian era, the period in which Lizzie grew to adulthood and in which the crimes and trial took place. However, Lizbeth Borden, as she called herself after the trial, lived more than three decades after her release on June 20, 1893. She died in 1927, well into the decade known as the Jazz Age or Roaring Twenties. Indeed, Lizbeth lived through periods that included some of the greatest changes the world has ever known. She saw revolutions in politics, entertainment, popular culture, and transportation. The acquitted Lizbeth lived from the era of the Gibson Girl to that of the flapper and witnessed the rise of the phonograph, the motion picture, the radio, the automobile, and the airplane. She also participated in some of these changes.
At the time her murder trial ended, President Grover Cleveland was in the White House and the nation was suffering an economic downturn but Lizbeth was wealthy. Along with her sister, Emma, she had inherited a handsome fortune that the sisters used to acquire a new home. According to Agnes deMille in Lizzie Borden, A Dance of Death, “Lizzie on her release had joined Emma at the homestead on Second Street. They stayed there for a few months and then…purchased a luxurious residence on French Street, ‘Maplecroft,’ up on the hill, in the best section of town.”
Leonard Rebello notes in Lizzie Borden Past & Present that the removal of furniture from the Second Street house drew many spectators. He quotes the New York Times as saying on September 10, 1893 that, “Knots of curious people gathered on the opposite side of the street, and pedestrians paused long enough to scrutinize the house and the household effects.” It also wrote, “A rumor prevails here that, rather than let it continue as an object of curiosity to the idle and the morbid, the Borden girls will have it destroyed and erect on its site an office building.” Of course, this rumor, like so much gossip around this case, proved to be baseless.
Frank Spiering, in Lizzie, writes that one Sunday shortly after moving into Maplecroft, Lizbeth attended her first church service since the verdict. She went to the same Congregational Church at which she had once taught Sunday school and at which Reverend Edwin Buck had proclaimed her innocent. She entered from a side door and took a place at the family pew that Andrew Borden had rented. According to Spiering, people began moving away from her as soon as she sat down, leaving her stranded in the middle of empty pews and she never went back to church.
This account is disputed in Rebello’s book. He quotes an article first published on June 5, 1894 in the Boston Daily Advertiser as saying that Lizzie “frequently attends service at the church where she has so long been a member.”
In 1893 Edwin Porter, a reporter for the Fall River Globe, published a book about the case called The Fall River Tragedy. Porter’s book never explicitly named the acquitted Lizzie as the murderer but strongly suggested her guilt. Spiering writes that Lizbeth bought up all the copies she could of the volume and had them burned and that only a few copies escaped her conflagration. However, this may be one of the many myths surrounding the Borden case. According to William Schley-Ulrich in an article on extant original Porter volumes in the October, 1997 issue of the LBQ, “No evidence to support this theory has ever surfaced.”
The following year, Lizbeth broke with the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, a group of which she had been an active member and who had strongly supported her during her trial. Feeling insulted by W.C.T.U. members, she evicted the Fall River branch from the A.J. Borden Building, according to Spiering.
There is no question that, in June of 1894, the Fall River W.C.T.U. stopped gathering at the A.J. Borden Building that had been their longtime meeting place. However, according to Rebello, the precise reason, and whether or not they were “evicted,” was a matter of dispute between newspapers. One said that several W.C.T.U. members would not speak to Lizbeth on the street and that their snubs led her to oust the organization from the A.J. Borden Building. The other two newspapers claimed the W.C.T.U. voluntarily vacated after Lizbeth told them she did not want them there. The Fall River Daily Globe responded that this was a distinction without a difference since being “given to understand that it wasn’t wanted” is “equivalent in polite society to be[ing] ordered out.”
Lizbeth wrote a letter to a friend dated 1897 in which she talked of how she spent “much time on the piazza in my steamer chair reading and building castles in the air.” Judging by the books willed to a friend at her death many years later, she probably had good taste in literary material. Agnes deMille, in A Dance of Death, mentions her possessing volumes of Dickens, Scott and Trollope. Rebello records that she had a library card when she lived at the French Street residence. The space for “occupation” is left blank since her father had supported her while he was alive. Lizzie was someone of independent means after Andrew’s death and so never had either a career or a job.
The 1900s saw ragtime emerge as a preeminent American musical genre. The feather boa became fashionable for females of the “swell” set. The popular ideal for young women was that of the “Gibson girl,” based on drawings of illustrator Charles Dana Gibson. According to eyewitnesstohistory.com, the quintessential Gibson Girl is described thusly: “With her hair piled atop her head and a waist so tiny as to defy belief, the Gibson Girl represented a serene self-confidence that could surmount any problem. The envy of all who knew her, the Gibson Girl remained aloof of her surroundings but not to the extent of haughtiness. She was at once remote but yet accessible.” No longer young or slim, Lizbeth was unlikely to fancy herself a Gibson girl.
Leonard Rebello published a brief note dated May 31, 1900 that “L. A. Borden” wrote to a neighbor named John S. Brayton. In it she said she was “sorry to make any complaint” but asked if he would “take away the little bird that crows so much” at his house because “it wakens me early so that I cannot sleep and when we are on the piazza it is so noisy.” She claimed she was very nervous, and by then she was nearly 40.
It is not known if Lizbeth followed headline grabbing murder cases. She may have avoided them so as not to be reminded of her life’s major trauma. However, a murder that would, like the Borden case, become a classic in the annals of crime was committed in 1906 when millionaire Harry K. Thaw shot and killed Stanford White. Thaw claimed to have been driven insane because White was having an affair with his wife, Evelyn Nesbit Thaw. The White-Thaw case captured public attention in part because, also like the Borden case, it focused on gender issues albeit of a different sort. Thaw appeared to argue that a man could naturally be expected to lose his mind if his wife betrayed him. The trial ended in a hung jury but doctors declared Thaw insane and he was put in an institution. An interesting link exists between this case and that of Lizzie Borden: at one time, Evelyn had been sent to a New Jersey boarding school by White, before her marriage to Thaw. The school was run by Mathilda deMille, mother of Cecil B. Agnes deMille, author of A Dance of Death, was Cecil’s niece.
Sometime in 1904 or 1905 Lizbeth met someone who would become vitally important in her life: stage (and later movie) actress Nance O’Neil. The Internet Movie Database records that “Between 1904 and 1906, Nance O’Neil was a close friend of Lizzie Borden” and that “there were rumors that they were lovers.” Little is known of the exact nature of the relationship between Lizbeth and O’Neil so it is quite possible that the rumors were just idle chatter.
A rift opened between Lizbeth and Emma in 1905 and Emma left Maplecroft. Ann Jones in Women Who Kill writes that the source of the sisters’ alienation from each other was “rumored to be a squabble over property,” however Spiering claims it was caused by a party Lizbeth threw for Nance and her theater company. He quotes a newspaper article as saying “Emma, who is puritanic and austere, objected vigorously” to the party even though it was “said to be of the quietist character.” Rebello records that Emma also “objected to the coachman, Joseph Tetrault, a former barber, known to have been a fine looking man and very popular among the ladies.” He worked for Emma and Lizzie from 1899 to 1902, was dismissed, returned to his previous occupation as a barber, and later rehired by the Bordens in 1904. He worked at Maplecroft until 1908. The fact that Emma left one year after his return and is known to have objected to him is certainly fodder for speculation. Additionally, it was at this time, 1905, that Lizzie was “for the first time…listed as Lizbeth” in the City Directory, according to a source found in Rebello, and could be reached at “Exchange 378.”
A Swedish born housekeeper named Hannah Nelson who started working for Lizbeth in 1903 took sick in 1908. Rebello gives evidence that Lizbeth “wrote a letter (June 30, 1908) to Rhode Island Hospital seeking the status of Miss Nelson’s condition.” In letters to several of her friends, Lizbeth expressed concern for the health of her employee. The 37-year-old Nelson died at the Rhode Island Hospital on July 3, 1908.
When the “teens” began, President Taft was still in the White House. He ran for re-election in 1912 in a three-way race. Former President Theodore Roosevelt was running on the third party Progressive ticket. Commentators tended to believe that his entrance into the race gave it to Democrat Woodrow Wilson.
The most momentous event of this decade was undoubtedly the war that would be touched off in the middle of it. The Lusitania was sunk in 1915 by a German sub. It was a cargo and passenger ship from Great Britain but included at least 114 Americans onboard. Two years later, the US severed diplomatic relations with Germany and entered the First World War. Also called “The Great War” and “The War to End All Wars,” it was the largest conflict the world had yet seen. It ended November 11, 1918, after convulsing much of Europe with bloodshed on an unprecedented scale. According to encyclopedia.com, “About 10 million dead and 20 million wounded is a conservative estimate.”
The friendship (and possible love affair) of Lizbeth Borden with Nance O’Neil had apparently dissolved by this decade. However, Lizbeth may have enjoyed watching Nance in the motion pictures, a young art form just then coming into vogue. According to the IMDB, the actress made her screen debut in 1913 in The Count of Monte Cristo.
Spiering writes that a reporter for the Boston Sunday Post, Edwin J. Maguire, attempted to see Lizbeth in 1913 on the twentieth anniversary of the year of her trial. Maguire telephoned but, as Spiering wrote, “Lizzie curtly let him know that she had nothing to say.”
However, Maguire was able to secure an interview with Emma who was then a guest at the home of the late Rev. Edwin Buck. Rebello supports Spiering’s account and writes that Maguire interviewed Emma and published the fruits of that interview in the April 13, 1913 edition of the Boston Sunday Post.
Emma would not tell Maguire why she felt she could not longer live in the same residence with her sister but insisted that she was certain Lizzie had not killed their stepmother and father. She is quoted in Spiering as saying “Here is the strongest thing that has convinced (sic: impressed) me of Lizzie’s innocence,” she explained. “The authorities never found the axe or whatever implement it was that figured in the killing. Lizzie, if she had done that deed, could never have hidden the instrument of death so that the police could not find it.”
In 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution passed making the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” unlawful in the United States. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, an organization of which Lizzie had once been an active member, had worked long and hard to make Prohibition the law of the land. The Eighteenth Amendment was a great triumph for that organization as well as many other temperance groups.
The 1920s have been called a “dress rehearsal for the 1960s” because it was a decade of so much rebellion against convention. Although Norman Mailer has often been derided as a male supremacist, he was indisputably right when he wrote of the Twenties in The Prisoner of Sex that it was “a decade conceivably as interesting in the emancipation of women as any other ten years since the decline of Rome.” For one thing, 1920 saw the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution giving women throughout the US the right to vote. The WCTU had also worked hard on behalf of women’s suffrage.
The era saw the rise of the “flapper,” young women who shocked their elders with such enormities as short or “bobbed” hair and daring dresses that exposed the calves of their legs. It is unlikely that Lizbeth, by then a corpulent senior citizen, took up the new fashions. Rather, like the vast majority of middle-aged and older women of the decade, she probably continued donning the ankle skimming dresses and skirts familiar to her and putting her long, gray hair up.
The Twenties were the decade in which the radio became a commonplace in American homes. The Archer Audio Archives record that while “Only 500 [radio] receivers existed in 1920,” by 1924 there were “2 1/2 million radios… in American households.”
In 1924, the murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks in Chicago grabbed headlines. The case resembled the Borden murders in that both victim and accused were from the upper classes. Unlike the Borden case, the Franks murder did not remain a mystery: 19-year-old Nathan Leopold, Jr. and 18-year-old Richard Loeb, both young men with distinguished academic records, confessed to the murder. As shocked as the public was by the identities of the murderers, it was even more aghast when the motive was revealed. The pair had plotted the killing as an experiment in the “perfect crime.” According to the book on H. H. Holmes and the 1893 Columbian Exposition of Chicago, The Devil In The White City, the clothing from the body of Franks was dumped at “the lagoons at Jackson Park,” the site of the Fair, which Lizzie had attended soon after her release from jail. A famous attorney of his day, Clarence Darrow defended the youths and managed to spare them from execution.
1927 saw the murder of Albert Snyder by his wife Ruth and her married lover, corset salesman Judd Gray. The case titillated with its details of double adultery and multiple insurance policies (one of which had a double indemnity clause that would serve as inspiration for the title of the classic film of that name) taken out on the deceased. Having neither the youth of Leopold and Loeb nor the virtuoso powers of Clarence Darrow on their side, both would be executed in 1928 – but Lizbeth Borden would not live to see it.
But she had seen, and become a part of, one of the most far-reaching transformations in human history: the advent of the automobile. Ford founded the Ford Motor Company in 1903 and in 1908 Model Ts began sharing the roads with horses pulling carriages.
By the 1920s, Lizbeth Borden was part of the automobile era and owned and drove a black Packard. In Lizzie Frank Spiering quotes Edith Coolidge Hart, as saying, “Many times I saw her in her automobile, driving around Fall River.”
In 1923, according to the land transaction records in Rebello, Emma sold her share in the A.J. Borden Building. Now 64 years old, Lizzie was white-haired and bespectacled. She did not want the property sold. The remaining land transactions between the sisters appear to have been very few and minor after this event until their deaths.
1926 found Lizzie in the hospital for a gallbladder operation. Hating the hospital food, she arranged for a caterer to provide her with meals. Spiering says she had a special fondness for orange sherbet. As she was recovering, Lizzie heard that a lady had just given birth and asked to see the baby. Spiering wrote, “As Lizzie caressed her, she remarked to the nurses present that it was the first baby she had ever held.”
That hospital stay lasted for several weeks. She returned to Maplecroft but was still sickly and weak. She became dreadfully sick on the night of June 1, 1927 and died. Emma, according to Spiering, did not yet know of her sister’s illness and death and claims she fell that same night, shattering her hip from which she never recovered. Emma died nine days later on June 10, 1927.
Part of Elton John’s song, “Goodbye, Norma Jean” about Marilyn Monroe, could have been written about Lizzie – or Lizbeth—Borden: “Your candle burned out long before your legend ever did.”
Works Cited:
ArcherAudioArchives.com. 2005. <http://archeraudioarchives.com> (27 June 2005).
de Mille, Agnes. Lizzie Borden: A Dance of Death. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1968.
“The Gibson Girl” EyeWitness to History. 2001. <http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/gibson.htm> (28 June 2005).
Internet Movie Database. <http://imdb.com> (27 June 2005).
Jones, Ann. Women Who Kill. NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980.
Larson, Eric, The Devil In The White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America. NY: Vintage, 2004.
Mailer, Norman. The Prisoner of Sex. NY: Signet, 1971.
Porter, Edwin H. The Fall River Tragedy. Fall River, MA: George R. H. Buffinton, Press of J. D. Munroe, 1893. Rpt. with new introduction by Robert Flynn. Portland, ME: King Philip Pub., 1985.
Rebello, Leonard. Lizzie Borden Past and Present. Al-Zach Press, 1999.
Schley-Ulrich, William. “Porter’s Fall River Tragedy: How Rare?” Lizzie Borden Quarterly IV.4 (October 1997): 3, 17-19.
Spiering, Frank, Lizzie: The Story of Lizzie Borden. NY: Random House, 1984.
“World War I: Aftermath and Reckoning on Encyclopedia.com 2002.” Encyclopedia.com. 2005. <http://encyclopedia.com/html/section/WW1_AftermathandReckoning.asp> (27 June 2005).
