Tales of Lizzie Borden

When I was a boy, I had zero interest in scary things.  Horror movies?  Horrible!  No thanks.  I was not interested in serial killers or famous crimes or any of that.  Too icky.  So, what a surprise it was for me to find myself married into a family that LOVED all that stuff.  You should see my mother-in-law’s library: it’s murder and mayhem from wall to wall and floor to ceiling.

      (By the way …this might make you wonder about my mother-in-law.  She’s really a sweet and kind lady …she just has a taste for the macabre in her reading, that’s all.)

      So, it was through them that I learned about the Manson murders, about the Espinoza brothers, about Ted Bundy and more.  Rosemary’s Baby, Carrie and American Horror Story are all THUMBS UP with them.  As a certified Lightweight when it comes to these sorts of thing, I have kept it as far away as possible, but sometimes even my enthusiastic avoidance is insufficient.  That’s how I came to be so versed in the story of Lizzie Borden that the folks at the house museum wanted to hire me.

      No joke.

      How?

      Well, let’s go back in time a little bit, to 2000.  That summer, my honey and I went for a road trip around New England, my first time in the area.  It was two weeks of great fun, and we successfully claimed all the states and all their capitols.  Albany and Hartford are particularly noteworthy.  What else featured on that trip?  Why, a visit AND overnight stay at the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast, in Fall River, MA.

      I didn’t want to go, but I had no choice.

      “We could not possibly be so close and not visit,” I was told, and in the way of loving spouses everywhere, I had to acquiesce.  So, we had a room booked at the B&B.  The one concession I asked for was to stay in one of the rooms (I think there are five) that did NOT have a dead body in it and is not reported to have haunted activity.  Remember: #1 Chicken here.

      That means we were on the top floor, in the maid’s room.

      While there, I learned all about Lizzie Borden.  I’m Generation X, and I’ve found that my generation and below usually doesn’t have much familiarity with her.  The Boomers and up usually DO know about her.  Not sure why that is, but it seems to be so.  Perhaps you know the famous rhyme:

Lizzie Borden took an ax

Gave her mother forty whacks

When she saw what she had done

Gave her father forty-one

      In August of 1892, in Fall River, MA, Mr. and Mrs. Borden were brutally murdered, with eleven and nineteen blows (not forty and forty-one) from a hatchet (not an ax).  The murders were particularly brutal and shocking.  After a brief investigation, blame fell on Mr. Borden’s second daughter, Lizzie.

      The course became hugely sensationalized and was much talked about around the country.

      Eventually, Lizzie was acquitted, and the crimes remain unsolved.

      I learned all about it in touring the house, and it was there that my interest in the story was kindled.  Not because of the gruesome yuck of the murders, but because of the connection to women’s suffrage.

      What?

      How is this connected to women’s suffrage?

      At this time, in the very heart of New England, choked under the crushing weight of Victorian culture and Puritanical ideas, being a woman meant a whole host of social and legal strictures.  If you’ve read anything by Jane Austen, some of the themes were still being felt almost a hundred years later.  Lizzie and her elder sister, being unmarried old maids (Lizzie was thirty-two when the murders took place, which meant she was essentially dead, in Victorian culture) had a troubled financial future.  Should their father die before his wife, which seemed likely, then the house and all the money would go to that wife.  Mrs. Borden was the girls’ stepmother.  According to many sources, there was no love between Lizzie and her stepmother.  So, upon Mr. Borden’s death, Lizzie and her sister would be pretty much penniless and subject to the whims and generosity of a disliked (some accounts say hated_ stepmother.

      The only way for the money to pass to the girls would be for the stepmother to die BEFORE her husband.  Abby Borden was a study woman, and this seemed unlikely.

      This was the situation, and beyond that we may only work with conjecture.

      We know that SOMEONE killed them.  IF (and it’s still unproven, so that’s why it’s an IF) Lizzie killed her father and her stepmother, it was vital, under the law, that the stepmother die first.  In that manner, Abby’s claim to the financial piece would be abrogated, falling to her husband and his children.  If he happened to die an hour and half AFTER she died, which he did, then all that money and the house and all the rest would go to the girls.

      Which it did.

      Our tour guide, who’d been there for years, walked us through all the permutations and considerations, including how, in her opinion, Lizzie committed the crime without having any blood on her.  There should have been LOTS of blood on her, and she was seen mere minutes after Andrew Borden’s death, so the lack of blood was a big factor in her acquittal.

      Another thing happened that helped cement her innocence, at least in the eyes of the all-male jury.  The prosecuting team somehow thought it would be a good idea to dig up Mr. and Mrs. Borden’s bodies immediately after they’d been buried, chop off their heads, boil the flesh off/out of their skulls and then dramatically unveil them at the trial, hoping to shock a confession out of Lizzie.  Instead, Lizzie fainted.  Makes sense …I’d faint if I saw anyone’s mutilated skull, much less one of them being a parents’ skull.  The all-male jury, seeing her faint, had their all-male compassion go out to her, a frail, delicate and incapable-of-violence woman.

      She was found not guilty.  Why?  Well, beyond the lack of evidence and the SUPER-shoddy management of the crime scene (don’t even get me started about those flea bites!), the understanding of the sexes at the time was that women were literally incapable of committing an act of violence.  Seriously.  A woman might poison someone.  She might hire a big, strong man to do her bidding, but to do it herself, actually chopping into a father’s face nineteen times with HER OWN HAND?  Impossible.  So, without hard evidence, the culture was such that the all-male jury was never going to find her guilty.

      I am a fan of the history of suffrage and how women have been perceived through history, so this whole story dramatically fascinated me, so I learned more about it and became something of an expert.  Not for the ick, again …for the cultural piece.  While this is an EXTREME example, I think it shows the things that the culture of the time could drive someone to when in despair for the future.

      So, when my in-laws wanted to do a tour of New England, we took them back to the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast, in 2004.  There’d been a change in ownership, and the lady who was our tour guide that night barely knew anything.  We offered her some help, which turned into our sort of taking over the tour for ourselves and the other guests.  Her boss tried to hire us on the spot.

      “We live in Denver.”

      “We’ll help you find a place in Fall River.”

      Bemused, we still passed on the offer.

      Funny, looking back now …this was a year before I got into the tour business, and yet the signs of my future touring life were already there, I guess.

      Whether you go for the blood and brains or for the examination of Victorian culture in New England in the 1890s, a visit to the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast is always a win.  We went last year, with a Treasure Box Tours trip, and we had a great visit.

      Now, while I know a lot about Lizzie and her moment of glory (gory?), this doesn’t mean I want to know about anything else gross or scary, so if you have any ghost stories, thank you for NOT sharing them with me!  Happy October!