Blood Evidence

When we hear that Lizzie Borden (or someone) took an axe (or hatchet) and gave her mother forty (or eighteen) whacks, it conjures up images of a bloodbath: spurts of crimson blood flying up onto the walls, the furniture, and especially upon the frenzied killer wielding the blade. It’s easy enough for us to imagine such a scene today, what with modern movie special effects having shown us plenty of examples of what a massacre looks like. But even in 1892, those who learned of the Borden murders took it as a given that the killer would necessarily have been covered with gore from such violent work.

Dr. William Dolan, medical examiner for Bristol County, said that when he arrived on the scene, about half-an-hour after the police received the first call about the crime, he found blood “was still flowing” from Andrew’s wounds, then added, “oozing would be probably the better term, from the wounds on the face and head.” Later, he said, “There was very little blood on his clothing, except on his bosom, his shirt bosom, and of course the back where the blood ran down, that is, the back of his cardigan, and his clothes were soaked, where it had run down from his face to the lounge … Through the lounge onto the floor after going through the pillow and his coat.”

Yet, while the dark pools of congealed blood that had flowed from the victims can be seen in the crime scene photos, the camera that took the photos was not sensitive enough to capture the blood spatters that hit the walls or furniture near where the bodies lay. In fact, the overexposed black-and-white photos look surprisingly bloodless. A lack of great sprays of blood around the rooms where the killings occurred made an impression on those who viewed the crime scenes as well. Dr. Bowen, in a newspaper account quoted by Pearson, observed that “there was some blood on the floor and spatters on the wall, but nothing to indicate the slaughter that had taken place.” John Manning, the first reporter on the scene, said that when he first went into the sitting room where Andrew lay, “There was some few spots around the wall. At that time, it didn’t strike me that there was much blood there as would be an ordinary killing.”

Meanwhile, when Dr. Dolan was asked on the stand if he saw any traces of blood between the vicinity of Abby and Andrew’s bodies, he replied, “I did not.” Apparently, there was not so much blood that the murderer couldn’t avoid tracking blood away from bodies that had just been butchered. (Although, in The Jennings Journals we find an entry on a reporter “from The News” named John Crowther, who told Jennings he “got blood on his shoes while going around the house; says Dr. Foley did, too.”)

So exactly how much blood did investigators find?   

Spatters and Drops

While several eyewitnesses remarked on how relatively little blood was found at the crime scenes, relative is the operative word, because there were, in fact, a great many blood spatters and drops flung up onto walls, baseboards and furniture both upstairs and down. At the preliminary hearing, Dr. Dolan testified that in the sitting room alone, where Andrew was attacked, there were blood drops found on the door to the kitchen and on the parlor door all the way on the other side of the room, as well as a spot on the ceiling. At the trial, Dolan elaborated further, explaining that he and State Detective George Seaver had made a memorandum of the blood found both upstairs and down.

As for what was found on the bed itself, the curator of the Fall River Historical society, where the unwashed bedspread and pillow shams from the bed are occasionally on display, describes three small blood spots in the left corner of the white spread, and a mysterious spot on the right corner. Meanwhile, he said, “there are three spots on one pillow sham, and a dark red trail on a second pillow sham, which most likely flew off the weapon in between blows.” All told, Dr. Dolan observed literally hundreds of drops of blood around Abby’s body, which lay in a large puddle of more congealed blood.

Dolan next described what he found in the sitting room near Andrew’s body. “There were eighty-six spots over the back of the lounge, in one cluster, as I say, describing the arc of a circle from the west, east, that is, from the parlor door toward the kitchen door … Beginning from within three or four inches east of his head. Some very minute, some the size of a pin head, others were the size of a pea …  Several larger drops were found above, the highest, except for one upon the ceiling, was six feet, one and three quarters inches from the floor … On the picture and frame [hanging above the sofa] were, in all, forty spots … as though shooting directly upward, that is, diagonally from the head … I found on the parlor door west of the head of the lounge about seven drops, that is on the door and its jamb … One of the drops was very large in the center division of the upper two panels of the door … There was another spot Mr. Jennings and I saw … about a foot or eighteen inches westward on the ceiling. I found one drop on the west door, the jamb of the door leading from the sitting room into the dining room.” Again, in total, hundreds of drops of blood, albeit most of them small, were spattered over a wide area of the room.

What About Blood on the Assailant?

With that much blood flying through the air, it would seem obvious the person wielding the hatchet would have been hit with at least some of those blood drops. But Dolan theorized there might not be as much blood on the killer as one might expect, saying that in the attack on Andrew, the semi-circular blood spatter of 86 drops behind the couch was likely the result of the first blow of the hatchet. That blow was undoubtedly a fatal blow that crushed his skull and killed him instantly, thus stopping his heart. Any blood elicited from the following blows would not have created a spray like the first, but in Dolan’s words, it would have “oozed” from the cuts.

Most of the other drops found around the room, including a “string” of blood two inches long on the door to the dining room, Dolan considered to be flung there from the swinging arc of the bloodied weapon. Because of this, in Dolan’s mind, the assailant would not necessarily have been covered in blood, especially if the assailant was standing in the open doorway of the dining room, as he believed, and delivered the blows from behind the arm of the sofa on which Andrew’s head rested. From that position, the killer would have been largely protected from flying blood drops. This was an opinion that Melvin Adams, one of Lizzie’s defense attorneys, sought to challenge.

Q: [Mr. Adams] If spots were thrown upon the wall over the sofa the way you have described, and thrown upon the parlor door, which would be back of where this man stood, and upon that part of the frame of the dining room door, which was farthest from the head of Mr. Borden, and therefore behind or beyond where this man stood, or this person stood, would not the assailant have necessarily received more or less spots of blood from these blows?

A: [Dr. Dolan] In all probability he would, not necessarily many …

Q: I suppose that would mean that it would be liable to strike the hair, if the person had nothing on the head; that is, it would be liable to strike the upper part of the body or person then exposed?

A: Yes, sir, but I do not think a great deal in taking that position, [relative to] the position of Mr. Borden, and given the position I have stated of the assailant. No spots went, hardly, in that direction, that is as far as we could see, and I do not think many went that we have not seen that is, toward the parlor; so, the assailant might not get scarcely any spots, if any.

Q: Do you mean to put yourself on record as saying the assailant could stand there, and not get less than ten spots on his clothes and hair?

A: Not many of them, because [the blood spray] is the other way, towards his feet and on the wall. The spots on the wall above his head I think were done by the first blow severing some artery that gave those.

Q: Would not an axe, the artery being severed, have gone into the bleeding wound and got blood on it?

A: Certainly.

Q: If it was bloody when it was lifted out of the wound, would not it throw it in some direction or other?

A: Yes, but throw it backwards.

Q: Might it not throw it upwards?

A: Yes, sir.

Q: Might it not throw it on [the assailant]?

A: Yes, sir.

From this exchange with Dr. Dolan, it sounds like Andrew’s killer may have been lightly marked by blood but certainly not drenched in blood as in our movie imaginations. However, during the actual trial, Dr. Dolan, on cross-examination again by Adams, seemed more willing to admit that the culprit would have been hit with blood spots.

Q: Wouldn’t you say it probable that the assailant would be covered with blood or have spatters upon him?

A: He would have spatters, yes sir …

Q: Would the hands be liable to be spotted or spattered?

A: They might.

Q: Would not it be probable?

A: Probable.

Dr. Dolan was followed to the stand by Dr. Edward Wood, a forensic expert and professor at Harvard University, who said, “I don’t see how [the assailant] could have avoided being spattered” with blood, although he could not offer any opinion on “as to the number.” Wood was then followed by Dr. Frank Draper, medical examiner of Boston. Adams asked him several questions about the probable length of a hatchet handle and how close the assailant must have been standing, with Draper agreeing that standing too far away from Andrew’s head, even as much as an arm’s length, would have made the killer “strike at a disadvantage.” In other words, Adams established that the killer was most likely standing quite close to Andrew’s head. He then continued:

Q: Assuming that the spots that were sent upon a picture upon the wall midway over the body to the extent of 40 or 50, that spots were seen upon the door which was in the general direction beyond his feet, and that other spots where seen upon the door which was in general direction behind his head, and between him and beyond the space where the assailant stood, in your opinion would the assailant of necessity receive some spatters of blood upon his clothes or person?

A: I should think so.

Adams next asked Draper if he thought that “many of the blows had made spatters,” and the witness answered with another, “I should think so, yes, sir.” After another long discussion of the wounds found on Mrs. Borden, Adams pointed out the high number of blood drops found near her body and asked, “Would not of necessity the assailant have been spattered with blood?” Again, the answer was, “I should think so.” Draper then said most of those spatters would be on the “front” of what the person was wearing, and “possibly the face, possibly the hair,” then added that “it is not inconceivable that some may have gone into the air and come down upon the back.” He also was asked how quickly blood would be absorbed into clothing, and he answered that it would not absorb quickly into wool, but cotton clothing would “absorb blood readily.”

Ultimately, whether the assailant would have been spattered with not much in the way flying blood drops (per Dolan and Wood), or by a moderate amount of blood spatter (per Draper) or with a considerable amount of drops (per Cheever), the killer was bound to be spattered with at least some blood. So, if it was Lizzie with the hatchet in hand, how did she manage to present herself free of any apparent blood to the dozen or so witnesses who showed up at 92 Second Street mere minutes after the killings?

Through the Lens of Guilt

The lack of blood on Lizzie Borden so soon after Andrew’s murder is, without a doubt, the biggest hurdle (along with the missing weapon) in accepting Lizzie as the killer. It was a problem on the minds of police, who made a diligent search of the house for dresses that might show evidence of blood on them. But, as they failed in that effort, they set about trying to come up with a covering that might have protected her clothing. At the inquest, Knowlton tried to get Lizzie to “remember” if she had been wearing an apron that morning, repeating the question in different ways, forcing Lizzie to answer numerous times that she wasn’t wearing one. (Bridget also testified she didn’t recall seeing Lizzie wearing an apron.) Emma, Lizzie, and Bridget were also questioned, on and off the stand, about raincoats or “gossamers” that were hanging in the closets, with the idea that perhaps a water-proof garment could have protected her dress and been easy to wipe off. It seemed like such an obvious solution that Edmund Pearson later wrote, “About three thousand persons conceived the idea of the gossamer, or waterproof cloak, and nearly all of them wrote a letter about it to the District Attorney.” But while police did find such garments in the house, there was no sign they’d been recently used or cleaned.

The problem was so mystifying that a number of questions at the preliminary hearing were directed to the question of whether it was possible Lizzie could have been wearing one dress on top of another; however, Mrs. Raymond, the dressmaker, said that the dresses she custom-made for Lizzie were too well-fitted to allow such a ruse. There was even an attempt by Knowlton to discover whether a dress pattern Lizzie had bought in New Bedford a few weeks before the killing had been used by Lizzie to secretly sew a dress that she wore only during the murders and then destroyed, and he had police officers assiduously looking for that pattern. (It turned out to be in a trunk in the attic, not yet used.)

In the end, Knowlton gave up trying to figure it out and said in his closing arguments that as to the question of how Lizzie could “have avoided the spattering of her dress with blood if she was the author of these crimes … I cannot answer it. You cannot answer it. You are neither murderers nor women. You have neither the craft of the assassin nor the cunning and deftness of the sex.” But he also told the jury that it wasn’t really his problem to solve. “It is not our business to prove what she did to conceal the blood spots; that is for the defense, not part of our case. We prove the murders. The concealment is a part of the assassin’s business.” He asserted that for Lizzie there was probably “no difficulty in that.” Why? Because “a woman’s cunning can devise that.”

Perhaps the most audacious example of keeping the lack of blood on Lizzie in the “guilty anyway” column comes from John Henry Wigmore, a professor of law at Northwestern University, who wrote an influential critique of Lizzie’s not-guilty verdict in 1893. Wigmore admitted the “difficulty” in explaining the lack of blood spatters on Lizzie so soon after the murders but declared it to be beside the point. “These are difficulties of ignorance; in other words, there is no proved fact which is inconsistent with a thing being so; we merely cannot find traces of the exact modus operandi.” In Wigmore’s learned opinion, if we assume Lizzie is guilty then it simply does not matter that we can’t figure out how she got the blood drops off her so quickly.

Still, those who are convinced that Lizzie did indeed kill her parents are more than game to theorize how it happened. The murder of Abby doesn’t introduce much of a problem, as she was almost certainly killed an hour or more before Andrew arrived home. With Bridget outside washing windows during that time, Lizzie would have had ample time to wash and wipe blood from herself, change her dress, hide it, or whatever else she might have needed to do in order to be seen clean and tidy by Bridget and her father when he returned at 10:40 a.m.

It is Andrew’s murder that presents the real problem, due to the short window between the time Bridget went upstairs to her room (about 10:57 am) to the time Lizzie called her back downstairs to go get help (about 11:10 am.) Thirteen minutes, give or take a minute or two, is not much time in which to first go retrieve the hatchet upstairs or downstairs or wherever she might have hid it after Abby’s murder; then murder Andrew with ten blows of the hatchet; then (perhaps) go upstairs to change her dress (again) without tracking blood anywhere; then clean all traces of blood from her person; then hide the weapon where it could not be found (or go down in the cellar to wash the rusty hatchet free of blood so thoroughly it could not be detected, then break off the handle and dip the blade into ashes, as claimed by the prosecution); or, alternatively, go outside to fling the hatchet on top of the Crowe barn (where it would be found less than a year later). That’s a lot of frantic action to accomplish in a brief time. Still, at the trial, Knowlton brushed off this logistical issue, declaring Lizzie had time enough. Indeed, in the years since, numerous armchair sleuths have timed such actions with their own experiments, some even performing hypothetical sequences of Lizzie’s alleged actions at the actual house on 92 Second Street, and they report 13 minutes to be more than enough time to get those various dark deeds done.

It helps the case for guilt that Dr. Dolan testified that, as the victims were likely killed with the first blows of the hatchet, there might not have been all that much blood to spatter over the hatchet-wielder. Yet, even the most hardcore believer in Lizzie’s guilt will concede that at least some amount of blood was likely to have landed on her. Several solutions to this “where did the blood go” problem have been proposed over the decades, starting with Knowlton’s first suggestion in his closing that Lizzie might have covered herself in a roll of paper and then burnt the paper in the stove. That idea didn’t sway anyone, but his next suggestion, that Lizzie may have slipped into her father’s long Prince Albert Coat, was more plausible. “How remarkable it is that the coat the old man took off, which I presume he took off, at any rate whether that coat or another, instead of being hung upon a nail, as a prudent old man would have hung it, was folded up underneath his cushion?”  This possible solution has gained wide acceptance over the decades, to the point it is repeated as a given by nearly every author who takes on an analysis of the case. (See Prince Albert Coat for more).

Another theory is that Lizzie was not as pristine as she may have looked after Andrew’s murder, and that is why she burned her Bedford Cord dress on Sunday, three days after the murders. The prosecution insisted that Lizzie was wearing that dress when she murdered Andrew and summoned help, but because it bore subtle blood stains that witnesses were too distracted to notice, she later hid the dress so the police wouldn’t find it during their searches until she had the chance to destroy it in her kitchen stove. Still another popular theory is that Lizzie cleaned blood from herself with the menstrual napkins that were found soaking in a pail by the sink in the cellar washroom in the immediate aftermath of the murders. This strikes many as Lizzie’s clever way of hiding evidence in plain sight and is considered another example of how her gender may have helped her get away with murder.

Yet, no matter how she accomplished it, the Lizzie-Is-Guilty camp has little doubt that Lizzie, with her free roam of the house and access to a sink or whatever else she may have needed, was able to use those 13 minutes to make any blood that may have landed on her during Andrew’s murder disappear. Meanwhile, those who do have some trouble wrapping their minds around that short time frame are more likely to entertain the idea of Lizzie having a co-conspirator who wielded the hatchet than to believe her completely innocent.

Through the Lens of Innocence

For many who first hear of Lizzie’s immaculate condition so soon after the murder of her father, there is just no way to believe Lizzie could be the killer. The medical experts all agreed that a certain amount of blood spatter would necessarily have landed on the assailant. Even if Lizzie had covered herself in her father’s long coat to protect her dress during Andrew’s murder, what about her hands, her face, her hair, her shoes? Yet, witness after witness, whether called by the prosecution or the defense, describes Lizzie’s spotless dress, her clean hands, her untouched hair. And, as Abby’s murderer was believed to have straddled Abby while delivering those eighteen blows, that person’s shoes had to have been splashed with blood. Yet, even after numerous searches, including a search that police described as exhaustive down to “the bumps on the wallpaper,” no blood was ever found on any of Lizzie’s shoes, nor on any other item of clothing belonging to her.

When faced by the question of “where did the blood go?” the prosecution more or less dodged it, surrendering the lack of an answer to Wigmore’s “difficulty of ignorance.” Offering a shrug to the problem, or blaming it on “a woman’s cunning,” is not a convincing argument for guilt. Theories and guesses on how Lizzie could have possibly cleaned herself up are not evidence either. But for those who think Lizzie innocent, it’s not just a lack of reasonable explanation for the lack of blood on her that is the core of the problem; it’s that the short time window available to her to have committed a blood-spraying murder and then make all traces of that blood disappear afterward—even if the clean-up may have been fairly minor. All those armchair sleuths with their stopwatches may experiment all they like, but thirteen minutes is not a believable amount of time for Lizzie to have performed all the complex actions that would have been required of her to come up and clean and dry for witnesses. There simply wasn’t enough time. End of story.  

Author’s Take

The lack of any sign blood on Lizzie (or any of her clothing anywhere in the house) so soon after the murder of Andrew is indeed the strongest evidence pointing to her innocence. I can see how it’s possible she could have covered herself with the Prince Albert Coat (assuming she thought of such a thing) and avoided getting too much blood on her that way. But I still think there had to have been a certain amount of blood on her person, whether hands or face or hair, to make disappear. And for me, the thirteen minutes she had available to do that, while theoretically not too short, is in reality dauntingly short. Even with my own “woman’s cunning,” I find it hard to imagine someone who had never killed before that day being able to pull off such an intricate series of actions at a frenzied pace without any mistakes—such as leaving behind a telltale smudge on a doorknob, or a rivulet of water in a sink stained pink. And then there’s the problem of shoes or whatever was on the killer’s feet while he was straddling Abby and delivering all those death blows; are we to assume Lizzie destroyed a pair of shoes in her kitchen stove as well?

Then again, I do not have the “craft of the assassin,” so maybe my imagination is lacking. But I don’t think so. As a professional writer of murder mysteries, I am paid to construct murder plots, and I could certainly write up a sequence in which Lizzie cleverly manages to kill her father and clean herself up in less than ten minutes without leaving physical evidence behind—a sequence with quick edits that would be set to suspenseful music. Several screenwriters have done this for characters based on Lizzie, although two out of the three movies that have been produced (as of this writing) only managed to do it by having Lizzie do her killing in the nude. Yet, although I can imagine writing such a sequence for the screen, I would be relying on what all writers rely on to make it believable—and that is by not needing it to be believable at all. Stories for the screen rely on the “suspension of disbelief,” which is by definition “the willing suspension of critical thinking and logic to enjoy fictional works.” The Borden murders were not fictional, and Lizzie Borden was not a fictional person. And, as I am not willing to suspend critical thinking and logic, the blood evidence, or lack thereof, pushes me in the direction of believing Lizzie innocent of the killings.