The trial of Lizzie Borden began on the morning of June 5, 1893, in the Superior Court for the County of Bristol. This was arguably the most celebrated criminal case of the century—rivaling the trials of Dred Scott, John Brown, the Haymarket bombers, even the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson—such was the interest and hoopla this spectacle created. The murders had long since become the prime topic of conversation not only in Fall River, but throughout New England, just as the Simpson-Goldman murders would rivet Los Angeles and the rest of the nation 102 years later. And as would happen with the Simpson trial, the national and world press converged upon the courthouse. Wealthy, prominent people just didn’t get hacked to death, and their children didn’t get accused of doing it. If this kind of thing could happen to a man like Andrew Borden and his wife, it could happen to anyone.
Knowlton, the district attorney of Fall River, was a reluctant prosecutor, forced into the role by Attorney General Arthur Pillsbury, who, at the time, would have been expected to try capital cases himself. But as the trial date approached, Pillsbury sensed pressure building from Lizzie’s supporters, particularly women’s groups and religious organizations. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, of which Lizzie was a member, publicly proclaimed its “unshaken faith in her, as a fellow worker and sister tenderly beloved.” Likewise, Lizzie’s ministers and fellow congregants at the Central Congregational Church—the most socially prominent church in Fall River—thought it impossible that the kind, demure, and dignified woman they knew could have committed such a pair of unthinkable acts.
The first day was devoted to selecting a jury—all white male—and then the prosecution presented its case. William Moody made the opening statements for the prosecution, presenting three essential arguments that were to represent the body of his case: that Lizzie Borden was predisposed to murder her father and stepmother and planned to do so; that the evidence would show that she did, in fact, murder them; and that her behavior and contradictory accounts were not consistent with innocence. Equally important, Moody made clear, was that the defendant had had the time to kill her stepmother while Bridget was washing the outside windows and was not in the house to hear anything. Then, when Andrew Borden came home, Bridget was up in her room in the attic lying down and, Moody contended, Lizzie was not in the barn but alone on the first floor of the house with her father.
Since there was no sign of struggle, the killer was logically someone well-known to both victims, who would not elicit any alarm. The only one who fit this criterion, the prosecution maintained, was Lizzie Borden herself.
The prosecution called Thomas Kieran, an architect and engineer who was sent in by the government to take full measurements of the Borden house. On cross-examination, he acknowledged that someone could have hidden in the closet in the front hall and not been seen by anyone inside the house. That afternoon, the judges had the jury visit the house to examine the crime scene for themselves.
John Morse testified that he had not seen Lizzie from the time he arrived at the Borden house on Wednesday until he returned after the murders on Thursday. He had been an early suspect, but convinced the police his alibi was sound and that he knew nothing about the crime. Interestingly, he was able to give a full and complete account of his own whereabouts at the time of the murders, down to the number of the streetcar he had ridden, the number on the conductor’s cap, and the names of everyone he had encountered. It is almost as if he knew he would need to have this corroborating information and so made careful note of all of it.
Bridget Sullivan testified that she had no knowledge of the communication from Abby’s sick friend that Lizzie had mentioned. When Robinson asked her if anyone could have entered the house while she was washing the outside windows, she admitted she had spent some time in a corner of the yard talking over the fence to the maid of the neighbors, Dr. and Mrs. Michael Kelly.
Crucial to the case was the evidence suggesting a motive. Knowlton and Moody called witnesses to establish that Andrew Borden was intending to write a new will. An old will was never found, nor its existence proven, although John Morse had testified that his brother-in-law had told him he had a will, but then later testified that Andrew had not mentioned one. The “new” will, according to Morse, was to leave Emma and Lizzie each $25,000, with the remainder of Andrew’s $500,000 estate going to Abby. Further, Knowlton developed the additional motive of Andrew’s intent to dispose of his farm to Abby, just as he had already transferred ownership of a house occupied by Abby’s half-sister Sarah Whitehead to her. This was apparently a sore point between the Borden sisters and their stepmother, and they feared it might be “handwriting on the wall” as to their father’s future intentions.
Hannah Gifford, a local dressmaker, recalled a conversation with Lizzie in March 1892, in which she had referred to Abby as Lizzie’s mother.
Lizzie had rebuked her for referring to Abby this way, calling her “a mean good-for-nothing.”
“Oh, Lizzie, you don’t mean that,” Gifford said she replied.
“Yes,” Lizzie countered, “I don’t have much to do with her.”
Bridget testified that in the two years she’d been with the Bordens, she’d never heard “any trouble with the family, no quarreling or anything of that kind.”
All in all, however, the testimony about Lizzie’s predisposition was ambiguous and contradictory. The relationship between Lizzie and her father could be proven neither cold and flinty nor warm and fuzzy. As is so often the case with human behavior, it depended on who was observing.
However, two rulings by the court became crucial to the eventual outcome of the trial.
On Saturday, June 10, the prosecution moved to enter Lizzie’s testimony at the inquest. George Robinson objected, since Lizzie had not been formally charged and was therefore not represented by counsel at the time. On Monday, when court resumed, the justices disallowed the introduction of Lizzie’s contradicting testimony. Although today the absence of counsel would weigh quite heavily in the defendant’s favor, many legal scholars were mystified by the decision.
Of the other contradictions that crept into the record, the defense got Dr. Bowen to acknowledge that the morphine he had prescribed for Lizzie could have left her thinking fuzzy and confused.
The most dramatic moment of the trial took place on the seventh day. Dr. Edward Wood testified about his examination of the victims’ stomach contents and said that he had found no evidence of poisoning. He had examined the hatchet head broken off from its handle—the one police felt most likely to have been the murder weapon—and could find no traces of blood. He said that the killer ought to have had considerable blood on his or her person. (Remember that Lizzie was seen by Mrs. Churchill within ten minutes of Andrew’s murder.) Told he would produce the actual skulls of the victims to show how the blade would have penetrated them, Lizzie fainted. A true lady, too sensitive to countenance such raw displays, she was allowed to leave the room. Certainly the men of the jury would not have held it against her.
But that this particular blade had been the murder weapon was only a theory. If the police and prosecution couldn’t definitively identify the weapon, then it might have been taken from the house by whoever committed the crimes, leaving a vast gulf of reasonable doubt in one of the key points of the case.
On Wednesday, June 14, the prosecution called Eli Bence, the drug-store clerk. The defense objected. After hearing arguments from both sides as to the relevance of Lizzie’s attempt to purchase prussic acid, the justices ruled that Bence’s testimony—and the entire issue of Lizzie’s alleged attempt to secure poison—was irrelevant and inadmissable.
There was, however, a chilling account from Alice Russell about a visit Lizzie had made to her on Wednesday, August 3, the evening before the murders. She quoted Lizzie as telling her, “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.”
After telling her friend about the sickness of
her father and stepmother, she confided, “Sometimes I think our milk might be poisoned.”
When Russell had related that comment to the police on the day of the murders, they had seized the Borden milk supply and had it tested. Nothing unusual turned up.
Lizzie also mentioned a previous break-in to the house and two breakins to the barn. She even said she had seen a “strange man run around the house.”
“I feel afraid sometimes that father has an enemy,” she said.
Another item was Anna Howland Borden’s statement recalling Lizzie’s unhappy description of her home life as the two women returned (along with Anna’s sister Carrie Lindley Borden) from a nineteen-week trip through Europe that Andrew had given Lizzie as a thirtieth birthday gift. Some accounts have referred to Anna and Carrie as Lizzie’s cousins, but the trial record states that they were not related (though, of course, Borden was a prominent name through this part of New England). Anna Borden’s statement said that Lizzie did not want to return to her stifling home life after the freedom and stimulation of the grand European tour.
When the defense objected to the introduction of the statement, the judges ruled that the testimony was too ambiguous and did not point directly to ill will against either Lizzie’s father or stepmother, so it, too, was excluded.
The defense used only two days to present its case. Essentially, they called witnesses to verify the presence of a mysterious young man in the vicinity of the Borden home. The intruder scenario was their alternative theory of the case. They explained away the missing note by suggesting that women did not like publicity and therefore it was natural that no one would come forward to say she had requested Abby’s presence on the fateful morning. The defense emphasized that no blood was found on Lizzie, ignoring testimony that the way the murders were committed—the killer’s position relative to the victims’—the offender easily could have avoided being spattered.
Andrew Jennings tried to get across several points to the jury: Lizzie must be presumed innocent unless she could not be proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. There was no direct evidence against Lizzie, and some of the circumstantial links were weak. There was no weapon identified. There was no well-established motive, and nothing in the defendant’s character or previous behavior indicated she was capable of violence. Others had the opportunity to enter the house during the crucial time.
To counteract the effects of Alice Russell’s testimony regarding the burning of the dress, Emma took the stand and said that she had urged Lizzie to burn the dress, a family custom when clothes were irredeemably soiled. This sounded odd from the household of a man as obsessively thrifty as Andrew Borden, actually known to make rags out of old clothes.
Emma testified that Lizzie deeply loved her father, that Andrew had worn a ring Lizzie had given him every day for the rest of his life. She insisted that she and Lizzie had been completely cooperative with the police during their examination of the house and had amply demonstrated they had nothing to hide.
To most observers, Emma remained something of an enigma. So retiring was she, few photographs are known to exist. She was described as shy, small, plain-looking, thin-faced, and bony—altogether an unremarkable forty-one-year-old spinster. She was strongly supportive of Lizzie during the trial, although one witness, Hannah Reagan, a day matron at the Central Police Station who had responsibility for Lizzie during the preliminary hearing, had testified to overhearing an argument between the sisters while Emma was visiting Lizzie on August 24.
“Emma, you have given me away, haven’t you?” Lizzie charged.
“No, Lizzie, I have not,” Emma responded.
“You have and I will let you see I won’t give in one inch.”
“Oh, Lizzie, I didn’t,” Emma insisted.
Lizzie did not take the stand in her own defense.
On Monday, June 19, defense attorney Robinson delivered his closing arguments, reiterating the points Jennings had made and dismissing the possibility that Lizzie could have kept changing out of blood-soaked dresses without anyone noticing and getting rid of them without a trace, as would have had to have happened if she had been the killer.
Then Knowlton began his own closing arguments, completing them the next day. He painted a word picture for the jury of what he considered the most likely scenario. He had Lizzie killing her hated stepmother, then knowing she could not face her father, she had no choice but to kill him, too.
After both sides were done, chief justice Mason asked Lizzie if she wanted to say anything. For the only time during the trial she spoke in open court, saying just, “I am innocent. I leave it to my counsel to speak for me.”
THE VERDICT
Justice Dewey’s charge to the jury remains one of the most controversial aspects of the entire trial. He instructed them to take into account her fine character and devotion to charitable organizations and to keep in mind that any single unprovable element in the prosecution’s chain of logic “is fatal to the government’s case,” or as he restated even more sharply, “if there is a fact established—whether in that line of proof or outside of it—which cannot reasonably be reconciled with her guilt, then guilt cannot be said to be established.”
At 3:24 on Tuesday, June 20, 1893, the jury was sworn and given the case. At 4:32 that same afternoon they announced that their deliberations were completed. Yet another way in which this trial prefigured the O. J. Simpson trial a century later.
The verdict was not guilty on all counts.
The case remains officially unsolved to this day.
Many commentators have stated that the trial and the verdict represented the triumph of law over popular emotion, and if one reviews the actual record of the case, this may well be true. But from every perspective other than the strictly jurisprudential one, the case remains troubling and unsettled, with the more than nagging feeling lingering that in the Lizzie Borden case, justice has not been served.
So how would we on the behavioral analysis side evaluate these crimes? And then, once that evaluation is complete, what could we have come up with of a proactive nature that might have gotten us closer to justice?
THE NATURE OF THE CRIME
If we were consulting on a case such as this today, the first thing we’d try to do is to define the crime according to several standard criteria and classifications. Some of this might seem self-evident as we go along, but it is important in all criminal investigations to proceed in a logical, step-by-step manner in which each step makes us more confident of the direction in which we’re heading. A good, experienced detective takes nothing for granted. It’s almost like a pilot’s preflight checklist. He may have gone over each item a million times, but if he happens to ignore one and that turns out to be the weak link, then he and his passengers could be headed for disaster. It is too easy—and I have seen this many times—to come to one simple, but wrong, conclusion and then proceed off logically from there. You will then, of course, come up with a logical and well-reasoned, but wrong, answer.
First of all, these murders are what we would term personal-cause homicides, which simply means acts ensuing from interpersonal aggression. Before we can be secure with this, though, we have to examine the other possibilities.
Nothing of value was taken from the victims or the house, which would tend to rule out the felony murder—that is, a murder during the commission of another crime, such as burglary—or the normal criminal enterprise type of homicide. However, we’d have to say that since the victim was a man of considerable means, we must consider that this could have been a contract—or third-party—killing, or an insurance/ inheritance-related death. Sometimes there will be a mixed motive, and we should keep both of these in mind as we proceed.
Nor does this scenario fit the other two general categories for murder. It does not suggest itself to be a sexual homicide as we saw with the Whitechapel murders. And there is no evidence of a group-cause homicide, which would include cult and extremist murders, hostage situations, or what we refer to a
s group-excitement homicides, in which two or more people commit murder as a result of the spontaneous excitement of the moment.
Because of where the crimes took place, we have to strongly consider that they may be domestic homicides, a subcategory of personal-cause homicides. And within this subcategory, we have the further refinements of spontaneous domestic homicide and staged domestic homicide. The prime difference between the two is that the latter involves some degree of planning and follow-through.
The first killing, determined by both direct forensic and circumstantial evidence, was of Abby. This might have been either a spontaneous or a planned crime. The subsequent killing of Andrew had to have been planned. The prosecution’s theory notwithstanding, this gives us some reason to believe the first killing may have been planned as well.
In any case, the sustained aggression of the repeated hatchet cuts to the face of both victims, much more than was necessary to cause nearly instant death, is commonly seen in domestic homicides. We believe this to be not only a manifestation of deep-seated and often long-standing anger by the offender against the victim, but also an attempt to depersonalize him or her. In the Whitechapel murders we could interpret the mutilation of the genitalia and evisceration of the vagina, uterus, and ovaries as an attempt to strip the victim of her sexual identity and power. Here, the facial battery indicates an attempt to strip the victim of actual identity and familiar power.
Significantly, Andrew was attacked as he slept. The first blow would have been sufficient to cause death and would have prevented him from crying out and alerting anyone. From the wound patterns on Abby’s body, however, it is clear that the killer straddled her during the attack, which means he or she would have had to look straight into the victim’s eyes.
The Cases That Haunt Us Page 12
