In spite of the heat, a crowd was gathering in the street outside the Borden house. Then a man came strolling up the street. It was Uncle John. It was his behaviour that now seemed remarkable. Instead of seeing the crowd and hurrying to see what had gone wrong at the Borden house, which would have been most people’s response, he slowed right down. When he at last reached the house, instead of going in, he went round to the back garden, picked some fruit from a tree and ate it. Even with the evidence of some domestic disaster unfolding round him, Uncle John was in no hurry to find out what it was. Did he perhaps already know?
Once he was inside the house, Uncle John was a changed man. His story of the morning’s events cascaded out of him. His alibi was so watertight – too good to be true – that he immediately became the principal suspect. When he emerged from the house, the crowd had already decided it was him, and they chased him back inside. When the police had finished with the Borden household for the day, they left a cordon round the house to keep away the crowd of curious onlookers which had gathered at the front of the house.
Emma was out of town, visiting friends, and Lizzie and Bridget were the only people left alive in the house. Bridget told the police she had been washing windows most of the morning, and then gone up to her room to lie down. She was still lying there when Lizzie had called her down. Bridget hurried downstairs to find Lizzie at the back door. Lizzie stopped her from going into the sitting room; ‘Don’t go in there. Go and get the doctor. Run.’ Bridget ran across the street to fetch their doctor and neighbour, Dr Bowen. He was out, so Bridget told Mrs Bowen that Mr Borden had been killed before running back to the house. Then Lizzie sent her to fetch her friend Alice Russell, who lived a few streets away.
Bridget was a straightforward young Irish woman of twenty-six. She had emigrated from Ireland in 1886 and found herself in a disadvantaged and discriminated class – the Irish immigrant community of Massachusetts. Her testimony, which was eventually published in full, comes across as honest, truthful, consistent. Interestingly, it neither incriminates nor vindicates Lizzie.
Bridget did not spend the night following the murders at the Borden house, but at a neighbour’s. She spent the following night (Friday) in her second-floor room there, but left on the Saturday, never to return. It is not known what the circumstances of her departure were. One theory is that she was paid off by Lizzie, that Lizzie gave her enough money to go back to Ireland. That is possible, but Bridget returned to North America a few years later, marrying and moving to Montana, where she died in 1948.
Bridget’s story never changed, but Lizzie kept on contradicting herself and giving versions of events that could not have been true. She said she was in the barn loft for twenty minutes before discovering her father’s body, but when the investigators went up to the loft they saw that the floor was covered with an undisturbed layer of dust: nobody had been up there for a long time. She had lied. In the cellar they found four hatchets. One of them had no handle and was covered in ash; this would be presented as the murder weapon at Lizzie’s trial. The murder investigation, including the gathering of evidence, was an unusually incompetent affair; it was largely thanks to this that Lizzie was acquitted. When Lizzie came to trial the case against her was circumstantial. Even the identification of the murder weapon was entirely arbitrary; there was no good forensic reason why the investigators should have thought one hatchet was used for the murders rather than another. No bloodstained clothing was found or presented.
The next day, the day following the double murder, Emma hired a lawyer. The District Attorney Hosea Knowlton, resisted the pleas from the police to arrest Lizzie; as he said, ‘You don’t have any evidence against her.’ Five days later, after an inquest had been held, Lizzie Borden was arrested, charged and taken to Taunton Jail. If it had been someone outside the family circle, an intruder, that intruder would have been incredibly lucky to hit a moment when Bridget was outside cleaning windows and Uncle John happened to be out. This was the same reasoning used by the British police when they charged Sion Jenkins with murdering Billie-Jo. Of course, the ‘too-great-a-coincidence’ argument can be turned round if the hypothetical intruder was watching the house, simply waiting until the coast is clear before going in and committing the crime.
A preliminary hearing opened on 7 November. One of the Bordens’ friends, Alice Russell, gave evidence; she had seen Lizzie burning a dress after the murders. On 2 December, Lizzie was formally charged on three counts of murder, one for the murder of Andrew, one for the murder of Abby, one (curiously) for the murder of them both.
The main trial opened on 5 June 1893 and lasted fourteen days. Witnesses for the prosecution testified that Andrew Borden was drawing up a new will. He intended to leave half his estate to Abby, the rest to be divided between his daughters. Another witness testified that Lizzie had tried to buy ten cents’ worth of prussic acid from Eli Bence at a drug store which she could have intended to use, or actually used, to poison her parents. It certainly tied in with Abby’s remark to Dr Bowen. The defence took only two days to present its case, calling witnesses who said that they had seen a mysterious man loitering near the Borden house. Emma Borden – who was not the most impartial of witnesses, since she hated Abby as much as Lizzie did and for the same reasons – confirmed that Lizzie had no motive for killing their parents. Was Emma protecting not only Lizzie but herself? Did she perhaps know that Lizzie was planning the murders? Did they perhaps collude? They both stood to gain equally from the deaths of Abby and their father.
A leading question related to Lizzie’s visit to the outbuilding during the twenty minutes when her father was being murdered. What was she doing in the outhouse? ‘To look for a piece of metal with which to mend a window screen, also to get some lead suitable for fishing weights.’ Detectives searching the house found no broken screens and no lead that could be used for fishing weights. She also claimed that she had eaten three pears while she was in the outbuilding, even though it had been stifling and she had a queasy stomach. None of this sounded true.
In her favour was the lack of bloodstained clothing. If she had committed the two murders, she would have been soaked in blood, twice in the space of ninety minutes, yet when the house was searched all of Lizzie’s clothes were found to be spotless. Alice Russell told a slightly different story. Before the second police search was carried out, Lizzie tore up an old dress and burnt it in the kitchen stove. That was on 7 August. She asked Lizzie why she was doing it. Lizzie said, ‘Because it was all faded and paint-stained.’ Alice said, ‘I wouldn’t let anybody see me do that, Lizzie, if I were you.’ Alice could not see any paint on the dress and obviously suspected that the dress was stained in some more sinister way. It may have been a Freudian slip that made Lizzie mention stains. On the other hand, if Lizzie was destroying incriminating evidence, why on earth did she do it in front of a witness? Why did she mention stains, when she could have said the garment was old, worn out or badly torn? And why did she wait until three days after the murders to dispose of it?
The court gave two rulings on points of order, and these proved to be decisive as far as the jury was concerned. This is unusual, in that the points of order were technical rather than substantive.
Lizzie’s inquest testimony was disallowed as trial evidence on the grounds that when she made the statement she had not been formally charged. The evidence of the drug store assistant was also disallowed because the matter of the poison was irrelevant to the case. No poison had had been involved in the murders. These rulings evidently impressed the jury, who were left feeling that the case for the prosecution had been heavy-handed, illegal, unfair, oppressive. It took only half an hour for the jury’s sense of fair play to prevail. They found Lizzie Borden not guilty on all three counts of murder. The court room reverberated with applause. That night she was guest of honour at a celebration party. She laughed over the scrapbook of newspaper cuttings of the trial that her supporters had compiled for her.
If Lizzie was innoc
ent, then who had committed the murders? Was it the agitated young man seen by the neighbour outside the Borden house? And who was he? If it was him, how did he get through the locked front door?
Lizzie Borden was found not guilty, but that does not necessarily mean that the jury believed she was innocent. Not guilty does not mean the same thing as innocent. In fact it has been suggested that, given the mores of the time, the jury did not like to think of a woman murdering her parents and in such a bloodthirsty way; that they found her not guilty because they wanted her not to be guilty. The closing speech of her defence lawyer, George D. Robinson, played up the idea that the murder was grotesque and diabolical, evidently relying on Lizzie’s very ordinariness to point up the fact that she could not have done it. She did not look like the sort of person who would commit ‘one of the most dastardly and diabolical crimes that was ever committed in Massachusetts. Who could have done such an act? In the quiet of the home, in the broad daylight of an August day, on the street of a popular city, with houses within a stone's throw, nay, almost touching, who could have done it?’ Obviously somebody did, but the jurors did not want that person to be Lizzie.
Lizzie Borden was acquitted and released, but in spite of that acquittal the suspicion that she had killed her parents hung in the air at Fall River. Lizzie and Emma had to leave the neighbourhood, though surprisingly they stayed in Fall River. Five weeks after the trial, the sisters moved to a house in a more fashionable neighbourhood, and called the house Maplecroft. Lizzie took to calling herself Lizbeth which, in a similar way, was a sort of break with the past but not really enough to make any difference.
Lizzie’s underlying deceitfulness and criminality, which seem to have been there all along, emerged in a small way again in 1897, when she was accused of shoplifting two paintings. The matter of $100 was settled out of court. Or, if we do not want to call it criminality, perhaps, as one writer has proposed, Lizzie suffered from temporal epilepsy, which would account for what the family called her ‘peculiar turns’.
Lizzie Borden’s lifestyle underwent a transformation when she met a young actress called Nance O’Neill. Nance moved into Maplecroft and Lizzie started throwing parties for Nance and her new-found theatrical friends, who were no doubt fascinated to meet the notorious Lizzie Borden. Emma did not like any of these new developments and moved out. She may have felt that Lizzie was tempting fate by inviting attention on this scale. She never spoke to her sister again. Lizzie Borden died at the age of sixty-six on 1 June 1927, following gall bladder surgery. A week later, her sister Emma died falling down stairs. Lizzie left her money to animal welfare organizations.
The Borden double murder remains unsolved. The maid, the doctor, an illegitimate brother demanding money, a mad stranger, Uncle John – all have been blamed by various authors, but Lizzie herself still looks like the obvious culprit. The Borden family was a profoundly dysfunctional family, and it is clear that both the daughters had a strong financial motive for resenting Abby’s intrusion and their father’s declared intention to draw up a new will in her favour. Abby could have been killed out of hatred; Andrew because he would have avenged Abby’s murder; Andrew had to die before he could draft and sign the new will. There was no need to look outside the immediate family for suspects or motives. We also know enough about Lizzie’s criminal tendencies (the faked burglaries, the shoplifting) and her violence (the beheading of Abby’s cat) to sense that she was capable of both murder and criminal deception.
It is possible that someone else, a nameless stranger, or a disaffected neighbour, was guilty of the break-ins, and that Lizzie was incensed that her father should blame her for them. Anger at her father’s unjust accusations could easily have fuelled her frenzied attack on him.
But there something else that happened that morning. The often forgotten figure of Uncle John was there for a particular purpose. Andrew Borden had already transferred a piece of property to Abby’s name and it had led to a massive row, with Lizzie protesting that she was being disinherited. Uncle John was there to assist in the transfer of a second property, out of Lizzie’s and Emma’s reach: a farm that the two young women had come to think of as their summer home. No wonder they were angry.
A young man called at about nine o’clock in the morning with a note. He may have left the note just before or just after Andrew Borden left for the bank. Neither Andrew nor Uncle John would have wanted to upset the property arrangements by telling Lizzie, but it may be that the note was for Andrew, concerned the contentious property transfer and arrived just after Andrew left. Lizzie might well have read it and realized its significance; she was going to lose her holiday home and have her share of her father’s wealth reduced even further. She could easily have flown into a towering rage and gone straight upstairs and killed Abby there and then. That makes more sense than temporal epilepsy. If it had been temporal epilepsy, Lizzie would have been quite certain she hadn’t committed the murders and would probably have gone on living in Second Street.
Not only has Lizzie Borden become part of the fabric of American folk history, the house on Second Street has become a kind of heritage site. Restored to its 1892 condition, it is currently open for bed and breakfast. An earlier restoration of the house turned up – a hatchet.
Lizzie Borden was guilty, beyond all reasonable doubt. That was the general perception in the United States at the time, and the country delivered its own sentence on Lizzie Borden by turning her into folklore. She became, like the Big Bad Wolf, a nursery rhyme hate figure:
Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
And when she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.
She became a jolly cautionary tale, a skipping rhyme. Lizzie Borden quickly turned into a kind of joke-evil which still persists and is in a strange way far worse than the guilty verdict which comes from a court of law – and which, of course, she should have had. Those who think she could not have done it should remember what she did to Abby’s cat. A woman who is capable of beheading a cat is certainly capable of killing her father.
PART FOUR: Unsolved Crimes of the Early Twentieth Century. (1901–1950)
The Murder of Marion Gilchrist: Sherlock Holmes to the Rescue
Miss Marion Gilchrist was battered to death in her apartment in Glasgow on 21 December 1908. Miss Gilchrist was eighty-two and what used to be called ‘a maiden lady’. She was looked after by a servant called Helen Lambie and the violent murder happened during the very short time when Helen was out buying a newspaper. Helen was out for as little as ten minutes, yet in that time an assailant managed to get into Miss Gilchrist’s apartment, beat her to death and make off with a small diamond brooch. One peculiarity of this case is that the police discovered that only the one small diamond brooch was stolen, when Marion Gilchrist had a large collection of jewellery.
The family in the apartment underneath Miss Gilchrist’s, the Adams family, heard noises, unusual noises, and Arthur Adams went upstairs to investigate. It had sounded like three knocks on the ceiling. Miss Gilchrist was an old lady and was perhaps in difficulties of some kind, possibly having a stroke or a heart attack or possibly she had fallen over and broken her leg; maybe she was signalling for help. When Mr Adams reached Miss Gilchrist’s door he rang the bell. There was no answer, though he could hear noises inside the apartment. He went downstairs again, but was urged by his sisters to check that Miss Gilchrist really was all right. He went back upstairs and was standing in front of the door when Miss Lambie arrived back from her errand. It was at this moment that they both saw a man down in the hallway of the building. This was a semi-public area, so it did not strike either of them as unusual: perhaps another tenant or a visitor. There was no reason to connect this person with Miss Gilchrist.
Mr Adams told Miss Lambie what he had heard and the two of them went into the apartment. Together they found Miss Gilchrist; she was lying near the fireplace with her head brutally smashed in.
Oscar Slater, the man who emerged as the chief police suspect, had been living in Glasgow for about six weeks with his French girlfriend. He claimed to be a diamond cutter. Whether he was or not, the police – and others – thought he was a ‘bad lot’. This assessment of Slater was based mainly on the lowest of prejudices; Oscar Slater was German, he was Jewish and he had a French mistress – a triple condemnation. But it must be admitted that he was also running an illegal gambling operation.
The day after the murder, Mary Barrowman, a girl of fourteen, told the police that at about the time when the murder had been committed she had bumped into a man hurrying out of the Gilchrist address. Mary described this man as tall, young and wearing a fawn cloak and a round hat. This description was evidently of a different man from the one Mr Adams and Miss Lambie saw. They described their man as ‘about five feet six inches, wearing a light grey overcoat and a black cap’.
The police found out that Oscar Slater tried to sell a pawn-ticket for a diamond brooch just four days after the murder, and assumed that this brooch must be Miss Gilchrist’s brooch. Even more suspicious was the fact that Slater and his girlfriend had then sailed for the United States on board the Lusitania, and Slater had used an assumed name for the passenger list. The police had been under a great deal of public pressure to find the villain who had committed this murder. Within five days they had their man, or at least a man. They cabled the police in the United States to take Slater into custody and then showed a picture of Slater to the three witnesses. The two girls, Helen Lambie and Mary Barrowman, obligingly identified Slater as the man they saw immediately after the murder; Mr Adams did not. It was the two girls who were sent off to the United States, on a free return trip, for the extradition proceedings. The expenses-paid trip to the United States for the girls looks suspiciously like a bribe.
Great Unsolved Crimes Page 23