Lizzie Borden Took An Axe...

Joanne Freeman:
On this episode of Backstory, we’re dipping into the history of true crime in modern American History.

Ed Ayers:
You’ll hear from Phoebe Judge about what it’s like behind the scenes of one of the most successful true crime podcasts, Criminal.

Joanne Freeman:
We’ll return to my conversation with Rachel Monroe to learn about how true crime obscures the true nature of crime.

Ed Ayers:
And you’ll hear how Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood captured a pivotal moment in the history of criminology and the development of prisoners rights.

Joanne Freeman:
First up, we thought we’d start back in 1892 with one of the most notorious whodunits in American history.

Cara Robertson:
It was sort of a OJ Simpson trial of its day in terms of the intensity of the press coverage. Newspapers from around the country sent special correspondents to cover it in addition to having the local papers and the wire services.

Joanne Freeman:
This is author and lawyer Cara Robertson.

Cara Robertson:
Many people traveled to New Bedford, which is the site of the trial, in order to witness the proceedings in person and police had to set up special barricades. People, it was said, like to make kind of a picnic day out of it.

Joanne Freeman:
The person on trial was a 32 year old woman named Lizzie Borden and the crime, double homicide.

Cara Robertson:
Well we know that in the mid morning of August 4th, 1892, which was a Thursday that the prosperous mill town of Full River, Massachusetts was the site of a grizzly double murder. Andrew Borden, a prominent local businessman and his second wife, Abby, were found hacked to death in their home near the city center. The murders were so violent that some speculated that Jack the Ripper had come to America.

Joanne Freeman:
Wow. Wow.

Cara Robertson:
Yeah, it was gruesome. Abby had been felled by 19 blows in an upstairs guest room and about an hour and a half later, Andrew received 10 blows as he lay sleeping on the sitting room sofa. Well first of all, given then crime scene people assumed that it was going to turn out to have been the work of some murderous stranger who was obviously insane. There were two things that seemed to rule that out. The first was that the house was pretty well locked up except for a side door that had been in view of either the housekeeper or a neighbor for much of the morning and the second major issue with that theory was that the interval between the murders. The prosecution eventually called that the controlling issue of the case. That would have meant that whoever killed Abby would have had to hide in the house for an hour and a half until Andrew came home to commit the second murder.

Cara Robertson:
So as a result, the police turned their attention to people inside the home and there were only three possible suspects. The housekeeper, Bridget Sullivan, who had been seen washing windows outside at the time of Abby’s murder. Andrew Borden’s brother in law who was visiting overnight but who was going to visit other relatives in the morning so was absent from the house and finally Andrew’s younger daughter, Lizzie. Lizzie Borden wasn’t someone who fit the profile of a suspected murderess. She seemed to tick all the boxes of upper middle class respectability but it was discovered that the house was the site of what some people thought of as almost a cold war. That there were ill feeling between Andrew Borden’s adult daughters and his second wife. It was also discovered that someone who was identified as Lizzie Borden tried to buy prussic acid on the day before the murders. Poison rather than a hatchet fit the profile of a murderess.

Joanne Freeman:
Lizzie is arrested and then her trial begins the following June 1893. What was the prosecutions case against her? How did they deal with all of these sort of obvious yes and no components to the murder?

Cara Robertson:
The prosecution argued that she was the only person with motive and opportunity to commit the murders. There’s really, based on the timetable that there’s no one else who could have done it. The prosecution pointed to the tension in the household as a motive. It was hard for people to accept that that would be enough, particularly that kind of murder and it should be noted that Lizzie Borden had no blood or any other kind of sign of disturbance on her when she reported the murder of her father.

Joanne Freeman:
So the prosecution goes in a sense for the obvious argument that she makes sense as the person who did the murder. What does the defense say?

Cara Robertson:
The defense essentially points to Lizzie Borden and says, “Someone like this couldn’t possibly have done it.” They do a good job of casting doubt on the question of exclusive opportunity by pointing to strangers who might have been seen in the vicinity and they point out that you can’t see everyone at any time so I mean, it was at least theoretically possible that someone had been in the house. At the same time, their most potent piece of evidence was the image of Lizzie Borden herself.

Joanne Freeman:
Was that she seemed gentile and middle class or even upper middle class and that she just didn’t seem like a sort of person who could have done that?

Cara Robertson:
Yeah, she has this extraordinary self possession, that’s the thing about her that everyone notes and that’s read in contradictory ways. So the defense points to it, as do Lizzie Borden’s many supporters, as a sign of inborn gentility. That this is really a sign of true American grit.

Joanne Freeman:
Hmm.

Cara Robertson:
And that she’s burying up in a ladylike fashion under the strain of unjust suspicion. For those people who thought she was the killer they saw it quite differently. They saw it as a sign of almost a masculine nerve. The Irish Catholic paper calls her, “The sphinx of coolness,” and that same paper, the Irish Catholic Fall River Daily Globe says that if a mill hand had been suspected or a domestic servant had been suspected then that person would have been arrested without ceremony and instead the police were pussyfooting around. On the other side of the ledger, the police and the prosecution received a lot of helpful suggestions about how it must have been this immigrant or that immigrant or maybe it was some plot by the Pope.

Joanne Freeman:
Okay so this is an age when sensationalist news and mass marketed newspapers and magazines are really booming so how did the press in that sort of new, dramatic form, maybe shape how people were responding to the trial?

Cara Robertson:
Yeah, it’s a case that obviously dovetails well with the heyday of yellow journalism because there’s so many horrifying sensational details. The exhibits, which are quite gruesome including the skulls of the victims are brought into the court and sketch artists do visual representations of those things for the audience at home as well as the pros portraits by the journalists. The audience as well as the fellow journalists become part of the story. It’s something that probably would be familiar to us, that the journalists pick out particularly good looking or odd looking people and describe them and overhear conversations and relay those to the people at home who are eagerly awaiting for details that come via updates throughout the day. There are no women on the jury. Women weren’t allowed to serve on Massachusetts juries until 1950 but there is a dedicated section of the audience that’s female and many of the journalists refer to them as a kind of self constituted stack of jury. They’re a lot more hostile than the actual jury.

Joanne Freeman:
What was that supposed jury saying as opposed to, we’re going to get back to in a moment, what the actual jury said?

Cara Robertson:
They seemed to think she was guilty and they viewed her as a woman who had transgressed in this fundamental way and were suspicious of the things that i think otherwise played quite well, which was the care that she devoted to her parents before trial. It was noticed that she, if her hair had been mussed, if the perfect curl was missing that she would fix it during the recesses of the trial.

Joanne Freeman:
On June 20th, Lizzie Borden ends up being acquitted by that all male jury. So how does that happen? How do they end up reaching that verdict?

Cara Robertson:
It’s an unusually long trial for its era. It’s almost three weeks. Despite that, despite the amount of evidence that’s presented by the prosecution, the jury’s pretty much decided. They reached their verdict within 20 minutes. They just take a vote almost immediately upon entering the jury room but they decide that that would be unseemly so they delay delivering the verdict for a while so that it looks like they’d been reasonably deliberative.

Joanne Freeman:
Wow.

Cara Robertson:
I mean, I should say that two of the most compelling pieces of evidence never reached the jury. The first is the alleged attempt by Lizzie Borden of buying prussic acid and the second is the contradictory account of her own movements that come from her inquest testimony. There’s a kind of technical legal reason why that’s not admitted but that has a lot to do with expectations about gender, as well, particularly middle class womanhood. That essentially she’s being entrapped by the police and bullied and it’s also noted that her doctor has given her a prescription for something containing morphine and so it’s no wonder she was all confused.

Joanne Freeman:
Wow. The ways in which sort of assumptions about protecting her and suspecting her and assuming things about her and then making excuses for her, it’s an amazing bundle of things.

Cara Robertson:
Yeah and I was struck by that. I’m a lawyer so I was looking at the lawyer’s strategy and trying to unpick whether they’re trying to make these arguments because they know they’ll be persuasive to the jury or is this what they believe themselves? It seems like a little bit of a mix because they act very much like paternal figures or at least her defense lawyers do. She’s 32 years old and she’s spoken about as if she is a girl. I mean, that she’s repeatedly called a, “Young girl,” but the prosecution doesn’t challenge that nor does it challenge other things that could have been quite useful. One of the most important pieces of evidence or non-evidence if you will that’s in Lizzie Borden’s favor is the absence of blood and no blood was found on Lizzie Borden or on any of her clothes. There are two things that could explain that. One is that there’s a dress that she burned on the Sunday after the murders on the theory that it’d been stained with paint and the second is that there was a pale of bloody cloths in the basement that her doctor assured the police were menstrual cloths and they may well have been but it’s something that the prosecution just prefers not to mention either.

Joanne Freeman:
Once again, gender playing a really interesting role here.

Cara Robertson:
Right. The defense gets to have it both ways because on the one hand it’s essentially kept out of the trial so they can harp of the fact that there’s no blood found on Lizzie Borden but they also use the fact of what they refer to as, “Her monthly illness,” to explain any oddities in her behavior or inconsistencies in her statements.

Joanne Freeman:
Wow, so she’s acquitted, she’s found not guilty. How did the public respond to that?

Cara Robertson:
In the immediate aftermath of the trial there’s celebration at the site. This seems to be a verdict that’s greeted with great enthusiasm by most people in the public. Locally it’s a lot more divisive. The same papers that criticized the police for dragging their feet about arresting Lizzie Borden viewed this as just yet another case of a member of the elite, a member of the Yankee elite, getting away with murders. It was an extremely stratified mill town. Enthusiasm about the verdict cools pretty quickly so that Lizzie Borden, when she returns to her old life and attends the church that had provided the bedrock of her support during the trial, finds herself surrounded by empty pews. That pretty much sets the tone for the way the town treated her, at least the part of the town that she aspired to join.

Joanne Freeman:
So then what happens to her in the time after the trial?

Cara Robertson:
Well one of the supposed motives for the murder was Lizzie Borden’s dissatisfaction with the cramped family house and after she’s acquitted, she and her sister move from the cramped family house in the business district to what’s effectively a McMansion in the Hill District, which is an elite residential area in Fall River. Then she lives it up. She starts to go to the theater in Boston and acts in a way that’s not entirely consistent with her earlier behavior. She was really expected to go back and live down her notoriety and instead she lived it up. She lives there with her sister for about 12 years, there’s an argument and the sister moves out and never speaks to her again. So she lives in Fall River to the end of her days but essentially alone.

Joanne Freeman:
I’m going to ask you one last question and I’m very curious about your answer. Who do you think killed Andrew and Abby Borden?

Cara Robertson:
Ah.

Joanne Freeman:
The question.

Cara Robertson:
Well I mean, this is a non-spoiler alert. I don’t solve the case in the book. I thought it was important not to. I think you lose credibility when you … What was important was to set out the story as completely as possible based on the primary sources and let the evidence that points in a bunch of different directions speak for itself. That said, I think I’m sort of in the same position as I was at the beginning which is that it is difficult as a practical matter to understand how she could have killed both people and presented herself in between. In between the murders and then again very quickly after the second murder in perfect attire without any blood. At the same time it seems almost impossible that anyone else could have done it and then alluded the two women who were in the house at the time.

Joanne Freeman:
Hmm. So you end up right there, able to see both sides and sort of standing on that border.

Cara Robertson:
Yeah. I’m comfortable with the ambiguity because I think there’s something about this case that it has a universality to it. I was interested in the specifics of it. I very much wanted to talk about Lizzie Borden’s trial in its exact social and cultural context but at the same time there’s something about this particular mystery that I think tugs at us and so not having a firm decision on it, not having made a firm decision I think is useful and probably honest.

Joanne Freeman:
Cara Robertson is the author of The Trial of Lizzie Borden.