Despite what you’ve heard, America’s most famous murderess was actually found innocent in a court of law. In 1893, after deliberating for a mere hour, the (all-male, white, protestant) jury unanimously decided that 32-year-old spinster and Sunday School teacher Lizzie Borden didn’t actually take an axe and give her parents 40 whacks. By their reasoning, someone else must have. But who?
Nobody knows for sure, and we probably never will. Still, more than a century’s worth of authors, historians, researchers, citizen sleuths, tabloid papers and nosy neighbors have examined no shortage of suspects who, if not Lizzie, may have actually committed the dirty deed: the brazen daytime double murder of 69-year-old Andrew Borden, one of the richest businessmen in Fall River, Massachusetts, and his 64-year-old second wife, Abby Borden. Since no will stating otherwise was ever found, should Andrew predecease his wife, she was set to inherit his fortune, while two spinster daughters would inherit nothing.
At 11:10am on a hot August Thursday in 1892, Lizzie Borden “discovered” her still-warm father, who had been bludgeoned to death (after 11 whacks, technically) on a settee in the sitting room. She called for help from their Irish maid, who in turn summoned the town doctor from across the street. Upstairs in the guest room, Abby’s colder body was found facedown. She had been dead approximately an hour and a half before her husband, killed by 18 whacks.
Though the murder predates Agatha Christie, the scene was straight out of one of her novels: All the doors in their humble home were kept locked. No conclusive murder weapon was ever found. Lizzie Borden had no blood splatter upon her person. She’d been leisurely eating pears in the barn as her parents were being bludgeoned, she said. Assuming her alibi is true, who else could have hacked up the Bordens? The game is afoot.
Suspect #1: Bridget Sullivan, the Maid
At the time of the murders—about 9:30 a.m. for Abby and 11 a.m. for Andrew, per the autopsies performed on the Bordens’ dining room table—just one other person was on site at their home at 92 Second Street: 25-year-old Irish immigrant and housemaid Bridget Sullivan, whom Emma and Lizzie called “Maggie”—a derogatory term for female Irish servants. Sullivan said she was washing windows at the time of the murder, an alibi Lizzie corroborated. Sullivan in turn testified faithfully on Lizzie’s behalf, telling authorities that all was well and good in the Borden home—a statement that was clearly false.
If she was actually not involved with the crime, why would Bridget lie? “Because she was a live-in domestic servant and she wanted to continue to get work,” explains C. Cree, author of Killing the Bordens. Unless she was secretly paid off, notes Cree, Sullivan had no motive—unless you get really creative. In the 1984 novel Lizzie, author Ed McBain posited that Borden and Sullivan were involved in a lesbian affair that was discovered by Abby Borden, who reacted with judgement and disgust. In an improbable scenario such as this, though Sullivan probably would not have wielded the hatchet, she could have been an accomplice after Lizzie hastily killed her stepmother, leaving the duo no choice but to kill Andrew when he returned to the house.
The only physical evidence implicating the maid was a bucket of bloody rags found in the basement—suspicious, given the crime scene upstairs. Sullivan said she’d never seen them before, while Lizzie told investigators they were menstrual rags, and in 1892, menstruation was so taboo that police took her at her word and said nothing more about the delicate matter.
Suspect #2: Antonio Auriel, the Disgruntled Worker (or any other random Portuguese immigrant)
In 1892, Fall River had a prominent population of Portuguese and Irish immigrants whom the town’s more established residents considered second-class citizens. In turn, the immigrants formed their own hierarchy, with the Portuguese occupying the lowest rung. Many worked in the industrial town’s textile mills, of which Andrew Borden owned three. A self-made man worth about $10 million in today’s money, Borden had a reputation for being a shrewd businessman and property manager who had little sympathy or generosity for his workers and tenants.
So when (Irish) policemen first arrived at the bloody scene on downtown’s Second Street, they automatically assumed—even though nothing had been stolen from the Borden home—that the gruesome crime was a robbery-gone-wrong committed by a Portuguese immigrant, who was likely drunken and still on the loose. Within a few hours, three nearby Portuguese men were arrested on suspicion on murder, including farmhand Antonio Auriel, who was apprehended at 2:15pm while he was drinking in a local saloon. Since Auriel, like all the others, had a firm alibi and no known connection to Andrew Borden, he was soon released.
Variations of Auriel’s familiar story, notes Cree, include other hypothetical immigrant culprits: “disgruntled farmhand, disgruntled employee, disgruntled tenant.” Any of these theoretical men could have been sufficiently disgruntled to commit murder, and had Lizzie pointed her privileged finger at a particular one, he likely would have been promptly arrested. “One of the best things about Lizzie Borden,” says The Trial of Lizzie Borden author Cara Robertson, “is that she could have pinned it on various immigrants, but she didn’t.”
Suspect #3: Emma Borden, the Older Sister
Without viable suspects outside the Borden home, investigators next looked inward. Little is known about elder sister Emma Borden, who was nine years Lizzie’s senior. But if 32-year-old Lizzie’s motive for murder was rage and resentment at her limited lot in life, then wouldn’t 41-year-old Emma have been more desperate and even angrier? “Emma was old enough to know her mother and feel her loss more keenly,” says Robertson. “She’s the one who’d been supplanted in the house by Abby in a way that Lizzie is not.”
Their overprotective father hadn’t allowed either daughter to date, and both were considered spinsters without marital prospects. But unlike spoiled and carefree Lizzie, Emma carried the lifelong responsibility of her sister’s care: on her deathbed, their mother made 12-year-old Emma swear to always take care of little Lizzie.
On the day of the murder, Emma Borden was out of town. She’d been staying with friends for two weeks in Fairhaven, about 15 miles away, or two hours via horse-and-buggy. In 1984’s very speculative Lizzie, author Frank Spiering surmised that Emma, not Lizzie, wielded the hatchet that morning—arriving by surprise from Fairhaven, her deliberately established alibi. According to this theory, knowing no physical evidence could connect her to the scene and a jury of her peers would never convict well-liked, upstanding Lizzie, the elder Borden sister murdered the elder Bordens so that she and Lizzie could ultimately claim and share their fortune.
Following Lizzie’s acquittal, the Borden sisters indeed sold the house they’d hated and moved to a fancy Fall River neighbourhood called “The Hill.” They named their 7-bedroom Victorian mansion “Maplecroft” and lived as roommates until 1905—when they had a falling out, became estranged, and never spoke again.
Suspect #4: John V. Morse, the Maternal Uncle
The night before the crime, Uncle John Morse—brother of Emma and Lizzie’s long-dead biological mother—arrived unexpectedly from Iowa and without any baggage. A butcher by trade, Morse and Borden often did business together, specifically dealing with livestock. “To call them scams is way too strong,” says Robertson, “but Uncle John has a grifting quality.” Morse was said to be close with his nieces and loyal to his deceased sister.
At Lizzie’s three-day inquest, Morse testified he’d had breakfast with Andrew and Abby before leaving for the post office at 8:45am. He visited with other Borden relatives, who corroborated his story, then took the trolley home. To some, Morse’s alibi is suspiciously detailed: He noted the trolley number, the number on the driver’s hat, and six priests who were also en route. To Cree, Morse was a “strange duck” whose odd behaviour could indicate something like autism or Asperger’s. Upon returning to the scene of the crime, for example, Morse didn’t notice the crowd gathering out front and walked around back to pick a pear.
“Popular sentiment favoured him as the most likely suspect,” says Robertson, noting Morse at one point was followed by a mob. Among those with a less forgiving perspective on Morse was his suspicious brother-in-law, George B. Fish, who on Tuesday, August 9th, told local reporters his theory that “[Lizzie] and Morse concocted the scene and hired someone else to do it.” Their motive, surmised Fish, was “simply to get them out of the way.”
Suspect #5: William Borden, the (Possibly Fictional) Illegitimate Son
In 1991, author Arnold R. Brown published Lizzie Borden: The Legend, the Truth, and the Final Chapter which posited an entirely new theory: During but outside his first marriage, Andrew Borden fathered an illegitimate son who was raised as a “cousin” by another Borden relative.
The existence of William Borden, according to Brown, was “whispered about on The Hill and was more than common knowledge within the Borden clan.” Brown reads deep between the lines in Lizzie’s testimony, where her prosecutor asks, “How many children has your father?” “Only two,” she replies. “Only you two?,” he reiterates, and then once more, “Any others ever?” Lizzie mentions another sister, Alice, who died at age 2 before Lizzie was born, but Brown suspects the lawyer was alluding to the existence of half-brother William—gossip those sitting in the courtroom may have heard (or spread) many times.
Brown’s theory imagines Andrew Borden was in the process of writing his will, which had everyone quarrelling, including William. This was why Uncle Morse came to town in the first place, suggests Brown, and also why Emma had left. Brown says Morse let William in the night before (with Lizzie’s knowledge), Abby was killed when she surprised him in the morning (without Lizzie’s knowledge) and then William killed his father and made a run for it. The only problem? “It’s not actually based on any evidence,” says Robertson, who relegates this theory to “interesting fiction.”
Suspect #6: Jose Correa de Mello, the Other Axe Murderer
What if, rather than any or all or some combinations of the suspects above, the killer of Andrew and Abby Borden was indeed a deranged axe murderer unbeknownst to either victim? A long shot, perhaps, unless you know this: In the same small city of Fall River on May 30, 1893, nine months after the Borden murder and just five days before Borden’s jury was sequestered, Bertha Manchester was found brutally killed by an axe murderer.
Another axe murder? No wonder papers immediately speculated and insinuated: “Deep mystery surrounds the murder of Berta Manchester,” read the next day’s headline on the front of the Boston Globe, above “Strange parallel to Borden tragedy.”
But Manchester’s murder would be resolved much more conventionally. On the same very day that Lizzie’s trial began, news broke that Portuguese immigrant worker Jose Correa de Mello had been arrested. He was indeed a disgruntled employee whose plans to rob his boss’s farmhouse snowballed into murder. “A worthless Portuguese arrested for the murder of the girl,” wrote The Cincinnati Enquirer. For the record, 19-year-old de Mello wasn’t even in America when the Bordens were murdered. And although de Mello maintained his innocence, he served twenty years for the crime.
Suspect #7: Jack the Ripper, the World’s Other Most Famous Killer
The very day that news of the Borden murders broke, Boston Globe writers speculated about “hints of a Jack the Ripper” that might connect the Fall River killings to the infamous Brit’s 1888 murder spree. Just three years later, Scotland Yard’s still-unsolved case was still often being mentioned in American newspapers, and Lizzie’s lawyer wasted no time invoking it to his advantage. “It may be said to be next to impossible for one to have entered the house unobserved, commit the murders, and make his escape without being seen,” he told the Globe. “The audacity of the Jack the Ripper cases in London is an illustration.”
On the Monday following the crimes, the local paper printed a reader letter that read, “the recent murder in Fall River appears to have about it some of the ghastly features of the work of Jack, the ripper, in London. It will send a shudder through every quiet New England home.” Baseless chatter moved townspeople to muse that the Borden murders may not only be like those of Jack the Ripper, but perhaps committed by Jack the Ripper—who could have travelled from London in the interim and struck again in their little town.
The theory is admittedly ridiculous in retrospect. But in 1982, it seemed plausible enough that police even received a letter from “Jack” mocking the police (“I don’t know if you fellows are sleeping or what”) and confessing to both the Borden and Manchester murders. Investigators dismissed the note as a fraud, and nobody in law enforcement seriously considered Jack the Ripper a legitimate suspect. But in the sensational and eternally unsolvable case of Lizzie Borden, Jack the Ripper is as good a guess as any other.
The post If Lizzie Borden Didn’t Kill Her Wealthy Parents, Who Did? appeared first on Vanity Fair.
