Did Lizzie Borden Get Away With Murder?

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Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. They're some of our favorites. And today we have Kara Robertson, author of The Trial of Lizzie Borden. This long unsolved double murder has haunted Fall River, Massachusetts since the late summer of 1892.

Here's Kara with the story. You know we're used to the idea of these new trials that become big media events. But Lizzie Borden's trial was, to use an oft-used phrase, the trial of the century. In her case it was the trial of the 19th century. There is a combination of technology and sensational subject matter that converge in turning her case into something akin to the O.J.

Simpson trial. It was such a heinous double murder and the person accused of it was someone who checks all the boxes of proper middle class womanhood. She was active in good work. She was a Sunday school teacher. And yet she's accused of the murder of her own father and her stepmother.

And this is just more than anyone can really comprehend. And so there is a strong desire to follow the case and to see her in mythic terms. You know she's either this monster, you know someone whose appearance must match the murder, or she's an innocent victim, almost a sentimental heroine just ensnared by circumstance and some insidious masculine conspiracy of men and policemen blue who are trying to pin the crime on her to cover up their own incompetence. And the sensationalism of the crime and also the press coverage that the trial generated means that it provides a place from which you can observe America in the Gilded Age and have a real window onto that period in American history. Fall River, Massachusetts was an extremely prosperous mill town. It was a central place for textile production in the United States. It was often called the Manchester of America. And it was a town that was separated from urban centers like Boston and New York, so had a slight provincialism to it.

But it also had easy access to those centers. So there was a lot of wealth and the people who enjoyed the wealth generated by the mills were able to travel to Boston and New York and the wider world and had a certain amount of sophistication. And then the people who worked in the mills were quite poor, often immigrants.

And what is particularly interesting about Fall River is that its geography exactly mirrors the social structure. The people who live closest to the mills, which is low, are the people who work in the mills. And then there's a city center that's sort of halfway up the hill and that's where mostly the doctors, lawyers live. And then there is an elite area called the Hill District, which is literally the highest place you can live.

And that's a place that's favored by the people who are the owners of the mills. On the surface, the Bordens probably looked like a fairly typical family. Andrew Borden was a successful real estate owner. He lived with his second wife, Abby, and his adult daughters, Emma and Lizzie, in a single family house near the center of town.

That was very convenient for him for walking around, collecting rents, checking on his businesses. But Andrew Borden was descended from one of the founding families of Fall River. And he was from what you might call a lesser branch. So his father was quite poor and he was himself a self-made man and pretty rich. So Lizzie and her sister Emma occupied a peculiar position in Fall River. They were on the one hand considered heiresses. One might have assumed them to be in the elite of Fall River, but because he chose to live, as one of his neighbors said, on a narrow scale in the middle-class, middling part of Fall River, and because he was a bit of a miser, the daughter's allowance was for pin money and things were sort of equivalent to the wage a worker in one of the mills would have earned.

Obviously they didn't have to work for it. And yet, on the other hand, they were socially fairly isolated by the decisions of their father. And it seems clear that they would have liked to have been cultured girls, as one of their neighbors put it.

They chose to attend or remain rather in the society church when their father had a dispute and left it for a different one. Abby Borden was Lizzie and Emma's stepmother. Lizzie was very young at the time of her mother's death and had no particular memory of her. So Emma was the woman who raised her. But Emma was 13 at the time of her mother's death and was thought to never fully accept Abby as her mother, as a replacement for her mother. About five years before the murders, Andrew Borden decided to give Abby a house, really to bail out her sister, her own half-sister and family. And Lizzie and Emma got wind of this and really resented this act of generosity. They said that what he did for her, he should do for his own blood. And Andrew subsequently gave them what had been his father's house that was rented out so that they would have their own income.

And although this had the effect of equalizing the gifts, it didn't really heal the breach. And from that time forward, Lizzie and her older sister Emma avoided their parents as much as possible in that small house. They preferred to take separate meals and to, if possible, entertain visitors in a guest room upstairs that they used as their own sort of sitting room. So within the small household, they lived quite separately and it was described by some as a site of really cold war between the generations. And you're listening to Kara Robertson tell the story of the trial of Lizzie Borden and giving you a backdrop. When we come back, more of the trial of Lizzie Borden here on Our American Story. Folks, if you love the stories we tell about this great country and especially the stories of America's rich past, know that all of our stories about American history, from war to innovation, culture, and faith are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that are good in life. And if you can't get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses.

Go to hillsdale.edu to learn more. And we return to Our American Stories and we've been listening to Kara Robertson, author of the trial of Lizzie Borden. By the way, it's a terrific read.

Go to Amazon or the usual suspects to pick it up. The Borden family from the outside seemed like a normal family, but there was discord amongst the generations and between them. Adult daughters Lizzie and Emma didn't care for their stepmother, Abby, making for a chilling home environment.

Back to Kara. Well, Emma was a fairly stoic character and much more mild mannered so that she wasn't really quoted saying anything negative about her stepmother, though it was known that there was this dispute in the family. Lizzie was a forthright character and she described her stepmother as a mean good for nothing thing to a dressmaker of all people a few months before the, before the murders.

She was just very frank about her dissatisfaction with her living conditions, her desire for, for more and also for the role that she felt that her stepmother had played, you know, in keeping her in this condition. About a year before the murders, the Bordens were the victim of a mysterious daytime theft. Andrew and Abby were out, but Emma Lizzie and Bridget Sullivan, the Bordens made were home. Abby Borden had some jewelry stolen and Mr. Borden also lost some money and streetcar tickets. And what was oddest about the crime was that no one seemed to have heard anyone enter or leave the house.

After the police were called and investigated and Mr. Borden told the police officer that he didn't think that they'd ever find the thief, suggesting to many people that perhaps he knew who was responsible. On August 2nd, the Borden household was a hit with what appeared to be food poisoning. It was a fairly typical complaint in Fall River in the summer. In fact, it was called the summer complaint because so many houses didn't have refrigeration.

The Bordens did have an icebox, but they ate a lot of leftovers and suffered the consequences. The next day, Abby consulted the family physician who lived across the street. Learning of their dinner, he wasn't particularly concerned, but Abby confided to him that she feared they had been poisoned.

When the doctor returned to the house to examine Andrew, along with Abby, Andrew stood in the doorway and refused to let him enter and also to tell him that he would not pay for the visit. Lizzie also had her own suspicions about poison, which she shared with her friend and former neighbor Alice Russell on the night before the murders. She said she was worried that the milk had been poisoned and that there were strange men who'd been seen, you know, in the vicinity of the house.

She also confessed her generalized sense of uneasiness and a sense of foreboding, remarking, 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. On the morning of August 4th, there were five people in the Borden household, Andrew Borden, his wife, Abby, his daughter, Lizzie, the housemaid, Bridget Sullivan, and Andrew's brother-in-law, John Morse, who was an occasional overnight visitor. Emma Borden was visiting friends in Fairhaven, which is some distance away. As was custom, the elder Bordens rose first and had breakfast as did John Morse. Andrew left to go about his business in town.

John followed in order to see some other relatives at the other side of town sometime between 9.20 and 9.30 in the morning. Around the same time, Abby Borden asked Bridget Sullivan to wash the windows inside and outside of the house. She went up to the guest room in order to change a pillowcase and tidy it up after John Morse's departure. Around 9.30, she was killed in that room. An assassin struck and hacked her to death with approximately 19 blows. About an hour after Abby was killed, Andrew Borden returned home.

He had trouble getting in the front door because it had been bolted from the inside. Bridget Sullivan, the housemaid, came to let him in. And as she was letting him in, uttered some sort of an oath. And this apparently evoked laughter from Lizzie Borden, who was upstairs on the landing in the process of descending the stairs. When Mr. Borden came in, his daughter Lizzie greeted him and inquired about the mail. He asked about her stepmother, Abby, and she said that she had had a note from a sick friend and gone out. Mr. Borden decided to take a nap on the sitting room sofa. And shortly thereafter, the snap became his final slumber.

He was struck by 10 blows, mostly in the face. At the time of her father's murder, Lizzie Borden later said that she had been outside first picking pears in the orchard and then looking for a sinker, you know, a weight for a fishing line or perhaps a piece of iron to fix a window in the upstairs loft of the barn. There she tarried and ate a pear or two. She estimated that she was there 20 minutes, perhaps 30, came back in from outside and discovered her father's body on the sitting room sofa. She immediately summoned the housemaid, Bridget Sullivan, who was upstairs in her third floor attic room, taking a little bit of a nap. She dispatched Bridget for the family doctor who lived across the street. He was not at home, so she sent her to find Alice Russell, who was a friend and neighbor. While she was waiting for Bridget to return, she waited inside the screen door at the side of the house and was spotted by her neighbor Alice Churchill, who asked her what was the matter.

And she replied that someone has killed father. The murders were so violent that some speculated that Jack the Ripper had come to America. The details were gruesome, yet oddly the house itself seemed to be in what one witness described as apple pie order.

The first thought was that it must be the work of a madman. But two key facts seem to rule out the possibility of a murderous stranger. First, the house was locked. The front door had been securely triple locked. And although there was a door from the cellar leading to the back, that too was locked. So the only point of access in the house seemed to be a side door that sometimes was latched, sometime was not latched. But it was often in sight of the neighbors or Bridget Sullivan, the housemate. The second key fact that seemed to rule out a murderous stranger was the interval between the murders.

It was something that one of the prosecutors would later call the controlling fact of the case. The idea that someone had broken in from the outside, killed Mrs. Borden first, and then waited an hour and a half to kill Andrew seemed really implausible. There were a few places in the house to hide. It is possible that an upstairs closed closet could have provided a refuge, but it was quite small and cramped. And also the door had been left open to the guest room, the scene of Abby's murder seeming to advertise rather than hide the fact. All in all, it was a very small house. And it was a house that had been converted from a tenement for two families into a single family house, which meant that the upstairs and the downstairs layouts mirrored each other.

Neither floor had a hallway so that one would have to pass from one room into the other in order to get through the house. It seemed very unlikely that someone from the outside would have been able to break in and then would have been able to elude the two women known to be in the house at the time of both murders, Lizzie Borden and Bridget Sullivan. Once that was clear, the police began to dig for a motive. But the first detective to question Lizzie Borden found her a bit evasive and suspicious.

In particular, he wondered what on earth she could have been doing in the loft of the barn, the hottest, most stifling part of the barn for 20 or 30 minutes. And you're listening to Kara Robertson, author of The Trial of Lizzie Borden. The murders were so violent, she said, that some speculated that Jack the Ripper himself had come to America. And we return more of The Trial of Lizzie Borden here on Our American Stories.

And we return to Our American Stories and to the mysterious double murder that took place in Fall River, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1892. The daughter of the victims, Lizzie Borden, was the main suspect. Back to Kara Robertson, author of The Trial of Lizzie Borden, with more of the story.

The police found no evidence that anyone had been in the loft of the barn. This is something that is disputed at the trial. At the time that the inquest started, the police already had strong suspicions of Lizzie Borden. Lizzie's family lawyer attempted to participate. He wanted to represent her at the inquest, but that wasn't permitted. The prosecutor at the inquest took her through her stated movements on the day of the murders.

Lizzie produced a contradictory story. She said that she was upstairs. She said that she was downstairs. She said that she was ironing handkerchiefs at the time of Abby's murder, a task that was significantly left undone or not completed by the time of her father's arrival. And yet she also claimed that she had not heard a sound.

This seemed implausible to people who'd been in the house, that the fall of someone upstairs should have produced some sort of a jar. On the last day of the inquest, Lizzie Borden was arrested and taken to jail. The trial begins in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a neighboring town on June 5th, 1893. Reporters and journalists from around the country are dispatched to cover the case. An extension to the courthouse is built in the rear so that all the wire services can be accommodated. And the most prominent columnists write not only about what is happening in the courthouse, but also what is happening outside the courthouse because it becomes an almost festive atmosphere with people who line up and bring lunch.

Desire for admission is widespread and much covered in the newspapers. One local newspaper under the headline, Where to Look for Your Wife, describes the number of women who are desirous of attending the trial. And these women, according at least to one of the journalists, constitute a sort of second jury.

The jury itself is all male. Women were not eligible for jury service in Massachusetts at the time, and actually wouldn't serve on a Massachusetts jury until 1950. Lizzie Borden had a team of defenders, the most prominent of whom was the former governor of Massachusetts, George Robinson. And he told a simple story that Lizzie Borden was simply in the wrong place in the wrong time, or as he would have put it, in the right place in her home at the wrong time.

And that it was not the defense's job to clear up the mystery, that this was beyond the capacity of a woman who looked like Lizzie Borden or who had the characteristics of Lizzie Borden. Lizzie Borden had an extraordinary self-possession. That's something that everyone noticed about her.

In other respects, she was quite ordinary. All the journalists agreed that she had this extraordinary self-possession, and that divided the audience. Some saw in it evidence of almost a masculine nerve, that there was something just disturbing about that kind of self-possession in the face of these kinds of crimes.

And one local newspaper, the Irish Catholic paper that viewed her case with some suspicion and hostility, referred to her as the Sphinx of Coolness. By contrast, many of the journalists saw in Lizzie Borden's self-possession a sign of Yankee grit and of true American womanhood. And both sides used that appearance or their analysis of her appearance to confirm their own opinions about her guilt and innocence or innocence. The prosecution was in a bind because the very brutality of the murders seemed to argue against Lizzie Borden as the murderer. She's someone who, you know, appears to fit the model of womanly behavior. And she's someone who just doesn't look like the sort of person based on late 19th century ideas of criminality, who would be the murderer in such a case.

They were looking for, or, you know, people were expecting some sort of insane immigrants. So for the prosecution, the task was to show that really only Lizzie Borden could have committed the murder and that that was their best, their best way to get a conviction. There was evidence that would have helped the prosecution that they were unable to tell the jury. The first piece was that Lizzie Borden was identified as a woman who tried to buy prussic acid on the day before the murders. This was significant because if Lizzie Borden had tried and failed to procure prussic acid, which is a deadly poison and poison, as we all know, is a woman's weapon, then she might well have turned to a readily available household implement to commit the murders. But that explained the choice of weapon, which otherwise seemed very much like a man's weapon. The other bit of evidence that they were not allowed to share was Lizzie Borden's own testimony that memorialized her conflicting accounts of where she had been on the morning of the murders.

The judges ruled that because she had effectively been denied counsel and the Massachusetts Constitution had a protection that was something like our modern Miranda rights, that the evidence could not be used at trial against her. Medical experts all testified that a woman could have committed the murders. And in fact, specifically said that with sufficient leverage, a weapon held by a woman could produce such wounds. And the prosecution even tried to argue that the number of wounds and the fact that some were weak and vacillating was somehow a sign that a woman had been the murderer.

They often want to have it both ways. But the defense just repeatedly said that a woman really could not have committed those crimes. The prosecution also had the problem that everyone who saw Lizzie Borden after the murders testified that she had no sign of blood anywhere on her person, that she seemed entirely put together. And so the defense was able to say that it just was impossible that someone would not have been spattered with blood after such violence, murders committed in such proximity to the victims. It was also known, however, that Lizzie Borden burned a dress on the Sunday after the murders, a dress that she claimed had been stained with paint.

And the defense produced the dressmaker to say that, yes, indeed, the dress had been stained with paint. And so the prosecution was able to imply that the dress that Lizzie Borden had been seen in after the murders was not the same blue dress that she had worn on the morning before the murders. The police produced a number of weapons, axes and hatchets found at the Borden household. The police found what they thought was the murder weapon, a hatchet head that had been found in the basement, among other tools that were rusty and fallen into disuse.

The hatchet head was covered with what the police described as ash, as opposed to the dust that covered other things in the basement, leading them to believe that someone had actually hidden it there in an attempt to make it look like it was just an innocent object. One of the ways that they determined that this was the likely murder weapon was by matching the cutting blade of that hatchet with the indentations in the skulls of the Bordens. The coroner had decapitated the Bordens and then rendered off the flesh in order to examine those skulls and then had cast made and drawn in the various wounds so that they could be brought into the trial.

When Lizzie Borden saw the skulls for the first time at the trial, she promptly fainted, earning her the support of many of the journalists and the derision of others. And we're listening to Cara Robertson, author of The Trial of Lizzie Borden, Evil Monster, and Family Member, when we continue the final chapter of The Trial of Lizzie Borden here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories and the final installment of The Trial of Lizzie Borden with author Cara Robertson.

Let's pick up where we last left off. The prosecution plays with tropes about hatred of stepmothers and has a sort of easier time conceptualizing the murder of the stepmother. The problem for the prosecution is Andrew Borden's murder.

There's never a theory as to why he was killed, except to say that he came home perhaps before she could establish an alibi or even more probably that she suddenly realized after killing her stepmother that her father would know that she had killed her stepmother and she couldn't bear the idea that he would look at her as a murderer, even if he might protect her as he did perhaps with the daytime theft of Abby's jewelry. And so that's something that the defense is able to really emphasize that whoever killed Abby Borden killed Andrew Borden. And while there may have been evidence of discord in the household and dislike of the stepmother, there was no real evidence that Lizzie Borden hated her father.

In fact, they seem to have in some respects an extremely close relationship as evidenced by the fact that Andrew Borden wore a ring that his daughter Lizzie gave him and it was the only ring, the only piece of jewelry he wore. The murders divided Fall River. The working classes whose views were reflected in and shaped by the Irish Catholic paper viewed this as another case of the police giving special breaks to someone from a good family. And there was a lot of grumbling that if a mill hand had been suspected of the murders, then that person would have been arrested and then convicted very quickly. People from Lizzie Borden's social set and especially from her church formed the bedrock of her support and attended the trial. After an unusually long trial lasting almost three weeks, the jury found that they were unanimous on the first ballot and they concluded, however, that they better wait about an hour an hour and a half for propriety sake so that they looked like they'd been appropriately deliberative. When the jury returned, the clerk of the court asked if Lizzie Borden was guilty or not guilty.

The foreman interrupted the clerk to shout, not guilty. Lizzie Borden fell as if shot and the courtroom and then the crowd outside erupted in cheers and she was warmly congratulated by her friends in attendance and even the most prominent journalists who had for the most part been her supporters. In Fall River, the story was a little bit different. The town was divided along class lines. For the most part, the working classes thought that this was someone who had simply just gotten away with murder.

It was another case of money talking. For the people who had been her supporters during the trial, however, the verdict was greeted with great relief and Lizzie Borden stayed with some friends and received many telegrams congratulating her from people far and wide who had supported her during the trial. Once the trial was over, many of the people who had backed her cooled in their enthusiasm and when she returned to her church, she found many of the pews empty so that the message was delivered that she was not particularly welcome.

There's something almost tribal about the way the punishment was meted out in the case. The elite and particularly her fellow churchgoers supported her during the trial. They backed her against the idea that someone like them, someone like her, could have committed the murders but then exacted their own punishment by ostracizing her. Lizzie Borden was expected to live down her notoriety and to show by her continued good works that this was simply had been a tragic incident of which she too was an innocent victim. But instead, Lizzie and her sister moved to a larger grander house, a sort of late Victorian McMansion on the hill and had the sort of life that she had apparently imagined for herself in earlier days. Although no longer fully welcome at her church, she went to the theater in Boston.

She had a special seat built into her chauffeur-driven car to accommodate her dogs. So she returned to Fall River, bought the house that she had always wanted and lived in a sense in the style that she had always wanted but she was shunned. I think it says something both about her nerve and her limitations that she chose to stay in Fall River rather than disappear into a big city where she could have enjoyed a high standard of living and been much more anonymous. I think Lizzie Borden stayed in Fall River because of her own parochialism that she really couldn't imagine anywhere else, that that was the limit of her ambition. She wanted to live in the style of the grander Bordens and didn't really imagine anything beyond that. If you think she did it, then that was the purpose of the murders.

The prosecution makes a point of saying that Lizzie Borden had plenty of money for the things that she wanted, plenty of pin money and that her father was capable of generosity at least towards her. And so therefore she had no financial motive. But if what she wanted was financial independence rather than the ability to get a new hat and one sees the murders through that lens, then she was simply living out what had been her fantasy and that the opinions of the people in the town were not particularly significant to her. She was very strong-willed, which is something that everyone says about her that unlike her much more demure sister that she is somebody, she resembles her father in terms of strength of character and hardness. Now, of course, if you think that she was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time or in the right place at the wrong time and she had no knowledge of the murders, then it also wouldn't make any sense for her to really live anywhere else, that that was her home and that that's where her sister would want to live because her sister's friends were all in Fall River. The sisters had a split in 1905. So 12 years after the murders, Emma moved out of the house and they never spoke again.

What we know is that as soon as Emma moved out, Lizzie lost the remaining friends she had there and was truly isolated. At that point, she turned mostly to her domestic staff, enjoyed the company also of her dogs. The tricky thing is she's socially isolated in the conventional sense, but she seems to enjoy the company of her staff. She seems to have a nice relationship with various housekeepers and the chauffeurs' family. She also sends really saccharine birthday and holiday greetings to the children of her domestic staff so that they receive postcards by special delivery with bunnies and things on them, wishing them happy birthday, happy Easter.

She also would take them out for ice cream. It didn't seem to be a case of reasonable doubt for the jury. Rather, it reflected their certainty that someone like Lizzie Borden could not have committed these crimes. It is one way in which she definitely benefits from the double standard, whether she did it or not, like she's the beneficiary of the double standard and that it just seems so difficult to imagine someone like Lizzie Borden who is, after all, sitting in the courtroom every day with perfectly coiffed hair composed, picking up a hatchet and killing her father and her stepmother in such a fashion. There is discussion on the part of the defense team that Lizzie and her sisters would continue to look for the real murderers. The prosecution and the police considered the case closed, that they had in fact found the person and she was acquitted. And although everyone associated with the household has been suspected at one time or another by amateur detectives, no one except Lizzie Borden was ever tried for the murders. It's a case in which people project a lot of their worst nightmares. It's such a horrible case and it's these horrible unsolved murders, I mean technically unsolved.

And even if you think who did it, it's a why done it if not a who done it. It's not surprising then that every generation effectively reinvents the case that finds an explanation that reflects the time in which the solution is written more so than the actual time of the murders. And I mean, maybe you could say that this was true of the town, that in exactly its own punishment, that it was just it was it was far better to let one woman get away with murder than to suggest that someone like Lizzie Borden was actually capable of it. And a special thanks to Kara Robertson. Please, by all means, go out and buy the book The Trial of Lizzie Borden. It's on Amazon and all the usual suspects. Was she guilty or guilty of being in the right place at the wrong time?

You be the judge. The Trial of Lizzie Borden here on Our American Stories. Sound is personal, intimate and emotive. Just like this podcast. We are audio stack.ai.

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