Motive: Other Theories

When putting together his case against Lizzie Borden for the murders of her father and stepmother, District Attorney Hosea Knowlton found himself with a formidable task: to convince a jury that an unassuming Sunday school teacher known for volunteering to charitable causes had a believable reason to savagely kill half her family with a hatchet. He found a hint of motive in Lizzie’s known antipathy to Abby Borden, and he built that up into a hatred so virulent it put enough strength in Lizzie’s arm to murder the woman she once called “Mother.” But that motive could not explain why she killed her father, a man to whom she was believed to have felt the proper daughterly devotion.

That meant a different motive had to be ascribed to the killing of Andrew, and as Lizzie inherited half his estate, it was generally believed that a desire to hasten her inheritance drove her to take the hatchet to Andrew while napping on the sofa. Indeed, it seemed Governor Robinson, Lizzie’s lead defense attorney, anticipated Knowlton would say as much and, in his closing argument for the defense, Robinson pointed out the absurdity of giving Lizzie two separate motives:

They say she killed her stepmother because of trouble … but then there was not trouble with her father, as they see, and then she had a change of purpose, or she had a double purpose—to kill Mrs. Borden because she did not like her, and to kill her father because she liked him but she wanted his money. What sort of a compound are we making out of this defendant by any such argument as that? Two motives running through it, inconsistent with each other, each directed independently to a specific end.”

But when Knowlton stood to deliver his own closing, he devoted only a few sentences to the possibility of a money motive. Instead, he chose a different tack; he told the jury that Lizzie killed her father because having killed once, she had no choice but to kill again. In other words, she killed Andrew from unfortunate necessity.

Unfortunate Necessity

“I have left the dead body of that aged woman upon the guest chamber floor in the room where she was last at work,” Knowlton said to the jury, “and am now asking you to come down with me to a far sadder tragedy, to the most horrible word that the English language knows, to a parricide … When I am asked to find and prove and declare and explain a motive for that act, well, my feeble powers quail at the undertaking.”

But undertake it he did, although he began by saying that he didn’t necessarily believe that Lizzie planned to kill her father. “I hope she did not. I should be slow to believe she did. I should be slow to ask you to believe she did.” It is striking that he admits he does not really know of a good reason for Lizzie to premeditate the murder of her father, the exact thing he was trying to get the jury to find her guilty of. But apparently Knowlton decided a good reason wasn’t necessary; what he decided to do instead was to dehumanize Lizzie. He stripped from her her history, even her very identity.

“It was not Lizzie Andrew Borden, the daughter of Andrew J. Borden, that came down those stairs, but a murderess, transformed from all the thirty three years of an honest life, transformed from the daughter, transformed from the ties of affection, to the most consummate criminal we have read of in all of our history or works of fiction.”

In Knowlton’s telling, Lizzie had no choice but to kill Andrew, too. “Crime breeds crime and is the mother of crime. So, when that woman came downstairs, it was her father, but it was also the husband of the stepmother she had slain, and it came to her—God grant it never came before! Let me have the confidence in human nature to believe it never came before—it came to her that she had become a criminal and there was no escape from the consequences of that crime but to complete the bloody work.”

Knowlton graciously grants that Lizzie, the woman he had just spent hours tearing down as wicked, would have never killed her father, too, not if she had a choice, and oh how he hopes she never even thought of it before that day! This is pure theatrics, not to mention dishonest theatrics. He had argued earlier that week for the admission of evidence that Lizzie tried to buy poison the day before the murders, and had told the judges he meant to introduce testimony that she also tried to buy it in New Bedford two weeks earlier, all in order to prove that she had been harboring an intent to kill her parents for a long while. But as that testimony was proven inadmissible, he was able to weave this new version of his story. Even though he immediately goes on to say, “I do not say that took place. It is not necessary for me to say that that took place;” he only needed to prove that she did kill her parents, “not why.” Still, he hoped “to find reasons to believe that the murder of Andrew Borden was not planned by his youngest daughter, but was done as wicked and dreadful necessity, which, if she could have foreseen, she never would have followed her mother up those stairs.”   

Another variation of this theory to explain why Lizzie killed a father who was presumably good to her is that Lizzie had no intention of killing him at all, ever. Her only plan was to kill Abby, then once she had cleaned herself up, she intended to go out of the house to establish an alibi. Victoria Lincoln contends this is why Lizzie had changed into the Bengaline Silk, a dress she oddly calls a “silk winter party dress,” and, while wrong for the season, it was right for the street. Lincoln, among numerous others, asserts that Andrew, still feeling under the weather from his recent illness, unexpectedly came home early from his morning rounds downtown. (Who knows if this is true, it doesn’t seem to have been established exactly when Andrew typically returned from his morning business calls.) With her father suddenly home, Lizzie couldn’t very well leave the house to establish a believable alibi for Abby’s murder, so again, by “unfortunate necessity,” she had no choice but to kill him, too. This seems quite a leap; after all, even if Lizzie had absented herself for a stretch of time, could she really have been so confident Andrew wouldn’t suspect her once Abby’s body was discovered butchered in the room across the hall from hers?

Either way, if Lizzie did kill the father she loved, and Knowlton was right that she did it to cover up Abby’s murder, then it was a bad bargain. She was arrested for both murders within a week. Then again, after ten months in a jail cell, she was tried and found not guilty, then went on to inherit half her father’s money, so maybe not such a bad bargain after all.

Andrew Was About To Have Lizzie Committed

This is not the most well-known theory of why Lizzie may have killed her father, but it pops up here and there in message boards where Borden buffs debate their theories. A version of it was introduced in Lizzie, the 2018 movie about the murders, although in that case her mental affliction was unacceptable lesbianism. (“You are an abomination,” says Andrew to Lizzie in the film. She snaps back with a defiant, “At last, we are on equal footing, Father.” Oh, the drama!)

Those who offer this scenario often throw in Lizzie’s supposed kleptomania as one facet of her unmanageable sickness and another reason for Andrew to act and protect his good name from scandal. Sometimes Dr. Bowen is roped into this potential plot as someone who might have signed commitment papers. (And could that be the paper he was burning in the stove after Andrew was found?) But of course, it’s all creative speculation; there exists not one shred of evidence it is true and, in fact, it flies in the face of what actually is known to be true. Still, like most theories that aim to fill the believable motive vacuum—like Borden scholar Jules Ryckebusch suggesting that Lizzie killed her stepmother because Abby caught her masturbating—it is interesting to consider.

The All-Of-The-Above Theory

When it comes to creative conjecture without evidence in trying to explain why Lizzie is guilty of murder, Victoria Lincoln is without equal. In A Private Disgrace, her account of the Borden murders, published in 1967, Lincoln is not content with just one or two or even three motives; she invents no less than five motives/reasons for the killings, all tangled together in a messy, complex knot.

Yes, Lincoln asserts Lizzie killed Abby because she couldn’t stand her (hatred), but also because Lizzie believed that Andrew was about to put the Swansea farm into Abby’s name (money), a transfer of property Lizzie could not abide. Although Lincoln is certain Lizzie would have preferred to have killed her father and stepmother with poison, she picked up the hatchet because she was in a fugue state from one of her “peculiar spells” (epileptic seizure), which were often triggered when she began her period (menstruation). Once Abby’s murder was accomplished, she had to kill Andrew, although not for the money she would inherit, nor even to protect herself from legal repercussions, but because she loved him too much to allow him to learn that she was now a murderer (unfortunate necessity).

Victoria Lincoln was primarily a writer of fiction, and it is obvious from the fantastical and fantastically unbelievable tale about Lizzie she presented to the world as non-fiction. I have come across literally no one who believes her theory of the crime to be what really happened, and yet many of the ancillary myths she invented or passed along about Lizzie and the murders are now part of “what everyone knows” about Lizzie, no matter how counterfactual. Her book is well-respected and considered a foundational text for Borden studies, something that mystifies me, but for those interested in learning more about her theories of the crime, see my review of A Private Disgrace.

Incest Theory

By the late 20th century, certain family dynamics that were never considered to be prevalent during the Victorian era—or at least considered too unseemly to be mentioned—started emerging from shrouds of secrecy. One of those dynamics was incest and the sexual abuse of children by their parents. As more and more psychology professors worked with incest survivors, noticeable patterns of behavior from this kind of trauma began to emerge. One of the most obvious signals that a child has been abused by a father or mother is if that child violently strikes out and kills that parent. When trying to understand why Lizzie Borden may have killed her parents, it slowly became believable, even starkly obvious to some, that she must have been sexually abused by Andrew, with meek Abby allowing it, or at least unable to stop it, and thus taking some of the blame in Lizzie’s mind. In the 1990s, numerous writers made a compelling case for the theory, and if Lizzie really did kill Andrew and Abby, it just might be the most credible theory of all. There is, of course, no proof that Andrew was sexually abusive to either of his daughters, but then again there wouldn’t be. It would have been a well-hidden secret, as incest almost always is.

The theory, for a time quite prevalent, has fallen out of favor in recent decades, perhaps due to the lack of even the barest hint of evidence. But for those who think it provides a plausible motive in explaining two murders that appear otherwise inexplicable, you’ll find a comprehensive look at the subject in the entry on Incest Theory.

Author’s Take

When Agnes DeMille was developing her ballet about Lizzie, she described in her book, Dance of Death, how difficult she found it to come up with “the reason for the murders.” DeMille and her composer ultimately decided to make up their own motive; they would suggest that  Lizzie had fallen in love with her pastor, but her stepmother poisoned his mind against her, whispering to him Lizzie that was insane, and thus frightened him away. DeMille was doing exactly what all writers must do who want to tell a Lizzie-Did-It story; there is so little motive in the official record they must make up their own. I confess that when I wrote my first script about Lizzie I invented a motive out of my imagination, too; I had Andrew chase off a suitor that Lizzie had hoped to marry. (Why so many made-up motives involve some thwarted romantic longing of Lizzie’s would make interesting conjecture.)

The fact is, if Lizzie did kill Andrew and Abby, no one knows why, nor could they ever know. Even if we could be certain she was guilty, we still wouldn’t know the reason, because it died with her. All we can do is sift through what we know and come up with a theory or two that sounds reasonable to our own ears. To me, the plethora of alleged motives for Lizzie Borden to commit the murders of her father and stepmother show us that no matter how finely we sift, there are not enough clues to point us convincingly in any one direction. And so, we continue to guess and speculate as to why Lizzie may have thought murder was the only way to solve whatever problem she thought she needed to solve. But it is curious to me that rarely does someone look at the poor evidence for motive and think that perhaps the reason for that is because Lizzie was innocent of the killings. It has certainly occurred to me.