The Cases That Haunt Us (17 page)

Given all of the foregoing, I’m ready to eliminate the contract killer scenario and move on. Okay, so no robber-burglar, no hit man. What about a disorganized offender? The rumors about a crazed madman were rife. Maybe he broke in and could even have hidden himself in the downstairs closet for the hour and a half between the murders. But not after the rage and overkill demonstrated with Abby’s murder and not before the rage and overkill that would be demonstrated again on Andrew. Nobody with that kind of seething turmoil inside is going to be able to control himself to that extent for that long. I’ve never seen or read about anything like it. Even waiting out in the open for Stephen Manchester to return home after the killing of Bertha, Jose Correira gave up and left. And this was someone with a discernible grudge. Given the physical setting, too, I would be extremely surprised to see a disorganized offender leave no blood trail between the upstairs murder site and the one downstairs. Certainly there would have been blood traces in the closet in which he would have hidden.

So what I’d be telling local police is the same conclusion they came to themselves: This is probably the work of someone close to the family, with knowledge of their comings and goings, with knowledge of the layout of the inside of the house. Someone whose presence would not arouse suspicion.

So is there anyone of this description who had motive for the murders? We could make cases for Emma, Lizzie, and Bridget. And of those, who had access and opportunity between 9:30 and 11:00 A.M. on August 4, 1892? Because of Emma’s trip to Fairhaven, we’re down to Lizzie and Bridget.

What was Bridget’s possible motive? What was the precipitating stressor? She wasn’t feeling well that warm and humid morning; she’d been vomiting and was weak from her ordeal. And yet Abby insisted she clean all the windows in the house, inside and out. Maybe she just cracked … lost it. The two years of domestic oppression caught up with her and she took out all of her frustration and rage on the hapless Abby. She could then either run away or stick around and complete the job on Andrew when he returned home and make it look like an intruder. But then wouldn’t she have killed Lizzie, too? Leaving her alive would have been more dangerous than leaving Andrew alive.

And we have another problem with this. Bridget liked her job. She wanted to be able to keep it. There is no indication that she ever had a serious disagreement with her employers. They got along well, and Mr. and Mrs. Borden treated her with respect and consideration. They even called her by her proper name, something Emma and Lizzie couldn’t be bothered with, calling her Maggie rather than Bridget.

What about Lizzie and Bridget in collusion? One or both of them kills the Bordens, Lizzie inherits a fortune and pays Bridget off for her troubles.

Again, we have to deal with personality, and there didn’t seem to be anything in Bridget’s that would allow her to take that bold a step. She would have been too scared. The police found her quite timid. Nothing indicates that she would have been motivated to commit such a crime for any amount of money. If Bridget had been involved, a vulnerable young servant with her personality would have broken under interrogation, particularly with the intimidation tactics the police would have used back then. That said, Bridget had to have suspected Lizzie. She was the only other one there, and Lizzie had pointedly brought up the cloth sale, likely in an attempt to get Bridget out of the house.

Although Emma seems to have been out of town during the murders, she has not avoided suspicion. After she received the telegram from Dr. Bowen, she did not take the first train back from Fairhaven. She did not take the second, nor the third. The fourth train did not get her back until the evening. This does not indicate conspiracy to me, but I sure wouldn’t discount it as a possible indication that as soon as she heard about the murders, Emma had at least a vague fear about what had really happened. The same could be said for Uncle John, who strolls back and, despite the activity on the street, stands around the backyard eating pears that have fallen from the trees.

Frank Spiering, who in
Prince Jack
proposed Prince Eddie, the Duke of Clarence, as Jack the Ripper, weaves a scenario for Emma as the killer of her father and stepmother in
Lizzie.
He has her establish her alibi fifteen miles away in Fairhaven, then surreptitiously driving her buggy back to Fall River, hiding upstairs in the house, committing the murders, then driving back to Fairhaven. Once Lizzie is accused, the sisters work together to protect each other. However, at one point it seems that Emma is trying to double-cross Lizzie, and Lizzie forces her to share the inheritance equally.

The problem with this scenario is that there is absolutely no evidence to support it—only that it
could
have happened. To me, this is a perfect example of the common tendency to make the facts fit the theory, rather than the other way around. All of the behavioral evidence concerning Emma—all of it—suggests she was shy, self-effacing, timid, and dominated by Lizzie. There is no way she could have come up with such an elaborate plan to kill her father and stepmother.

Another theory concerns Andrew’s alleged disturbed, illegitimate son, William Borden, by a local woman named Phebe Hathaway. Author Arnold R. Brown makes a case for William as the killer in his interesting and provocative 1991 book,
Lizzie Borden: The Legend, the Truth, the FinalChapter.

According to the William Borden theory, he was making demands of his father, who was drawing up his will. These demands were rejected by Andrew. William, in a fit of rage, killed Abby first, hid in the house with Lizzie’s knowledge, then killed his father. Because of his illegitimate status and a possible claim he might have to Andrew’s estate, Lizzie, Emma, Uncle John, Dr. Bowen, and attorney Jennings conspired to keep his crime hidden. The conspirators then either paid William off, threatened him, or both. They decided that Lizzie would allow herself to be a suspect and be tried for the murders, knowing she could always identify the actual killer, should that become necessary. William apparently was fascinated with hatchets and may have had a connection to the Bertha Manchester murder. Arnold Brown questions whether it might have been a contract murder to divert guilt away from Lizzie. As intriguing as this theory may be, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence to support it. In fact, Leonard Rebello, author of the comprehensive and exhaustively researched
LizzieBorden Past & Present
, writes, “No information was located to substantiate Mr. Brown’s allegation.” The behavioral evidence regarding Lizzie, on the other hand, has been well documented.

LIZZIE

Let’s take a look at Lizzie’s situation. From photographs, she had been rather cute as a child and teenager. But by the time in question, she had matured into what can be most delicately described as a rather plain, round-faced, robust woman—not exactly like the late actress Elizabeth Montgomery, the talented beauty I remember from the TV movie about Lizzie. She was an unmarried spinster living in her father’s house, not getting along with her stepmother, with no real prospects of getting out or changing things. The same can be said for Emma, but Emma was not the kind of outgoing woman with high social expectations that Lizzie was. Since their mother’s death, Emma had essentially dedicated herself to caring for Lizzie, a promise she had made to her mother on her deathbed.

Lizzie was willful and stubborn and liked to be noticed, which would almost surely have put her into conflict with her father. At the inquest, she often displayed a belligerent temper. She dropped out of school in the tenth grade, was subject to black moods, and indulged in numerous remedies to deal with them. She desperately wanted to live in the style to which she felt her family’s social station entitled her, and that began with a house on “the Hill,” by far the best neighborhood in town. The people Lizzie envied there were largely her rich cousins who had inherited their wealth for two generations running and had no compunction about spending it. Her father, who had scraped for every penny, however, had no interest in such pretensions. He gave Lizzie a generous allowance, and Lizzie had all the fine dresses she wanted, but Andrew thought the house at 92 Second Street was perfectly adequate for their needs. If he wouldn’t go for electricity and modern plumbing, he certainly wasn’t going to relocate his family to a grand house on the Hill.

Lizzie was in a bind. She yearned to move out and live in a socially prominent manner. But she certainly couldn’t afford to do that on her own, and even if she could, it was so socially improper for a single woman of her class not to live at home while her parents remained alive that had she moved out, she would not have been accepted by the society she so craved to join. The real hope would be marriage to a well-to-do gentleman. But she was thirty-two, so that didn’t look likely. She had had a few beaux over the years, but all of the relationships had been short-lived. The men in her neighborhood were all working class, and she couldn’t very well have the young men who lived on the Hill come calling in her embarrassing house.

And the situation might have been getting desperate. Andrew had already turned over real estate holdings to Abby and her half-sister as early as 1887—five years before—and Lizzie and Emma both feared they would increasingly be cut out of their father’s estate. If that was the case, then they would be at Abby’s mercy when the already seventy-year-old Andrew passed on.

We know that the night before the murders, Andrew and John Morse discussed business with each other in the first-floor sitting room. There is some indication Andrew was seeking advice about his will. So whether or not Lizzie had been gradually trying to poison her parents, this discussion with Uncle John could have been the precipitating stressor that made the act urgent. Once there was a will bequeathing everything to Abby, it would be too late.

Did a will actually exist? We’ll never know. None was ever found, though it is difficult to imagine a man as meticulous as Andrew Borden not having one. Perhaps the stained dress was not the only thing burned.

Strong evidence suggests that at least at one time, Lizzie and Andrew were close, though his marriage to Abby would have made their relationship emotionally complicated at best. He constantly wore the ring Lizzie had given him as a sign of her love and devotion. Father and daughter had gone on frequent fishing trips together while she was growing up, and she maintained a passion for fishing, though she had not been in five years. This fact made her story about going into the barn to make sinkers somewhat suspect.

Another story believed by case scholars to be apocryphal offers an interesting possible precipitating incident in May 1892. Some say Lizzie kept pigeons roosting in the barn, which had recently been broken into. Andrew surmised that the culprits were boys wanting to steal the pigeons, so to thwart them, he went into the barn with a hatchet and killed all of the birds, leaving a bloody hatchet for all, including Lizzie, to see.

The symmetry with the murders three months later seems almost too neat and facile, but we certainly can’t ignore the possible influence if the first event occurred. At the very least, it would show two people apparently unable to deal with each other’s emotional needs or sensibilities.

I don’t think it is going too far to say that in many ways Lizzie saw herself as a victim. Under the section on Staged Domestic Homicide in the
Crime Classification Manual
, we wrote: “Post-offense interviews of close friends or family members often reveal that the victim had expressed concerns or fears regarding his or her safety or even a sense of foreboding.” If Lizzie had somehow transposed the roles of attacker and victim in her mind, then the anguished visit to Alice Russell the night before the murders fits perfectly into this emotional context.

In late July of 1892, Lizzie accompanied Emma to New Bedford, Massachusetts. By some accounts they left home after a family disagreement over a suspected transfer to Abby of one of the Swansea farms they had often visited as girls. They were on their way to see friends—Emma to the Brownells in Fairhaven and Lizzie to some acquaintances in Marion. But in New Bedford, Lizzie decided to spend several days with an old schoolmate before returning home on August 2. By then, Andrew and Abby were complaining of stomach upset, and Abby would then go to Dr. Bowen with the notion that someone was trying to poison them. (Note again the just mentioned passage from the
Crime ClassificationManual.
)

It was the next day that Lizzie was seen in the drugstore trying to buy prussic acid (for another try?) and that night that she visited Alice Russell.

THE
BEHAVIORAL
CASE

The personality and the pre-offense behavioral indicators are there. Let’s look at the crime scene indicators.

Lizzie claimed to have discovered her father’s freshly slain body, but did not leave the house. Instead, she sent Bridget out and called a neighbor over, even though she would have to presume the killer might still be inside. Mrs. Churchill reported no expressions of fear for their immediate safety by Lizzie at this time.

Likewise with the first murder, Lizzie said she believed her stepmother had just returned home and asked Bridget (ultimately accompanied by Mrs. Churchill) to go look for her upstairs.

With a crazed killer still in the house?

Lizzie made no move to flee the house or to get the others out to safety. Nor did anyone suggest to Dr. Bowen or arriving police officers that maybe the killer was still in the house.

In domestic murders, the killer often sets up someone else to discover the body, rather than having to “find” it him- or herself.

To assume an intruder, we have to deal with all the implications of someone coming into the house, staying there for more than an hour and a half, and not alerting any family members. This guy would have had to have had the stealth and assassin skills of a Navy
SEAL
. From my experience, there is no way a stranger off the street would have come in and gone straight up to the second floor. He wouldn’t have known who was inside, what the environment was. He would have been afraid of being trapped. Even a maniac wouldn’t hang around for ninety minutes, and he would have killed Lizzie and Bridget, too. No one is going into that house without some critical information, and this is a subject with which we’ll also deal in the next chapter.