Don’t Dig Up the Bordens

A blast from the past: A letter to the editor of the New York Times from 1992, written by Neilson Caplain of Fall River, Massachusetts, former president of the board of the Fall River Historical Society.

Letter: On Lizzie Borden; The Murder Weapon Mystery
Published: May 16, 1992

To the Editor:

According to a report from George Washington University (Campus Life, April 26), Prof. James E. Starrs hopes to dig up the bodies of Abby and Andrew Borden to compare the chips on a hatchet with the wounds inflicted by the hatchet when they were slain in Fall River, Mass., in 1892. The professor is bound to be disappointed. The hatchet to which he has access is not the one that did in the Bordens.

The hatchet he would examine, dubbed the “handleless hatchet,” is in the collection at the Fall River Historical Society. It is indeed the one presented at the trial of Lizzie Borden in June 1893. However, the prosecution did not claim that this was the very instrument used in the double murder. Reference to “The Trial of Lizzie Borden” by Edmund Pearson, which gives the verbatim testimony, discloses that the good doctors who testified said only that this hatchet could have been the murder weapon.

Furthermore there was no evidence presented at the trial to tie the hatchet to the crime — no blood, hair or tissue staining the metal or wood, or in the crevices between the two. To the contrary, the testimony of the forensic experts at Harvard was that the hatchet was clear of any such tell-tale matter.

To this day the mystery of the murder weapon has sustained interest and titillated investigators. What happened to the hatchet? How could it have been hidden or otherwise disposed of? Never before has a credible explanation been postulated.

Now, however, 100 years after the commission of the crime, startling new information regarding the actual murder weapon has become known and will be revealed in forthcoming books, confirming that a hatchet other than the one at the historical society did the dirty deed.

Under the circumstances exhumation of the bodies would serve no useful purpose, and it is to be hoped that the responsible authorities in Fall River will bar any violation of the graves. NEILSON CAPLAIN Fall River, Mass., April 30, 1992 The writer is a director and immediate past president of the Fall River Historical Society.