Letter to Elizabeth Johnston

On August 16th, nearly two weeks after the murders, the New Bedford Evening Standard reported that Lizzie Borden, who’d been recently arrested for the crime, had written a letter “which her father mailed on the day he was murdered, advising her friends [in Marion] that she would join them on Monday, the 8th.” This story matches what Lizzie told her friend Alice Russell on the night before the murders, that she had written to her vacationing friends that she would be joining them the following Monday, after she fulfilled an obligation to her secretary/treasurer duties at the meeting of the Christian Endeavor Society on Sunday.  

The growing speculation about the contents of the letter eventually reached the Fall River Police Department, and according to a letter published in The Knowlton Papers, Officer Philip Harrington wrote to the district attorney in early September about a story that had appeared in the Fall River Daily Globe. The article stated that Lizzie had sent a letter to her friends in Marion containing the sentence: “When I come I will chop all the wood, for I have a new sharper axe.” Harrington suggested to Knowlton that perhaps the Globe would be willing to produce the letter.

A few days later, on September 12th, Knowlton wrote to Attorney General Pillsbury, saying: “It is doubtless true that Lizzie Borden wrote to her Marion friends the day before the murder that she should be over Monday; and would chop all their wood for them for she had been looking at the axes in the cellar and she had found one as sharp as a razor. If this is so, it means insanity.”

The “if” in that final sentence implies that Knowlton had not actually seen the letter that allegedly carried this information, yet believed it to be true anyway, at least at that time. No doubt this is why officers were dispatched to speak to Elizabeth Johnston herself. Officer William Medley visited her several times, and on September 12th, he wrote the following report:

“I visited Miss Lizzie Johnson [Johnston] at Myricks on Saturday. She refused to make known to me the contents of the letter received from Lizzie Borden on the day of the Borden murder until she had consulted Mr. Jennings. I talked with her for two hours but was unable to make her change her mind. She met Mr. Jennings Saturday night. I saw her again today, when she informed me that Mr. Jennings told her she need not tell me the contents of the letter if she did not want to; and she did not want to. I have seen the other girls who were at Marion at the time. None of them will talk. I have made all this known to Mr. Knowlton, and that gentleman instructed me to procure all their names, and give them to you, in order that they may be summoned to appear before the Grand Jury. The names are as follows; Mary L. Holmes, Isabel J. Fraser, Lizzie Johnson, Louise Remington, Mabel H. Remington.”

A few weeks later, either Officer Doherty or Harrington or both (they wrote joint reports), went to speak to Elizabeth Johnston again, presumably to encourage her to share the contents of the letter, but she refused again, saying “I have said all I think I should about that letter.” And she stuck to her word, never speaking publicly about the letter again. Johnston did, however, appear before the grand jury, whether to discuss the letter in particular is unknown. She was also placed on the prosecution’s witness list for the trial, but was never called to the stand to testify, so the subject doesn’t come up in the transcripts of any court proceedings. Still, the rumor endured, even after Lizzie’s acquittal.

Writing about the letter forty years later for The New Yorker, crime journalist Edmund Pearson noted, “The belief is still nourished [in Fall River] that three days before the murders Miss Borden wrote to some friends in Fairhaven that she had a fine, new axe, and that she was having a lovely time whetting it. This story was investigated at the time and exploded. I have seen District Attorney Knowlton’s letter in which he says that no such message was written or received.” This claim seems to be contradicted by the letter Knowlton wrote to Pillsbury in 1892, published in The Knowlton Papers, but it’s possible Pearson had access to later letters written by the district attorney that were not included in the collection of his letters donated to the Fall River Historial Society. (Pearson went to great effort in the 1920s to locate hard-to-find source documents of the case and spoke to a number of Knowlton’s contemporaries.) Then again, it’s also possible Pearson was mistaken in his memory of seeing another letter and Knowlton remained sure Lizzie did mention having an axe in her missive to Elizabeth Johnston. If so, that would beg the question of why he didn’t introduce such an incriminating fact at trial and/or call Elizabeth Johnston to the stand to testify. But either way, Edmund Pearson, like Knowlton, believed Lizzie to be guilty, damaging letter or not.

It would be another thirty years before someone who believed in Lizzie’s innocence took on the story. Edward Radin, in his 1961 book, considered the myth about Lizzie having a new hatchet to have come from a “humorous note” she’d written to Elizabeth Johnston.

“Several days before the murders Lizzie wrote to some friends that before coming up to visit them she would get a sharp axe to make certain she did not freeze. She was referring to an episode that had occurred the previous summer when they were together at the same cottage. On the first chilly evening they found that the logs on hand were too large for the fireplace and the axe so dull they could not chop the wood to fit. They had to search constantly for small branches and twigs in order to keep warm. A reporter who went to Marion to interview Lizzie’s friends after the murders either misunderstood her reference in the letter or let his imagination run wild. He wrote that Lizzie had bought a sharp ax just prior to the murders. Before the police understood the real meaning of the letter, officers questioned every hardware merchant in Fall River and for miles around. They found no one to testify that Lizzie had purchased an axe.”

Radin’s version is full of convincing details, yet he does not provide a source for the story; thus, how he came to hear about it, or how trustworthy his source might be, is unclear. That version of the story certainly doesn’t appear anywhere else.

Finally, the Fall River Historical Society addressed the story in its masterwork, Parallel Lives, on the history of Fall River and its citizens, a thick tome which includes short sections on Lizzie Borden’s life before and after the murders. Here is an excerpt:

“The ladies at Marion, who were staying at a cottage owned by Dr. Benjamin J. Handy, were “living in a rough and ready way, and were doing their own work.” … Reports stated that the responsibilities for the household were assigned, and the question of who would handle chopping wood for the stove arose; Lizzie, it was said, “agreed to take charge of that department” upon her arrival. According to the Fall River Daily Herald, Lizzie, when told that the axe at Marion was a “dull affair,” was said to have written that she would gladly chop wood for the party, as she had a “very sharp hatchet.” … It seems unlikely that Lizzie would have made a light-hearted reference to a weapon that would later that day be “buried into the head of her own father … if she was the murderess.”

The authors of Parallel Lives then questioned whether there was actually a mention of a hatchet in the letter at all, or if it was “something else that Lizzie confided in writing that Elizabeth thought best kept private?” Perhaps Lizzie shared her fears about Andrew having an enemy that could be a danger to the family, just as she had shared with Alice Russell the night before. If so, then perhaps Elizabeth “felt that these personal remarks might best be left between the two.” In the end, the authors added, “what was written from one to the other remains a mystery; whether the content was macabre, as suggested, a melancholy confidence, or an outright expression of a deep fear will never be known. The letter never surfaced, Elizabeth M. Johnston did not testify, and her final statement to the police concerning the matter was “I have said all I think I should about that letter.”