The Cases That Haunt Us (16 page)

To counteract the effects of Alice Russell’s testimony regarding the burning of the dress, Emma took the stand and said that she had urged Lizzie to burn the dress, a family custom when clothes were irredeemably soiled. This sounded odd from the household of a man as obsessively thrifty as Andrew Borden, actually known to make rags out of old clothes.

Emma testified that Lizzie deeply loved her father, that Andrew had worn a ring Lizzie had given him every day for the rest of his life. She insisted that she and Lizzie had been completely cooperative with the police during their examination of the house and had amply demonstrated they had nothing to hide.

To most observers, Emma remained something of an enigma. So retiring was she, few photographs are known to exist. She was described as shy, small, plain-looking, thin-faced, and bony—altogether an unremarkable forty-one-year-old spinster. She was strongly supportive of Lizzie during the trial, although one witness, Hannah Reagan, a day matron at the Central Police Station who had responsibility for Lizzie during the preliminary hearing, had testified to overhearing an argument between the sisters while Emma was visiting Lizzie on August 24.

“Emma, you have given me away, haven’t you?” Lizzie charged.

“No, Lizzie, I have not,” Emma responded.

“You have and I will let you see I won’t give in one inch.”

“Oh, Lizzie, I didn’t,” Emma insisted.

Lizzie did not take the stand in her own defense.

On Monday, June 19, defense attorney Robinson delivered his closing arguments, reiterating the points Jennings had made and dismissing the possibility that Lizzie could have kept changing out of blood-soaked dresses without anyone noticing and getting rid of them without a trace, as would have had to have happened if she had been the killer.

Then Knowlton began his own closing arguments, completing them the next day. He painted a word picture for the jury of what he considered the most likely scenario. He had Lizzie killing her hated stepmother, then knowing she could not face her father, she had no choice but to kill him, too.

After both sides were done, chief justice Mason asked Lizzie if she wanted to say anything. For the only time during the trial she spoke in open court, saying just, “I am innocent. I leave it to my counsel to speak for me.”

THE
VERDICT

Justice Dewey’s charge to the jury remains one of the most controversial aspects of the entire trial. He instructed them to take into account her fine character and devotion to charitable organizations and to keep in mind that any single unprovable element in the prosecution’s chain of logic “is fatal to the government’s case,” or as he restated even more sharply, “if there is a fact established—whether in that line of proof or outside of it—which cannot reasonably be reconciled with her guilt, then guilt cannot be said to be established.”

At 3:24 on Tuesday, June 20, 1893, the jury was sworn and given the case. At 4:32 that same afternoon they announced that their deliberations were completed. Yet another way in which this trial prefigured the O. J. Simpson trial a century later.

The verdict was not guilty on all counts.

The case remains officially unsolved to this day.

Many commentators have stated that the trial and the verdict represented the triumph of law over popular emotion, and if one reviews the actual record of the case, this may well be true. But from every perspective other than the strictly jurisprudential one, the case remains troubling and unsettled, with the more than nagging feeling lingering that in the Lizzie Borden case, justice has not been served.

So how would we on the behavioral analysis side evaluate these crimes? And then, once that evaluation is complete, what could we have come up with of a proactive nature that might have gotten us closer to justice?

THE
NATURE
OF
THE
CRIME

If we were consulting on a case such as this today, the first thing we’d try to do is to define the crime according to several standard criteria and classifications. Some of this might seem self-evident as we go along, but it is important in all criminal investigations to proceed in a logical, step-by-step manner in which each step makes us more confident of the direction in which we’re heading. A good, experienced detective takes nothing for granted. It’s almost like a pilot’s preflight checklist. He may have gone over each item a million times, but if he happens to ignore one and that turns out to be the weak link, then he and his passengers could be headed for disaster. It is too easy—and I have seen this many times—to come to one simple, but wrong, conclusion and then proceed off logically from there. You will then, of course, come up with a logical and well-reasoned, but wrong, answer.

First of all, these murders are what we would term personal-cause homicides, which simply means acts ensuing from interpersonal aggression. Before we can be secure with this, though, we have to examine the other possibilities.

Nothing of value was taken from the victims or the house, which would tend to rule out the felony murder—that is, a murder during the commission of another crime, such as burglary—or the normal criminalenterprise type of homicide. However, we’d have to say that since the victim was a man of considerable means, we must consider that this could have been a contract—or third-party—killing, or an insurance/ inheritance-related death. Sometimes there will be a mixed motive, and we should keep both of these in mind as we proceed.

Nor does this scenario fit the other two general categories for murder. It does not suggest itself to be a sexual homicide as we saw with the Whitechapel murders. And there is no evidence of a group-cause homicide, which would include cult and extremist murders, hostage situations, or what we refer to as group-excitement homicides, in which two or more people commit murder as a result of the spontaneous excitement of the moment.

Because of where the crimes took place, we have to strongly consider that they may be domestic homicides, a subcategory of personal-cause homicides. And within this subcategory, we have the further refinements of spontaneous domestic homicide and staged domestic homicide. The prime difference between the two is that the latter involves some degree of planning and follow-through.

The first killing, determined by both direct forensic and circumstantial evidence, was of Abby. This might have been either a spontaneous or a planned crime. The subsequent killing of Andrew had to have been planned. The prosecution’s theory notwithstanding, this gives us some reason to believe the first killing may have been planned as well.

In any case, the sustained aggression of the repeated hatchet cuts to the face of both victims, much more than was necessary to cause nearly instant death, is commonly seen in domestic homicides. We believe this to be not only a manifestation of deep-seated and often long-standing anger by the offender against the victim, but also an attempt to depersonalize him or her. In the Whitechapel murders we could interpret the mutilation of the genitalia and evisceration of the vagina, uterus, and ovaries as an attempt to strip the victim of her sexual identity and power. Here, the facial battery indicates an attempt to strip the victim of actual identity and familiar power.

Significantly, Andrew was attacked as he slept. The first blow would have been sufficient to cause death and would have prevented him from crying out and alerting anyone. From the wound patterns on Abby’s body, however, it is clear that the killer straddled her during the attack, which means he or she would have had to look straight into the victim’s eyes.

VICTIMOLOGY

We have examined Andrew Borden’s business prominence and his seemingly obsessive, almost ostentatious frugality. There is no indication he was a likable man. But from what we can gather, despite the frugal nature of the daily lives he imposed on himself and his family, he was moderately generous with his wife and daughters. He did, after all, give Lizzie an expensive trip to Europe for her thirtieth birthday. He was tidy, reserved, and brusque, but we have to keep in mind that it was the social ethos of the day that males worked hard to support the family and, in turn, were expected to rule that family. This was especially true in New England.

Ever since the house had been robbed in the summer of 1891, Andrew had kept his own bedroom locked, although he left the key in plain sight on the downstairs mantel. This may seem strange until we look further into the family dynamics. Though it was never proven, Andrew suspected Lizzie of having been the burglar. This wasn’t just an idle speculation. For some years, Lizzie had had a quiet reputation around town as a kleptomaniac. The local merchants would discreetly present invoices to Andrew for what she had taken and he would discreetly pay them, avoiding any taint of public scandal. As far as we can tell, this habit was never mentioned in the Borden household. It is likely that locking the bedroom door but leaving the key in plain sight was a silent communication to Lizzie.

How much of Lizzie’s behavior was acting out to get her father’s attention is open to psychological interpretation. Andrew had married his first wife, Sarah Anthony Morse, in 1845. Sarah died in 1862. Emma had just turned twelve. Lizzie was two and a half. Two years later, Andrew married Abby Durfee Grady, a shy, squat, heavy, and humorless woman from a family nearly as prominent as the Bordens. Abby was thirty-six years of age and had never been married.

Andrew was a rigid obsessive-compulsive and together with Lizzie’s behavior, there has been speculation that his traits match those of a sexual abuser and hers match those of a woman victimized. Certainly he kept his family socially isolated, and his driving force seemed to be having power and control over others. His choice of a second wife is significant in that it was as pragmatic as everything else in his life. He opted for a socially prominent but unattractive woman without other prospects who he could be assured would be grateful and subservient to him, rather than a younger woman who might give him the son he had always wanted.

Abby was devoted to her much younger half-sister Sarah Whitehead, and Abby’s generous, eager-to-please personality came out only in the home of her sister. Other than with Sarah and Sarah’s daughter, Abby appeared to have no real close relationships. Since the squabble over the ownership transfer of some of Andrew’s properties, Lizzie had stopped calling Abby her mother and now called her Mrs. Borden. She wasn’t shy about telling friends how oppressive she found her home life with Abby.

PRIME
SUSPECTS
AND
MOTIVES

Okay, so where do we go from here?

The next factor to consider is the relative risk level of the crime. It took place in broad daylight, in a low-crime area, on a street with frequent pedestrian and vehicular traffic of both a personal and business nature. And since this was before the days of automobiles, such traffic would be relatively slow. Moreover, we know from Bridget Sullivan’s account that the door Andrew Borden used to gain entry to the house had been locked and bolted. Is it possible that an intruder gained entry through an unlocked door and then locked it behind him to keep others away? Highly doubtful, because an intruder’s primary concern is going to be how to get quickly out of the premises. Bridget herself had trouble with the bolt. This would not have allowed for a quick getaway.

Since we’ve ruled out professional or amateur burglary, what other type of offender might take the kind of risk this crime entailed?

If the stakes were high enough or the payoff sufficiently worthwhile, a contract killer might take such a risk. We could, off the tops of our heads, come up with a scenario in which any of the numerous parties with whom Andrew Borden had business might have a reason to want him “out of business.” But there are two problems with this. First, investigators found no such animosity. Andrew was a hard-driving, tightfisted businessman, but no one was out to get him or found to have profited significantly from his death. Second, a contract killer would have had no conceivable reason to kill Abby. So if the
UNSUB
got to the Borden home expecting Andrew to be there and found he was not, he would simply have gotten the hell out and waited for another opportunity.

There is, of course, one exception to this logic. And that is if the reason for the murders had to do with insurance and/or inheritance. In that case, Abby is a critical target. And in that case, who would have had reason to put up the contract? The suspect population is small: Emma, Lizzie, and possibly Abby’s half-sister, Sarah Whitehead.

We can reasonably eliminate Sarah. Not only did she and Abby have a close relationship, she had no problem with the Bordens. Andrew had deeded over some of his property to her already and there were indications of more, a fact that the Borden sisters were said to have resented deeply. Also, even if Mrs. Whitehead had decided to do in her sister for her inheritance, she would have needed Andrew to die
first
, so that according to law, Abby would have first inherited her husband’s estate. As it was, with Abby dying first, the estate would go to his heirs, namely Emma and Lizzie.

And this is exactly what happened. It cannot be by chance that Abby was killed first.

Which leaves the two sisters and a believable motive. But if Emma and/or Lizzie was going to hire a contract killer, wouldn’t the trained professional have made the crime look like a robbery, or at least the clear work of an intruder? What would be the point of hiring a contract killer but then having the crime scene and circumstantial evidence point right back to Lizzie? Unless it was Emma who hired the killer and her intention was to set up Lizzie so that Emma would get the entire estate. But that’s really getting excessively complicated. There is nothing in Emma’s personality to suggest she could be this Machiavellian, and more to the point, when she had the perfect opportunity to cut her sister loose after she was arrested and indicted, Emma stood by her and insisted Lizzie did not commit the heinous killings.