by Bill James
3) That Abby Borden then lay dead in the house for an hour without anyone being aware of it seems incongruous but is not actually difficult to believe, since a prosecution witness performed tests which showed definitively that it was almost impossible to see Abby’s body from anywhere other than inside the guest bedroom.
4) That the murderer remained hidden in the house for that hour without anyone becoming aware of his presence is creepy but not otherwise difficult to imagine. Also, this “hour” may have been only 20 minutes.
5) That he then attacked and murdered Andrew Borden with equal violence, again without anyone being aware that this was happening is not easy to envision, but it is possible if Bridget was up in the attic lying down and Lizzie was out in the barn, which is where they testified that they were.
6) That he then left the house unseen and unnoticed through the busy neighborhood when he was virtually a walking bloodstain is very difficult to imagine, although I suppose that it could happen if he had on dark clothes and was well known in the neighborhood, or if it simply happened that none of the people who might have seen him chanced to be paying attention at that moment.
7) That he avoided the attention of police and avoided being associated with the crime for the rest of his life is surprising.
The neighbor’s testimony about being able to see the back door from 10:00 to 10:55, while writing some letters, does not conflict with the intruder theory, since the intruder was most likely in the house before 10:00 and departed just moments before 11:00. The intruder explanation, taken as a whole, is immensely difficult to swallow. But the alternative explanation—that Lizzie committed the murders—seems even more difficult to believe, if not entirely impossible. First, the time frame:
1) Borden had a conversation with a carpenter who was working on a store that Borden owned downtown. That conversation ended about 10:30.
2) Andrew Borden was seen by numerous people downtown, blocks from his house, just as a 10:35 trolley car departed, and it departed on time.
3) Borden then walked home. He was admitted to his house by the maid at about 10:45, according to her testimony.
4) He then went upstairs and did something in his bedroom, probably dropping off some papers from his morning rounds, while Bridget continued washing windows. He then spoke to the maid, spoke to Lizzie, went into the parlor and lay down to take a rest.
5) Lizzie yelled for the maid just after 11:00.
6) The maid went to the neighbors to fetch a doctor. The doctor was not there, so the neighbor yelled for her handyman, and sent him to run to the police station, about a quarter of a mile away.
7) The police logged the report of the incident at 11:15.
8) By 11:30, many people were in the house.
Lizzie was entirely clean at that time, and there was no murder weapon in the house. This seems impossible to explain if Lizzie had committed the murders. The time frame of Andrew Borden’s murder absolutely will not expand. No matter how you look at it, Lizzie Borden has no more than ten minutes to commit the second murder, clean herself up and dispose of the murder weapon. It’s impossible. Some people have suggested that she committed the murders while wrapped in protective sheets, and then burned the sheets, but that seems hardly possible. She could cover her clothes, but her hair, her face, her hands, her feet? There was no blood on her anywhere. If she had covered herself with a sheet, blood should have seeped through it. Even if she had wrapped herself up like a mummy, she would have gotten blood on her hands and arms when she pulled it all off and put it in the fire—and there is no time. She didn’t have time to put her shoes back on; she didn’t have time to wash her hands. She didn’t have time to build a fire. If that had happened there would have been blood all around the stove and bloodstains forming a path to the stove, and she didn’t have time to clean it up—even assuming that she had the remarkable foresight to plan all this out in advance.
In a 1975 made-for-TV movie starring Elizabeth Montgomery as Lizzie Borden it was suggested that she committed the murders in the nude, then washed herself off quickly and re-dressed before calling down the maid. Again, this seems to be virtually impossible. First, for a Victorian Sunday school teacher, the idea of running around an occupied house naked in the middle of the day is almost more inconceivable than committing a couple of hatchet murders. Second, the only running water in the house was a spigot in the basement. If she had committed the murders in the nude, it is likely that there would have been bloody footprints leading to the basement—and there is no time to have cleaned them up. There isn’t enough time for her to have washed herself off and gotten back into her clothes, even if that was all she had to do.
Bridget saw Lizzie after the first murder and before the second (if the first murder was committed much earlier, as contemporary authorities believed). She wasn’t covered in blood then. She’d have had to clean herself up twice. She couldn’t have gone through the house to the basement and washed herself off in the basement while Bridget was washing windows without Bridget being aware of that. And … where’s the murder weapon? The police tore the house and the property apart looking for the murder weapon. When they couldn’t find a murder weapon, they took a broken-handled hatchet out of the basement, its head covered with ashes or dirt, and suggested that perhaps Lizzie had broken off the handle during the assault, then burned the handle in the kitchen stove. This exploded in the prosecution’s face when:
1) One of the policemen confessed that the broken-off handle had actually been in the box with the hatchet when they found the hatchet,
2) The prosecution’s expert witness testified that there wasn’t a trace of blood on that hatchet, that it would have been extremely difficult to have cleaned all of the blood off the hatchet so that it couldn’t be found, that the hatchet was dirty and obviously had not been cleaned at all, and further, that the hatchet was dull and rusted, whereas the murder weapon was razor sharp.
Modern re-tellings of the Borden story will sometimes point out that, in the eyes of a modern criminal profiler, the excessive violence of the murders—hacking the bodies far beyond what was necessary to end their lives—indicates that the person who committed the murder had a passionate hatred for these two people, and thus indicates someone who was involved in a close relationship with them. This is true—but what else would the modern criminal profiler say? A modern criminal profiler, looking at these murders without knowing who was accused of the crime, would say that the attacker was almost certainly male, over 30 years of age, probably had a documented history of violence, probably lived or worked in the neighborhood, probably was well known to the victims, and very likely was a person who was comfortable being covered in blood, such as a butcher, a farmer who did his own butchering (as farmers usually did in the 19th century), or someone who had worked on a whaling vessel.
Leaving the issue of gender entirely out of it, it would be extremely unusual for a person with no history of violence to commit two extraordinarily savage hatchet murders without provocation—or, for that matter, with provocation. Lizzie has no documented history of violence, and these murders were without provocation.
Unusual; I can get by unusual. But the murderous attack probably occurred between 10:55 and 10:58, and Lizzie probably yelled for help about three minutes later. That leaves her essentially three minutes to clean herself up, get her shoes and stockings back on, bundle herself back into her cumbersome Victorian outfit, dispose of the murder weapon and pull herself together. Make it six minutes, make it nine minutes, make it twelve. You can’t do it in an hour. Empty a bottle of ketchup all over yourself, over your face, your hair, your shoes, your clothes, and then see how long it takes you to get back to clean and dry—even using the kitchen sink and the shower.
I believe that in a modern investigation, Lizzie Borden would have been almost immediately excluded from suspicion, because a modern investigator would know immediately that the perpetrator would have to be covered with blood spatter. Hitting a person in the head
with a hatchet causes blood to squirt everywhere. In a modern investigation this would have been one of the “first facts” of the investigation, and this would have taken the investigation away from Lizzie Borden within a matter of hours.
VI
I left a loose end hanging in Lizzie Borden, which is that I failed to address the question “What is the potential value of the allegation that the defendant stood to profit from the death of the victim?”
It seems to me that this allegation, by itself, is never very persuasive evidence, and I question whether this allegation should ever be valued at more than about 5 points on a 100-point scale. There are some cases in which it seems to be much more. Suppose, for example, that a man buys several life insurance policies on his wife, who then is dispatched into eternity. This, certainly, is fairly persuasive evidence, and I might value that at 35 points, since I would think that three facts of this nature might be sufficient to establish guilt, but two would not.
This, however, is quite different from the Lizzie Borden case, in that the accused there has taken deliberate steps to profit from the death of the victim. It might be more than 35 points if we find, for example, that the accused has taken out life insurance policies on the deceased, and the signature of the deceased was a forgery. Then that might be 45 points, since this would be a very bad fact for the accused.
Or suppose … this is something that we see often in crime stories … suppose that there is a young woman who has a boyfriend who then marries a well-off man in his late fifties. The well-heeled hubby is murdered some months later, and it is then learned that the young widow has been continuing to enjoy Thursday afternoon relations with the old boyfriend, throughout her marriage. Again, the accused has taken deliberate actions to profit from the death, and again there is deceit involved in those actions. Doesn’t look good.
Even in the case of Lizzie Borden, I might find her inheritance to be somewhat persuasive, if she was desperate for money, or if she had a clearly demonstrated focus on the money. The Menendez brothers, after all, killed their parents for the money, as have thousands of others. But the Menendez brothers were greedy little bastards who killed their parents and started spending money like it was toilet paper—and even that was nowhere near sufficient grounds to arrest them, until there was other evidence. It seems to me that there might be an array of statements of evidence here, like this:
1) The accused took deliberate actions involving fraud or deceit to profit from the death of the victim (0 to 45 points).
2) The accused took deliberate steps to profit from the death of the victim (0 to 35 points).
3) The accused stood to profit from the death of the deceased and had a demonstrated focus on that potential (0 to 25 points).
4) The accused stood to profit from the death of the deceased and was in a precarious financial position (0 to 15 points).
5) The accused stood to profit from the death of the deceased (0 to 5 points).
A demonstrated focus on the money means either that the accused had talked about the money he/she stood to inherit in more than a casual way, or that the accused is shown to be an avaricious person or a greedy little bastard. This should not be redundantly charged. In the case of the Harvard murder, for example, Dr. Webster certainly was in a precarious financial position (15 points), but also took fraudulent actions designed to profit from Parkman’s death (45 points). But that’s 45 points maximum, not 60, because the fraudulent note in that case is certainly not 60% persuasive of Webster’s guilt.
I have used the term “profit” to refer to money, but what if the profit is less direct? What if, for example, A and B are rivals for a promotion, and B is murdered? That’s an entirely different kettle of fish, and, by the way, to the best of my knowledge there are very few real murders that occur under that scenario; it’s something that happens often in fiction, but not so much in real life. But let’s move on …
There are two outstanding books of recent years about crimes of the same era as the Borden murders. One is The Devil in the White City (Erik Larson, 2004, Vintage Books), about the murders by H. H. Holmes in Chicago, which happened in the same time frame as the Borden murders—Holmes murdered some people before, some after. The Devil in the White City is about Holmes, but also about the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, and really, more about the fair than the murders. Larson is more comfortable when he is writing about fairs, architects, inventors and inventions than when he is writing about murder, and the story of the Chicago World’s Fair is a fantastic story. Some people don’t like the book because there’s a little bit of that old turn-up-your-nose-at-the-crime-story attitude in Larson’s writing. Did you ever know one of those people in college who was a good guy but so responsible that you always wanted to set his shoes on fire? It’s 5 o’clock on Saturday afternoon, and he’s studying his Latin. Larson is kind of like that. Whereas some other sources blandly assert that Holmes murdered 30 to 70 women—with basically little evidence that he did, but some indications that he might have—Larson goes to the other extreme, the “responsible” extreme: he refuses to speculate at all about crimes that Holmes might have committed. Sometimes you want to slap him. He is, however, a terrific researcher and a terrific writer, so I guess I am honor bound to recommend the book.
The truTV Crime Library account of the Lizzie Borden case states, somewhat bizarrely, that the Borden case “was the first nationally prominent murder case in the United States,” while the Wikipedia entry on Lizzie Borden at this writing states that the publicity given to the case was “a relatively new phenomenon for the times.” Hurray for them; it’s hard to be first when you arrive on the scene so late. On the other hand, Larson tells about a drinking establishment created and frequented by Chicago newspapermen of the era, the Whitechapel Club, which celebrated famous murders. They had guns and knives all over the walls that had been used to commit murders, a noose that had actually been used to hang somebody, skeletons and skulls taken from medical schools and a coffin for atmosphere. That gives you a better sense of the true state of journalism in that era. These people wallowed in crime stories like pigs in muck, utterly unashamed. Nancy Grace, by comparison, looks like she’s reporting on arms control negotiations. There were probably, I would guess, more famous and more nationally famous murder cases in 19th century America than in 20th century America.
And Holmes was a fascinating criminal, in a way that escapes Larson’s best efforts. Compare Holmes with the most famous criminal of them all, Jack the Ripper, who was a contemporary. Holmes built and lived in a sort of handyman’s castle, a huge, jerry-built house/hotel on Chicago’s south side. Here’s the funny part: he didn’t really have much money. He conned people into building it for him. He’d hire a contractor to come in, put up some exterior walls, do some foundation work, then he’d find fault with his work, fire him, refuse to pay him what he owed, and hire another guy. The other guy would build some walls, put in some windows … Holmes would pay him a little bit, string him along, then fire him. That’s a sophisticated criminal, who can con people into building a hotel for him. He had a room or two in there with no doors, no escape … a kind of gas chamber with a peephole so he could watch you die. An elevator. That’s a really sophisticated serial murderer. Jack the Ripper, as much as the British love him, was just some dumb jackass with a knife who ran around slashing hookers. And there are 75 books about him.
The other crime book that I want to recommend is Kansas Charley, by Joan Jacobs Brumberg (Penguin, 2003). Charley Miller was a New York City orphan who adopted the sobriquet Kansas Charley, in the manner of a Wild West adventurer, after spending a few relatively pleasant and peaceful weeks on a Kansas farm.
In September 1890 Charley Miller murdered two other young travelers on a train near the border between Nebraska and Wyoming. It proved difficult to deliver justice to Charley Miller, because:
a) nobody was too sure whether the train was in Nebraska or Wyoming at the time of the murders, and
b) Charley Mill
er was only fifteen years old.
There was a very active movement against the death penalty in the 1890s, and the wisdom of executing a juvenile was a natural flashpoint in that debate. A national debate developed about whether Kansas Charley should be executed, very reminiscent of a similar debate that we have had in America in the last twenty years. Ms. Brumberg’s excellent book recounts and illuminates that debate.
In the years after the Lizzie Borden case American crime stories were dominated by a long series of murders of rich and powerful people, sometimes by assassins but more often by relatives, lawyers and other rich people.
On January 30, 1900, William Goebel, due to be sworn in as Governor of Kentucky the next day, was shot five or six times from a window of the state building as he walked across the grounds of the Kentucky State Capitol. It had been widely rumored that an assassination plot was afoot. Kentucky politics were descending into violence, and the state was hovering on the brink of a civil war. Goebel himself had killed a political opponent in a gun battle on the streets just a few years earlier.
The kingpin of the Kentucky legislature, Goebel had “earned” the governorship by a long series of political shenanigans. He had gotten passed a phony election reform bill, the Goebel Election Law, which put his political appointees in charge of Kentucky elections. Finding himself the third-most-popular Democrat at the Democratic state convention in 1899, he had made a deal with the second-most-popular Democrat to unite their votes and drive the most popular candidate out of the race, in part by denying credentials to his voters; Goebel, predictably, controlled the credentials committee. With the leading Democrat forced out of the race, Goebel stabbed the second-most-popular candidate in the back (figuratively) by breaking the agreement and re-entering the contest. This split the Democratic Party and created another three-way contest in November, allowing a Republican, William Taylor, to win the election. Goebel appealed to his political appointees who controlled the election boards. To everybody’s surprise they turned him down and affirmed the Republican winner by a two-to-one vote.
