The Barn

When Lizzie Borden first raised the alarm about her father’s murder, calling Bridget Sullivan down from her attic bedroom, one of the first things a startled Bridget asked was, “Where was you, Miss Lizzie? Didn’t I hook the screen?” Lizzie said she had been out in the back yard. When Mrs. Churchill asked the same question, Lizzie added that she had come in from the back yard because, “I was out in the barn looking for a piece of iron.” When Dr. Seabury Bowen asked her, she said she was up “in the barn looking for some irons.” Alice Russell, after hearing Lizzie repeat that she had been up in the barn, asked her what she went up for, and Lizzie replied she’d gone for a piece of tin or iron to fix her screen or window. “She gave me to understand that they did not come together right.”

No doubt the shift in her story from looking for iron to fix a window screen, as other witnesses described, to looking for lead to make fishing sinkers put Knowlton on the alert that Lizzie might not be telling the truth about going up into the barn. And when he himself heard her meandering tale of going outside, grabbing some pears from under the tree and eating them in the barn loft while looking out the window, before she finally got around to looking in “a sort of box” for lead for sinkers, he was sure she was not telling the truth. But there was yet another reason he came to disbelieve her to the point that he told the jury numerous times that her story was “absurd.” In his mind, and clearly in the minds of police officers who first heard her alibi, it was simply too hot that day to accept that Lizzie would spend twenty minutes in a sweltering barn loft.

Officer Phillip Harrington described going up into the loft the afternoon of the murders along with Police Marshal Rufus Hillard. Harrington—who had already taken issue with Lizzie’s overly calm demeanor and told Hilliard on his arrival, “I don’t like that girl,”—wrote in his report that Hilliard told him and several of the other officers to give the loft a complete going over. In return, Harrington said to the Marshal, “If any girl can show you or me or anybody else what could interest her up here for twenty minutes, I would like to have her do it.” The Marshal, added Harrington, “shook his head, and said something about it being incredible; his words I cannot give.” (It was this kind of shockingly immediate police bias against Lizzie that caused George Robinson, her lead defense attorney, to denounce the officers’ callous attitude toward her, the dazed and grieving daughter of the victims.)

At the preliminary hearing, held less than a month after the murders, Knowlton dismissed Lizzie’s barn story as ridiculous, declaring, “I never saw an alibi labor as this one does … going up into the barn on the hottest of days for something unnecessary.” Judge Blaisdell agreed, saying in his ruling, “Suppose a man had been found in the vicinity of Mr. Borden; was the first to find the body, and the only account he could give of himself was the unreasonable one that he was out in the barn looking for sinkers; then he was out in the yard; then he was out for something else; would there be any question in the minds of men what should be done with such a man?” He then pronounced her “probably guilty” and turned her over to the further action of the Superior Court.

By the time of the jury trial, Knowlton’s characterization of the heat in the Borden barn on the day of the murders took on epic proportions. “This,” he said, “was a place hot beyond the power of description.” But, of course, he described it anyway, telling the jury, “There is not a man of you that does not remember that that day, which was within four days of being the very midsummer day of one of the hottest summers within our remembrance.” Knowlton then asked the jury members if it was credible that Lizzie, “being engaged in a occupation which of itself would be heating, the ironing of those handkerchiefs, she left that job on the eve of is completion and went out of the house and up in that barn to the hottest place in Fall River, and there remained during the entire time that was covered by the absence of Bridget upstairs?”

Here we arrive at another problem with Lizzie’s story of being in the barn while Andrew was being killed, at least according to the prosecutors and many observers since: It was simply too convenient. At the inquest, Knowlton had asked Lizzie, “Why should you select that place, which was the only place which would put you out of sight of the house, to eat those three pears in?” When she said she could not give him any reason (other than what she’d already told him about looking for material for sinkers), he let her know he found it too coincidental. “You observe that fact, do you not? You have put yourself in the only place perhaps, where it would be impossible for you to see a person going into the house?” Even though she replied she certainly could have seen someone from the barn window while she was standing there eating her pears, Knowlton remained firm that she’d invented the story. He told the jury, “It was necessary she be up in the loft … It was the only place where she could put herself and not known what took place.”

At first glance, this seems to be valid point, it does seem overly convenient that Lizzie just happened to go up into the barn at the very time Andrew was being murdered. Especially when we learn that Lizzie admitted at the inquest she hadn’t been up into the barn in at least three months. However, it is a circular argument as one must begin with the presumption of guilt in order to call it “too convenient;” in other words, it helps support guilt only if we already accept that Lizzie was guilty. But Lizzie sat in the courtroom with the legal presumption of innocence, and if she was indeed innocent then it would absolutely not be “too convenient” for Lizzie to have left the house at that moment, it would instead be convenient for the actual killer, the intruder hiding in the house and waiting for his opportunity. If she was innocent, then it was the killer who chose the moment that Lizzie went out the door to attack Andew, and she may have inadvertently saved her own life from the hatchet-wielding assassin who would have also chopped her down if she got in his way, just as he had done to Abby.

Thus, Knowlton’s “too convenient alibi” argument does not stand on its own merits; however, he did have what he considered proof that Lizzie did not go up into the barn that morning: an experiment that Officer William Medley testified to performing in the barn within an hour of Andrew’s murder.

Officer Medley’s Dust Experiment

When Officer Medley took the stand at Lizzie’s jury trial, he testified he’d arrived at the Borden house the morning of the murder just before 11:45 a.m. He then waited a minute or two for Fleet to show up before entering the house and viewing the bodies of the two victims. He first went down into the cellar to look around, then next went upstairs to knock on Lizzie’s door. He had a brief conversation with her, asking her several questions, including where she’d been when Andrew was killed. She told him she’d been up in the barn, but Medley must not have been satisfied with this reply, for he decided he should go up into the barn to check out her story, a choice Knowlton praised in his closing as Medley having “had his wits about him.” Medley estimated he got to the barn about eight to ten minutes after he went into the house, so somewhere between 11:55 a.m. and 12 noon. He said he found the barn door closed, and to open it he had to take a pin from a hasp. This is how he described what he did next:

“I went upstairs until I reached about three or four steps from the top, and while there part of my body was above the floor, above the level of the floor, I looked around the barn to see if there was any evidence of anything having been disturbed, and I didn’t notice that anything had or seemed to have been disturbed, and I stooped down low to [look across the bottom of the barn floor] to see if I could discern any marks on the floor of the barn having been made there … I didn’t see any, and I reached out my hand to see if I could make an impression on the floor of the barn, and I did this by putting my hand down … and found that I made an impression on the barn floor [on the] accumulated hay dust and other dust.”

He added that he could “distinctly” see his handprint in the dust. “Then I stepped up on the top and took four or five steps on the outer edge of the barn floor, the edge nearest the stairs, then came up to see if I could discern those, and I did … by stooping down and casting my eye on a level with the barn floor, and I could see them plainly.” He said he saw no other footprints.

Alfred Clarkson, a steam fitter, who was one of the first to enter the Borden yard, was first on the stand, then came a reporter by the name of Walter Stevens, who was followed by two young men named Everett Brown and Thomas Barlow. All testified that they themselves had been in the barn loft, or had heard others up in the barn loft, up to 20 minutes before Medley ascended those stairs. (For a more detailed look at what each witness said on the stand, see Dust Experiment.)

From the testimony of these witnesses, it became clear that Everett and Barlow were actually the first people up into the barn loft that morning, somewhere around 11:35. They soon came down, shut the door behind them, but as they were busy in the yard, trying to peer into the windows of the house, three other young men re-opened the barn door and headed up into the loft as well, leaving the door wide open behind them. While these unidentified men were up in the loft, Clarkson entered through the open door, with Clarkson going up the stairs to encounter those three men who got up there before him, and a few minutes later Stevens wandered into the barn and heard others thumping up (or perhaps down) the stairs as well. It would also appear that as the last of this bunch of inquisitive men exited the barn, one of them decided to close the door and replace the pin in the hasp just as Barlow had done. And, because Fleet had instructed that the yard be cleared the yard at about 11:50 a.m., no others were able to get in the barn for a good ten minutes, perhaps allowing the dust that had been stirred up by the troop of onlookers to settle. Then, just before 12 noon, Medley went out to the barn, found the closed door, and went inside to perform his experiment, assuming that no others had been up in the loft before him.

None of the naysayers deterred Knowlton from insisting at the trial that Medley was first to study the barn loft, and that his experiment was valid proof Lizzie had not been up there an hour earlier. He defended this claim by asserting that, because Medley found the barn door closed, then everyone else who testified for the defense was wrong about the time they went into the barn. “If it happened, it never happened before Medley. Medley was the first one there.”

A Witness Corroborates Lizzie’s Story

If there was one witness who most helped the defense win a “not guilty” verdict from the jury, it was probably Hyman Lubinsky, a young Russian immigrant and ice cream peddler. He took the stand to testify that on the morning of August 4th, he was driving his team down Second Street and past the Borden House at about 11:10 a.m. when he saw a woman in the Borden yard. Asked by Robinson exactly what he’d seen, Lubinsky said, “I saw a lady come out the way from the barn right to the stairs from the back of the house.” He said the woman was “walking very slow,” and although he couldn’t identify the color of her dress, he said it was “dark-colored.” (This would match Lizzie’s claim she’d been wearing the dark blue Bengaline Silk she’d provided to police.) He knew it was not Bridget Sullivan because he’d sold ice cream to Bridget two or three weeks before and knew what she looked like.

Next on the stand was Charles Gardner, the stable owner, who corroborated the time Lubinsky left, recalling that the ice cream peddler had been upset that he was leaving so late, and he himself had been reluctant to let the horses go until they’d finished eating. He said Lubinsky kept urging him to “hurry up.” He confirmed that Lubinsky had left “between five and ten minutes after 11 a.m.” and that he himself had also headed down Second Street about 10 or 15 minutes later with his own team, carrying one of his customers, a Mr. Charles Newhall. By the time Gardner was nearing the Borden House, a boy called to him that there’s been a “fight down below.” (Knowlton tried to shake him as to the time he remembered Lubinsky leaving as well, but he stood by his regular schedule of feeding the horses at 11 a.m. and telling Lubinsky he had to wait, although he couldn’t get him to wait for long.) Gardner’s story was then corroborated by Newhall, the customer riding beside him, who took the stand to say he also remembered leaving the stable with Gardener around 11:15 or a little after, and also hearing about the fight as they rode down Second Street. “Someone said there was a man stabbed another one.”

Undeterred by Lubinsky’s testimony and its corroboration, Moody called Officer Mullaly back to the stand and had him recount his initial interview of Lubinsky on August 8th. Mullally testified that Lubinsky told him that the morning of August 4th, “he’d been coming down Second Street from Charley Gardner’s stable, and as he got along by the Borden house, he saw a lady pass from the barn to the house of Mr. Borden’s, and he said it was 10:30 at that time; he was positive it was 10:30.” Mullaly wrote the time down in his memorandum book (which he showed Moody), then reported the interview to Deputy Marshal Fleet.

Mr. Robinson then got up to cross-examine Mullaly on the subject.

Q: Did you ask [Mr. Lubinsky] what time he usually went out on his route in the forenoon?

A: No, sir.

Q: You didn’t learn that his usual time was half past ten?

A: No, sir.

Q: And you didn’t learn from him that he found he was a little late that morning, did you?

A: No, sir.

Q: You didn’t consider it as of much account?

A: Well, I didn’t know how much account it was.

Q: And you don’t recall that he told you that he usually left at half past ten?

A: No, sir.

Q: And that he was late that morning, or something of that kind?

A: No sir, I don’t.

Q: He said he had come over from Gardner’s stable. You learned that?

A: Yes, sir.

Q: And you know where the stable is?

A: Well, I don’t know about that either.

Q: I say, don’t you know where the stable is?

A: No sir, I don’t.

Q: And that is all the attention you gave to it?

A: That is about all, as a report.

From his questions, it apears that Robinson was suggesting to the jury that Lubinsky told Lizzie’s defense attorneys, who tracked him down two weeks after the murder, that he’d told Mullaly that 10:30 was the usual time he started, but he was running late that morning. The implication was that careless Mullaly didn’t register that, perhaps because of the language barrier. But the idea that it was Mullaly who was mistaken about the time Lubinsky said he saw the woman is not borne out by a newspaper account that appeared August 8th, the same day that Mullaly interviewed Lubinsky, in which Lubinsky apparently also told a reporter for the Fall River Daily Evening News that he had seen the woman in the Borden yard at 10:30 a.m, “walking slowly” from the direction of the barn to the side screen door. So, if a mistake was made about the time, it would seem it had been made by Lubinsky and not Mullaly.

Though it didn’t come up in the trial, the newspapers following Lubinsky’s claim, including the Fall River Herald of August 4th, put out a story several days later reporting that Officers Harrington and Doherty went looking for this woman and concluded that Lubinsky had likely mistaken the Kelly yard for the Borden yard as they had located a woman named Ellan Eagan who told them that she’d gone into the Kelly yard to be sick around 10:30 that morning. (If true, this bit of investigation doesn’t appear in the reports made my Harrington and Doherty that were preserved in the Witness Statements). The assumption that Eagan was the woman Lubinsky saw soon made his claim less interesting to reporters, and clearly less interesting to the police.

The attorneys working on Lizzie’s defense, however, remained interested and eventually discovered, as seen from court testimony, that Lubinsky hadn’t left Gardner’s stable at 10:30 a.m. after all, but had either remembered, or perhaps been reminded, that he’d been running late that day. He had actually started down Second Street much later than he’d originally said to Mullaly and had, in fact, passed the Borden house at exactly the time that would have allowed him to see Lizzie walk from the barn to the side door at exactly the time Lizzie claimed to have done so.

At the trial, Knowlton refused to allow that the revised time of this sighting of Lizzie was legitimate, and told the jury that the peddler’s testimony was irrelevant. “I will spend little time in the prosecution of this argument to discuss Mr. Lubinsky. What he saw and when he saw it are absolutely indefinite.” He suggested that if Lubinsky did see a woman in the Borden yard (which he clearly found questionable), it was most likely either Bridget or Mrs. Churchill, who were both coming and going to the side screen door between 11:10 and 11:15. Of course, neither of those woman would have been coming from the direction of the barn, nor would the women who’d just learned of Andrew’s murder have been walking slowly, as was Lubinsky’s testimony, they were in fact noticed by others to be hurrying back and forth across the street.

Knowlton then declared Lubinsky to be “a discarded witness,” which, in a legal context, refers to a witness whose testimony or evidence is deemed unreliable or otherwise inadmissible by the court. Why did he deem Lubinsky unreliable? Because Andrew Jennings knew about his story at the time of the preliminary hearing and didn’t call him to testify. In other words, because Lubinsky was not called by the defense at the hearing, that means they didn’t consider him a reliable witness. Or, as Knowlton put it, “He had not got things patched up.” He also tried to dismiss Gardner’s corroborating testimony as to the time Lubinsky arrived at his stable (when he was feeding the horses), as well as the time he said Lubinsky left, by asserting that Gardner couldn’t have been exact as to time because “how long does it take a feed a horse?” He added that the men of the jury would know exactly what that meant, leaving non-horse owners to wonder.

Having thus discarded the witness to his own satisfaction, in the very next sentence Knowlton said, without a trace of irony, that “it is not charged here that [Lizzie] did not go to the barn. It is not charged here that perhaps, in some part of the work of concealing the evidence of that crime, she may not have found it necessary to visit the barn. What is charged here—and Lubinsky never touches a hair of it in any part of the this story, if you take it to the uttermost—what is charged here is that her deliberate, her chosen, her formal alibi of being up in the barn loft twenty minutes … is absolutely beyond the power of human credence to believe.” While Knowlton’s grammar is a little unclear, he appears to be suggesting that maybe Lubinsky was right after all, and he did see Lizzie coming back from the barn but only because she was out there cleaning herself up or otherwise concealing evidence, and not because she was telling the truth about being in the barn loft.

Through the Lens of Guilt

Despite the corroboration of Lizzie’s story from an eyewitness who saw her walking back from the barn to the house, Knowlton made it clear to the jury that Lizzie’s claim was not to be believed. Even if the ice cream peddler was right, and he did see Lizzie heading from the direction from the barn to the house, that didn’t mean she’d been up in the loft, casually eating pears, poking around for something to use for fishing sinkers. (Victoria Lincoln suggested she’d likely gone to the barn to use the vise said to be out there to break off the handle of the hatchet Lincoln believed she’d used in the killings.) Or, Lizzie might not have even been in the barn at all when Lubinsky saw her.

The possibility that the claw-hammer hatchet found atop Crowe’s barn, just on the other side of the Borden’s back fence, ten months after the murders, was the weapon used to kill Andrew and Abby has led more recent observers to believe that Lizzie went out into the backyard to fling that bloody hatchet up onto the flat roof of that barn. In 1893, police had quickly dismissed the possibility of the Crowe hatchet being the murder weapon; Lizzie’s trial was already underway, and the prosecution had already argued extensively for the handleless hatchet found in the Borden cellar as the most likely candidate. But in the ensuing decades, Lubinsky’s testimony would lend accumulating credence to such a theory. (Of course, if the Crowe hatchet truly was the murder weapon, an intruder could just as easily have tossed it up there, too.)

Either way, Knowlton was adamant that Lizzie’s alibi was too flimsy to stand. “I assert that that story is simply incredible, I assert that that story is simply absurd, I assert that that story is not within the bounds of reasonable possibilities.” He then asked, where was the evidence to support any of her various reasons for visiting such a stifling place at that particular hour? “Why could we not have had somebody to have told us what was the screen that needed fixing, and to have corroborated that story by finding the piece of iron that was put into the screen?” (He asked this ten months later, when the police never asked it so far as we know, nor did he himself put the question to Lizzie at the inquest. Plus, Lizzie had told him she didn’t find anything helpful in her search for iron anyway.) “Show us the fishing line those sinkers went on. It was easy to do if they were in existence, if there was any truth in the story.” (Knowlton also seemed to have forgotten that Lizzie told him she was planning to buy new fishing lines to take on her trip because her old lines were no good.)  

Furthermore, as other observers have also asked, if she had really gone into that dusty barn, why did all the witnesses who saw her immediately afterward testify that her dress, her hands, her hair, were all spotless? How could a woman who spent 20 minutes in that sweltering barn, pulling over boards to get to a box full of old junk in the loft, near piles of decaying hay, not have any streaks of sweat or dust or hay particles on her person? If she had really climbed up into the loft, it would seem that the hem of her dress at least would have picked up some dust. (Interesting that the lack of any trace of blood on Lizzie from Andrew’s murder seems not to bother the guilty camp nearly as much as the lack of dust on her from the barn.)

And what about the pear cores? Lizzie said she ate three pears while up in the loft, looking out the window, but not one of the dozens of people who searched the barn ever reported finding the pear cores. Over the decades, many have found it damning that there was no mention in police reports of stumbling into three pear cores in the loft. (Bridget testified that Andrew usually took rotting pears and “threw them under the barn;” so perhaps that is what Lizzie would have done with her pear cores.)

In the end, Lizzie’s story is far too convenient, far too absurd. As Edmund Pearson put it, telling police she had been in the barn loft for twenty minutes “seemed to pass belief. That anyone, ironing handkerchiefs on a hot morning, should desert this torrid occupation and deliberately seek out the stuffiest, dustiest place on the premises, and do this for precisely the time needed to give the murderer a chance to commit the crime and make his escape, seemed doubly hard to believe. It was not only a queer thing to do, but it was an extraordinary coincidence that it should be done at a time so favorable to the murderer’s plans.”

For those in the guilty camp, it is too far a stretch to believe Lizzie would take herself up into that stifling hot barn loft. She lied about going up there, and she lied because she was guilty.

Through the Lens of Innocence

The testimony of Hyman Lubinsky was convincing; it seems likely he saw Lizzie walking back from the barn, walking very slowly as he said. When the Fall River Evening News reported Lubinsky’s story on August 8th, the reporter wrote that Lubinsky said the woman he saw “had one hand on her hip, and the other hanging or swinging.” Walking slowly, with one arm swinging; does that really sound like the walk of a woman who had just committed murder?  (The bare-headed observation does throw some people as Lizzie said at the inquest that she came back in from the barn and “laid my hat on the dining table.”)

Still, Lizzie’s inquest testimony about what she remembered being in the box of odds and ends (actually a willow basket of odds and ends, which she called “sort of a box”) she searched through was generally correct. Marshal Hilliard testified that the basket was found sitting atop of some boards that were sitting on top of the carpenter’s workbench that ran along the south side of the barn. At the inquest, Lizzie had said she’d had to move some boards to get to the basket, which she recalled sitting on the workbench. That basket had been sitting at the police station since the week after the murders and was eventually introduced as an exhibit in the courtroom. Moody showed the basket to the jury, along with a box of iron and lead found downstairs, and listed the contents of the basket as “nails with a few screws, paper, underneath two pieces of lead pipe and three pieces of sheet lead.”

At the inquest, Lizzie said that in her search she remembered coming across “nails and some old locks and I don’t know but there was a doorknob,” along with “flat pieces of lead … some of them were doubled together.” Her memory was consistent with what was presented in court, although Moody did not mention old locks or a doorknob as being in the basket (hard to know if he was offering a complete inventory or not). Yet, Lizzie also said she had looked at “things right on the side that were not in the box,” and it’s possible a doorknob or old lock was one of those things on the side. Of course, it’s also possible that, as Victoria Lincoln believed, Lizzie was merely remembering what she’d seen in the basket upstairs from the last time she’d been up there, when a doorknob and locks might have been there.

Either way, actual evidence existed that Lizzie did go up into the barn that morning. The only proof Knowlton offered for his insistence she hadn’t been up there was Medley’s dust experiment, which was rendered thoroughly irrelevant by defense witnesses. In his book, The Case Against Lizzie Borden, William Spencer argued that putting Medley on the stand was ultimately harmful to the prosecution’s case, saying not only did the jury not believe him, but that his discredited testimony “added to the defense’s allegations of a too-quick focus on Lizzie Borden … [and] may have also helped the jury lean toward police incompetence in the case, or even police bias.”  

Meanwhile, Knowlton’s opinion that Lizzie’s alibi was absurd because it was just “too hot” for her to have gone up into the barn that morning was in itself absurd. Lizzie Borden spent her entire life in Fall River with its steamy New England summers, she was accustomed to living in the heat and humidity, as was everyone connected to the case. Mrs. Churchill did not stop making beds in her upstairs rooms that morning or decide not to the walk to the market that day because it was too hot, Bridget did not refuse to wash windows that day because it was too hot, police officers didn’t decline to search the barn loft that afternoon because it was too hot up there (much hotter than when Lizzie had gone up in the morning), nor did the hundreds of people who thronged the street in front of the Borden house for hours that day give up and go home because it was too hot. Certainly, Hosea Knowlton did not stop prosecuting his case even though the courtroom was said to be unbearably hot the first week of the trial, to the point that a juror became faint and the judge had to call a recess. No, Knowlton stood in suit and collar and tie in the humid New England heat, no doubt mopping the sweat from his brow from time to time, while Lizzie sat watching, covered from head to toe in corset and high-button collar and hat and gloves, even as Knowlton was trying to convince the jurors that it was the heat that made Lizzie’s alibi absurd.

As for Knowlton’s assertion that Lizzie had purposely put herself in a place where she could not see an intruder leave the house, that was not true. In fact, Lizzie put herself in sight of the side door of the house for the majority of the time she was in the barn. She told Knowlton she was standing at the window, gazing out at the side yard as she ate the three pears she’d picked up from the ground on her way into the barn, and added that she could not have failed to see anyone going in or out of the screen door from that vantage point. Lincoln claimed amazement that a guilty Lizzie would purposely undermine her own made-up alibi. “She would have been out of sight of the side door of the house for the ‘only two’ minutes she was under the pear tree, or the ‘three or four’ she was looking through the box. [The intruder] had no other chance. For the rest of the time, Lizzie, in her sweltering eyrie, had eyed the yard.”

It seemed not to occur to Lincoln that perhaps Lizzie did such a poor job of inventing a more airtight alibi because she was not inventing an alibi at all but was describing exactly what she remembered doing.

Author’s Take

There were several arguments made at the trial for Lizzie’s guilt that seemed so unfounded and/or exaggerated that when I read the transcript, they made me roll my eyes at Knowlton’s overblown invective against Lizzie. The most egregious example was the way he created a monster of hatred out of Lizzie in regard to her lack of warm feelings for Abby. Here, Knowlton’s rejection of her claim of going up into the barn when Andrew was killed, insisting on its absurdity through his own definition of absurdity, also did nothing to win my admiration for his lawyering skills.

Yet, despite credible evidence to the contrary, I know it’s possible that Knowlton could be right and Lizzie did indeed lie about going to the barn. I just don’t believe evidence for such a falsehood would rest in the heat of the day. The experience of temperature appropriate for an activity is simply too individual and relative. (I spent four years living through sweltering New England summers without air conditioning, then lived in Phoenix, Arizona, for decades; the things some people routinely do in extreme heat is sometimes mind-boggling to me.)  

Evidence for the lie also cannot be found in its so-called “convenience.” That logic is backwards, it puts the cart before the horse, as it is only convenient if Lizzie is first proven to be the killer. As Knowlton himself said in his defense of circumstantial evidence, “murderers do their murdering in secret, out of the eyes of others.” If Andrew was killed by an intruder, we would not expect the intruder jump out of the closet while Lizzie was ironing handkerchiefs and say, will you please stand back miss, while I butcher your father? One assumes that an intruder who didn’t want his violent deed complicated by a screaming woman would wait for the coast to be clear. Unless and until Lizzie is proven guilty, then logic tells us that Lizzie didn’t “just happen” to go to the barn at the right time; rather, the murderer picked that time because she went to the barn. And, if she hadn’t gone out, one assumes the intruder wouldn’t have waited much longer to make his move or else he’d lose the chance to kill Andrew as he lay asleep and vulnerable on the sofa. (More than a few of us have wondered if the sound of him emerging from his hiding spot, maybe from the upstairs guest room or the parlor, was the sound Lizzie heard on her way out that made her later say of Abby “I thought she heard her come in.”) One also assumes that if Lizzie had been in the killer’s way as he was making his escape, she would have fallen to the hatchet as well. And, with the Fall River police on the case, poor Bridget probably would have stood trial for the murder of the entire family, her alibi of being upstairs to lie down while murders were happening below also deemed “too convenient.”

Because there is evidence to support it, I do lean toward believing Lizzie did indeed go to the barn as she claimed. But of course, I cannot be sure. One cannot be sure of anything when, as William Spencer wrote in his description of the defense’s position, the police and prosecution chose a “too quick focus on Lizzie Borden.” It may have ultimately been the right focus, but, like the jury, it is difficult for me to have confidence in their conclusions if all the leads furnished to them were treated as cavalierly as the one given to them by Hyman Lubinsky. As Spencer also wrote of Medley’s dust experiment, “How could the defense, with only a few men, find the witnesses who challenged the Medley experiment, but the entire police force could not?” I cannot help but wonder what other leads police officers may have failed to follow up on because of their near-immediate certainty Lizzie was culprit, or what other information they may have been given and quickly discarded as being, in Robinson’s words, of “not much account.” Whether it was Lizzie who killed them or not, Andrew and Abby Borden deserved better.