October 31, 2024 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, the brutal double-murder that happened in Fall River, Massachusetts in 1892 has long been considered an unsolved mystery. Cara Robertson, author of the The Trial Of Lizzie Borden, tells the story.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories
and you are listening to our Halloween special all show long.
We love doing these special shows, be it Memorial Day,
or Christmas or Thanksgiving or so many of the others
we do. And today we have a murder mystery story
for you. Cara Robertson, author of the Trial of Lizzie Borden,
(00:32):
will be sharing with us the story from her book.
This long unsolved double murder has haunted Fall River, Massachusetts
since late summer of eighteen ninety two. Here's Carr with
a story.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
You know, we're used to the idea of these trials
that become big media events, but Lizzie Borden's trial was,
to use an off use phrase, the trial of the cent.
In her case, it was the trial of the nineteenth century.
There is a combination of technology and you know, sensational
(01:09):
subject matter that converge in turning her case into something,
you know, akin to the O. J. Simpson trial. It
was such a heinous double murder, and the person accused
of it with someone who checks all the boxes of
proper middle class womanhood. She was active in good work.
(01:31):
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,
(01:53):
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's blue who were trying to
(02:17):
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
(02:37):
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
(02:57):
from urban centers like Boston and New York, so had
a slight provincialism to it, but it was also had
easy access to those centers. So there there's 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
(03:18):
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
(03:39):
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 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 and the that's
(04:00):
the place that's favored by the people who are the
owners of the mills. You know, on the surface, the
Borden's 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
(04:22):
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
(04:44):
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, because
he chose to live, as one of his neighbors said,
on a narrow scale, in the middle class, middling part
(05:06):
of Full River, and because he was a bit of
a miser, wasn't The daughter's allowance was for pen money
and things, where it's sort of equivalent to the wage
a worker and 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
(05:29):
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
(05:50):
no particular memory of her, so Emma was the woman
who raised her. But Emma was thirteen at the time
of her mother's death and was thought to never fully
accept as her mother, you know, as a replacement for
her mother. About five years before the murders, Andrew Borden
decided to give Abby a house, really to bail out
(06:12):
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, you know, what he
did for her, he should do for his own blood.
And Andrew subsequently gave them what had been his father's house,
(06:34):
you know 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
(06:55):
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 side of really cold
war between the generations.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
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
(07:34):
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 dot edu to
(07:57):
learn more. And we continue with our American stories. And
we've been listening to our Halloween special and the Unsolved
double Murder from Kara Robertson's book The Trial of Lizzie Borden.
(08:19):
The Borden family from the outside seemed like a normal family,
but there was discord amongst the generations. Adult daughters Lizzie
and Emma didn't care for their stepmom Abbey, making for
a chilling environment. Let's get back to Kara.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
Well. Emma was a fairly stoic character and much more
mild manner, 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 the fourth
right character, and she described her stepmother as a mean,
good for nothing thing to a dressmaker of all people.
A few months before the murders, she was just very
(08:58):
frank about her dissatisfaction with her living conditions, her desire
for more, and also for the role that she felt
that her stepmother had played in keeping her in this condition.
About a year before the murders, the Burdons were the
victim of a mysterious daytime theft. Andrew and Abby were out,
(09:20):
but Emma, Lizzie, and Bridget Sullivan, the Borton's made, were home.
Abby Bordon had some jewelry stolen, and mister Bordon also
lost some money and street car tickets. And what was
oddest about the crime was that no one seemed to
have heard anyone enter or leave the house. After the
(09:40):
police were called and investigated, and mister Bordon 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 second, the Bordon household was
a hit with what appeared to be food poisoning. It
was a fairly typical complaint in Fall River in the summer.
(10:03):
In fact, it was called the summer complaint because so
many houses didn't have refrigeration. The boards didn't 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,
(10:24):
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
(10:45):
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 in the vicinity of the house.
She also confessed her general life sense of uneasiness and
a sense of foreboding, remarking, I feel as if something
(11:07):
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 fourth, there were five people
in the Bordon household Andrew Borden, his wife Abby, his
daughter Lizzie, the housemaid Bridget Sullivan, and Andrew's brother in
(11:32):
law John Morse, who was an occasional overnight visitor. Emma
Borden was visiting friends in fair Haven, which is some
distance away. As was custom, the elder Bordons rose first
and had breakfast, as did John Morse. Andrew left to
go about his business in town. John followed in order
(11:55):
to see some other relatives at the other side of town.
Sometime between nine and nine thirty 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
(12:16):
nine thirty she was killed in that room. An assassin
struck and hacked her to death with approximately nineteen blows.
About an hour after Abby was killed, Andrew Borden returned home.
He had trouble getting in the front door because it
(12:38):
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
mister Borden came in, his daughter Lizzie greeted him and
(12:59):
inquired at the mail. He asked about her stepmother, Abby,
and she said that she had had a note from
a sick friend and gone out. Mister Borden decided to
take a nap on the sitting room sofa, and shortly
thereafter this nap became his final slumber, he was struck
by ten blows, mostly in the face. At the time
(13:23):
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 wait for
a fishing line, or perhaps a piece of iron to
fix a window in the upstairs loft of the barn.
(13:44):
There she tarried and ate a pair or two. She
estimated that she was there twenty minutes, perhaps thirty, came
back in from outside and discovered her father's body on
the sitting room sofa. She immediately summoned the housemaid, Sullivan,
who was upstairs in her third floor attic room taking
a little bit of a nap. She dispatched Bridget for
(14:08):
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
(14:28):
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,
(14:50):
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 seemed to rule out the possibility of a
murderous stranger. First, the house was locked. The front door
(15:11):
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,
sometimes was not latched, but it was often in sight
of the neighbors or Bridget Sullivan, the housemate. The second
(15:33):
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 missus Borden first and then waited
an hour and a half to kill Andrew seemed really implausible.
(15:57):
There were a few places in the house to hide.
It is possible that an upstairs guessed an upstairs a
clothes 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 Abbey's murder,
seeming to advertise rather than hide the fact. All in all,
(16:18):
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 neared each other. Neither floor
had a hallway, so that one would have to pass
from one room into the other in order to get
(16:40):
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
(17:01):
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 twenty
or thirty minutes, and.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
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 when we come back more of our Halloween special,
the Trial of Lizzie Borden. Here on our American story,
(18:07):
and we returned to our American stories and our Halloween
special and the mysterious double murder that took place in
Fall River, Massachusetts in the summer of eighteen ninety two.
The daughter of the victims, Lizzie Borden, was the main suspect.
Let's return to Kara Robertson, author of the Trial of
Lizzie Borden, with more of this story.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
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
(18:53):
the inquest took her through her stated movements and the
day of the murderers. 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
(19:14):
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
(19:36):
The trial begins in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a neighboring town,
on June fifth, eighteen ninety three. 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
(19:58):
most prominent columnist 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
(20:18):
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
(20:40):
Massachusetts jury until nineteen fifty. Lizzy Bordon 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,
(21:02):
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 Bordon, or who had
the characteristics of Lizzy Bordon. Lizzy Bordon had an extraordinary
(21:23):
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
(21:45):
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 Bordon's self possession a
sign of Yankee grit and of true American womanhood, and
(22:07):
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
Bordon as the murderer. She's someone who, you know, appears
(22:30):
to fit the model of womanly behavior, and she's someone
who just doesn't look like the sort of person based
on late nineteenth 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
(22:52):
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 Bordon was identified as a
woman who tried to buy prussic acid on the day
(23:15):
before the murders. This was significant because if Lizzie Bordon
had tried and failed to procure prussic acid, which is
a deadly poison, and poison as we all know, as
a woman's weapon, then she might well have turned to
a readily available household implement to commit the murders. That
that explained the choice of weapon, which otherwise seemed very
(23:37):
much like a man's weapon. The other bit of evidence
that they were not allowed to share was Lizzie Borton'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
(24:00):
our modern Miranda writes that the evidence could not be
used a trial against her. Medical experts all testified that
a woman could have committed the murders, and in fact
specifically said that, you know, with sufficient leverage, a weapon
(24:21):
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 assigned that a woman had been the murderer. You know,
they often want to have it both ways, but the
defense just repeatedly said that a woman really could not
(24:42):
have committed those crimes. The prosecution also had the problem
that everyone who saw Lizzie Vorden after the murders testified
that she had no sign of blood anywhere on her person,
that she seemed, you know, entirely put together, and so
the defense was able to say that it just was
(25:04):
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 dressed that
she claimed had been stained with paint, and the defense
(25:25):
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 Bordon 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 Bordon household. The police found
(25:49):
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 in to disuse. The hatchet
head was covered with what the police described as ash,
as opposed to the dust that covered other things in
(26:10):
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 Burdons. The
(26:34):
coroner had decapitated the burtons 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 faded, earning her the support of many of
(26:57):
the journalists and the derision of others.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
And we're listening to Kara Robertson, author of the Trial
of Lizzie Bordon, Evil Monster, Innocent family Member. When we
continue the final chapter of the trial of Lizzie Bordon
here on our American Stories, and we continue with our
(27:38):
American Stories and our Halloween special. We've been diving into
the story of the trials of Lizzie Bordon by author
Kara Robertson. The horrible double murders of Andrew and Abbie
Borden have haunted Fall River, Massachusetts ever since the tragic
event in the summer of eighteen ninety two. Their daughter
was the prime suspect that the prosecutors had to fight
(28:00):
against cultural ideas of womanhood in order to prove her guilt.
Let's return to Kara.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
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,
(28:30):
except to say that he came home, perhaps before she
could establish an alibi, or even more improbably 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
(28:53):
did perhaps with the daytime theft of Abby's jewelry. And
so that's thing that the defense is able to really
emphasize that whoever killed Abby Bordon killed Andrew Borden. And
while there may have been evidence of discord on the
household and dislike of the stepmother, there was no real
(29:16):
evidence that Lizzie Bordon hated her father. In fact, they
seemed to have in some respects of 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 full river. The working classes, whose views
(29:41):
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 convicted very quickly. People from Lizzie Borden's
(30:03):
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
(30:23):
a half for propriety's 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 Bordon fell as if shot in the courtroom, and
(30:47):
then the crowd outside erupted in cheers, and she was
warmly congratulated by her friends and attendants, and even the
most prominent journalists who had for the most part been
and her supporters. In Fall River, the story was a
little bit different. The town was divided along class lines.
(31:08):
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.
(31:30):
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
(31:54):
punishment was meeted out in the case. The elite and
a particular her fellow churchgoers supported her during the trial.
They backed her, you know, 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
(32:16):
Borden was expected to live down her notoriety and a
show by your continued good works that this was simply
had been a tragic incident of which she too was
an instant victim. But instead, Lizzie and her sister moved
to a larger, grander house, a sort of late Victorian
(32:36):
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.
(32:58):
And 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. That that was the limit of her ambition.
She wanted to live, you know, in the style of
(33:19):
the grander Borden's, and didn't really imagine anything beyond that.
If you think she did it, then you know 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, you know, plenty of
pen money, and that her father was capable of generosity,
(33:41):
at least towards her, and so therefore she had no
financial motive. But if what she wanted was financial independence
rather than you know, the ability to get a new hat,
and one sees the murders through that lens, then she
was simply living out, you know, what had been her fantasy,
(34:03):
and that you know, 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 you know, 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's was simply in the wrong place
(34:26):
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 full river. The sisters
had a split in nineteen oh five, so twelve years
(34:49):
after the murders, Emma moved out of the house and
they never spoke again. What we know is that is
that as soon as Emma moved, doubt Lizzie lost the
remaining friends she had there and was truly isolated. At
that point. She turned mostly to her domestic staff, enjoyed
(35:10):
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 chauffe's family,
and she also sends really saccharine birthday and holiday greetings
(35:34):
to the children of her domestic staff, so that they
received postcards by special delivery with buddies 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
(35:58):
not have committed these crimes. It is one way in
which she definitely benefits from the double standard. Whether she
did it or not, you know, like she's the beneficiary
of the double standard, and that it just seems it
just seems so difficult to imagine someone like Lizzie Borden,
who is, after all, sitting in the courtroom every day
with perfectly quafft hair, composed picking up a hatchet and
(36:22):
killing her father and her stepmother in such a fashion.
There is discussion on the part of the defense team
that you know, 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
(36:47):
with the household has been suspected at one time or
another by amateur detectives, no one except Lizzie Borton 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 you know, it's these horrible
unsolved murders, I mean technically unsolved, and even if you
think you know who did it, it's still a you know,
(37:10):
it's it's a wide done And 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.
You know that, in exactly its own punishment, that it
(37:32):
was just it was. It was far better to let
one woman get away with murder than to suggest that
someone like Lizzie Borton was actually capable of it.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
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, in 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
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories
and you are listening to our Halloween special all show long.
We love doing these special shows, be it Memorial Day,
or Christmas or Thanksgiving or so many of the others
we do. And today we have a murder mystery story
for you. Cara Robertson, author of the Trial of Lizzie Borden,
(00:32):
will be sharing with us the story from her book.
This long unsolved double murder has haunted Fall River, Massachusetts
since late summer of eighteen ninety two. Here's Carr with
a story.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
You know, we're used to the idea of these trials
that become big media events, but Lizzie Borden's trial was,
to use an off use phrase, the trial of the cent.
In her case, it was the trial of the nineteenth century.
There is a combination of technology and you know, sensational
(01:09):
subject matter that converge in turning her case into something,
you know, akin to the O. J. Simpson trial. It
was such a heinous double murder, and the person accused
of it with someone who checks all the boxes of
proper middle class womanhood. She was active in good work.
(01:31):
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,
(01:53):
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's blue who were trying to
(02:17):
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
(02:37):
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
(02:57):
from urban centers like Boston and New York, so had
a slight provincialism to it, but it was also had
easy access to those centers. So there there's 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
(03:18):
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
(03:39):
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 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 and the that's
(04:00):
the place that's favored by the people who are the
owners of the mills. You know, on the surface, the
Borden's 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
(04:22):
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
(04:44):
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, because
he chose to live, as one of his neighbors said,
on a narrow scale, in the middle class, middling part
(05:06):
of Full River, and because he was a bit of
a miser, wasn't The daughter's allowance was for pen money
and things, where it's sort of equivalent to the wage
a worker and 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
(05:29):
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
(05:50):
no particular memory of her, so Emma was the woman
who raised her. But Emma was thirteen at the time
of her mother's death and was thought to never fully
accept as her mother, you know, as a replacement for
her mother. About five years before the murders, Andrew Borden
decided to give Abby a house, really to bail out
(06:12):
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, you know, what he
did for her, he should do for his own blood.
And Andrew subsequently gave them what had been his father's house,
(06:34):
you know 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
(06:55):
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 side of really cold
war between the generations.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
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
(07:34):
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 dot edu to
(07:57):
learn more. And we continue with our American stories. And
we've been listening to our Halloween special and the Unsolved
double Murder from Kara Robertson's book The Trial of Lizzie Borden.
(08:19):
The Borden family from the outside seemed like a normal family,
but there was discord amongst the generations. Adult daughters Lizzie
and Emma didn't care for their stepmom Abbey, making for
a chilling environment. Let's get back to Kara.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
Well. Emma was a fairly stoic character and much more
mild manner, 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 the fourth
right character, and she described her stepmother as a mean,
good for nothing thing to a dressmaker of all people.
A few months before the murders, she was just very
(08:58):
frank about her dissatisfaction with her living conditions, her desire
for more, and also for the role that she felt
that her stepmother had played in keeping her in this condition.
About a year before the murders, the Burdons were the
victim of a mysterious daytime theft. Andrew and Abby were out,
(09:20):
but Emma, Lizzie, and Bridget Sullivan, the Borton's made, were home.
Abby Bordon had some jewelry stolen, and mister Bordon also
lost some money and street car tickets. And what was
oddest about the crime was that no one seemed to
have heard anyone enter or leave the house. After the
(09:40):
police were called and investigated, and mister Bordon 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 second, the Bordon household was
a hit with what appeared to be food poisoning. It
was a fairly typical complaint in Fall River in the summer.
(10:03):
In fact, it was called the summer complaint because so
many houses didn't have refrigeration. The boards didn't 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,
(10:24):
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
(10:45):
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 in the vicinity of the house.
She also confessed her general life sense of uneasiness and
a sense of foreboding, remarking, I feel as if something
(11:07):
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 fourth, there were five people
in the Bordon household Andrew Borden, his wife Abby, his
daughter Lizzie, the housemaid Bridget Sullivan, and Andrew's brother in
(11:32):
law John Morse, who was an occasional overnight visitor. Emma
Borden was visiting friends in fair Haven, which is some
distance away. As was custom, the elder Bordons rose first
and had breakfast, as did John Morse. Andrew left to
go about his business in town. John followed in order
(11:55):
to see some other relatives at the other side of town.
Sometime between nine and nine thirty 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
(12:16):
nine thirty she was killed in that room. An assassin
struck and hacked her to death with approximately nineteen blows.
About an hour after Abby was killed, Andrew Borden returned home.
He had trouble getting in the front door because it
(12:38):
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
mister Borden came in, his daughter Lizzie greeted him and
(12:59):
inquired at the mail. He asked about her stepmother, Abby,
and she said that she had had a note from
a sick friend and gone out. Mister Borden decided to
take a nap on the sitting room sofa, and shortly
thereafter this nap became his final slumber, he was struck
by ten blows, mostly in the face. At the time
(13:23):
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 wait for
a fishing line, or perhaps a piece of iron to
fix a window in the upstairs loft of the barn.
(13:44):
There she tarried and ate a pair or two. She
estimated that she was there twenty minutes, perhaps thirty, came
back in from outside and discovered her father's body on
the sitting room sofa. She immediately summoned the housemaid, Sullivan,
who was upstairs in her third floor attic room taking
a little bit of a nap. She dispatched Bridget for
(14:08):
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
(14:28):
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,
(14:50):
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 seemed to rule out the possibility of a
murderous stranger. First, the house was locked. The front door
(15:11):
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,
sometimes was not latched, but it was often in sight
of the neighbors or Bridget Sullivan, the housemate. The second
(15:33):
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 missus Borden first and then waited
an hour and a half to kill Andrew seemed really implausible.
(15:57):
There were a few places in the house to hide.
It is possible that an upstairs guessed an upstairs a
clothes 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 Abbey's murder,
seeming to advertise rather than hide the fact. All in all,
(16:18):
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 neared each other. Neither floor
had a hallway, so that one would have to pass
from one room into the other in order to get
(16:40):
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
(17:01):
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 twenty
or thirty minutes, and.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
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 when we come back more of our Halloween special,
the Trial of Lizzie Borden. Here on our American story,
(18:07):
and we returned to our American stories and our Halloween
special and the mysterious double murder that took place in
Fall River, Massachusetts in the summer of eighteen ninety two.
The daughter of the victims, Lizzie Borden, was the main suspect.
Let's return to Kara Robertson, author of the Trial of
Lizzie Borden, with more of this story.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
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
(18:53):
the inquest took her through her stated movements and the
day of the murderers. 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
(19:14):
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
(19:36):
The trial begins in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a neighboring town,
on June fifth, eighteen ninety three. 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
(19:58):
most prominent columnist 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
(20:18):
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
(20:40):
Massachusetts jury until nineteen fifty. Lizzy Bordon 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,
(21:02):
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 Bordon, or who had
the characteristics of Lizzy Bordon. Lizzy Bordon had an extraordinary
(21:23):
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
(21:45):
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 Bordon's self possession a
sign of Yankee grit and of true American womanhood, and
(22:07):
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
Bordon as the murderer. She's someone who, you know, appears
(22:30):
to fit the model of womanly behavior, and she's someone
who just doesn't look like the sort of person based
on late nineteenth 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
(22:52):
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 Bordon was identified as a
woman who tried to buy prussic acid on the day
(23:15):
before the murders. This was significant because if Lizzie Bordon
had tried and failed to procure prussic acid, which is
a deadly poison, and poison as we all know, as
a woman's weapon, then she might well have turned to
a readily available household implement to commit the murders. That
that explained the choice of weapon, which otherwise seemed very
(23:37):
much like a man's weapon. The other bit of evidence
that they were not allowed to share was Lizzie Borton'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
(24:00):
our modern Miranda writes that the evidence could not be
used a trial against her. Medical experts all testified that
a woman could have committed the murders, and in fact
specifically said that, you know, with sufficient leverage, a weapon
(24:21):
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 assigned that a woman had been the murderer. You know,
they often want to have it both ways, but the
defense just repeatedly said that a woman really could not
(24:42):
have committed those crimes. The prosecution also had the problem
that everyone who saw Lizzie Vorden after the murders testified
that she had no sign of blood anywhere on her person,
that she seemed, you know, entirely put together, and so
the defense was able to say that it just was
(25:04):
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 dressed that
she claimed had been stained with paint, and the defense
(25:25):
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 Bordon 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 Bordon household. The police found
(25:49):
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 in to disuse. The hatchet
head was covered with what the police described as ash,
as opposed to the dust that covered other things in
(26:10):
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 Burdons. The
(26:34):
coroner had decapitated the burtons 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 faded, earning her the support of many of
(26:57):
the journalists and the derision of others.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
And we're listening to Kara Robertson, author of the Trial
of Lizzie Bordon, Evil Monster, Innocent family Member. When we
continue the final chapter of the trial of Lizzie Bordon
here on our American Stories, and we continue with our
(27:38):
American Stories and our Halloween special. We've been diving into
the story of the trials of Lizzie Bordon by author
Kara Robertson. The horrible double murders of Andrew and Abbie
Borden have haunted Fall River, Massachusetts ever since the tragic
event in the summer of eighteen ninety two. Their daughter
was the prime suspect that the prosecutors had to fight
(28:00):
against cultural ideas of womanhood in order to prove her guilt.
Let's return to Kara.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
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,
(28:30):
except to say that he came home, perhaps before she
could establish an alibi, or even more improbably 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
(28:53):
did perhaps with the daytime theft of Abby's jewelry. And
so that's thing that the defense is able to really
emphasize that whoever killed Abby Bordon killed Andrew Borden. And
while there may have been evidence of discord on the
household and dislike of the stepmother, there was no real
(29:16):
evidence that Lizzie Bordon hated her father. In fact, they
seemed to have in some respects of 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 full river. The working classes, whose views
(29:41):
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 convicted very quickly. People from Lizzie Borden's
(30:03):
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
(30:23):
a half for propriety's 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 Bordon fell as if shot in the courtroom, and
(30:47):
then the crowd outside erupted in cheers, and she was
warmly congratulated by her friends and attendants, and even the
most prominent journalists who had for the most part been
and her supporters. In Fall River, the story was a
little bit different. The town was divided along class lines.
(31:08):
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.
(31:30):
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
(31:54):
punishment was meeted out in the case. The elite and
a particular her fellow churchgoers supported her during the trial.
They backed her, you know, 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
(32:16):
Borden was expected to live down her notoriety and a
show by your continued good works that this was simply
had been a tragic incident of which she too was
an instant victim. But instead, Lizzie and her sister moved
to a larger, grander house, a sort of late Victorian
(32:36):
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.
(32:58):
And 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. That that was the limit of her ambition.
She wanted to live, you know, in the style of
(33:19):
the grander Borden's, and didn't really imagine anything beyond that.
If you think she did it, then you know 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, you know, plenty of
pen money, and that her father was capable of generosity,
(33:41):
at least towards her, and so therefore she had no
financial motive. But if what she wanted was financial independence
rather than you know, the ability to get a new hat,
and one sees the murders through that lens, then she
was simply living out, you know, what had been her fantasy,
(34:03):
and that you know, 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 you know, 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's was simply in the wrong place
(34:26):
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 full river. The sisters
had a split in nineteen oh five, so twelve years
(34:49):
after the murders, Emma moved out of the house and
they never spoke again. What we know is that is
that as soon as Emma moved, doubt Lizzie lost the
remaining friends she had there and was truly isolated. At
that point. She turned mostly to her domestic staff, enjoyed
(35:10):
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 chauffe's family,
and she also sends really saccharine birthday and holiday greetings
(35:34):
to the children of her domestic staff, so that they
received postcards by special delivery with buddies 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
(35:58):
not have committed these crimes. It is one way in
which she definitely benefits from the double standard. Whether she
did it or not, you know, like she's the beneficiary
of the double standard, and that it just seems it
just seems so difficult to imagine someone like Lizzie Borden,
who is, after all, sitting in the courtroom every day
with perfectly quafft hair, composed picking up a hatchet and
(36:22):
killing her father and her stepmother in such a fashion.
There is discussion on the part of the defense team
that you know, 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
(36:47):
with the household has been suspected at one time or
another by amateur detectives, no one except Lizzie Borton 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 you know, it's these horrible
unsolved murders, I mean technically unsolved, and even if you
think you know who did it, it's still a you know,
(37:10):
it's it's a wide done And 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.
You know that, in exactly its own punishment, that it
(37:32):
was just it was. It was far better to let
one woman get away with murder than to suggest that
someone like Lizzie Borton was actually capable of it.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
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, in 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
Host
Lee Habeeb
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