Arrival of Police

At 11:15 a.m., on the warm Thursday morning of August 4th, 1892, the phone rang at the Fall River Police station with a call placed by John Cunningham. The news dealer had been walking by a stable on Second Street where the men gathered there had just been told by Mrs. Adelaide Churchill that there had been a “stabbing” at the Andrew Borden house and police were needed. Cunningham walked several yards up the street to a paint store where he knew there was a phone and made the call. The phone was answered by the city police marshal himself, Rufus Hilliard, who was sitting in his office, chatting with a visiting Sheriff’s deputy, Francis Wixon. A good half of the police force was off that day at the annual Police Association clambake at Rocky Point, so Hilliard poked his head out of his office and saw plainclothes officer George Allen outside the guardroom, waiting for his next order to escort those committed by the Fall River District Court to their place of confinement. Hilliard told Allen to go up to the Borden House “to see what the matter is.”

A presumably stunned Allen quickly checked the front door to see if it was locked and looked in the front closet. He then turned around to head back to the station for reinforcements, telling Sawyer to stand guard at the side door and not let anyone in but police officers. On his way back through the kitchen, he checked both the pantry and coal cupboards, then rushed out the side door to run back to the station. And so began the police investigation into the Borden murders.

The Parade of Officers Begins

Just after 11:30 a.m., Officer Doherty caught up with Wixon as the deputy reached the house. Both men walked through the north gate, noticing that were several people already gathered out front, then headed into the house. (John Manning, a reporter who had been sitting outside on the step, was allowed to enter with them.) Once inside, the officers learned that Abby Borden had been found dead upstairs by Bridget Sullivan, the maid, and Mrs. Adelaide Churchill, the Borden’s next door neighbor, lying face down in a congealed pool of blood. After looking on Andrew’s body, Doherty went upstairs to see Abby’s body. He pulled the bed away from her to properly see her, then, realizing she had also been butchered, he left to go find a phone to report this second murder to the marshal. He was away only a few minutes, and was back at the house by about 11:35 a.m.

Doherty then became the first police officer to question Lizzie, who was, he said, still sitting in the kitchen with two women ministering to her, Mrs. Churchill and Lizzie’s friend, Alice Russell. (For more on Lizzie’s movements during this time, see Minutes After the Murders.) Doherty testified to asking Lizzie where she was when her father was killed (in the barn), then asked about her father’s employees across the river at Swansea (she said neither of them would hurt Andrew). He asked her if she had heard anything (she said she heard some kind of scraping noise). Lizzie then went into the dining room with the ladies to escape the heat in the kitchen, leaving Doherty to speak to Bridget Sullivan.

Mullaly and Doherty next went together through the sitting room, where Mullaly saw Andrew’s body for the first time, then both officers went up to the guest room to view Abby’s body. Dr. Bowen, Wixon and Allen were already up there. Several of the men turned her body over, and Allen said he heard Doherty exclaim, “My God, her face is smashed in!” It was sometime during this chaotic time period, that John Morse returned to the house and was shocked at what he discovered, exclaiming to Lizzie something like, “For God’s sake! How did this happen!”

The Medical Examiner Arrives

At about 11:45 a.m., the county medical examiner, Dr. William Dolan, coincidentally happened to be driving his carriage down Second Street when he noticed the crowd gathering in the front of the Borden House. When told what was happening, Dolan climbed down from his carriage and headed into the house to investigate. Dr. Bowen greeted him and then showed him the body of Andrew first—Dolan later calling it “the most ghastly sight I’ve ever seen”—followed by the face-down Abby. Dolan took it all in and knew he had his work cut out for him. As medical examiner, he was now officially in charge of the bodies and so he began a more thorough forensic examination of the wounds inflicted on each, with Dr. Bowen taking notes for him.

There were a number of men working on the other side, but they didn’t notice Wixon until he approached them. The men eventually told him that they hadn’t seen anyone else come into the yard in the past hour. Wixon then continued on home for his noon meal and that was the last of his efforts on the case.

Inside the house, Doherty and Mullaly had begun searching the house. They asked Bridget to show them up the back stairs. She unlocked doors for them, and they performed a quick search of the attic rooms, then moved down one floor to the door of Andrew and Abby’s room, which they supposedly found locked. But there is some reason to believe it may not have actually been locked at that particular moment.

Bridget and Mrs. Churchill had already gone into that room to get sheets to cover the bodies, so it had already been unlocked once. Plus, we know that sometime before Lizzie went upstairs to her own room, which she was about to do in the next few minutes, the door between her room and Andrew and Abby’s bedroom had been forced open by police officers. Marshal Hilliard admitted as much to the Fall River Herald on the day of Lizzie’s arrest, saying of the searches conducted on Thursday that “Lizzie Borden’s room was examined before she knew anything about it.” Both Lizzie and Alice testified that they found the hook that locked the room on her side had been ripped from the wall. Thus, Doherty and Mullaly’s earliest trip up the back stairs would appear to be the only apparent opportunity for such an “examination.” (See more in Police Searches.)

The Assistant Marshal Takes Charge

At 11:50 a.m., at least according to his testimony from the preliminary hearing, Assistant Marshal Fleet arrived at the house. He noticed the number of people milling around the yard and instructed one of the other officers already stationed outside, an Officer Patrick Gillon, to clear the yard. Fleet then spoke to Medley for a few moments before going into the house. Medley remained outside to do his own quick search of the backyard.

By this time, Dr. Bowen had already told an overwhelmed Lizzie that she should go up to her room, and she had just gone up when Fleet entered the house and viewed the bodies. When Lizzie first made it upstairs, a still searching Doherty and Mullaly, now in the front part of the house, stuck their heads in the door, saw Lizzie and Alice Russell inside, but did not go into the room. They then went downstairs and asked Bridget to take them to the cellar and show them where the household hatchets were kept.

In Lizzie’s room, Lizzie asked Alice to let Dr. Bowen know that when it came time to call for an undertaker she wanted him to call James Winward, the undertaker of choice for the Fall River elite. Alice went downstairs and was waiting in the front entry to speak to Dr. Bowen when Lizzie’s pastor Reverend Buck arrived at the front door. Alice let him into the house, then as soon as Alice spoke to Dr. Bowen, Buck followed her upstairs to Lizzie’s room, where Lizzie had just changed out of the dress she was wearing and into a pink-striped wrapper.

Searching and More Searching

In the cellar, Bridget led Doherty and Mullaly to a ”starch box” kept on a shelf in the cellar, a box in which they found two hatchets. They also discovered two axes in the wood room. Mullaly collected all four “weapons” and laid them on the floor near a wall of the cellar. The men also noted a pail of bloodied menstrual rags sitting near the washroom sink that caught their interest. Officer Allen was the next to show up in the cellar and as they continued searching …

Fleet had finished viewing Abby’s body and was now in Lizzie’s room, interviewing her in the presence of Alice and Buck. He asked Lizzie, as the other officers had, what she had been doing when her father was killed, then asked her if she had any idea who may have wanted to kill her father. She ruled out Bridget and John Morse and anyone who worked for Andrew, then told him about an angry potential tenant who she had heard arguing with him. Other than that, she didn’t know. Fleet then made a quick look around the room before leaving. As he continued on down the stairs, he made a quick search of every room and closet he could find unlocked, then went looking around the first floor before he headed up the back stairs to the attic. After poking around everything he had access to, he went down to the cellar to join Doherty, Mullaly, and Allen along with Officer John Devine.

By 11:55 a.m., Medley had satisfied himself he would find nothing more in the yard and went into the house. (He may have gone down to the cellar first as he seemed to know about the pail with the bloody rags in it before he went upstairs.) He quickly viewed Andrew and Abby’s bodies and then, like the other officers before him, crossed the landing from the guest room and knocked on Lizzie’s door. Alice was there, Reverend Buck was still there, and Dr. Bowen was now present as well. Also like the others, Medley asked Lizzie where she was when her father was killed, and Lizzie again repeated that she had been up in the barn loft.

At about 12:00 noon, give or take a few minutes, Medley found the door to the barn shut, then went up into the loft. He would later testify that he noticed a thick layer of dust on the floor of the loft, which seemed to him undisturbed by any kind of footprints. He walked on the floor himself and noticed he left clear footprints. This convinced him that Lizzie had lied about being up in the barn loft, and in the coming days he would not only tell his superiors but also several reporters all about his dust experiment. (Unfortunately, as he would later learn at trial, numerous people had been up in the barn loft between the time of the murders and the time he himself went up to the loft and his experiment would be soundly discredited.)

The Roster of Officers Gets Busy

A short while later, at 12:20 p.m., Officer Philip Harrington, a ten-year veteran of the force, arrived at the house. After viewing the bodies, he followed the path of the officers before him and asked to enter Lizzie’s room. There he spoke to her, asking her the same questions that the others had asked, but his gut reaction to her similar answers was not quite the same as the officers who came before. He found her cool and calm demeanor inappropriate for the severity of the situation and was unnerved by it. He would later write in his report that her lack of emotion “gave birth to a thought that was most revolting. I thought, at least, she knew more than she wished to tell.” Later in the afternoon, when Hilliard arrived on the scene, he was more blunt, telling the marshal, “I don’t like that girl.”

Thus, only an hour after the arrival of the first police officer, the die was cast, and Lizzie was already a suspect in the murders.

Lizzie Under the Microscope

Fleet would soon return to the house and head up the front stairs to question Lizzie a second time with Officers Minnehan and Wilson in tow. This time however, after enduring five interviews by five different officers—Doherty, Mullaly, Fleet, Medley, and Harrington—the strain was wearing on Lizzie. She complained of feeling sick, said her head hurt and she wanted only for the police to hurry with whatever they needed to do. When Fleet said it was his duty to search her room, she seemed not to understand why it was necessary, telling him that her room had been locked when the killer was in the house, and she didn’t see how anything could have been hidden there. But she did not refuse the search, and ultimately, Lizzie’s friend, Mrs. Marianna Holmes, who was now there with Lizzie, would testify that the three men spent 30 minutes in the room.

Afterward, Fleet wanted to look into the clothes press, the closet upstairs he had earlier found locked, and Lizzie got up to take the keys to the closet, and she unlocked it for him. He looked around inside for a few minutes, lifting several of the dresses hanging there on nails to look behind them, but didn’t see anything of note.

Fleet, along with Minnehan and Wilson, then continued with a more systematic and thorough search of the rooms he had covered earlier, beginning with the guest room where Abby’s body still lay, and continuing on to the first floor. They searched the parlor, the sitting room, the sitting room closet, then on to the kitchen and the closets there. They next went up to Andrew and Abby’s room, which Fleet said had to be unlocked by Bridget, searched that room, along with the room off to the side known as “Abby’s dressing room,” where they found a safe they could not open. Bridget then led the officers up into the attic, where they searched all the rooms and opened at least one trunk.

The men eventually ended up in the cellar, where Mullaly pointed out the Handleless Hatchet to Fleet for the first time. (Fleet didn’t think it a viable weapon and put it back in the box, where it would remain until the following Monday, when Medley found it again and, along with Captain Dennis Desmond, decided to wrap it up and take it to the station.) Afterward, Fleet went back out in the yard to consult with the officers still searching out there and then, at 2 p.m., headed back to the station to make his report to the marshal.

The Investigation Kicks Into High Gear

Before leaving the Borden house, Fleet had sent several officers, including Medley and Harrington, out into the city to look for suspicious strangers. Marshal Hilliard had already taken a trip to Swansea to visit Andrew’s farms for a possible reason to suspect anyone there, but finding nothing had returned to the station, where he met with Fleet, just returning from the Borden house. Hilliard then decided to go to the Borden house himself and was met there at about 3 p.m. by Mayor John Coughlin, along with Fleet, Harrington, Medley, and several other officers.

While a photographer was taking photos of the bodies and the crime scenes inside the house, Fleet ordered his officers to begin an intensive search of the barn, which included turning over all the hay in the loft. Hilliard assigned others to search in nearby yards, including all the yards on Third Street, behind the Borden house.

Outside, as the search was extending throughout the neighborhood for a possible weapon as well as to identify potential witnesses who may have seen something suspicious, inside the house, a partial autopsy of the victims was being conducted in the sitting room by Dr. Dolan, with the assistance of Mayor Coughlin (also a doctor), Dr. Bowen, and several other physicians. Dolan removed the stomachs of both Andrew and Abby in order to send them to the forensic lab at Harvard to check for signs of poisoning. After Dolan was finished, he spoke for awhile with Hilliard, then he turned the bodies over to the undertaker (Winward) to prepare them for their funeral.

At 5 p.m. Emma finally arrived home from Fairhaven, where she had  been visiting for two weeks, summoned by a telegram that Dr. Bowen had earlier sent at Lizzie’s request. We have no testimony that tells us about Emma’s first hours home, or how she managed to absorb the tragedy. The house was still full of officers, with Hilliard and State Detective George Seaver arriving back at the house between 5 p.m. and 5:30. Seaver would play a large part in the investigation over the following days and weeks. He merely looked things over, with an intention to start investigating in earnest the following day.

Suspicion Becomes Certainty

Throughout the day, the officers who were sizing up the situation at the Borden house, and especially those who had spoken to Lizzie, were clearly talking amongst themselves and sharing their suspicions about the daughter of the victims. Not only was she acting too unemotional for their taste, but they were also coming to realize that Abby, whose blood was much more congealed than her husband’s when they first arrived, and her body much cooler and harder to the touch, must have died quite awhile before Andrew, perhaps an hour or two. This meant that the killer had been inside the house the entire time. It was also difficult to believe that an intruder could have gotten into and out of the Borden house unnoticed by neighbors. Still, officers wandered out into the city throughout the afternoon and evening to see if they could locate any news of suspicious strangers.

At about 8 p.m., Officers Doherty and Harrington ended up in a drug store, D.R. Smith’s, about three blocks from the Borden house. There they learned from a druggist named Eli Bence that he believed Lizzie Borden had come into his store the morning before to ask for prussic acid, the lethal poison we now know as cyanide. The officers immediately escorted Bence to the Borden House and brought him inside the kitchen so he could see Lizzie. He positively identified her as the woman who had attempted to buy the poison from him. This strongly suggested to them an intent on Lizzie’s part to harm her parents.

From that point on, only nine hours after Andrew Borden was killed, the police officers of Fall River were certain it was Lizzie who had hacked her father and stepmother to death. And while they would continue to chase down any reasonable tip given to them by the public about a potential intruder, they devoted most of their effort to tracking down evidence that Lizzie was the culprit. And, exactly one week after the Bordens fell to a hatchet, they arrested her for the crime.

Authors Note: Most of the information above was culled from the meticulous research done by William Spencer in his book, The Case Against Lizzie Borden, the most detailed and insightful account of the investigation to be found in print. Spencer’s books are essential reading for any serious student of the Borden murders.