Denise Noeby Denise Noe
First published in October/November, 2005, Volume 2, Issue 5, The Hatchet: Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies.
The Borden case continues to intrigue over a century after the fact because there is so much that seems to point unmistakably to Lizzie Borden’s guilt – and important facts that appear to make that guilt utterly impossible.
Behavior prior to the murders that has been attributed to Lizzie would, if true, powerfully show a guilty predisposition. Eli Bence, a clerk at D. R. Smith’s drugstore, testified at both the inquest and the preliminary hearing that Lizzie attempted to purchase prussic acid on the day before the murders, and that she claimed she wanted the poison to put on “either a seal skin sack or a seal skin cape.” Another witness to the exchange, Frederick Harte, also testified at the preliminary that the woman said she wanted to put the prussic acid “around the edges” of a “cape or sack” of a “seal skin garment.” Unfortunately, Bence was never asked, nor did he offer, the reason why the woman needed poison for the garment. The June 7th, 1893 issue of the Democrat & Chronicle (Rochester, NY), reported the incident, saying that “the prisoner went to a drug store and there asked the clerk for 10 cents’ worth of prussic acid for cleaning a cape,” assuming the use for the poison. If true, this assumption begs the question: Why would anyone even be thinking about cleaning a cape in the early August summer heat? Of course, it should be noted that Lizzie always denied attempting to purchase the poison or even having been to Smith’s drugstore.
Then there is Lizzie’s oddly prescient statement Wednesday evening to her friend, Alice Russell, which Alice related at the trial: “. . . I feel depressed. I feel as if something was hanging over me that I cannot throw off, and it comes over me at times, no matter where I am. . . . I feel as if I wanted to sleep with my eyes half open – with one eye open half the time – for fear they will burn the house down over us. . . . I am afraid somebody will do something; I don’t know but what somebody will do something.” As Ann Jones in Woman Who Kill commented sardonically, “The next day somebody did something, and it seemed strange that Miss Lizzie should so clearly have seen it coming.”
The all-important factor of opportunity appears to point directly to Lizzie. Only two people besides the victims are known to have been on the Borden property at the time Abby and Andrew were killed—Lizzie, and Abby’s maid Bridget Sullivan. Some writers like Edward D. Radin have indeed pinned the rap on Bridget. However, given the temper of the times, it seems likely that the authorities would have much rather prosecuted an Irish servant than a respectable “lady” so the fact that she was never charged with the crimes speaks powerfully in Bridget’s favor.
However, part of Bridget’s testimony implicates Lizzie. Bridget claimed that while Lizzie was on the second floor of the house and she, Bridget, was on the first floor opening the front door for Andrew, Lizzie giggled. Lizzie-did-it partisans have always thought this a fiendish, post-murder chuckle. There is a more innocent explanation. David Kent in Forty Whacks writes that Bridget also told authorities that she “fumbled” to get all three locks opened and exclaimed in exasperation, “Pshaw!” Lizzie might just have been simply laughing at Bridget’s frustration. If Lizzie didn’t know that Abby had been killed, her laughter at Bridget’s plight is an innocent expression. Yet, as Bridget’s testimony indicated, at the time Andrew returned home, Lizzie was very near the room in which Abby lay dead, a room that may have had its door partially open. Many observers have wondered how Lizzie could have failed to notice the body that lay motionless on the floor.
The usual estimate of the time between the death of Abby and Andrew is that of roughly one hour or an hour and a half. Dr. Albert C. Dedrick testified at trial that Abby’s blood “was more of a ropy consistency and had coagulated so it would not run,” while Andrew’s blood “was more of an oozy character.” Dedrick testified that in his opinion, Mrs. Borden had died several hours before her husband. Dr. Dolan likewise testified that Mrs. Borden had died first. When asked for specifics, he replied, “I thought it was from an hour and a half to two hours—or from an hour to a hour and a half, I should say.” Those who believe Lizzie guilty think it strains credibility to imagine an assassin lurking in this small house for that period of time without being seen by either Lizzie or Bridget.
The story of the note also arouses suspicion. Bridget testified at the trial that she heard Lizzie “ask her father if he had any mail, and they had some talk between them which I didn’t understand or pay any attention to, but I heard her tell her father that Mrs. Borden had a note and gone out.” However, after people came to the house to find Andrew dead, Lizzie suggested they look for her stepmother. Advertisements were taken out to find the person who delivered the note and the party who sent it yet no one ever came forward and the note itself was not found. Many people have assumed there was never a note and that a guilty Lizzie was trying to prevent Andrew from looking for Abby.
Lizzie also claimed that the reason she was not her father’s killer was that she had impulsively gone to the barn to hunt up some lead for fishing sinkers during that period of time. At trial, the defense called to the stand an ice cream vendor named Hyman Lubinsky who supported Lizzie’s peculiar alibi. Lubinsky claimed he left the stable from which he had picked up horse and wagon “a few minutes after eleven.” He saw a woman “come out the way from the barn right to the stairs from the back of the house.” Despite the seeming confirmation from the ice cream vendor, Lizzie’s story of the barn trip for sinkers has struck many as “fishy” in the extreme.
But there are also stumbling blocks to accepting the hypothesis of Lizzie’s guilt, stumbling blocks that on first blush seem insurmountable. One of them is the all-important issue of the murder weapon. Emma Borden concisely summarized the problem when she told Boston Sunday Post reporter Edwin J. Maguire in an April 1913 interview, “Here is the strongest thing that has impressed me of Lizzie’s innocence. 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. Why, there was no hiding place in the old house that would serve for effectual concealment. Neither did she have the time.”
In his opening argument for the defense, Andrew Jennings pointedly pleaded with the jury that in order to prove part of its case, the state’s attorneys had to either “produce the weapon which did the deed, and, having produced it, connect it in some way directly with the prisoner, or else they have got to account in some reasonable way for its disappearance.”
The prosecution could do neither. Several axes and hatchets were found on the Borden premises but all tested negative for human blood. The prosecution put forward the infamous “handleless hatchet” as prime candidate for murder weapon. However, the defense, in closing arguments, exposed improbabilities in this identification. For this to be the weapon, the person that used it would have had to break most of the handle off, and then dispose of that thick wood. The defense theorized that the government had the idea that Lizzie had burned it in the kitchen stove, which was not brought up in the trial evidence. A charred roll of something like a newspaper was found in the stove but not a trace of hatchet. Lizzie’s chief defense attorney, ex-Governor George Robinson, asked during his closing, “Did you ever see such a funny fire in the world? What a funny fire that was! A hardwood stick inside the newspaper, and the hard wood stick would go out beyond recall, and the newspaper that lives forever would stay there! What a funny idea! What a theory that is!”
Two other factors make it unlikely that the handleless hatchet was the murder weapon. One is that Frank Draper, a Suffolk County medical examiner, found a deposit of gilt metal in one of the cuts on Abby Borden, indicating that the hatchet that killed her was new. As Professor of Chemistry, Edward S. Wood testified, the handleless hatchet was “uniformly rusty on the beveled edge as well as on the sides.” Finally, the piece of the wood that remained with the head, the part that would have been closest to the victims, tested negative for blood.
The absence of a blood stained garment is another major stumbling block to agreeing with the prosecution’s case. Of course, as is well known to even the most casual student of the Borden case, Lizzie burned a dress on Sunday, August 7, 1892. The dress burning has damned her in many eyes. According to Alice Russell, Lizzie claimed she was destroying it because the cheap dress had been stained with paint. Many have assumed the stain was “red paint”—put there by the splatter from a homicidal hatchet.
The belief that Lizzie was lying about the reason for burning the dress, however, has its difficulties. For one thing, the descriptions of the burned dress do not tally with those of the garment she wore on the day of the killings. Emma testified with specificity that the destroyed garment “was a blue cotton Bedford cord, very light blue ground with a darker figure about an inch long and I think about three quarters of an inch wide.”
Mary Raymond, the dressmaker, testified that the Bedford cord was “light blue with a dark figure…a cheap cotton dress…Trimmed with a ruffle around the bottom.” Alice Russell, who witnessed Lizzie preparing to burn cloth, said it was the Bedford cord, which she described as a “Light-blue ground with a dark figure” and that she had not seen it between the time it was made in the early spring and the day it was burned. She had not seen Lizzie wearing it on the day of the slayings.
Dr. Bowen testified that the dress Lizzie wore on the day of the slayings was “drab” while his wife characterized it as “a dark dress” with “a blouse waist, with a white design on it.” Lubinsky described the woman he saw outside the Borden home as wearing “a dark colored dress.” However, other witnesses, such as Mrs. Churchill and Officer Patrick Doherty described the dress they saw on Lizzie on August 4 as “light blue,” which sounds more like the burned article. But that still leaves the fact that not one of the witnesses who saw Lizzie in the immediate aftermath of her father’s killing recalled seeing any blood on the dress Lizzie wore or on her person or even the slightest disarrangement of her hair.
One way to reconcile the considerable damning evidence against Lizzie with the strongly exonerating facts in her favor is to postulate that she was part of a conspiracy. She may have killed Abby and/or Andrew or aided and/or covered up for someone else who did.
Indeed, the possibility of a conspiracy has hung over the Borden case from the first. In an August 12, 1892 Providence Daily Journal article subtitled “Police Believe Miss Lizzie Borden Was Not Alone in the Crime,” the reporter comments that authorities “suspect that Lizzie Borden had a confederate or assistants.” Prosecutor Hosea Knowlton, in a letter to Massachusetts Attorney General Arthur Pillsbury, wrote that “nothing has developed which satisfies either of us that she is innocent, neither of us can escape the conclusion that she must have had some knowledge of the occurrence.” Although Knowlton did not introduce the possibility at trial, the implication is clear that he and Pillsbury believed it possible that she was involved with others in the slayings of her stepmother and father.
So whom could Lizzie have conspired with? And what were the roles of the respective conspirators?
Perhaps the most obvious candidate for co-conspirator is the only other person known to be on the property of the Borden residence at the time of the killings, the maid Bridget Sullivan. Len Rebello, in Lizzie Borden Past and Present, records that an article by one Mary D. Smith proposing that the pair were “partners in crime” first appeared in a 1978 issue of The Armchair Detective and was republished in 1992 in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Evan Hunter did a fictional treatment in Lizzie: A Novel in 1984, in which Lizzie and Bridget are in cahoots, with Mrs. Borden being killed because she stumbled upon Lizzie and Bridget making lesbian love. In Hunter’s story, Lizzie clobbered Abby with a candlestick holder, and then later uses an axe on Andrew.
There is another, even odder theory that makes Bridget a co-conspirator but does not assert that Lizzie was her crime partner. Rebello quotes a 1996 interview with Leonard Healy for his yet unpublished book entitled Iron or Lead? His theory was that Andrew and Abby were “gassed to death by inhaling vapors of the deadly asphyxiate, hydrocyanic acid forcibly administered by . . . Bridget Sullivan . . . the ax-wielding was carried out by one of the girl’s accomplices as a post mortem event,” with money as the motive.
Owen Haskell authored a novella called Sherlock Holmes and the Fall River Tragedy that had Lizzie conspiring with Dr. Seabury Bowen, who spirited a bloodstained garment and a hatchet away in his big black medical bag. There is no solid evidence implicating Dr. Bowen in reality and the book is written as fiction, but the idea does credibly explain why neither the weapon nor a bloody garment was ever found.
Uncle John Vinnicum Morse, who had come to visit the Borden household on August 3, is another candidate theorists have put up as a confederate. Even before Lizzie came to trial, newspapers carried the speculation of George Fish, husband of Abby’s sister Priscilla that Lizzie had conspired with Uncle John. Found in Rebello, the August 9, 1892 Fall River Daily Globe reports that Fish “believed Lizzie and her uncle John V. Morse planned the murders but hired someone to commit the murders.”
Fritz Adilz wrote a convoluted conspiracy scenario entitled “Whodunit?: An Armchair Solution to the Borden Mystery” that was serialized in The Lizzie Borden Quarterly from 1994 to 1996. Adilz postulates that Lizzie was part of an intrigue involving Uncle John as well as Emma. However, he does not identify any of these three as the hands-on executioner. He reserves that dishonor for William Davis, a man with whom Uncle John had once worked. According to Rebello, Uncle John learned the butcher’s trade from William’s father Isaac Davis. Adilz also theorizes that there was yet a fifth person in the machination and that that individual spirited Davis from the crime scene.
There are several factors that make Adilz’s theory unconvincing. One is the “too many cooks spoil the broth” difficulty of keeping so many people in the know quiet – especially when one of them went on trial for her life. Adilz also writes that, “If Lizzie and her uncle had an agent committing the murders for them, one would expect them to have as airtight an alibi as possible.” But Lizzie glaringly lacked such an alibi. Finally, while the theory has explanatory power, it suffers from a lack of hard evidence.
Frank Spiering in his book Lizzie writes about a possible impromptu murder scheme between Lizzie and Emma. In Spiering’s telling, both Lizzie and Emma were – independently of each other and without the other’s knowledge – plotting to murder Abby and Andrew. According to Spiering, Lizzie sprinkled arsenic into the broth bubbling around the mutton that Bridget was cooking while the maid was gone from the kitchen, accounting for the sickness the family was known to have suffered the day prior to the killings. When Abby and Andrew did not die as a result of the poisoned food, Lizzie was determined to try again and made her fruitless trip to D. R. Smith’s Drugstore.
Emma was more effective, Spiering asserts. Off in Fairhaven visiting friends in the Brownell family, possibly to establish an alibi, he writes that Emma “hitched a horse to the black carriage and headed into the woodshed adjacent to the Brownell house to get an axe.” Spiering believes she then drove that carriage back to her home.
In Spiering’s book, Lizzie was still planning to do away with her stepmother and father by poison when she was startled to find her older sister had returned home – with an axe in her hands. Instantly understanding, Lizzie led Emma up the stairs to the guest room in which Abby was doing some housework. When Andrew came home, Lizzie tried to make sure things went smoothly for Emma to use the axe on him.
Why did Lizzie burn a dress? Spiering asks was it because “its corded cotton fabric” could have been tested and “found to contain traces of arsenic.”
Spiering’s most audacious claim and one that makes much of his theory hard to swallow is that the two sisters were each independently intending to kill Abby and Andrew. This is implausible on the face of it. Additionally, like so many other Borden “solutions,” his is hampered by a lack of hard evidence.
Arnold Brown suggested an extremely far-reaching and convoluted conspiracy theory in his book, Lizzie Borden, the Legend, the Truth, the Final Chapter. In his telling, Lizzie is not guilty of either killing or of conspiring to kill. According to him, Andrew Borden had fathered a son, William “Bill” Borden, by another woman while still married to his first wife, Sarah. Brown writes that Bill’s mother was Phebe, wife of Charles Borden (he does not explain the exact relationship between Andrew and Charles). As a young man, Bill began making financial demands on his natural father. Both Uncle John and Lizzie knew of this and sometimes acted as mediators between Andrew and Bill. Lizzie was scared of Bill; that, Brown says, was the reason she sought poison.
Bill conspired with his own half-brother, William Lewis Bassett. In Brown’s account, it was Bassett who delivered a note to Abby, hoping to lure her from the home so Bill could be alone with Andrew. For some reason, the ploy failed and Abby did not rush off but went about her domestic duties. Bill was surprised to find Abby in the guest room and, caught off guard, murdered her in a panic. When Andrew came home, he agreed to have a chat with his unacknowledged son and an obliging Lizzie took a trip to the barn to give them privacy. Brown believes they did not talk long as Bill took out the hatchet he had recently used on Abby and killed Andrew with it. Then Bill hurried off to the shop where Bassett waited with the getaway carriage.
After the murders, a truly far-ranging conspiracy swung into action. Lizzie did not want the truth about her half-brother’s existence made public because she feared having to share her inheritance with him. To avoid that, she conspired with a group of Fall River VIPs Brown calls the “Mellen House gang” to have herself tried and acquitted.
Like other conspiracy theories, Brown’s relies to a great extent on suppositions and extrapolations. It also has a specific problem in his depiction of the character of the true killer. According to Brown, Bill Borden had severe mental problems and may have suffered from both mental illness and mental retardation. He is even supposed to have kept the murder weapon with him for the rest of his life and talked to it like a child with a teddy bear! Finally, the reason he gives for Lizzie’s supposedly allowing herself to be tried when she knew the true murderer seems flimsy. It is extremely unlikely that the courts would have recognized the standing as an heir to Andrew Borden of a child born to a woman married to another man and, if Bill Borden had been convicted of the murders, the entire question would have been rendered moot.
Were Abby and Andrew Borden murdered as the result of a conspiracy? Like so much connected with this case, this question will probably never be definitively answered. However, while “too many cooks spoil the broth” is an adage that works against the possibility of a conspiracy, the truism that division of labor makes for success can apply to wicked goals as well as positive ones. The curiously conflicting evidence in the Borden murders that has kept the mystery alive for over a century make a conspiracy a tantalizing and plausible possibility.
Works Cited
Adilz, Fritz. “An Armchair Solution to the Borden Mystery.” The Lizzie Borden Quarterly (Summer 1994 – July 1997).
Brown, Arnold R. Lizzie Borden: The Legend, the Truth, the Final Chapter. Nashville, TN: Rutledge Hill Press, 1991.
Haskell, Owen. Sherlock Holmes and the Fall River Tragedy. Lazarus Press, 1997.
Hunter, Evan. Lizzie. NY: Arbor House, 1984.
Kent, David. Forty Whacks: New Evidence in the Life and Legend of Lizzie Borden. Emmaus, PA: Yankee Books, 1992.
Jones, Ann. Women Who Kill. NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980.
Rebello, Leonard. Lizzie Borden: Past and Present. Al-Zach Press, 1999.
Spiering, Frank. Lizzie: The Story of Lizzie Borden. NY: Random House, 1984.
