Lizzie Borden

The backstory

The household

In August 1892, Andrew Jackson Borden lived in a house on Second Street in Fall River with his second wife, Abby Durfee Borden, his younger daughter, Lizzie, and a servant, Bridget Sullivan, who had worked for the family for nearly three years.¹ His elder daughter, Emma, was away visiting in Fairhaven.¹ The Fall River Herald described Andrew Borden as a bank president and “a very wealthy man.”⁴ John V. Morse, the brother of Andrew Borden’s first wife, arrived on Wednesday, Aug. 3, and stayed the night.¹

According to the prosecution’s opening statement, Andrew and Abby Borden became violently ill on the night of Tuesday, Aug. 2, Lizzie to a lesser degree, and Bridget Sullivan not at all.¹ The Boston Globe reported that the prosecution told the court Mrs. Borden had sent for a doctor, saying she had been poisoned.⁸ The district attorney said that on Wednesday evening Lizzie visited a friend, Alice Russell, and said, “I cannot shake it off,” describing a feeling that something was going to happen.¹

Thursday, Aug. 4, 1892

The prosecution’s account of the morning, given in its opening statement, was that the household had breakfast, Morse left at about 7:45, and Andrew Borden went downtown between 9 and 9:30.¹ Abby Borden told Lizzie she was going upstairs to put pillowcases on the pillows in the guest room, and, in the district attorney’s words, she “never left that room alive.”¹

Bridget Sullivan testified that at about 9 o’clock Mrs. Borden told her to wash the windows, and she began at once.⁷ She testified that she let Mr. Borden in when he came back from downtown and had trouble with the locks on the front door, and that Lizzie, at the head of the stairs or in her room, laughed.⁷ By her testimony, Lizzie told her that Mrs. Borden had gone out on a sick call, and Sullivan then went up to her own room and lay down.⁷ She testified that she heard the City Hall clock strike 11, and that a short time later Lizzie called her downstairs, saying her father had been killed.⁷

Andrew Borden was found on the lounge in the sitting room on the first floor.⁴ Abby Borden was found in an upstairs bedroom.⁴¹ A neighbor, Adelaide Churchill, came to the house, and the police were called by telephone.⁴ The district attorney said the alarm reached the police station at about 11:15.¹

Her accounts of the morning

The prosecution told the jury that Lizzie said her stepmother had received a note from someone who was sick, and called that account “a lie.”¹ At the inquest she testified that Mrs. Borden told her she had had a note from someone who was sick, and that she herself never saw it.³

According to the district attorney, she first told people she had gone to the barn for a piece of iron or tin, or for lead, and heard a noise; in a later, fuller account, she said she went up to the barn loft, ate pears and looked over lead for fishing sinkers.¹ At the inquest she testified that she ate some pears in the loft.³ The prosecution relied on a police officer, Medley, who said the dust in the loft was undisturbed except for his own marks.¹ Defense witnesses later cast doubt on that account, according to legal historian Douglas Linder.¹⁴

The medical evidence

Dr. William Dolan, the medical examiner, testified that Abby Borden had eighteen wounds on her head and one on her back, and that Andrew Borden had ten wounds, all on the head.² He testified that Mrs. Borden had died first, by about an hour to an hour and a half.² He also testified that he found undigested food in Mrs. Borden’s intestines, while Mr. Borden’s were comparatively empty.²

The weapon and the dress

The indictment charged that both were killed with “a sharp cutting instrument,” whose name and description the grand jurors said were unknown to them.¹ Edwin Porter, a police reporter for the Fall River Globe, wrote in 1893 that officers found four hatchets in the cellar and sent them to Prof. Edward Wood of Harvard for examination.¹² According to Smithsonian, a Harvard chemist testified that he found no blood on two axes and two hatchets the police took from the cellar.¹⁶ At trial the prosecution produced the head of a hatchet whose handle had broken off, and the defense asked where the missing handle was.¹⁴⁹

The district attorney told the jury that the most rigorous examination had found no blood on the dress Lizzie gave the police, apart from “one minute spot,” and that a witness would say it was not the dress she wore that morning.¹ He said that on the Sunday after the killings she burned a dress, saying it was covered with paint.¹

The inquest and arrest

An inquest was held behind closed doors before Judge Josiah Blaisdell from Aug. 9 to Aug. 11, 1892, and District Attorney Hosea Knowlton questioned Borden on all three days.³⁶¹⁶ She had no defense lawyer present.¹⁶ At the close of the inquest on Aug. 11, she was arrested on a warrant charging her with killing her father and stepmother.⁶ She was held in the jail at Taunton.¹⁴ A grand jury indicted her on Dec. 2, 1892, and on May 8, 1893, she pleaded not guilty.¹

The trial

The trial opened in New Bedford on June 5, 1893, before three justices: Chief Justice Albert Mason, Caleb Blodgett and Justin Dewey.¹¹³ William H. Moody gave the prosecution’s opening statement, and Knowlton tried the case with him.¹ George D. Robinson, a former governor of Massachusetts, and Andrew J. Jennings defended her.¹³⁸¹⁶ The jury was twelve men.¹⁴

The excluded evidence

The prosecution offered Borden’s inquest testimony. The court excluded it, and the Boston Globe reported that Chief Justice Mason had sustained the defense on the point.¹¹ According to Linder’s account, the justices concluded that she had been, in substance, a prisoner charged with the murders when she testified, so her statements were not voluntary.¹⁴ Her inquest testimony therefore never went before the jury.¹⁴

The prosecution also offered testimony from Eli Bence, a drug clerk, that the day before the killings Borden asked for “ten cents worth of prussic acid” to clean a sealskin cape and was refused without a prescription.¹⁸ Robinson objected that the experts found no poison in either body and that the indictment charged a killing with a cutting instrument, not poison; Moody answered that the attempt showed premeditation.⁸ With the jury out of the room, the prosecution called druggists, furriers and chemists on the properties and uses of the acid.¹⁴⁹ Chief Justice Mason then ruled: “It is the opinion of the court that the preliminary proceedings have not been sufficient; the evidence is excluded.”⁹ Smithsonian wrote that the justices found the prosecution had not refuted that the acid had innocent uses.¹⁶ The prosecution rested after that ruling.¹⁴

The court also excluded some defense evidence, including testimony about a man reportedly seen with a bloody hatchet, and Jennings took an exception.¹⁰ Defense witnesses testified that they had seen a strange man near the Borden house that morning.¹⁴ By June 16 the defense had rested.¹⁰

Her statement, the charge and the verdict

Borden did not testify at trial.¹⁸¹³ Asked whether she had anything to say, she told the jury, “I am innocent. I leave it to my counsel to speak for me.”¹³ Justice Dewey charged the jury that if the evidence fell short, “it would be your plain duty to return a verdict of not guilty.”¹³ The Globe called the charge “a plea for the innocent.”¹¹ Smithsonian noted that Robinson, as governor, had appointed one of the three justices who presided over the trial.¹⁶

On June 20, 1893, the foreman answered the clerk, “Not guilty.”¹¹ The Globe reported that Borden sank into a chair, put her face on her hands at the rail and cried.¹¹

Theories

No one else was ever charged with the killings.¹⁹ Smithsonian reported that Knowlton believed she was guilty but “realized the long odds against conviction.”¹⁶ Her defense attributed the killings to an outside attacker, and Robinson told the jury they “must have been committed by a maniac or a devil.”¹⁴ Some writers have speculated that she was protecting her sister Emma, a theory Great American Trials says has no proof behind it.¹³ The jury’s verdict is the only legal finding in the case.¹¹

Personal backstory

Early life

Lizzie Andrew Borden was born in Fall River on July 19, 1860.¹⁵¹⁹ Her mother, Sarah Morse Borden, died on March 26, 1863, when Lizzie was 2.¹⁵ Her father married Abby Gray on June 6, 1865.¹⁵ The Boston Herald reported in 1892 that she went to the Morgan Street school for the primary and grammar grades and later entered the high school.⁵ The same article quoted friends describing her “modesty of manner” and “unswerving sincerity,” and said that about five years earlier she had begun to take part in church life.⁵

The family before 1892

At the inquest, Borden testified that she had stopped calling her stepmother “mother” about five or six years earlier, after a family dispute; asked why, she answered, “Because I wanted to.”³ Linder writes that her sister Emma admitted lasting resentment over their father’s transfer of a house to Abby Borden and her sister.¹⁴ The district attorney told the jury the relationship between Lizzie and her stepmother was strained.¹

After the trial

Borden and her sister bought a house in the Hill section of Fall River and named it Maplecroft.²²¹⁴ She changed her first name to Lizbeth, and Yankee wrote that she avoided Fall River society and lived in what it called “internal exile.”¹⁷ Yankee reported that much was made of her friendship with the actress Nance O’Neil, and that Emma moved out in 1905, after which the sisters rarely spoke.¹⁷ About four years after the trial, a warrant was issued for her in Providence; Yankee reported it concerned two paintings on porcelain and was never served, and Smithsonian reported that she apparently made restitution.¹⁷¹⁶

Death

Borden died of pneumonia at her home in Fall River on June 1, 1927.¹⁸¹⁷ Friends held a small funeral at Maplecroft, and she was buried in the family plot at Oak Grove Cemetery.¹⁷ Her largest bequest, $30,000 in cash plus some stock, went to the Fall River Animal Rescue League.¹⁷ Emma died days later and was buried in the same plot.¹⁶