Defending the men of Lizzie Borden’s jury

We are approaching August 4, the anniversary of the day in 1892 when Andrew and Abby Borden of Fall River, Massachusetts were brutally murdered in their homes. The doubly slaying is a familiar part of popular culture as is the perception that the accused, Lizzie Borden, stepdaughter of Abby and daughter of Andrew, committed the slayings despite her acquittal.

The famous and macabre children’s rhyme has helped solidify that perception: “Lizzie Borden took an axe/Gave her mother forty whacks/When she saw when she had done/She gave her father forty-one.” People might know that the poem exaggerates the number of “whacks” and is misleading as to the precise relationship between Abby and Lizzie but accept the poem’s confidence in her guilt.

Indeed, a widespread perception is that Lizzie Borden was acquitted solely because of a combination of sexism and class bias. Juries were by law composed only of men when she was tried. Many people believe the twelve men of Lizzie Borden’s jury set free an obviously guilty murderer out of a misguided chivalry.

Feminist Ann Jones champions this view in Women Who Kill, claiming that the Borden jury ignored evidence in favor of “patriarchal” myths about upper-class women or “ladies.” According to this author, “Lizzie Borden owed her life largely to those tacit assumptions: ladies aren’t strong enough to swing a two-pound hatchet hard enough to break a brittle substance one-sixteenth of an inch thick. Ladies cry a lot. Ladies love to stay home all the time. Ladies are ceaselessly grateful to the men – father or husbands – who support them. Ladies never stand with their legs apart. Ladies cannot plan more than a few minutes ahead.”

In her zeal to pronounce Lizzie guilty and slam the men of her jury as fools for chivalry, Jones, like so many other commentators, distorts the facts of the case.

One of the most baffling of those facts is the failure of authorities to find the murder weapon. One of Lizzie’s attorneys, Andrew Jennings, pointed out the pivotal nature of this point in his opening statement, saying, “[The government must] produce the weapon which did the deed, and, having produced it, connect it in some way directly with the prisoner, or else they have got to account in some reasonable way for its disappearance.”

The government could not do any of those things. Several axes and hatchets were found on the Borden premises. All tested negative for human blood and human hair. The prosecution singled out the so-called “handleless hatchet” as probable murder weapon but their identification of it was shaky, saying only “it may well have been the weapon.”

It probably was not. The government’s suggestion that Lizzie had broken off most of the wood and then burned it up in the few minutes that would have been available to her between butchering her father and sending out the alarm was easily ridiculed by one of her attorneys, Governor George Robinson. An officer had found a rolled up and charred newspaper in the stove where the wood was supposedly sent to oblivion. Gov. Robinson asked, “Did you ever see such a funny fire in the world? A hard wood stick inside the newspaper, and the hard wood stick goes out beyond recall – and the newspaper that lives forever would stay there!”

Another problem ruling out the handleless hatchet is that a medical examiner found there was a deposit of gilt metal in one of Abby Borden’s wounds. The handleless hatchet was old.

The second major issue the government failed to adequately deal with was the lack of blood on Lizzie in the immediate aftermath of her father’s brutal slaying and the failure of officers to discover a bloodstained garment. Jones, like some other Lizzie-did-it advocates, distorts truth in order to make it seem that the men of the Borden jury obstinately ignored evidence to acquit Lizzie. She acknowledges that witnesses who saw her immediately after the discovery of the killings saw no blood on her but claims “all the medical experts agreed that the assailant need not have been spattered with blood.” In fact, medical opinion was divided and a doctor testified that the killer of Abby would have had to have been spattered over the lower body and the killer of Andrew on the upper body. Several witnesses saw Lizzie only minutes after Andrew’s murder. Not only was she spotless but her hair, up in a bun, was not disarranged.

It is true that Lizzie burned a dress only a few days after the slayings, saying it was “covered with paint.” Many have wryly concluded, “Yes, red paint.” However, police officers made a thorough search of the home in the immediate aftermath of the crimes, examining every garment in the home and finding none that were blood-spattered.

Lizzie’s story of why she happened to be away when her father was killed was that she went to the barn to look for sinkers for a planned fishing trip. The alibi has, understandably, struck many as fishy (sorry). However, it was supported by the testimony of Hyman Lubinsky, a young ice-cream vendor. He said that, as he was making his rounds, he saw a woman coming from the area of the Borden barn to the back door of the residence.

The Lizzie Borden case is America’s perennial murder mystery for good reason. This is not the place to go into all the facts that point to her guilt but they are many and strong. However, as already discussed, there are also strongly exculpatory facts. This combination keeps Borden buffs busy.

It was not the job of the Borden jury to solve the case but to decide if the prosecution had proven Lizzie Borden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. It had not. The men of the Borden jury did their duty in finding her not guilty and deserve respect.

Anyone interested in more information about this most enduring and fascinating of American murder mysteries should look up “The Hatchet: The Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies” at http://www.hatchetonline.com/HatchetOnline//index.htm.