In 1892, when Lizzie Borden was accused of murdering her
father and stepmother with a hatchet, women were not allowed to vote. They were
not allowed to serve on juries. Lizzie therefore didn’t face a jury of her
peers; she faced 12 men who didn’t believe her physically or even
foundationally capable of such a brutal murder.
Questioning at the inquest and trial looks at the height of
her father, Andrew Borden. Could she, a woman, have been capable of felling
such a tall man with such an instrument? Well, it helped her cause that he was
reclining at the time, lying down asleep or close to it, on a lounge in the
sitting room. Andrew was also very frail and thin. When I first
looked at the autopsy photos of him shirtless, lying on a wicker autopsy table,
I thought he was a woman. His thin chest even curves in to a bit of an
hourglass waist.
And could Lizzie possibly have been capable of bringing down
her very stout stepmother? Abby was 180 pounds, and short. Victoria Lincoln’s nonfiction
book A Private Disgrace never talks of Abby walking without it being
described as “waddling.” Her fat is relentlessly mentioned with deep scorn by
Lincoln. Lizzie herself was quite solidly built and tall—but could she bring
down someone likely more physically powerful than herself?
The first blow was established to be one on Abby’s forehead.
She must’ve faced her killer, who raised the weapon and blatantly struck her
while being watched. Now if her killer was her own stepdaughter, whom
she had raised since the age of three, Abby must’ve calmly faced her
hatchet-holding child, perhaps even amused to find her upstairs in the guest
room with such an odd item in her hand. The wonderful Elizabeth Montgomery
movie, Legend of Lizzie Borden, even portrays Abby as looking up at
Lizzie from making the guest bed with a smile. Which quickly turns to a
frown and then…well, you’ll have to watch the movie.
Subsequent blows were to the back of Abby’s head and neck.
It is surmised that the killer straddled the now-face-down Abby and rained down
the blows. It is fascinating that both deaths only involve blows to the head.
Did Lizzie, or whoever the killer was (see how I did that?), read that there is
not much blood flow to the outside of the head—I mean, certainly the brain gets
blood, but the thin layer of skin covering our skulls doesn’t contain many
blood vessels? Was the killer deliberately trying to attack a place on the body
that wouldn’t create a huge flow of blood to be cleaned off, say, one’s
clothes?
Getting back to the idea of that all-male jury in Fall
River, Massachusetts. The name of Sarah Jane Robinson was evoked by the
prosecution as an example of a woman quite capable of murder, thank you very
much. Between 1881 and 1885 (the Borden murders were in 1892), and in nearby
Cambridge, Massachusetts, Robinson murdered eight people. The difference to
this jury, however, was that she did it in a womanly way: she used
arsenic.
Moreover, Robinson was born in Northern Ireland, part of a a class of people despised at
this time period (in fact, when Lizzie dispatched her Irish maid to find a
doctor for her father’s corpse, she only asked for Dr. Bowen, kitty-corner to
their house, and when he was not at home, she completely ignored
Dr. Chagnon, kitty-corner to the back because he was French, and the next-door
Dr. Kelly….because he was Irish. She instead asked for her friend Alice Russell).
Although the Robinson case first resulted in a hung jury
because jurors were only permitted to know about one of the many proven arsenic
deaths (bodies were exhumed and tested), a second trial allowed the
admission of these other murders, and Robinson was sentenced to hang. A
petition (signed by seven jurors!) asked that the sentence be commuted to life
in prison and so she was, with the addition of solitary confinement. She died
in prison in 1906.
I’m certain that had Lizzie Borden been found guilty, she
too would not have hung. Public sentiment would’ve rallied deeply in her favor.
My point is that the Irish Mrs. Robinson, of a “dirty”
immigrant class, who had used the effortlessly-delivered-in-food arsenic for
her plots, was easier for a jury to find guilty than Massachusetts-born Lizzie Borden, whose
father owned banks, who was very active in the church, who volunteered for the
Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Fruit & Flower Society, who was
accused of something so masculine as wielding a hatchet directly into family
members’ brains.
Let’s take a moment just to consider such an act. Although
perhaps farm women hefted axes to make firewood, to sever chickens from their
heads, the genteel Lizzie Borden would not have done so. In fact, not even
Andrew Borden did this work. A hired man came. In short, a hatchet was not a
tool a woman was seen as using, so a hatchet as a weapon was an even
farther stretch.
The Fall River Historical Society has a new artifact as of
this summer: a letter Lizzie wrote to one of the jurors, thanking him for
acquitting him. A thank you note: what a nice, ladylike thing to do!
. . . . .
