Bengaline Silk

On Saturday, August 6th, two days after the horrifying murders of Andrew and Abby Borden, at the conclusion of the most thorough police search of the Borden house yet, Police Marshal Rufus Hilliard asked Lizzie’s lawyer, Andrew Jennings, to provide him with the dress Lizzie was wearing the morning of the murders. Lizzie handed Jennings a navy-blue Bengaline silk dress (or, rather, a blouse and skirt combination), which Jennings then offered to the police marshal and Dr. Dolan, the county medical examiner. The officials wrapped the ensemble in a cloth “lounge cover,” and, in keeping with the lax standards of evidence-collecting of the day, allowed Jennings to leave with the bundle and drop it by the police station.

Again, what Lizzie handed over to the authorities wasn’t actually a dress; rather, it was a skirt made of Bengaline silk, and a blouse or “waist” of a different material, as Jennings reminded Marshal Hilliard when questioning him at the preliminary hearing. The two men had apparently inspected the garments together at the time they were provided by Lizzie, and Jennings described the blouse half of the ensemble as made of cotton. Thus, the blouse, at least, was not made of shiny or silky material.

Regardless, after getting conflicting witness testimony at the inquest about what Lizzie was wearing, it struck both police and the district attorney as suspicious that Lizzie may have handed over a dress that did not match the recollections of two of the people who saw her that morning. Why hand over the wrong clothing? What was she trying to hide? This question has echoed down over the decades since the murders and today it is “common knowledge” that the Bengaline silk Lizzie turned over to authorities was decidedly not the dress she was wearing in the hour after the murders. Hosea Knowlton said as much in his closing argument, telling the jury that officers “in good faith had asked her to produce the dress she was wearing that morning, they were fooled with that garment which lies on that trunk, which was not upon her when any human being saw her.”

This claim has caused armchair sleuths much consternation over how a woman who was seen by so many different people could think she could possibly get away with misleading investigators with such bald-faced dishonesty. True, no one had seen any traces of blood on her dress when they were in the room with her, but certainly there had to have been some telltale blood splattered on it somewhere for her to decide to risk such a brazen switch, a switch that seemed to be a tacit admission of guilt.

It is true that quite a number of people did see and, in most cases, spoke to Lizzie in the hour after she discovered her father’s body and before she went upstairs and changed into a pink wrapper. Besides Bridget Sullivan, there was her neighbor, Mrs. Adelaide Churchill, along with her close friend, Alice Russell, both of whom arrived within minutes of Lizzie’s call of alarm. Dr. Seabury Bowen, her family physician, came quickly, followed by his wife, Mrs. Phoebe Bowen. There was George Allen, the first officer on the scene, who entered the house along with Charles Sawyer, who he assigned to guard the back door as he left. Allen was followed by Officer Patrick Doherty, and soon thereafter, by Officer Michael Mullaly (making it three law enforcement officers in total). Lizzie’s uncle, John Morse, eventually wandered inside after returning from a trip downtown. Three reporters were allowed inside, including John Manning, Walter Stevens and Edwin Porter. Dr. William Dolan, the county medical examiner, also came in and saw Lizzie as well. That is a total of 13 people who saw Lizzie downstairs that morning. (Two other men, Deputy Sheriff Wixon and Borden friend George Pettey, entered the house before Lizzie went upstairs and changed, but they did not see Lizzie.)

Of those 13 people, three of them (Bridget Sullivan, Alice Russell, and Charles Sawyer) would testify at the 1893 jury trial that they had no memory of what Lizzie was wearing in that frantic and confused hour after Andrew’s body was discovered. Five more of them (John Morse, George Allen, Walter Stevens, Officer Mullaly and John Manning) were called to the stand but were not asked if they could describe what Lizzie was wearing. Fall River Globe reporter, Edwin Porter, wasn’t called to testify during the trial at all.

Ultimately, only four of those 13 witnesses attempted to describe for the jury what they remembered Lizzie wearing that morning. Dr. Bowen, who initially described what he considered to be a “drab”-colored “morning calico,” was shown the Bengaline Silk but declared he could not say one way or the other whether it was the dress Lizzie was wearing, despite some heavy pressuring by the prosecution to reject it. Mrs. Bowen, however, did agree that the dress matched her memory of Lizzie wearing a “dark” colored dress. Two of the witnesses—Officer Doherty and Mrs. Churchill—were the only ones who definitively said they didn’t believe Lizzie was wearing the Bengaline Silk. Thus, only two out of the 13 people who were in the Borden House with Lizzie that morning felt sure the Bengaline was the wrong dress. Two out of 13. This was considered “proof” that Lizzie tried to deceive the police, and was thus, likely guilty. But is this a justified conclusion?

What the Prosecution Witnesses Remembered

At the trial, the Bengaline silk that Lizzie had given police was brought to the courtroom for witnesses to view. Described in the court transcript as “a dark blue dress with a small light figure,” it was shown to exactly four of the witnesses who saw Lizzie immediately after Andrew’s body was discovered. Officer Doherty took the stand to say he had a “faint recollection” of “a light blue dress with a bosom in a waist.” Asked if he could recall if there was a figure, he said he thought there was a “little spot,” but couldn’t remember the color of it. When shown the Bengaline Silk and asked if that was the dress he recalled Lizzie wearing, he answered, “No, I don’t think so.”

Mrs. Churchill seemed to have had the clearest memory of the dress she saw Lizzie wearing that morning.

Q: Will you describe the dress that she had on while you were there?

A: It looked like a light-blue-and-white groundwork; it seemed like calico or cambric, and it had a light-blue-and-white groundwork with a dark, navy-blue diamond printed on it …

Q: Was that the dress she had on this morning? [Showing dark-blue dress]

A: It does not look like it.

Q: Was it?

A: That is not the dress I have described.

Q: Was it the dress she had on?

A: I did not see her with it on that morning.

Later, during his cross-examination, Robinson asked if Mrs. Churchill could describe the dresses the other women there that morning (Mrs. Bowen, Alice Russell) were wearing and she made a half-hearted attempt but ultimately concluded, “I don’t know.” She did, however, specifically recall that Bridget, like Lizzie, was also wearing a “light blue calico.” But Bridget had already testified that she herself had been wearing an “indigo blue” calico that morning, which is a dark blue hue. When Governor Robinson read Bridget’s testimony to her, Mrs. Churchill stuck to her guns and said she was sure that Bridget’s dress had been a much lighter color. As Radin would later write, this “greatly weakened the value of her previous testimony” about the dress Lizzie wore that morning. Since Mrs. Churchill “apparently was mistaken about Bridget’s dress, she could therefore be equally mistaken about Lizzie’s dress.”  

What Other Witnesses Remembered

While two of the 13 people who saw Lizzie that morning claimed the Bengaline silk ensemble as the wrong clothing, not everyone who was asked would make the same claim. Dr. Bowen, who at the inquest remembered Lizzie wearing a morning calico he described as so “drab” that he couldn’t determine its color, was shown the navy-colored ensemble and asked if that was what he meant by drab-colored. He replied that he couldn’t judge. When more pointedly asked by Moody if the Bengaline skirt and waist shown to him was the dress Lizzie was wore, Bowen answered, “I don’t know, sir.” He stuck to that answer despite some aggressive pushing by Moody, which ended only when the defense objected to the strong-arming.

Meanwhile, his wife, Mrs. Phoebe Bowen, particularly remembered that Lizzie was wearing a dark dress; she had noticed how pale Lizzie looked when she arrived, “especially her hands … how very white they were … as they laid against her dark dress in her lap.” When asked to describe the dress, she said “it had a blouse waist with a white design on it.” When shown the waist (blouse) in the courtroom and asked, if “this looks anything like the waist she had on that morning?” she answered, “I should say it was.” This did not sit well with Knowlton, who challenged her during his cross by asking her to identify the figure on the Bengaline silk skirt, which was apparently not a spray, before reminding her that at the preliminary hearing she had testified that Lizzie was wearing “a white dress, with blue material, with a white spray running through it.” She answered, “I did not mean a dress with any white, but dark blue, the dress with a blouse that had the figure in it.” (Knowlton continued challenging her, seeming to insinuate that she was changing her story because she was such an “intimate friend” of the family, an odd choice since Mrs. Bowen had been much closer to the murdered Abby than to the accused Lizzie.)

Later, Mrs. Bowen’s preliminary hearing testimony was read aloud in court at the request of the prosecution, although it is hard to understand why prosecutors would ask for it, since it basically reaffirmed her impression of the dress that she had just given for the jury. At the hearing, when asked whether the ground of the blouse she had described as blue was light or dark blue, Mrs. Bowen had replied, “I should say quite a dark shade; I cannot tell.” Mrs. Bowen had also testified that the dress she remembered “was nothing more than an ordinary morning dress,” and that she had seen it on Lizzie before “in the mornings when I have been in.” (This memory of Mrs. Bowen’s flies in the face of the assertion of many Lizzie doubters that the Bengaline was not a dress Lizzie would choose to wear in the mornings.)  

Furthermore, Hyman Lubinsky, the ice cream peddler the defense called to testify that he’d seen Lizzie slowly walking back from the barn to the house at about 11:10 a.m. as he drove by her house, confirming her alibi of being in the barn at the time of Andrew’s murder, also described her as wearing a “dark” colored dress, which would be consistent with navy blue.   

It’s not surprising that both Lubinsky and Mrs. Bowen, the witnesses who supported what Lizzie said she was wearing, were called by the defense. What is surprising, and a little curious, is that the prosecution called to the stand a number of other witnesses who also saw Lizzie at that time, and except for the two they knew from earlier testimony would tell a different story (Churchill and Doherty), and the three who had claimed since the inquest to have no memory of what she wore (Bridget, Alice Russell, and Charles Sawyer), they failed to ask the others about what they thought she was wearing. They had the Bengaline right there in the courtroom, why not show the other witnesses and ask them if they recognized it?

One also wonders why the prosecutors didn’t ask Bridget if she had noticed whether Lizzie had changed her dress between the time she saw Lizzie come down for breakfast (before Abby’s murder) and the second time she saw her (before Andrew’s murder) and then later after Lizzie called her downstairs. Perhaps they thought the question useless for someone who claimed not to remember anything about what Lizzie was wearing that day, and yet, according to The Jennings’ Journals, Charles Sawyer overheard Office Medley asking her that very question. “Officer Medley asked Bridget about Lizzie’s wrapper—if it was the same one she had on earlier and she said, yes. Think there were spots on the dress. Am nearsighted some anyway.”

In the end, the testimony about the dress Lizzie wore that morning was basically a wash. The four witnesses willing to venture an opinion on its color were divided on whether it was light blue or dark blue. Either way, neither they nor any of the other witnesses who saw Lizzie that morning noticed any blood on her clothing. There she was, wearing whatever shade of blue dress in full sight of doctors, police officers, and reporters—with friends fussing over her, patting her, fanning her—and to a person, they all agreed there was no sign of blood on her dress (or her hair, or her hands). Many of the Lizzie-is-Guilty folks would say just because they didn’t notice blood on the dress in the blur of events that morning doesn’t mean the dress would have passed a thorough inspection. Obviously, it wouldn’t have survived a closer look, or she would have handed it over, right?

Victoria Lincoln and Having it Both Ways

While the prosecution rejected the Bengaline Silk as the dress Lizzie wore, and her failure to provide the “real” dress evidence of her guilt, there is another theory, put forth in 1967 by Victoria Lincoln, that Lizzie was indeed wearing the Bengaline Silk ensemble in the hour after the murders, but rather than allowing this to speak for Lizzie’s innocence, Lincoln believed this only affirmed her guilt. In Lincoln’s theory, Lizzie had to change the first dress she put on that morning (presumably the Bedford Cord she burned several days later) after it became blood-spattered from killing Abby. Lizzie then decided to put on a more street-worthy ensemble like the Bengaline Silk because she needed to leave the house to establish an alibi for herself. After all, she did earlier tell Bridget that she “might go out.” But, according to Lincoln, an unwell Andrew came home unexpectedly early and so Lizzie, knowing that Andrew would eventually realize she had killed Abby, had no choice but to kill him while wearing that Bengaline Silk. But clever Lizzie was able to keep blood from besmirching it by shielding herself with Andrew’s Prince Albert Coat, which was later found folded under his ruined head.

Lincoln’s theory does away with all the silly arguing about whether Lizzie turned over the right dress or not, even if it means ignoring Mrs. Churchill’s detailed description of a “light blue” dress. And never mind that Abby was killed a good hour before Andrew came home, and if Lizzie had really wanted to leave the house and establish an alibi she had plenty of time to do so. And never mind that we actually have no idea what time Andrew typically came home from his morning rounds. It is still an attractive theory to many, as is Lincoln’s assertion that Lizzie hid the blood-stained Bedford Cord she wore while butchering Abby behind the heavy silk dresses in the clothes press, dresses that Officer Fleet and State Dective George Seaver “looked at,” but chose not to remove from the nails on which they hung. (Lincoln makes it clear that Lizzie, with her womanly wiles, could all but predict ahead of time that the officers, being men befuddled by women’s clothing, would never think to look behind the winter silks.)

It is interesting that Lincoln, such a strong proponent of Lizzie’s guilt, thought it implausible that Lizzie would have been so foolish as to hand over the wrong dress to police. While most of her core theories (such as Lizzie killing Abby in the middle of an epileptic seizure) are today roundly dismissed, her assertion that Lizzie changed into the Bengaline Silk to head downtown to establish an alibi still has adherents in the Lizzie-Is-Guilty faction.

Through the Lens of Guilt

In his closing arguments, Knowlton is clear that he believes Lizzie was simply not wearing the Bengaline Silk when seen by the 13 witnesses in the hour after murder, and the fact that she tried to “fool” police with the wrong dress is proof she committed the murders. The two witnesses who did say on the stand they remembered Lizzie wearing a dark dress—Phoebe Bowen and Hyman Lubinsky—Knowlton simply dismissed. Lubinsky, said the prosecutor, was “a discarded witness.” As for Mrs. Bowen, Knowlton casts doubt on her testimony by implying she was lying or at least was planning to lie.

“It may be that you observed that when Mrs. Bowen raised her hand to take her oath it shook like an aspen leaf. Poor woman, she knew what she had said [at the inquest]. She knew she had been describing that dress, [the Bedford Cord], and I pitied her from the bottom of my heart.” (Knowlton remained oddly insistent that Lizzie was wearing the Bedford Cord rather than the Bengaline when witnesses saw her that morning even though his own witness, Alice Russell, testified she had not seen the Bedford Cord since the time it was made until the day Lizzie burned it.)

Ironically, Victoria Lincoln also accused Mrs. Bowen of lying—even as she was sure Lizzie was indeed wearing the Bengaline. Lincoln was apparently swayed by Knowlton’s dubious assessment that Mrs. Bowen changed her story about what she recalled about the dress at the inquest. “Before the final trial,” wrote Lincoln, “certain rumors swept the town concerning her husband and a missing note and Phoebe Bowen was eager to see Lizzie cleared. She offered herself as a witness for the defense and on the stand she vividly remembered the Bengaline. She was a loyal wife. It is amusing that the one person claimed to remember the dress that Lizzie, in all probability, actually wore under the eyes of all those witnesses, believed herself to be lying.” (Like so much of Lincoln’s logic, there is no logic at all.)

Lincoln could be right about one thing, though; Lizzie may have been wearing the Bengaline Silk, as she claimed, and still have been able to kill her father without getting blood spatter on the dress—if she had worn some kind of protective layer, such as the Prince Albert Coat. Despite Knowlton trying to make the “wrong dress” into a piece of circumstantial evidence pointing to Lizzie’s guilt, it is not an either/or choice. She could potentially be guilty no matter what dress she did or didn’t wear. Of course, this means that, technically, Lizzie could have handed over the wrong dress, perhaps due to faulty memory of her own, and also be innocent.

Still, with Mrs. Churchill’s very detailed description of the light-blue color she recalled on Lizzie, and Doherty’s corroboration, it is now set in stone for the Lizzie-is-Guilty camp that the Bengaline Silk was absolutely not the dress Lizzie wore that morning. She clearly handed over the wrong dress in order to hide evidence of her guilt. Adding to their certainty is what they consider the unlikelihood that Lizzie would be wearing a silk dress, even one that isn’t actually silk, to putter around the house on an ordinary Thursday morning. As Victoria Lincoln put it, “This was an astounding dress to have chosen in which to lounge about the house through a record-breaking scorcher of a day.” The Bengaline Silk, it is argued, was a “going out dress” that may have even required a corset to be worn underneath it in order to fit, and not a dress made for ironing handkerchiefs near a hot stove or poking around a dusty barn.

Through the Lens of Innocence

While many feel certain that Lizzie simply wouldn’t have put on the Bengaline Silk first thing in the morning merely to sit around at home, there was another witness at the trial who contradicted such an assertion. Mrs. Marianna Holmes, Lizzie’s close friend from church, did not see Lizzie the morning of the murders, at least not before she changed into a pink wrapper, but she did spend time with Lizzie at the house the next day, Friday, and again on Saturday. On the stand, Mrs. Holmes, who saw the Bengaline Silk displayed there in the courtroom, recalled that Lizzie wore the navy-blue ensemble both on Friday, the day after the murders, and again on Saturday morning before the funeral. This is consistent with Mrs. Bowen’s testimony that the Bengaline ensemble she remembered Lizzie wearing was an “ordinary morning dress” that she’d seen Lizzie wearing before. Clearly, Lizzie considered the Bengaline a stay-at-home outfit that she wore in the mornings. It would also seem Lizzie was in the habit of wearing the same dress several days in a row, not a surprising choice when one has a limited number of stay-at-home dresses and laundry was a heavy chore done only once a week.

But beyond the corroboration of several witnesses to support Lizzie’s truthfulness about what she was wearing that morning is the fact that it makes so little sense to believe otherwise. If a dozen or more people, including police officers, saw you wearing a light blue calico dress, it would be idiotic to believe they would blandly accept you were wearing a dark blue faux silk skirt and waist. Handing over the wrong clothing would be a nonsensical act of self-sabotage, guaranteed to make her look guilty, and why would she do that?

Author’s Take

Thanks to the conflicting reports by a few key witnesses about the dress they remembered Lizzie wearing the morning of the murders, I tend to believe the Bengaline Silk ensemble she handed over to the police was indeed the dress she actually wore, especially since eleven other witnesses either declined to rule it out, or were not given the opportunity to say nay. And, as Lizzie was the one who did the choosing of what she wore that day, I think she ought to get at least some benefit of the doubt. But mostly, it defies common sense to me that she would provide the wrong dress knowing so many people saw with their own eyes what she was wearing. She had no way of knowing when she handed it over that the majority of those witnesses would fail to remember what she wore, or would not be asked to describe it at all.

Still, while I believe the Bengaline was probably the dress she wore, I cannot be completely confident of it either. Mrs. Churchill’s impression was just as specific and compelling as Mrs. Bowen’s different impression. So, the question remains: If Lizzie handed over the wrong dress, was it really because the actual dress she wore so betrayed her guilt that she thought it was the lesser of the evils in trying to save herself from the gallows? If so, then it was an incredibly risky gamble that paid off.

Yet, if it was the right dress, then here we have another example of how fast the vigorous mythology around the Borden murder grew and devoured any small, plain fact in its path. The tale of the wrong dress with its archetype of the trickster villain escaping detection by slipping on a different set of clothes—Lizzie as wolf in Bengaline silk sheep’s clothing—is just too rich in symbolism to resist.