The Trial of Lizzie Borden(89)

Chapter 12


THE ENDURING ENIGMA





Borden monument, Oak Grove Cemetery, courtesy of Fall River Historical Society



The popular fascination with the Borden mystery and its central enigmatic character has endured for over 125 years. Three years before Lizzie Borden died, the celebrated true crime writer Edmund Lester Pearson opined: “The Borden case is without parallel in the criminal history of America. It is the most interesting and perhaps the most puzzling murder which has occurred in this country.” Despite having written what was then the definitive account of the case in his 1924 compendium Studies in Murder, Pearson returned again and again to the Borden story. In the course of his correspondence with Hosea Knowlton’s son (whom he had met, years earlier, in Memorial Hall at Harvard), Pearson even reported his own failed attempt to set eyes upon the “famous citizen of Fall River.” After lurking in front of Lizzie’s home on French Street, he described being “more disappointed than I was many years ago when I waited one and one-half hours in Hyde Park but failed in the end to see the Queen of England.” Seeking to explain the story’s continuing allure, he argued:

There are in it all the elements which make such an event worth reading about, since, in the first place, it was a mysterious crime in a class of society where such deeds are not only foreign, but usually wildly impossible . . . The evidence was wholly circumstantial. The perpetrator of the double murder was protected by a series of chances which might not happen again in a thousand years. And, finally, the case attracted national attention, and divided public opinion, as no criminal prosecution has done since, nor, to the best of my belief, as any murder trial in the United States had ever done before.

Immortalized in rhyme, told and retold in every conceivable genre, the Borden murders and the subsequent trial reveal, in Pearson’s words, “the extraordinary fascination of this case as a problem in human character and human relations.” Combining the enduring emotional force of myth and the more prosaic intellectual challenge of a detective story, it is a “locked room” mystery written by Sophocles. Even as the murders themselves seemed summoned from a mythic reservoir of human darkness, the trial of the alleged perpetrator occurred in a specific time and place: America in the Gilded Age, its most deeply held convictions and its most troubling anxieties inscribed in every moment of the legal process. Lizzie Borden was a devout young woman “of good family”—a lady—and an accused axe-wielding parricide. It should not have been possible.

Throughout the trial, Lizzie Borden remained a sphinxlike cipher. Reporters “found texts for columns in her looks, her bearing, her method of speech, her personal habits, her ability to sleep, her fattening process . . . and everything connected with her.” Yet, for all the scrutiny, she remained elusive. As the New York Times correctly predicted, “The verdict, if there shall be a verdict, will make little difference.”

In the last 125 years, the Borden mystery and its central enigmatic figure have been explored in fiction, reimagined in ballet and opera, and dramatized in films, plays, and even musicals. When writers of fiction train their gaze on the events, most find the basic plot lacking romance and have generally invented a mystery lover—much like the unscrupulous private detective McHenry—to provide Lizzie Borden with a more conventional motive and, occasionally, with an accomplice or coconspirator. Lizzie’s dance card was not replete with potential gentlemen callers; however, recent authors (including the screenwriter of the 2018 film Lizzie) have found Lizzie’s paramour hiding in plain sight, suggesting that Lizzie and Bridget shared an illicit passion that precipitated the murders.

Others have tried to solve the case without a romantic subplot, instead finding new reasons to suspect nearly everyone associated with the family. Edward Radin’s Lizzie Borden: The Untold Story, for example, argues that the Bordens’ maid Bridget Sullivan was the real culprit. It is a gripping read—Radin was a two-time winner of the Edgar Award for Fact Crime—and he devotes an entire chapter to refuting Edmund Pearson’s classic account of the case, characterizing it, more in sorrow than in anger, as “a literary hoax.” In Radin’s telling, Abby’s demand that Bridget wash the windows outside, after “a difficult work week in all the heat,” was the final straw and she snapped. For Pearson, Knowlton was a dedicated public servant who did his best to bring a murderess to justice; for Radin, Hosea Knowlton is the villain of the story, a ruthless district attorney who “was willing to blight her life with nothing more than a belief that she might be guilty.” Other authors imagine Emma as the murderer. After all, by her own admission, she was supplanted as Lizzie’s substitute mother by her father’s remarriage and she testified that she, not Lizzie, held the strongest grudge about Abby’s role in the property dispute. For his part, Radin also considered her a possible suspect: she could have returned from Fairhaven, killed Abby, secreted herself in the house until her father’s return, killed him, and then disposed of the weapon somewhere far from the scene. For aficionados of detective fiction, John V. Morse’s alibi is so perfect that it must have been concocted. One writer suggested that he realized Abby was dead and rushed out to give himself a plausible story. Still others see conspiracies of Harvard men or town grandees pulling the strings in the investigation, trial, and ultimate acquittal of Lizzie Borden. Perhaps Dr. Handy’s wild-eyed man was Andrew Borden’s illegitimate son intent on killing the father who would not acknowledge him. Even sports statistician Bill James, the father of sabermetrics, has weighed in, using the Borden case to illustrate a mathematical system that could be used to determine guilt. His conclusion: not guilty. But he contends that such a system should not have been necessary in Lizzie Borden’s case. Modern forensics would have quickly ruled her out as a suspect.