Considerations

Looking into the evidence gathered by police in the Borden Murders is like opening a giant box of puzzle pieces, and, after hours of labor trying to put it together, discovering that there are important pieces missing. Meanwhile, some of the pieces we do have seem to belong to a different puzzle altogether as they don’t seem fit no matter how we turn them. It is no wonder the jury that heard the case in 1893 pronounced Lizzie Borden “not guilty.” Their conclusion was not merely the result of reasonable doubt; those twelve men reportedly believed Lizzie to be truly innocent. As numerous mock trials of Lizzie in the years since have concluded—including a 1997 Stanford Law School mock trial presided over by Supreme Court Justices William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O’Connor—the evidence for guilt just wasn’t there.

The case against Lizzie was “circumstantial;” that is, there was no direct physical evidence linking her to the murders. At the heart of that case was the fact that police officers simply couldn’t believe an intruder could have entered the house, then hacked into the heads of two people 90 minutes apart, then slipped out of the house, all without being seen or heard by anyone else. Add to that Lizzie’s alleged attempt to purchase poison, along with her own self-contradictory words making her sound like a desperate liar who couldn’t get her story straight, and the authorities had good-enough reason to suspect her. Unfortunately for the prosecution, most of her self-incriminating words (spoken at the inquest) and her attempt to buy poison were ruled inadmissible in court, so there wasn’t much of substance left to paint a picture of guilt for the jury.

Yet, just because the jury didn’t see that picture of Lizzie as cold-blooded killer doesn’t mean other people don’t see it. The puzzle pieces are all still there, and many who sift through them decide they do create a compelling picture of Lizzie’s guilt. In fact, most people who have looked at the case over the years, whether briefly or more fully, come away convinced it was Lizzie who killed her father and stepmother. Then again, a good number of others work the puzzle and, like those 1892 jury members, still don’t see it. I am always interested in the reasons why for either side, how they got there, and how they navigated some of the complex challenges in putting together a cohesive picture.

If you are undertaking an effort to put together the puzzle for yourself, here are a number of factors to keep in mind if you want to come to a fair conclusion and don’t want your brain to knot itself into a pretzel.

We face a strong cultural bias toward Lizzie’s guilt

When it comes to the long-ago Borden murders, our traditional responsibility to assume a suspect “innocent until proven guilty” has been turned on its head, and Lizzie is almost always assumed to be guilty. Of the 26 papers gathered into the published proceedings of the centennial conference on the Borden case at Bristol College in 1992, only one paper left open the possibility Lizzie may have been innocent; the others proceeded from an assumption of guilt. Indeed, Lizzie Borden as axe-murderess is such a well-established narrative that we can be swayed by it without even being fully aware of it. As Judge Charles Davis, commenting on the Borden case in 1893 pointed out, “For it is of their very essence that bias and prejudice are unknown to us while they rule us.” Of course, Davis then went on to ignore his own bias and explained why he was certain Lizzie was guilty and her verdict in error.

There is a reason the presumption of innocence is the bedrock of our legal system. When we start with a bias toward guilt, we often become trapped in a loop in which we interpret Lizzie’s words and actions through a guilty lens, which then makes those words and actions appear as if they point to guilt, which then further convinces us she is guilty; and, so it continues until our opinion is hardened and no new information or insight can penetrate. When all the cultural messages we have absorbed throughout our lives tell us that “Lizzie did it,” it takes deliberate effort to keep an open mind and look at the evidence with fresh eyes.

Lizzie-as-killer is a more exciting, and more satisfying, story

Even Emma, who is often seen as “lying” to cover for Lizzie, becomes an accessory after the fact. All become villains, except, ironically, for Lizzie, who, as our protagonist, plays the anti-heroine meting out her own dramatic brand of justice. Plus, if she did it, we get to indulge in all the pleasures of conjecture about how she was able to pull it off. Our imaginations can follow Lizzie around her house as she wipes herself clean of blood or slides the weapon into a clever hiding space. How easy this is to do when we already know she will be acquitted and win the reward of her father’s fortune.

Lizzie-as-wrongfully-accused is a depressing story we have reason to reject

If Lizzie is innocent, we get none of the satisfactions that come with a guilty story. An unknown intruder is not a compelling villain, just a blank. This is so unsatisfying that the idea of an unknown intruder has regularly been mocked since 1893 with the publication of “A Mystery Unveiled,” a pamphlet that ridiculed the jury’s verdict. We need a flesh and blood villain. I suspect that is why so many writers who examine the Borden case and know something is not quite right with the Lizzie-Did-It conclusion reach for another person on the stage on which to pin the guilt—whether Bridget the maid, or Uncle John Morse, or even sister Emma in faraway Fairhaven. Either way, if Lizzie is innocent and her life ruined by undeserved suspicion, then the story is no longer a gripping murder mystery, it becomes a sad tale of injustice. Lizzie Borden, the daughter of the victim, never allowed to grieve, her every move questioned, her every word picked apart and doubted, scapegoated by police who were too hapless to find the real murderer … ? No, it’s too awful to contemplate. It is safer to believe her guilty, lest we become complicit in the besmirching of an innocent and make villains of ourselves.

There is a mythology that has developed around the case that simply isn’t true

Just because we come across something in a book about the murders that presents itself as evidence, or as an argument to support a certain theory, doesn’t mean that it’s actually supported by facts. For example, the assertion that Andrew was so cheap he forced his family to eat rotting mutton every meal for five days straight before the Thursday murders is repeated everywhere, but not true. Many such myths, sprung from decades of gossip and rumor, have been passed along from one author to another, and have been repeated so many times with added embellishments that they are simply accepted as true. The problem has become even more pronounced with the dawn of A.I.; since 2025, new A.I.-generated articles, books and videos full of errors and ludicrous claims have been churned out almost daily and posted online in an effort to make a quick dollar off interest in Lizzie Borden. (There’s a reason they call it A.I. slop.) When we have been fed a steady diet of bad information, we can try to fit those pieces into our puzzle as if they belong. But so many myths about Lizzie don’t actually belong in the puzzle, and can give us a false picture.

We are all informed—and limited—by our own personal experiences

The Borden case has a mirror-like quality that reveals how we view the world and the people in it. I once spent an amusing hour going through a thread on a Lizzie Borden forum, following a heated debate on whether Lizzie could have hidden the hatchet used in the murders so well it was not found, despite several intensive police searches of the house. Some in the Lizzie-Did-It Camp were unbothered that the weapon wasn’t found because they knew of several places in their own houses they were confident the police could never find. (“My kids can never find where I hide Christmas presents, and kids are smarter than cops,” argued one.) The few on the Lizzie-Didn’t-Do-It side argued they couldn’t imagine any hiding place in their own house that the police wouldn’t eventually discover. (“My husband always finds candy no matter how well I hide it.”) In the words of Pearson, “People insist upon reading their own minds, their own characteristics, into the plans of a murderer.” What is most interesting about the missing weapon debate is that some, like Hosea Knowlton, consider that the weapon not being found is proof that Lizzie had cleverly hidden it, because in their minds an intruder would have left it lying by the bodies so as not to be seen walking away with a telltale bloody blade. The lack of a weapon that would connect Lizzie to the murders is thus translated into “evidence” of her guilt. Clearly, our objectivity has subjective blind spots created by our own personal and unique experiences. (I disclose some of my own personal experiences and resulting biases regarding the murders here.)

Confirmation bias is a thing

Once we decide on an issue one way or another, it is not easy to budge ourselves from that position. Human beings love to be right, and we will twist ourselves around in all kinds of ways to avoid admitting we were wrong. And so, we are quick to hook onto any evidence that might confirm our preconception of guilt or innocence, and gloss over evidence that doesn’t fit. This is also known as cherry-picking, and every writer that has ever presented the Borden case to a reading public (including this writer) does it because we are all human beings with brains that are wired to see what we expect to see. Thus, as we work our way through the puzzle of the Borden case, we can find ourselves in a chicken-or-egg situation where we would do well to ask: Does this piece of evidence drive me to believe that Lizzie was guilty, or does the fact that I think Lizzie was guilty drive me to give this so-called evidence more weight than it warrants?

Much of the evidence can be interpreted either way

Because of our personal experiences and resulting biases, and the way we tend to defend them with confirmation bias and cherry-picking, most of the evidence in the Borden case, being circumstantial, can be shaped in our minds to support guilt or innocence as we choose. This has been well-noted even as far back as the 1893 trial, with Julian Ralph of The New York Sun reporting during the first week of testimony that, “Most fair-minded persons here of the opinion that there has been nothing brought forward [in court] that does not tend to prove the woman innocent just as much as to suggest her guilty.” Beyond that, some of the evidence for guilt, if taken as fact, necessarily leads to undermining other evidence that the prosecution also relied on to prove guilt. For example, when three men at a drug store near Lizzie’s house claimed that she had visited there the morning before the murders to try to buy a lethal poison, despite both Bridget Sullivan and Abby Borden telling others that Lizzie had been home sick all morning, the prosecution insisted that Lizzie was able to sneak in and out of her house Wednesday with no one either inside or outside the house the wiser. Yet, their case also put great weight on Lizzie’s supposed exclusive opportunity to commit the murders because an intruder couldn’t have possibly sneaked in and out of the house on Thursday with no one either inside or outside the house the wiser. So, was it possible or not? To accept it was possible for Lizzie means it had to be possible for an intruder as well. Accepting a primary piece of evidence pointing to guilt can essentially erase another important piece of evidence pointing to guilt.

Conjecture is not evidence

A circumstantial case is, by nature, full of unknowns, gaps in the “who, what, when, how, and why” of the crime that sit empty from lack of hard evidence. The authorities who decide they have enough to arrest a suspect must then fill in those gaps with a narrative of what they believed happened. The prosecution then tries to make it a persuasive story for the jury. They do this with a good amount of conjecture and speculation, and sometimes they may be right (or at least close to right), and sometimes they can be spectacularly wrong, and their conjecture ends up blowing up in their faces—as in the prosecution’s theory of the handleless hatchet as murder weapon at Lizzie’s trial. Either way, lawyers work hard to give the impression of being sure of themselves, augmenting their narrative with parts of known facts, fitting them into their story so that it all looks of a piece. Writers who present the story of the Borden murders do the same, filling in gaps between the known and the unknown with whatever pieces of conjecture makes sense to them. The better the writer, the more skilled that writer can be at spinning known facts to fit their favored theory, even if it pulls the story far astray from the realm of believability. (I’m looking at you, Victoria Lincoln.) Most of us have pretty decent imaginations, and can play that guessing game ourselves, and come up with all manner of reasonable theories. We can have a lot of fun playing detective, coming up with possible scenarios, and the Borden murders with all their intriguing unknowns lend themselves well to that; hence, their staying power in our culture. But we have to remember that just because the murders could have happened in a certain way doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what happened. Beware the allure of speculation.

We don’t know what we don’t know

With a case as legendary as the Borden murders, and so much material about the investigation now available online and in various books, as well as in newspaper archives, one can get the impression that everything that is necessary to know to solve the case is already out there. But the volume of material is misleading; the unknowns are plentiful. I don’t know how many times a witness on the stand would start to relay a conversation had with another witness only to be shut down by attorneys due to the inadmissibility of hearsay. How much relevant information was in those conversations that were never allowed to be spoken and put down in the record? At the same time, bits of information and mysterious names appear in newspaper articles or on witness lists from 1892 and 1893 in relation to the case, mentioned once and never again. Certainly, not every interview made by a police officer made it into an official witness statement, and certainly, there were plenty of witnesses who did make statements but were not asked obvious questions. (“Say, Bridget, did you first notice the pail of bloody rags found in the cellar that morning before the murders or after?”)  Plus, who knows how many people might have had relevant information but were not interviewed, or simply didn’t want to get involved and kept it to themselves?

There is also the pervasive problem of assuming that because police didn’t come across a piece of information or person of interest then that particular thing or person was not important. It both amuses and maddens me that because several of the “mysterious” people seen by witnesses around the Borden house around the time of the murders were never identified by police (despite their sincere efforts), that those persons became immaterial, even though one of them could conceivably have been the murderer or his/her accomplice. And what about possible persons who may have been in or around the house without a witness to notice their presence at all? There was no set of eyes aimed steadily at 92 Second Street for two hours on the morning of August 4th, no cameras pointed at it, no one taking down names of all those who passed by; yet, because no one that police spoke to happened to see an intruder enter the house, that somehow translated to mean an intruder did not exist. This error of logic then became “evidence” against Lizzie. While we have plenty of evidence to sort through and entertain ourselves with, it is helpful to keep in mind that pieces of the puzzle are inevitably missing, and there is no way to know exactly how many, or how important, those pieces might be.

Taking all of the above into account, perhaps we can better understand why opinions of who committed the Borden murders can be so dramatically opposed. We can also better understand why the murders are considered essentially unsolvable. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth the effort to dig into the case and come up with your own opinion. Indeed, there is no more diverting case in the annals of American crime, nor one so full of perplexing clues, on which to exercise one’s powers of deduction. And, as with any good puzzle, there is great reward to be found in taking on the challenge and patiently working through the pieces to discover how they fit together. Hopefully, in the end, we come up with a picture, however incomplete, that is as close as possible to what may have really happened.