Author’s Note: This was originally published in The Hatchet: The Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies.

The Borden case continues to intrigue over a century after the fact because there is so much that seems to point unmistakably to Lizzie Borden’s guilt – and important facts that appear to make that guilt utterly impossible.

Behavior prior to the murders that has been attributed to Lizzie would, if true, powerfully show a guilty predisposition. According to Leonard Rebello in Lizzie Borden Past & Present, Eli Bence, a clerk at D. R. Smith’s drugstore, testified at both the inquest and the preliminary hearing that “Lizzie attempted to purchase prussic acid on Wednesday, August 3, 1892” and that she claimed she wanted the poison “for the purpose of cleaning a seal skin coat.” Rebello quotes the Stenographer’s Minutes as stating that, “After being placed in a position where he [Eli Bence] could both see and hear Miss Borden, he was very positive in identification.”

The reason Bence quoted her as giving for wanting the poison sounded jarringly false. It was August. Why would anyone even be thinking about cleaning a coat in the summer heat?

Of course, it should be noted that Lizzie always denied attempting to purchase the poison and even having been to D. R. Smith’s drugstore.

Then there is Lizzie’s oddly prescient statement to her friend, Alice Russell as quoted in Ann Jones’ Women Who Kill: “I feel depressed. I feel as if something was hanging over me that I cannot throw off, and it comes over me at times, no matter where I am. . . . I feel as if I wanted to sleep with my eyes half open – with one eye open half the time – for fear they will burn the house down over us. . . . I am afraid somebody will do something; I don’t know but what somebody will do something.” As Jones commented sardonically, “The next day somebody did something and it seemed strange that Miss Lizzie should so clearly have seen it coming.”

The all-important factor of opportunity appears to point directly to Lizzie. Only two people besides the victims are known to have been on the Borden property at the time Abby and Andrew were killed. One is Lizzie and the other is the maid Bridget Sullivan. Some writers like Edwin R. Radin have indeed pinned the rap on Bridget. However, given the temper of the times, it seems likely that the authorities would have much rather prosecuted an Irish servant rather than a respectable “lady” so the fact that she was never charged with the crimes speaks powerfully in Bridget’s favor.

However, part of Bridget’s testimony implicates Lizzie. Bridget claimed that while Lizzie was on the second floor of the house and she, Bridget, was on the first floor opening the front door for Andrew, Lizzie giggled. Lizzie-did-it partisans have always thought this a fiendish, post-murder chuckle. There is a more innocent explanation: David Kent in Forty Whacks writes that Bridget also told authorities that she “fumbled” to get all three locks opened and exclaimed in exasperation, “Pshaw!” Lizzie might just have laughed at Bridget’s frustration.

Additionally, Bridget’s testimony indicated that, at the time Andrew returned home, Lizzie was near the room in which Abby lay dead, a room that had its door partially open. Many observers have wondered how Lizzie could have failed to notice the body that lay motionless on the floor.

The usual estimate of the time between the death of Abby and Andrew fixes a period of roughly one hour or an hour and a half. According to Kent, medical examiner Dr. William A. Dolan “could tell by the blackened, thickened blood of Abby’s wounds and the fresh, red flow from Andrew’s that Abby had already been dead an hour or so when Andrew’s time had come.” Kent further writes that, “If Andrew had died at 11:00, Abby had died at 9:30 or 10:00.”

Those who believe Lizzie guilty think it strains credibility to imagine an assassin lurking in this small house for that period of time without being seen by either Lizzie or Bridget.

The story of the note also arouses suspicion. Walter L. Hixson in Murder, Culture and Injustice writes that Bridget testified that, “When Andrew Borden returned home on the morning of the murders . . . Lizzie ‘spoke very low’ but she clearly heard her tell her father that Abby had received a note and had gone out to attend someone who was sick.” However, after people came to the house to find Andrew dead, Lizzie suggested they look upstairs for her stepmother. Advertisements were taken out to find the person who delivered the note and the party who sent it yet neither of them ever came forward and the note itself was not found. Many people have assumed there was no note and that a guilty Lizzie was trying to prevent Andrew from looking for Abby.

Lizzie also claimed that the reason she missed her father’s killing was that she impulsively went to the barn to hunt up some lead for fishing sinkers. At trial, the defense called to the stand an ice cream vendor named Hyman Lubinsky who supported Lizzie’s peculiar alibi. Kent writes that Lubinsky claimed he left the stable in which he had picked up horse and wagon “between 11:05 and 11:00 and passed the Borden house just minutes later.” He saw a woman “come out of the way from the barn right to the stairs at the back of the house.” Despite the seeming confirmation from the ice cream vendor, Lizzie’s story of the barn trip for sinkers has struck many as “fishy” in the extreme.

But there are also stumbling blocks to accepting the hypothesis of Lizzie’s guilt, stumbling blocks that at first blush seem insurmountable. One of them is the all-important issue of the murder weapon. Emma Borden concisely summarized the problem when she told Boston Sunday Post reporter Edwin J. Maguire in a 1913 interview, “Here is the strongest thing that has convinced me of Lizzie’s innocence. The authorities never found the axe or whatever implement it was that figured in the killing. Lizzie, if she had done that deed, could never have hidden the instrument of death so that the police could not find it. Why, there was no hiding place in the old house that would serve for effectual concealment. Neither did she have the time.”

Kent quotes attorney Andrew Jennings as saying pointedly in his opening statement that, in order to prove its case, the state’s attorneys had to “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 prosecution could do neither. Several axes and hatchets were found on the Borden premises but all tested negative for human blood. The prosecution put forward the infamous “handleless hatchet” as prime candidate for murder weapon, suggesting the handle had been destroyed because it is extremely difficult to wash blood from wood.

However, the defense pointed out several improbabilities in this identification. For this to be the weapon, Lizzie would have had to break most of the handle off, then obliterate that thick wood. The prosecution theorized that she had burned it in the kitchen stove. A charred roll of newspaper was found in the stove and not a trace of hatchet. Lizzie’s chief defense attorney, Governor George Robinson asked pertinently, “Did you ever see such a funny fire in the world? A hard wood stick inside the newspaper, and the hard wood stick would go out beyond recall – and the newspaper that lives forever would stay there!”

Two other factors make it unlikely the handleless hatchet was the murder weapon. One is that a Suffolk County medical examiner found a deposit of gilt metal in one of the cuts on Abby Borden, indicating that the hatchet that killed her was new. As Kent writes, the handleless hatchet was “old, dull, and rusty.”

Finally, the piece of the wood that remained with the head, the part that would have been closest to the victims, tested negative for blood.

The absence of a blood stained garment is another major stumbling block to buying the prosecution’s case.

Of course, as is well known to even the most casual student of the Borden case, Lizzie burned a dress on Sunday, August 7, 1892. The dress burning has damned her in many eyes. Both she and Emma claimed she destroyed it because the cheap dress had been stained with paint and many wags have assumed the stain was “red paint” put there by the splatter from a homicidal hatchet.

However, this hypothesis has its difficulties. For one thing, descriptions of the burned dress do not tally with those of the garment she wore on the day of the killings. According to Rebello, Emma testified that the destroyed garment was a blue cotton Bedford cord, very light blue ground.” Rebello also writes that the woman who supposedly made the dress, Mary Raymond, took the witness stand to say it was “a Bedford cord, a cheap cotton dress . . . light blue.” Kent quotes Alice Russell, who witnessed the burning, as saying its color was “light-blue ground with a dark figure” and that she had not seen it between the time it was made early spring and the day it was burned. In other words, she had not seen Lizzie wearing it on the day of the slayings.

Rebello further states that Dr. Bowen testified that the dress Lizzie wore on the day of the slayings was “dark blue.” His wife also called it “dark blue.” Kent writes that Lubinsky described the woman who walked from the barn to the back of the Borden home as “wearing a dark-colored dress.” However, other witnesses, such as Mrs. Churchill and Officer Patrick Doherty described the dress they saw on Lizzie on August 4 as “light blue” which sounds more like the burned article.

But that still leaves the fact that not one of the witnesses who saw Lizzie in the immediate aftermath of her father’s killing recalled seeing any blood on the dress Lizzie wore or on her person or even the slightest disarrangement of her hair which was up in a bun.

One way to reconcile the considerable damning evidence against Lizzie with the strongly exonerating facts in her favor is to postulate that she was part of a conspiracy. She may have killed Abby and/or Andrew or aided and/or covered up for someone else who did.

Indeed, the possibility of a conspiracy has hung over the Borden case from the first. Rebello reprints part of an August 12, 1892 Providence Daily Journal article entitled “Police Believe Miss Lizzie Borden was Not Alone in the Case.” The piece comments that authorities “suspect Lizzie Borden has a confederate or assistants.” In Forty Whacks, David Kent quotes prosecutor Hosea Knowlton, in a letter to Massachusetts Attorney General Arthur Pillsbury, as writing, “”nothing has developed which satisfies either of us that she is innocent; neither of us can escape the conclusion that she must have had some knowledge of the occurrence.” Although Knowlton did not introduce the possibility at trial, the implication is clear that he and Pillsbury believed it possible that she was involved with others in the slayings of her stepmother and father.

So whom could Lizzie have conspired with? And what were the roles of the respective conspirators?

Perhaps the most obvious candidate for co-conspirator is the only other person known to be on the property of the Borden residence at the time of the killings, the maid Bridget Sullivan. Rebello records that an article by one Mary D. Smith proposing that the pair were “partners in crime” first appeared in a 1978 issue of The Armchair Detective and was republished in 1992 in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Evan Hunter did a fictional treatment in Lizzie: A Novel in which Lizzie and Bridget are in cahoots, as Mrs. Borden is killed because she stumbles upon the two of them making lesbian love. Lizzie clobbers Abby, then Andrew, with a candlestick holder. Then she hides it in plain sight, putting a candle back inside it.

There is another, even odder theory that makes Bridget a conspirator but does not assert that Lizzie was her crime partner. Rebello says an author named Leonard Healy theorized that “the Bordens were ‘gassed to death by inhaling vapors of the deadly asphyxiate, hydrocyanic acid forcibly administered by . . . Bridget Sullivan . . . the ax-wielding was carried out by one of the girl’s accomplices as a post mortem event.’”

Owen Haskell authored a novella called Sherlock Holmes and the Fall River Tragedy that had Lizzie conspiring with Dr. Seabury Bowen, who spirited a blood-stained garment and a hatchet away in his big black medical bag. There is no solid evidence implicating Dr. Bowen in reality and the book is written as fiction but the idea does credibly explain why neither the weapon nor a bloody garment was ever found.

Uncle John Vinnicum Morse, who had come to visit the Borden household on August 3, is another candidate theorists have put up as a conspirator. Even before Lizzie came to trial, newspapers carried the speculation of George H. Fish, husband of Abby’s sister Priscilla, that Lizzie had conspired with Uncle John. Rebello quotes the August 9, 1892 Fall River Daily Globe as writing that Fish “believed Lizzie and her uncle John V. Morse planned the murders but hired someone to commit the murders.”

Fritz Adliz wrote a convoluted conspiracy scenario entitled “Whodunit?: An Armchair Solution to the Borden Mystery” that was serialized in The Lizzie Borden Quarterly in issues from 1994 to 1996. Adilz postulates that Lizzie was part of a conspiracy involving Uncle John as well as Emma. However, he does not identify any of these three as the hands-on executioner. He reserves that dishonor for Isaac C. Davis, a man for whom Uncle John had once worked. According to Rebello, Uncle John learned the butcher’s trade from Davis. Adilz also theorizes that there was yet a fifth person in the conspiracy and that that individual spirited Davis from the crime scene.

There are several factors that make Adilz’s theory unconvincing. One is the “too many cooks spoil the broth” difficulty of keeping so many conspirators quiet – especially when one of them went on trial for her life. Adilz also writes that, “if Lizzie and her uncle had an agent committing the murders for them, one would expect them to have as airtight an alibi as possible.” But Lizzie glaringly lacked such an alibi. Finally, while the theory has explanatory power, it suffers from a lack of hard evidence.

Frank Spiering in his book Lizzie writes about an impromptu conspiracy between Lizzie and Emma. In Spiering’s telling, both Lizzie and Emma were – independently of each other and without the other’s knowledge – plotting to murder Abby and Andrew.

According to Spiering, Lizzie sprinkled arsenic into the broth that Bridget was cooking when the maid was gone from the kitchen, accounting for the sickness the family was known to have suffered the day prior to the killings. When Abby and Andrew did not die as a result of the poisoned food, Spiering writes, Lizzie determined to try again and made her fruitless trip to D.R. Smith’s Drugstore.

Emma was more effective, Spiering asserts. Off in Fairhaven visiting friends in the Brownell family, possibly to establish an alibi, he writes that Emma “hitched a horse to the black carriage and headed into the woodshed adjacent to the Brownell house to get an axe.” Spiering believes she then drove that carriage back to her home.

In Spiering’s book, Lizzie was still planning to do away with her stepmother and father by poison when she was startled to find her older sister had returned home – with an axe in her hands. Instantly understanding, Lizzie led Emma up the stairs to the guest room in which Abby was doing some housework. When Andrew came home, Lizzie she made sure the coast was clear for Emma to use the axe on him.

Why did Lizzie burn a dress? According to Spiering, because she feared “its corded cotton fabric” could have been tested and “found to contain traces of arsenic.”

Spiering’s most audacious claim and one that makes much of his theory hard to swallow is that the two sisters were each independently intending to kill Abby and Andrew. This is implausible on the face of it. Additionally, like so many other Borden “solutions,” his is hampered by a lack of hard evidence.

Arnold Brown suggested an extremely far-reaching and convoluted conspiracy theory in his book, Lizzie Borden, the Legend, the Truth, the Final Chapter. In his telling, Lizzie is not guilty of either killing or of conspiring to kill. According to him, Andrew Borden had fathered a son, William “Bill” Borden, by another woman while still married to his first wife, Sarah. Brown writes that Bill’s mother was Phebe, wife of Charles Borden (he does not explain the exact relationship between Andrew and Charles).

As a young man, Bill began making financial demands on his natural father. Both Uncle John and Lizzie knew of this and sometimes acted as mediators between Andrew and Bill. Lizzie was scared of Bill; that, Brown says, was the reason she sought poison.

Bill conspired with his own half-brother, William Lewis Bassett. In Brown’s account, it was Bassett who delivered a note to Abby, hoping to lure her from the home so Bill could be alone with Andrew. For some reason, the ploy failed and Abby did not rush off but went about her domestic duties. Bill was surprised to find Abby in the guestroom and, caught off guard, murdered her in a panic.

When Andrew came home, he agreed to have a chat with his unacknowledged son and an obliging Lizzie took a trip to the barn to give them privacy.

Brown believes they did not talk long as Bill took out the hatchet he had recently used on Abby and killed Andrew with it. Then Bill hurried off to the shop where Bassett waited with the getaway carriage.

After the murders, a truly far-ranging conspiracy swung into action. Lizzie did not want the truth about her half-brother’s existence made public because she feared having to share her inheritance with him. To avoid that, she conspired with a group of Fall River VIPs Brown calls the “Mellen House gang” to have herself tried and acquitted.

Like other conspiracy theories, Brown’s relies to a great extent on suppositions and extrapolations. It also has a specific problem in his depiction of the character of the true killer. According to Brown, Bill Borden had severe mental problems and may have suffered from both mental illness and mental retardation. He is even supposed to have kept the murder weapon with him for the rest of his life and talked to it like a child with a teddy bear! Finally, the reason he gives for Lizzie’s supposedly allowing herself to be tried when she knew the true murderer seems flimsy. It is extremely unlikely that the courts would have recognized the standing as an heir to Andrew Borden of a child born to a woman married to another man and, if Bill Borden had been convicted of the murders, the entire question would have been rendered moot.

Were Abby and Andrew Borden murdered as the result of a conspiracy? Like so much connected with this case, this question will probably never be definitively answered. However, while “too many cooks spoil the broth” is an adage that works against the possibility of a conspiracy, the truism that division of labor makes for success can apply to wicked goals as well as positive ones. The curiously conflicting evidence in the Borden murders that has kept the mystery alive for over a century make a conspiracy a tantalizing and plausible possibility.

Works cited

“Whodunit?: An Armchair Solution to the Borden Mystery” by Fritz Adilz

Lizzie Borden, the Legend, the Truth, the Final Chapter by Arnold Brown

Murder, Culture, and Injustice by Walter L. Hixson

Sherlock Holmes and the Fall River Tragedy by Owen Haskell

Lizzie: A Novel by Evan Hunter

Forty Whacks by David Kent

Women Who Kill by Ann Jones

Lizzie Borden Past & Present by Leonard Rebello

Lizzie by Frank Spiering

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