The Trial of Lizzie Borden(9)
The Fall River Police Department, headed by Marshal Rufus Hilliard, began its investigation by immediately rounding up the usual suspects. In keeping with prevailing attitudes about criminality, the Fall River police expected to find a depraved outsider with a foreign accent. That year, as in the prior years, more than two-thirds of those arrested were born abroad. (The Report of the City Marshal helpfully listed the national origin of all those arrested.) Stories circulated that “a Swede or a Portuguese” in Borden’s employ had come to the Borden house demanding money on the morning of the murders. Lizzie herself vouched for Alfred Johnson, the Swede. The police eliminated Johnson and Portuguese laborers from Borden’s Swansea farm as well as several other immigrant suspects. Peleg Brightman reported that he had seen a bloody axe owned by Joseph Silvia. When the police investigated, they found children with “dirty dresses on, which were caked with blood.” This alarming sight had an apparently innocent explanation: their mother explained that the children were “very subject to the nose bleed.” The police concluded that the axe itself was too “old, dull, and . . . worn” to have caused the wounds on the Bordens. The police were also called to the New Bedford Savings Bank to pick up “a Portuguese” who was attempting to cash out his savings of “sixty odd dollars.” He, like the others, gave “a satisfactory account of himself” and was released. Another line of thought hinged on the nature of the crimes, that there was something “effeminate” about the hacking and, therefore, according to racial theories of the day, pointed to a “Chinaman.”
Many contemporary commentators envisaged the murderer through the lens of Lombroso’s theories—a brutish throwback, more monster than man. One newspaper conceived of the guilty party as a “human fiend,” for no ordinary criminal could repeatedly axe two elderly people. After the murders, Rev. William Walker Jubb, pastor of the Central Congregational Church, the society church favored by Lizzie and her sister, Emma, asked his congregation not to allow rumor to blight the lives of the innocent, which he contrasted with the necessary character of the true murderer. He asked, “What must have been the person who could have been guilty of such a revolting crime? One to commit such a murder must have been without heart, without soul, a fiend incarnate, the very vilest of degraded humanity, or he must have been a maniac.”
The idea of a maniac as the murderer provided an explanation for the shocking brutality of the murders: the skulls of the Bordens had been so shattered by the force of multiple blows that the victims were virtually unrecognizable. One witness described Andrew’s face as “a mass of raw meat.” The prominent attorney and former mayor Milton Reed also advised: “Look for the maniac.” He explained: “We who have had some experience with criminals, and some knowledge of crime, know that murderers do not stand over the victims delivering blow after blow when they know the victims are dead . . . In every detail it shows the stubborn and dogged brutality of the insane.”
Dr. Benjamin Handy, a respected local physician and Borden family friend, claimed to have seen a pale young man, eyes fixed on the sidewalk, walking nervously on Second Street the morning of the murders. Transformed by newspaper accounts into “Dr. Handy’s wild-eyed man,” the Fall River police identified him as “Mike the Soldier,” the sobriquet of a local dipsomaniac who had been seen in the area around the same time. They ruled him out and, over Dr. Handy’s objections that he was not the same man, they turned their attention to other strangers. The officers became suspicious of Dr. Handy’s sighting when he seemed reluctant to go to Boston to identify another possible suspect and then “readily pronounced him not the man” even though “his face was very much shaded.” Dr. Handy, it was noted, owned the holiday cottage in the seaside village of Marion, Massachusetts, where Lizzie had planned to join a group of friends.
Unsolicited advice came from a variety of sources. Among the “multitude of crank communications” sent to the police and the prosecutors were suggestions about where to search—the kitchen stove, the attic, a well, and the piano (if, the writer acknowledged, the Bordens owned a piano)—on the theory that all would make excellent hiding places. An infallible clue to the murderer’s identity, some insisted, could be found in the eyes of the victims, for the retinas retained the last image seen: “Dark mysteries have been brought to light in this manner by means of photography.” Still others imagined a secret society, perhaps anarchists, taking revenge on the Borden household. Most had more conventional ideas, offering leads on suspicious characters or enjoining the police to arrest someone closer to home. A few even confessed, including a man who claimed to be the illegitimate son of Andrew Borden and a woman he had committed to an insane asylum. One man, Charles Peckham, actually turned himself in. He, like the others, was quickly ruled out. Marshal Hilliard explained, “I have devoted attention to many stories that were foolish just because of the enormity of the crime, and in order that I might leave no stone unturned to solve it.”
Even those beyond the veil of this life weighed in. A medium claimed to have had word from the late Andrew Borden, but the famously reticent Mr. Borden refused to divulge his murderer’s identity. “Trance Medium and Physician” J. Burns Strand recounted his vision of the murders. He offered to “come at once” to Fall River and, in the interim, enjoined the authorities to “arrest Morse, Lizzie and the man at West Port.” Yet it seemed “there was a diversity of opinion in the spirit world as to the identity of the person who murdered Mr. and Mrs. Borden.” One medium explained: “Spirits don’t know everything . . . And if they didn’t happen to be looking just at the moment when the murder was committed they couldn’t be expected to know about it.”