Was there a conspiracy in the infamous murder mystery of Andrew and Abby Borden?


Was there a conspiracy in the infamous murder mystery of Andrew and
Abby Borden?
By Denise Noe

Author’s Note: This was originally published in The Hatchet: The
Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies.


The Borden case continues to intrigue over a century after the fact
because there is so much that seems to point unmistakably to Lizzie
Borden’s guilt – and important facts that appear to make that guilt
utterly impossible.

Behavior prior to the murders that has been attributed to Lizzie
would, if true, powerfully show a guilty predisposition. According to
Leonard Rebello in Lizzie Borden Past & Present, Eli Bence, a clerk at
D. R. Smith’s drugstore, testified at both the inquest and the
preliminary hearing that “Lizzie attempted to purchase prussic acid on
Wednesday, August 3, 1892” and that she claimed she wanted the poison
“for the purpose of cleaning a seal skin coat.” Rebello quotes the
Stenographer’s Minutes as stating that, “After being placed in a
position where he [Eli Bence] could both see and hear Miss Borden, he
was very positive in identification.”

The reason Bence quoted her as giving for wanting the poison sounded
jarringly false. It was August. Why would anyone even be thinking
about cleaning a coat in the summer heat?

Of course, it should be noted that Lizzie always denied attempting to
purchase the poison and even having been to D. R. Smith’s drugstore.

Then there is Lizzie’s oddly prescient statement to her friend, Alice
Russell as quoted in Ann Jones’ Women Who Kill: “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. . . . I feel as if I
wanted to sleep with my eyes half open – with one eye open half the
time – for fear they will burn the house down over us. . . . I am
afraid somebody will do something; I don’t know but what somebody will
do something.” As Jones commented sardonically, “The next day
somebody did something and it seemed strange that Miss Lizzie should
so clearly have seen it coming.”

The all-important factor of opportunity appears to point directly to
Lizzie. Only two people besides the victims are known to have been on
the Borden property at the time Abby and Andrew were killed. One is
Lizzie and the other is the maid Bridget Sullivan. Some writers like
Edwin R. Radin have indeed pinned the rap on Bridget. However, given
the temper of the times, it seems likely that the authorities would
have much rather prosecuted an Irish servant rather than a respectable
“lady” so the fact that she was never charged with the crimes speaks
powerfully in Bridget’s favor.

However, part of Bridget’s testimony implicates Lizzie. Bridget
claimed that while Lizzie was on the second floor of the house and
she, Bridget, was on the first floor opening the front door for
Andrew, Lizzie giggled. Lizzie-did-it partisans have always thought
this a fiendish, post-murder chuckle. There is a more innocent
explanation: David Kent in Forty Whacks writes that Bridget also told
authorities that she “fumbled” to get all three locks opened and
exclaimed in exasperation, “Pshaw!” Lizzie might just have laughed at
Bridget’s frustration.

Additionally, Bridget’s testimony indicated that, at the time Andrew
returned home, Lizzie was near the room in which Abby lay dead, a room
that had its door partially open. Many observers have wondered how
Lizzie could have failed to notice the body that lay motionless on the
floor.

The usual estimate of the time between the death of Abby and Andrew
fixes a period of roughly one hour or an hour and a half. According
to Kent, medical examiner Dr. William A. Dolan “could tell by the
blackened, thickened blood of Abby’s wounds and the fresh, red flow
from Andrew’s that Abby had already been dead an hour or so when
Andrew’s time had come.” Kent further writes that, “If Andrew had died
at 11:00, Abby had died at 9:30 or 10:00.”

Those who believe Lizzie guilty think it strains credibility to
imagine an assassin lurking in this small house for that period of
time without being seen by either Lizzie or Bridget.

The story of the note also arouses suspicion. Walter L. Hixson in
Murder, Culture and Injustice writes that Bridget testified that,
“When Andrew Borden returned home on the morning of the murders . . .
Lizzie ‘spoke very low’ but she clearly heard her tell her father that
Abby had received a note and had gone out to attend someone who was
sick.” However, after people came to the house to find Andrew dead,
Lizzie suggested they look upstairs for her stepmother.
Advertisements were taken out to find the person who delivered the
note and the party who sent it yet neither of them ever came forward
and the note itself was not found. Many people have assumed there was
no note and that a guilty Lizzie was trying to prevent Andrew from
looking for Abby.

Lizzie also claimed that the reason she missed her father’s killing
was that she impulsively went to the barn to hunt up some lead for
fishing sinkers. At trial, the defense called to the stand an ice
cream vendor named Hyman Lubinsky who supported Lizzie’s peculiar
alibi. Kent writes that Lubinsky claimed he left the stable in which
he had picked up horse and wagon “between 11:05 and 11:00 and passed
the Borden house just minutes later.” He saw a woman “come out of the
way from the barn right to the stairs at the back of the house.”
Despite the seeming confirmation from the ice cream vendor, Lizzie’s
story of the barn trip for sinkers has struck many as “fishy” in the
extreme.

But there are also stumbling blocks to accepting the hypothesis of
Lizzie’s guilt, stumbling blocks that at first blush seem
insurmountable. One of them is the all-important issue of the murder
weapon. Emma Borden concisely summarized the problem when she told
Boston Sunday Post reporter Edwin J. Maguire in a 1913 interview,
“Here is the strongest thing that has convinced me of Lizzie’s
innocence. The authorities never found the axe or whatever implement
it was that figured in the killing. Lizzie, if she had done that deed,
could never have hidden the instrument of death so that the police
could not find it. Why, there was no hiding place in the old house
that would serve for effectual concealment. Neither did she have the
time.”

Kent quotes attorney Andrew Jennings as saying pointedly in his
opening statement that, in order to prove its case, the state’s
attorneys had to “produce the weapon which did the deed, and, having
produced it, connect it in some way directly with the prisoner, or
else they have got to account in some reasonable way for its
disappearance.”

The prosecution could do neither. Several axes and hatchets were
found on the Borden premises but all tested negative for human blood.
The prosecution put forward the infamous “handleless hatchet” as prime
candidate for murder weapon, suggesting the handle had been destroyed
because it is extremely difficult to wash blood from wood.

However, the defense pointed out several improbabilities in this
identification. For this to be the weapon, Lizzie would have had to
break most of the handle off, then obliterate that thick wood. The
prosecution theorized that she had burned it in the kitchen stove. A
charred roll of newspaper was found in the stove and not a trace of
hatchet. Lizzie’s chief defense attorney, Governor George Robinson
asked pertinently, “Did you ever see such a funny fire in the world? A
hard wood stick inside the newspaper, and the hard wood stick would go
out beyond recall – and the newspaper that lives forever would stay
there!”

Two other factors make it unlikely the handleless hatchet was the
murder weapon. One is that a Suffolk County medical examiner found a
deposit of gilt metal in one of the cuts on Abby Borden, indicating
that the hatchet that killed her was new. As Kent writes, the
handleless hatchet was “old, dull, and rusty.”

Finally, the piece of the wood that remained with the head, the part
that would have been closest to the victims, tested negative for
blood.

The absence of a blood stained garment is another major stumbling
block to buying the prosecution’s case.

Of course, as is well known to even the most casual student of the
Borden case, Lizzie burned a dress on Sunday, August 7, 1892. The
dress burning has damned her in many eyes. Both she and Emma claimed
she destroyed it because the cheap dress had been stained with paint
and many wags have assumed the stain was “red paint” put there by the
splatter from a homicidal hatchet.

However, this hypothesis has its difficulties. For one thing,
descriptions of the burned dress do not tally with those of the
garment she wore on the day of the killings. According to Rebello,
Emma testified that the destroyed garment was a blue cotton Bedford
cord, very light blue ground.” Rebello also writes that the woman who
supposedly made the dress, Mary Raymond, took the witness stand to say
it was “a Bedford cord, a cheap cotton dress . . . light blue.” Kent
quotes Alice Russell, who witnessed the burning, as saying its color
was “light-blue ground with a dark figure” and that she had not seen
it between the time it was made early spring and the day it was
burned. In other words, she had not seen Lizzie wearing it on the day
of the slayings.

Rebello further states that Dr. Bowen testified that the dress Lizzie
wore on the day of the slayings was “dark blue.” His wife also called
it “dark blue.” Kent writes that Lubinsky described the woman who
walked from the barn to the back of the Borden home as “wearing a dark-
colored dress.” However, other witnesses, such as Mrs. Churchill and
Officer Patrick Doherty described the dress they saw on Lizzie on
August 4 as “light blue” which sounds more like the burned article.

But that still leaves the fact that not one of the witnesses who saw
Lizzie in the immediate aftermath of her father’s killing recalled
seeing any blood on the dress Lizzie wore or on her person or even the
slightest disarrangement of her hair which was up in a bun.

One way to reconcile the considerable damning evidence against Lizzie
with the strongly exonerating facts in her favor is to postulate that
she was part of a conspiracy. She may have killed Abby and/or Andrew
or aided and/or covered up for someone else who did.

Indeed, the possibility of a conspiracy has hung over the Borden case
from the first. Rebello reprints part of an August 12, 1892
Providence Daily Journal article entitled “Police Believe Miss Lizzie
Borden was Not Alone in the Case.” The piece comments that authorities
“suspect Lizzie Borden has a confederate or assistants.” In Forty
Whacks, David Kent quotes prosecutor Hosea Knowlton, in a letter to
Massachusetts Attorney General Arthur Pillsbury, as writing, “”nothing
has developed which satisfies either of us that she is innocent;
neither of us can escape the conclusion that she must have had some
knowledge of the occurrence.” Although Knowlton did not introduce the
possibility at trial, the implication is clear that he and Pillsbury
believed it possible that she was involved with others in the slayings
of her stepmother and father.

So whom could Lizzie have conspired with? And what were the roles of
the respective conspirators?

Perhaps the most obvious candidate for co-conspirator is the only
other person known to be on the property of the Borden residence at
the time of the killings, the maid Bridget Sullivan. Rebello records
that an article by one Mary D. Smith proposing that the pair were
“partners in crime” first appeared in a 1978 issue of The Armchair
Detective and was republished in 1992 in Ellery Queen’s Mystery
Magazine. Evan Hunter did a fictional treatment in Lizzie: A Novel in
which Lizzie and Bridget are in cahoots, as Mrs. Borden is killed
because she stumbles upon the two of them making lesbian love. Lizzie
clobbers Abby, then Andrew, with a candlestick holder. Then she hides
it in plain sight, putting a candle back inside it.

There is another, even odder theory that makes Bridget a conspirator
but does not assert that Lizzie was her crime partner. Rebello says
an author named Leonard Healy theorized that “the Bordens were ‘gassed
to death by inhaling vapors of the deadly asphyxiate, hydrocyanic acid
forcibly administered by . . . Bridget Sullivan . . . the ax-wielding
was carried out by one of the girl’s accomplices as a post mortem
event.’”

Owen Haskell authored a novella called Sherlock Holmes and the Fall
River Tragedy that had Lizzie conspiring with Dr. Seabury Bowen, who
spirited a blood-stained garment and a hatchet away in his big black
medical bag. There is no solid evidence implicating Dr. Bowen in
reality and the book is written as fiction but the idea does credibly
explain why neither the weapon nor a bloody garment was ever found.

Uncle John Vinnicum Morse, who had come to visit the Borden household
on August 3, is another candidate theorists have put up as a
conspirator. Even before Lizzie came to trial, newspapers carried the
speculation of George H. Fish, husband of Abby’s sister Priscilla,
that Lizzie had conspired with Uncle John. Rebello quotes the August
9, 1892 Fall River Daily Globe as writing that Fish “believed Lizzie
and her uncle John V. Morse planned the murders but hired someone to
commit the murders.”

Fritz Adliz wrote a convoluted conspiracy scenario entitled
“Whodunit?: An Armchair Solution to the Borden Mystery” that was
serialized in The Lizzie Borden Quarterly in issues from 1994 to
1996. Adilz postulates that Lizzie was part of a conspiracy
involving Uncle John as well as Emma. However, he does not identify
any of these three as the hands-on executioner. He reserves that
dishonor for Isaac C. Davis, a man for whom Uncle John had once
worked. According to Rebello, Uncle John learned the butcher’s trade
from Davis. Adilz also theorizes that there was yet a fifth person in
the conspiracy and that that individual spirited Davis from the crime
scene.

There are several factors that make Adilz’s theory unconvincing. One
is the “too many cooks spoil the broth” difficulty of keeping so many
conspirators quiet – especially when one of them went on trial for her
life. Adilz also writes that, “if Lizzie and her uncle had an agent
committing the murders for them, one would expect them to have as
airtight an alibi as possible.” But Lizzie glaringly lacked such an
alibi. Finally, while the theory has explanatory power, it suffers
from a lack of hard evidence.

Frank Spiering in his book Lizzie writes about an impromptu conspiracy
between Lizzie and Emma. In Spiering’s telling, both Lizzie and Emma
were – independently of each other and without the other’s knowledge –
plotting to murder Abby and Andrew.

According to Spiering, Lizzie sprinkled arsenic into the broth that
Bridget was cooking when the maid was gone from the kitchen,
accounting for the sickness the family was known to have suffered the
day prior to the killings. When Abby and Andrew did not die as a
result of the poisoned food, Spiering writes, Lizzie determined to try
again and made her fruitless trip to D.R. Smith’s Drugstore.

Emma was more effective, Spiering asserts. Off in Fairhaven visiting
friends in the Brownell family, possibly to establish an alibi, he
writes that Emma “hitched a horse to the black carriage and headed
into the woodshed adjacent to the Brownell house to get an axe.”
Spiering believes she then drove that carriage back to her home.

In Spiering’s book, Lizzie was still planning to do away with her
stepmother and father by poison when she was startled to find her
older sister had returned home – with an axe in her hands. Instantly
understanding, Lizzie led Emma up the stairs to the guest room in
which Abby was doing some housework. When Andrew came home, Lizzie
she made sure the coast was clear for Emma to use the axe on him.

Why did Lizzie burn a dress? According to Spiering, because she
feared “its corded cotton fabric” could have been tested and “found to
contain traces of arsenic.”

Spiering’s most audacious claim and one that makes much of his theory
hard to swallow is that the two sisters were each independently
intending to kill Abby and Andrew. This is implausible on the face of
it. Additionally, like so many other Borden “solutions,” his is
hampered by a lack of hard evidence.

Arnold Brown suggested an extremely far-reaching and convoluted
conspiracy theory in his book, Lizzie Borden, the Legend, the Truth,
the Final Chapter. In his telling, Lizzie is not guilty of either
killing or of conspiring to kill. According to him, Andrew Borden had
fathered a son, William “Bill” Borden, by another woman while still
married to his first wife, Sarah. Brown writes that Bill’s mother was
Phebe, wife of Charles Borden (he does not explain the exact
relationship between Andrew and Charles).

As a young man, Bill began making financial demands on his natural
father. Both Uncle John and Lizzie knew of this and sometimes acted as
mediators between Andrew and Bill. Lizzie was scared of Bill; that,
Brown says, was the reason she sought poison.

Bill conspired with his own half-brother, William Lewis Bassett. In
Brown’s account, it was Bassett who delivered a note to Abby, hoping
to lure her from the home so Bill could be alone with Andrew. For
some reason, the ploy failed and Abby did not rush off but went about
her domestic duties. Bill was surprised to find Abby in the guestroom
and, caught off guard, murdered her in a panic.

When Andrew came home, he agreed to have a chat with his
unacknowledged son and an obliging Lizzie took a trip to the barn to
give them privacy.

Brown believes they did not talk long as Bill took out the hatchet he
had recently used on Abby and killed Andrew with it. Then Bill
hurried off to the shop where Bassett waited with the getaway
carriage.

After the murders, a truly far-ranging conspiracy swung into action.
Lizzie did not want the truth about her half-brother’s existence made
public because she feared having to share her inheritance with him.
To avoid that, she conspired with a group of Fall River VIPs Brown
calls the “Mellen House gang” to have herself tried and acquitted.

Like other conspiracy theories, Brown’s relies to a great extent on
suppositions and extrapolations. It also has a specific problem in
his depiction of the character of the true killer. According to
Brown, Bill Borden had severe mental problems and may have suffered
from both mental illness and mental retardation. He is even supposed
to have kept the murder weapon with him for the rest of his life and
talked to it like a child with a teddy bear! Finally, the reason he
gives for Lizzie’s supposedly allowing herself to be tried when she
knew the true murderer seems flimsy. It is extremely unlikely that
the courts would have recognized the standing as an heir to Andrew
Borden of a child born to a woman married to another man and, if Bill
Borden had been convicted of the murders, the entire question would
have been rendered moot.

Were Abby and Andrew Borden murdered as the result of a conspiracy?
Like so much connected with this case, this question will probably
never be definitively answered. However, while “too many cooks spoil
the broth” is an adage that works against the possibility of a
conspiracy, the truism that division of labor makes for success can
apply to wicked goals as well as positive ones. The curiously
conflicting evidence in the Borden murders that has kept the mystery
alive for over a century make a conspiracy a tantalizing and plausible
possibility.

Works cited

“Whodunit?: An Armchair Solution to the Borden Mystery” by Fritz Adilz

Lizzie Borden, the Legend, the Truth, the Final Chapter by Arnold
Brown

Murder, Culture, and Injustice by Walter L. Hixson

Sherlock Holmes and the Fall River Tragedy by Owen Haskell

Lizzie: A Novel by Evan Hunter

Forty Whacks by David Kent

Women Who Kill by Ann Jones

Lizzie Borden Past & Present by Leonard Rebello

Lizzie by Frank Spiering




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