Commonwealth v. Lizzie Borden, Retried

This case was decided long ago. The verdict is not before you. The record is.

On the morning of August 4, 1892, Andrew Borden and his wife Abby were killed by hatchet blows inside their home at 92 Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts. Abby died first, upstairs in the guest room, struck roughly eighteen or nineteen times. Andrew died later, on the sitting room sofa, struck roughly ten or eleven. The nursery rhyme is wrong about the count and wrong about a great deal else.

Andrew's daughter Lizzie, then thirty-two, was in or near the house through the morning. The maid, Bridget Sullivan, had washed windows and then gone up to the attic to rest. No intruder was ever identified, though defense witnesses claimed sightings of strangers near the house that were disputed at trial. The house was a warren of locked interior doors, and the Commonwealth built its case on that geometry: that the killer had to be inside, that the window of time was small, and that Lizzie was in it.

The Commonwealth pointed to more. Lizzie gave accounts of her whereabouts that did not sit still, including a story about time spent in the barn loft, a hot and dusty place that officers testified showed no sign of recent visitors. The day after the funerals, with police already through the house, she burned a dress in the kitchen stove. She said it was smeared with paint. She referred to her stepmother of nearly three decades as "Mrs. Borden," and there had been friction in the family over property Andrew had transferred to his wife's side.

The defense answered with absence. No blood was found on Lizzie when neighbors and a doctor reached her within minutes of the alarm. No weapon was conclusively matched to the wounds; a handleless hatchet head recovered from the cellar was disputed by the experts who examined it. The defense pressed the physical problem hardest: two killings separated by an hour or more, both close-range and violent, and a woman who would have had to clean herself, hide or destroy a weapon, and compose herself twice, all within a house where a maid was moving about.

Two matters belong in the open. The jury that decided this case never heard that a Fall River pharmacy clerk, Eli Bence, claimed Lizzie tried to buy prussic acid the day before the killings, ostensibly to clean a sealskin cape. The court excluded it as too remote from the manner of death. The jury also never heard Lizzie's inquest testimony, in which the transcript shows her account of her movements changing across the questioning. It was excluded because she gave it without counsel and under a form of compulsion, the court treating her as effectively in custody at the time. The defense had also urged that she was then taking morphine prescribed after the deaths. Those rulings were made for real legal reasons. You are told about them so you understand what the original jury was deciding on, and so you can decide for yourself what weight, if any, such material deserves now.

No one confessed. The Commonwealth offered opportunity, motive, and conduct after the fact. The defense offered a clean body, an unmatched weapon, and a timeline it called impossible.

Did Lizzie Borden kill Andrew and Abby Borden?

We do not need a bloody dress to prove this case. We need a door log and a clock.

The Borden house was locked from within. Bridget Sullivan was outside washing windows, then resting in the attic. Andrew was killed on a sofa in a room the killer had to reach and leave in silence, over an hour after Abby fell upstairs. That is not a burglar's crime. A burglar does not wait an hour in a house with two women awake in it. That is someone with a reason to be there and no reason to hurry.

Lizzie was the only person in that window with the run of the house. Her account of it moved. The barn loft was hot, dusty, and undisturbed. And the day after the funerals, with police already through her home, she put a dress in the stove and burned it.

Innocent people do not need to explain away their own clothing. We ask you to weigh what she did after, and what only she could have done during.

Consider what the Commonwealth never produced. Not one drop of blood on her person, minutes after the alarm, from a killing that painted a room. Not a weapon. The hatchet head from the cellar was contested by the very experts called to examine it, and no one could tie it to these wounds. And the morning was not empty of witnesses: Hyman Lubinsky, passing on an ice cream wagon, told the jury he saw a woman walking from the barn toward the house at the very time Lizzie said she was returning from the loft. The Commonwealth calls him mistaken. It cannot call him absent.

Now consider what it would have taken. Kill Abby upstairs. Clean yourself completely. Wait an hour. Kill Andrew downstairs. Clean yourself again. Conceal the weapon and the clothing so thoroughly that trained officers searching that house within the day found nothing. All while a maid moved through the same small building.

A burned dress is not evidence of murder. It is evidence that a woman under suspicion did something the suspicious will always call sinister. Cool manner is not proof. Calling a stepmother "Mrs. Borden" is not proof.

Suspicion is not a case. The Commonwealth has offered you a story where its evidence should be. We ask you to require more.