The Trial of Lizzie Borden(4)

Having perhaps married without affection, Abby also lacked the consolations of authority. Her husband retained tight control over the finances and her grown stepdaughters appeared to prefer their own company, receiving occasional visitors in the upstairs guest room. As family friend and former neighbor Alice Russell would later remark, “Mrs. Borden did not control the house; the whole summing up of it, was that.” When John Grouard arrived to paint the Borden house in May 1892, Andrew told him that Lizzie “was to select the color, and I better not go on with it until the color was determined.” (Lizzie did not approve of the tubs he had mixed; she supervised the remixing to the perfect shade of “dark drab.”) In another sign of Abby’s lesser status, her stepdaughters received the same allowance as she did. For Lizzie and Emma, it was pin money for whatever extras they might enjoy; Abby’s allowance went toward household expenses. Yet, she seemed to accept her lot. According to her own stepmother, Abby was a “closed-mouth woman” who could “bear a great deal and say nothing.”

Abby’s attempt to help her half sister transformed her stepdaughters’ chilly tolerance to open animosity. Abby’s father left his house to his wife Jane Gray and their daughter Sarah Whitehead. Abby’s stepmother wanted to sell her half of the property but Sarah did not have the funds to buy her share. At Abby’s request in 1887, Andrew purchased Mrs. Gray’s half interest and put it in Abby’s name to allow Sarah and her husband to live there rent-free. His daughters objected to his spousal solicitude. What he did for Abby, Lizzie and Emma believed, he should do for his own flesh and blood. Andrew sought to appease his daughters by transferring property of equal value into their names. This effort at equalization was not a success. Instead, Andrew’s purchase of the Whitehead house raised the tension in the Borden household to the surface. Thereafter, Bridget served two sittings of each meal because the daughters refused to eat with their parents and neither daughter would speak to Abby except in response to a direct question. “We always spoke,” Emma later explained. Lizzie pointedly began referring to Abby as Mrs. Borden, her stepmother, and expressed her hostility toward Abby to anyone who asked. In March 1892, Lizzie chastised her dressmaker for referring to Abby as her mother. She said: “Don’t say that to me, for she is a mean good-for-nothing thing.” Augusta Tripp, Lizzie’s friend and former classmate, said: “Lizzie told me she thought her stepmother was deceitful, being one thing to her face, and another to her back.” As Abby’s own stepmother, Jane Gray, succinctly put it: “I told Mrs. Borden I would not change places with her for all her money.”

Emma Borden, courtesy of Fall River Historical Society



Money was the source of other dissatisfactions in the household. Andrew Borden’s miserly habits—in particular, his refusal to live on the Hill, the neighborhood of choice for the Fall River elite—placed his daughters in virtual social quarantine. Lizzie, in particular, did not appreciate her father’s determined economies, and she freely indicated her unhappiness with her living conditions. As Alice Russell astutely explained, “He was a very plain living man; he did not care for anything different. It always seemed to me as if he did not see why they should care for anything different.” She elaborated: “They had quite refined ideas, and they would like to have been cultured girls.” Lizzie’s estranged uncle, Hiram Harrington, was less charitable: “She thought she should entertain as others did, and felt that with her father’s wealth she was expected to hold her end up with the other members of her set. Her father’s constant refusal to entertain lavishly angered her.”

In 1890, just prior to her thirtieth birthday, Lizzie Borden briefly experienced an unwonted measure of freedom when her father sent her on a Grand Tour of Europe in the company of other unmarried women of her acquaintance. In their shared cabin during the return voyage, Lizzie confided to her distant cousin Anna Borden her unwillingness to return to the house on Second Street with sufficient vehemence that Anna was able to recount the conversation three years later. Yet, return she did, at which point her father gave her a sealskin cape. The motivation for such extravagant gifts is unclear: Andrew Borden was a man who calculated the probable returns on his investments carefully, and the record discloses no other comparable generosity toward his daughters. After all, their weekly allowance remained set at four dollars—less than the weekly wage of a female spinner in the local mills.

Less than a year after Lizzie’s return from Europe, at the end of June 1891, the Borden household was the scene of a mysterious crime. Captain Dennis Desmond reported to 92 Second Street to learn the odd particulars: Abby’s jewelry drawer had been rifled and some trinkets—most notably, a gold watch and chain of particular sentimental value—were missing. Andrew’s desk had also been denuded of about $80 in cash, $25 to $30 in gold, and several commemorative streetcar tickets. Although the theft occurred in the middle of the day, none of the women in the house—neither Bridget, nor Emma, nor Lizzie—claimed to have heard a sound. When the police arrived, Lizzie Borden excitedly led them on a tour of the house and showed them the lock on the downstairs cellar door, which had apparently been forced open with a “6 or 8 penny nail.” She suggested: “Someone might have come in that way.” Desmond was stunned by the interloper’s good fortune: the thief had broken in and discovered the Bordens’ bedroom without attracting the attention of the women in the house. Andrew Borden noticed that the thief could only have entered through Lizzie’s bedroom, and three times told Desmond: “I am afraid the police will not be able to find the real thief.” The police were baffled or, at least, thought better of voicing their suspicions; Andrew Borden called off the investigation and attempted to keep word of the theft out of the papers.