Life and Trial of Lizzie Borden (Part II)

Trial and acquittal

Borden's trial took place in New Bedford starting on June 5, 1893.  Prosecuting attorneys were Hosea M. Knowlton and future Supreme Court Justice William H. Moody; defending were Andrew V. Jennings, Melvin O. Adams, and former Massachusetts governor George D. Robinson.  Five days before the trial's commencement, on June 1, another axe murder occurred in Fall River. This time the victim was Bertha Manchester, who was found hacked to death in her kitchen. The similarities between the Manchester and Bordens' murders were striking and noted by jurors.  However, Jose Correa deMello, a Portuguese immigrant, was later convicted of Manchester's murder in 1894, and was determined to not have been in the vicinity of Fall River at the time of the Borden murders.

A prominent point of discussion in the trial (or press coverage of it) was the hatchet-head found in the basement, which was not convincingly demonstrated by the prosecution to be the murder weapon. Prosecutors argued that the killer had removed the handle because it would have been covered in blood.  One officer testified that a hatchet handle was found near the hatchet-head, but another officer contradicted this.  Though no bloody clothing was found at the scene, Russell testified that on August 8, 1892, she had witnessed Borden burn a dress in the kitchen stove, claiming it had been ruined when she brushed against wet paint.  During the course of the trial, defense never attempted to challenge this claim.

Trial jury that acquitted Borden

Lizzie Borden's presence at the home was also a point of dispute during the trial; according to testimony, Sullivan entered the second floor of the home at around 10:58 am and left Lizzie and her father downstairs. Lizzie told several people that at this time, she went into the barn and was not in the house for "20 minutes or possibly a half an hour."  Hyman Lubinsky testified for the defense that he saw Lizzie Borden leaving the barn at 11:03 am and Charles Gardner confirmed the time.   At 11:10 am, Lizzie called Sullivan downstairs, told her Andrew had been murdered, and ordered her not to enter the room; instead, Borden sent her to get a doctor.

Both victims' heads had been removed during autopsy and the skulls were admitted as evidence during the trial and presented on June 5, 1893.  Upon seeing them in the courtroom, Borden fainted.  Evidence was excluded that Borden had sought to purchase prussic acid, purportedly for cleaning a sealskin cloak, from a local druggist on the day before the murders. The judge ruled that the incident was too remote in time to have any connection.

The presiding Associate Justice, Justin Dewey (who had been appointed by Robinson when he was governor), delivered a lengthy summary that supported the defense as his charge to the jury before it was sent to deliberate on June 20, 1893.  After an hour and a half of deliberation, the jury acquitted Borden of the murders.  Upon exiting the courthouse, she told reporters she was "the happiest woman in the world."

The trial has been compared to the later trials of Bruno Hauptmann, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and O.J. Simpson as a landmark in publicity and public interest in the history of American legal proceedings.

Theories

Although acquitted at trial, Borden remains the prime suspect in her father and stepmother's murders. Writer Victoria Lincoln proposed in 1967 that Borden might have committed the murders while in a fugue state.  Another prominent theory suggests that she was physically and sexually abused by her father, which drove her to commit parricide.  There is little evidence to support this, but incest is not a topic that would have been discussed at the time, and the methods for collecting physical evidence would have been quite different in 1892.  This theory was intimated in local papers at the time of the murders, and was revisited by scholar Marcia Carlisle in a 1992 essay.

Mystery author Ed McBain, in his 1984 novel Lizzie, suggested that Borden committed the murders after being caught in a lesbian tryst with Sullivan.  McBain elaborated on his theory in a 1999 interview, speculating that Abby had caught Lizzie and Sullivan together and had reacted with horror and disgust, and that Lizzie had killed Abby with a candlestick. When Andrew returned she had confessed to him, but killed him in a rage with a hatchet when he reacted exactly as Abby had. McBain further speculates that Sullivan disposed of the hatchet somewhere afterwards. In her later years, Borden was rumored to be a lesbian, but there was no such speculation about Sullivan, who found other employment after the murders and later married a man she met while working as a maid in Butte, Montana. She died in Butte in 1948, where she allegedly gave a deathbed confession to her sister, stating that she had changed her testimony on the stand in order to protect Borden.

Another significant suspect is John Morse, Lizzie's maternal uncle, who rarely met with the family after his sister died, but had slept in the house the night before the murders; according to law enforcement, Morse had provided an "absurdly perfect and overdetailed alibi for the death of Abby Borden".  He was considered a suspect by police for a period.

Others noted as potential suspects in the crimes include Sullivan, possibly in retaliation for being ordered to clean the windows on a hot day; the day of the murders was unusually hot—and at the time she was still recovering from the mystery illness that had struck the household.   A "William Borden", suspected to be Andrew's illegitimate son, was noted as a possible suspect by writer Arnold Brown, who surmised in his book Lizzie Borden: The Legend, the Truth, the Final Chapter that William had tried and failed to extort money from his father.  However, author Leonard Rebello did extensive research on the William Borden in Brown's book and he was able to prove he was not Andrew Borden's son.  Although Emma had an alibi at Fairhaven, (about 15 miles (24 km) from Fall River), crime writer Frank Spiering proposed in his 1984 book Lizzie that she might have secretly visited the residence to kill her parents before returning to Fairhaven to receive the telegram informing her of the murders.

Later life

After the trial, the Borden sisters moved into a large, modern house in The Hill neighborhood in Fall River. Around this time, Lizzie began using the name Lizbeth A. Borden.  At their new house, which Lizbeth dubbed "Maplecroft", they had a staff that included live-in maids, a housekeeper, and a coachman. Because Abby was ruled to have died before Andrew, her estate went first to Andrew and then, at his death, passed to his daughters as part of his estate; a considerable settlement, however, was paid to settle claims by Abby's family.

Despite the acquittal, Borden was ostracized by Fall River society. Her name was again brought into the public eye when she was accused of shoplifting in 1897 in Providence, Rhode Island.  In 1905, shortly after an argument over a party that Lizbeth had given for actress Nance O'Neil, Emma moved out of the house. She never saw her sister again.

Death

Borden was ill in her last year following the removal of her gallbladder; she died of pneumonia on June 1, 1927, in Fall River. Funeral details were not published and few attended. Nine days later, Emma died from chronic nephritis at the age of 76 in a nursing home in Newmarket, New Hampshire having moved to this location in 1923 both for health reasons and to avoid renewed publicity following the publication of another book about the murders. The sisters, neither of whom had ever married, were buried side by side in the family plot in Oak Grove Cemetery.

At the time of her death, Borden was worth over $250,000 (equivalent to $4,839,000 in 2018).  She owned a house on the corner of French Street and Belmont Street, several office buildings, shares in several utilities, two cars and a large amount of jewelry. She left $30,000 (equivalent to $581,000 in 2018) to the Fall River Animal Rescue League and $500 ($10,000 in 2018) in trust for perpetual care of her father's grave. Her closest friend and a cousin each received $6,000 ($116,000 today)—substantial sums at the time of the estate's distribution in 1927—and numerous friends and family members each received between $1,000 ($19,000 in 2018) and $5,000 ($97,000 in 2018).

In culture

Scholar Ann Schofield notes that "Borden's story has tended to take one or the other of two fictional forms: the tragic romance and the feminist quest ...  As the story of Lizzie Borden has been created and re-created through rhyme and fiction it has taken on the qualities of a popular American myth or legend that effectively links the present to the past."

The Borden house is now a museum, and operates a bed and breakfast with 1890s styling.  Pieces of evidence used in the trial, including the axehead, are preserved at the Fall River Historical Society.

Folkrhyme

The case was memorialized in a popular skipping-rope rhyme sung to the tune of the then-popular song Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay:

Lizzie Borden took an axe

And gave her mother forty whacks.

When she saw what she had done,

She gave her father forty-one.

Folklore says that the rhyme was made up by an anonymous writer as a tune to sell newspapers. Others attribute it to the ubiquitous, but anonymous, "Mother Goose".

In reality, Borden's stepmother suffered eighteen or nineteen blows; her father suffered eleven blows.

The rhyme has a less well-known second verse:

Andrew Borden now is dead,

Lizzie hit him on the head.

Up in heaven he will sing,

On the gallows she will swing.

Depictions

Borden has been depicted in music, radio, film, theater, and television, often in association with the murders of which she was acquitted.

Among the earlier portrayals on stage was in New Faces of 1952, a 1952 Broadway musical with a number titled "Lizzie Borden" depicting the crimes, as well as Agnes De Mille's ballet Fall River Legend (1948) and the Jack Beeson opera Lizzie Borden (1965), both works being based on Borden and the murders of her father and stepmother. Other plays based on Borden include Blood Relations (1980), a Canadian production written by Sharon Pollock centered on the events leading up to the murders, which was made into a television movie in Calgary. Lizzie Borden, another musical adaptation, was also made starring Tony nominee Alison Fraser.

On the April 13, 1955 episode of Playbill, Ruth Springford played Lizzie in the television play "Lizzie Borden Took an Axe".

Carmen Matthews played Lizzie Borden in the Alfred Hitchcock Presents Season 1 episode "The Older Sister", with Joan Lorring as Emma and Hitchcock's daughter Pat as the servant Margaret. The episode aired on January 22, 1956 and takes place in 1893, with a determined woman reporter trying to interview the sisters one year after the murders.

A March 24, 1957 episode of Omnibus presented two different adaptations of the Lizzie Borden story: the first a play, "The Trial of Lizzie Borden" with Katharine Bard as Lizzie; the second a production of the Fall River Legend ballet with Nora Kaye as "The Accused".

ABC commissioned The Legend of Lizzie Borden (1975), a television film starring Elizabeth Montgomery as Lizzie Borden, Katherine Helmond as Emma Borden, and Fionnula Flanagan as Bridget Sullivan; it was later discovered after Montgomery died that she and Borden were in fact sixth cousins once removed, both descending from 17th-century Massachusetts resident John Luther. Rhonda McClure, the genealogist who documented the Montgomery-Borden connection, said: "I wonder how Elizabeth would have felt if she knew she was playing her own cousin."

Lifetime produced Lizzie Borden Took an Ax (2014), a speculative television film with Christina Ricci portraying Borden, which was followed by The Lizzie Borden Chronicles (2015), a limited series and sequel to the television film which presents a fictional account of Borden's life after the trial.  A feature film, Lizzie (2018), with Chloë Sevigny as Borden and Kristen Stewart as Bridget Sullivan, depicts a lesbian tryst between Borden and Sullivan which leads to the murders.

The events of the murders and the trial, with actors portraying the people involved, have been re-created for a number of documentary programs. In 1936, the radio program Unsolved Mysteries broadcast a 15-minute dramatization of "The Lizzie Borden Case", with a possible solution presented that the murders were committed during a botched robbery attempt by a tramp, who then escaped. Television recreations have included Biography, Second Verdict, History's Mysteries, Case Reopened (1999) and Mysteries Decoded (2019).

In literature

Borden has been depicted in several works, such as "The Fall River Axe Murders," a short story by Angela Carter, published in her collection Black Venus (1985).  Another Borden-inspired story by Carter was "Lizzie's Tiger", in which Borden, imagined as a four-year-old, has an extraordinary encounter at the circus. The story was published in 1993 (posthumously) in the collection American Ghosts and Old World Wonders. Miss Lizzie, a 1989 novel by Walter Satterthwait, takes place thirty years after the murders and recounts an unlikely friendship between Borden and a child, and the suspicions that arise from a murder.