The Trial of Lizzie Borden(88)

Maplecroft, Lizzie Borden’s house on French Street, courtesy of Fall River Historical Society



Lizzie practiced her aspirational nomenclature on herself, changing her own girlish name to the grander-sounding Lizbeth. Lizbeth of Maplecroft, unlike Miss Lizzie Borden of Second Street, went to the theater in Boston and dropped her Christian charities. (One could argue that they dropped her. She supported Central Congregational Church, maintaining a pew where she herself was unwelcome, until 1905.) About this time, Emma consulted Reverend Buck about “happenings at the French Street house” of which she strongly disapproved. There were rumors about “a fine looking young” man named Joseph Tetrault who worked as the Bordens’ coachman. Perhaps even more significantly, Lizzie developed a close if short-lived friendship with the actress Nance O’Neil, then “the greatest tragedienne . . . on the stage [outside of New York],” that purportedly scandalized her more retiring sister. Indeed it may well have been O’Neil’s influence that led Lizzie to recast herself as “Lizbeth.” O’Neil inscribed a copy of The Poems of Thomas Bailey Aldrich—Aldrich was the author of the play Judith of Bethulia, in which O’Neil appeared as the eponymous heroine—to “Lizbeth” and signed herself “Daphne.” Lizzie invited the entire cast of one of O’Neil’s productions for a lavish party that featured a full orchestra and champagne, belying her previous temperance work. In the midst of litigation with her manager, Nance O’Neil borrowed money from Lizzie (who was also touched for a $50 loan by a supporting actress in O’Neil’s company). Finding the atmosphere “unbearable,” Emma belatedly followed Reverend Buck’s advice to make her home elsewhere. In 1905, she moved out and never spoke to her sister again. The rest of their circle followed Emma’s example.

Nance O’Neil as Judith of Bethulia, courtesy of Fall River Historical Society



Lizzie Borden may have been shunned, but she was not ignored. To mark the anniversary of the murders, her journalistic nemesis, the Irish-Catholic Fall River Daily Globe, published an annual reminder of the town’s most infamous crime. Its 1904 article included, in the headline, the following disingenuous afterthought: “Perhaps the Murderer or Murderess May Be in the City. Who Can Tell?” The following year, under the headline, “Great Wrong Is Righted,” the Globe provocatively declared: “There were no Borden murders! Both the victims of 13 years ago died as the result of excessive heat!” This taunting continued for more than two decades.

Lizzie Borden was also dogged by less veiled innuendo. Schoolchildren began to sing an insistent little rhyme:

Lizzie Borden took an ax,

Gave her mother forty whacks,

When she saw what she had done,

She gave her father forty-one.

Papers printed improbable reports of engagements, including a betrothal to one of her former jurors. It was said that salespeople would find items missing after Borden’s visits, itemize the loss, and report the figure to the manager, who would, in turn, send the bill to Borden’s French Street address. At one point, her alleged transgressions became newsworthy. A woman brought a painted Meissen porcelain plaque to the Tilden-Thurber gallery in Providence for restoration, stating that Lizzie Borden had given it to her. The saleswoman, apparently recognizing the piece, informed the manager that a stolen item had been brought into the store. He notified Borden that she would have to pay for it and had the police issue a warrant for her arrest. She was not arrested but the story was featured in the local papers under the headline “Lizzie Borden Again.”

Lizzie Borden on piazza with dog Laddie, circa 1926, courtesy of Fall River Historical Society



Despite her isolation, Lizzie Borden remained in Fall River for the rest of her life. She took comfort in her Boston terriers, for whom she built a special raised seat in her black Packard; she befriended the children of her domestic staff, treating them to ice cream in Tiverton and special-delivery birthday wishes from Auntie Borden. She died quietly at Maplecroft on June 1, 1927. She left instructions “to be laid at my Father’s feet” in the Borden family plot at Fall River’s Oak Grove Cemetery, less than a mile from her home. The mourners were few, the interment “strictly private,” her grave bricked to prevent disturbance. There, she also joined Abby; her mother, Sarah; and her infant sister, Alice. Emma died ten days later, thus reuniting the family in death. They lie together, in perpetual rest, less than two miles from the house on Second Street.

It is tempting to speculate about Lizzie Borden’s motivation for remaining in Fall River and enduring the ostracism of the community whose good opinion she had so assiduously sought. But perhaps, half a century earlier, Nathaniel Hawthorne penned the most convincing explanation for his fictional outcast in The Scarlet Letter:

It may seem marvellous, that, with the world before her . . . this woman should still call that place her home, where, and where only, she must needs be the type of shame. But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event has given color to their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.

Lizzie Borden herself never publicly commented about the case that altered the course of her otherwise drab life. Like the town that bred her and then ostracized her, as she aged, Lizzie Borden turned inward, reclusive, and, above all, silent.